Special Issue: Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene

Theory, Culture & Society

2017, Vol. 34(2–3) 169–185
An Interview with ! The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276417689900

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Biopolitics and the

Anthropocene
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Columbia University

Mathew Coleman
Ohio State University

Kathryn Yusoff
Queen Mary University of London

Abstract
This article is an interview with Elizabeth Povinelli, by Mathew Coleman and Kathryn
Yusoff. It addresses Povinelli’s approaches to ‘geontologies’ and ‘geontopower’, and
the discussion encompasses an exploration of her ideas on biopolitics, her retheor-
ization of power in the current conditions of late liberalism, and the situation of the
inhuman within philosophical and anthropological economies. Povinelli describes a
mode of power that she calls geontopower, which operates through the governance of
Life and Nonlife. The interview is accompanied by a brief contextualizing
introduction.

Keywords
Anthropocene, biopolitics, geontology, inhuman, liberalism

Who doesn’t do biopolitics these days? In the decades since the publica-
tion of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1978), biopolitics has
migrated from the margins, as an unconventional and much-debated
theoretical approach to the study of power, to become a ubiquitous
and very nearly required vocabulary for critical social scientists and
humanities scholars working generally on the problem of population
and its governance. Moreover, what counts as biopolitics has undergone

Corresponding author: Kathryn Yusoff. Email:k.yusoff@qmul.ac.uk

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
170 Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3)

an impressive expansion over the past 15 years, such that the concept
now signals a range of rich – and not always compatible – accounts of the
ways in which life is both the basis of politics as well as an object of
politics (Lemke, 2011).
Elizabeth Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at
Columbia University, has played an important role in the normalization
of biopolitics as an accepted way of knowing power, but in a way that is
markedly different from the bulk of biopolitics scholarship focused as it
is on the generalities of this specific mode of government as well as the
zero point, or ground state, of its application, i.e. death.
What sets Povinelli’s work on biopolitics apart from other scholarship
on the topic is indeed her repeated explorations of what she calls, in her
Economies of Abandonment, an ‘anthropology of ordinary suffering’
(2011: 14). On the one hand, this phrase refers to the incredible violence
which inhabits routine practices and spaces of life, and as a result high-
lights the need to think through abjection, catastrophe, and dispossession
in terms of what Povinelli calls ‘cruddy’ quasi-events which frequently do
not rise to the level of an explicit crisis even as they may indeed be
ruinous and destructive for certain people. In this way, Povinelli’s atten-
tion to ordinary suffering serves as a warning about the shortcomings of
a molar approach to biopower which skips over the always differentiated,
and sometimes hard-to-grasp, terrain of laboring and social reproduc-
tion. But there is more. In Povinelli’s hands the problem of ordinary
suffering also surfaces as the struggle for existence, rather than outright
extinction, which constitutes biopolitics. Povinelli’s focus on persever-
ance, endurance, effort, and precarious survival, as opposed to biopoli-
tically-engineered elimination, is what really sets Povinelli’s work
apart from much of what has been written about biopolitics, especially
under the umbrella of state theory, which tends to focus on the hyper-
intensification of what Foucault called projects of ‘making live and let-
ting die’.
Indeed, there is clearly a fascination with the accomplishment of par-
ticular projects of ‘making live’ and ‘letting die’ in the biopolitics litera-
ture, as opposed to the almost-accomplishment of these projects and
hence the forms of life which persist, somewhere between life and
death, despite them. As Povinelli argued in her Empire of Love, the
biopolitics literature is concerned mostly with the problem of corporeal-
ity and is under-attentive to the problem of carnality, or the physical
mattering that emerges in the cramped spaces between life and death.
Rather than the ‘clean division’ between life and death that underwrites
much of what is written about biopolitics, Povinelli draws attention to
‘the temporality of diarrhea – slow, debilitating, and blurred’ (2006: 204).
And so, in Economies Povinelli asks: ‘How do new forms of social life
maintain the force of existing in specific social spacings of life? How do
they endure the effort it takes to strive to survive?’ (2011: 9).
Povinelli et al. 171

Povinelli extends her exploration of survival, as well as her critique of

biopolitics, in her newest book, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late
Liberalism. In Geontologies, published in 2016 by Duke University
Press, Povinelli suggests that scholars have become spellbound by the
concept of biopolitics, such that other governance strategies core to late
liberalism have been left unexplored. Povinelli is particularly interested in
something she calls geontological power, or geontopower, which she
defines as the maintenance of a difference between life/being (bios) and
nonlife (geos). As Povinelli outlines, biopolitics is lodged within a larger
bios/geos binary that has received little to no attention: Life (Life {birth,
growth, reproduction} v. Death) v. Nonlife (2016: 9). In other words, the
focus on biopolitics – Life {birth, growth, reproduction} v. Death – has
come at the expense of a consideration of the larger problem of bios versus
geos, of which biopolitics is but a part – Life v. Nonlife. In this way
geontopower is, as Povinelli argues, a ‘biontological enclosure of exist-
ence’ – or the restriction of existence to the sequential problems of birth,
growth, reproduction, and death – made meaningful by way of a sharp
contrast with the inanimate geos. In our conversation with Povinelli
below, building on a prior conversation (Coleman and Yusoff, 2014),
we delve into the problem of geontopower, and especially how the geon-
tological acts as a ‘subtending’ force to biopolitics (Yusoff, 2015).
What does the geontological do, apart from problematizing the ‘bio-
politics of biopolitics’ – or, the policing of what counts as life (and what
counts as nonlife) which underwrites so many critical accounts of the
governance of life? Perhaps the most obvious point – as explored in our
interview – is that geontology offers a different lens on the so-called
Anthropocene, defined as the post-Holocene emergence of human life
as newly a geological as well as meteorological force. We qualify the
Anthropocene as ‘so-called’ not because we doubt that humans are geo-
logic agents as such, but rather because there has been substantive debate
about how we should know this new period. Both the key events which
have given birth to the Anthropocene, as well as the nature and location
of the stratigraphic marker(s) of this new period, are deeply contested.
Indeed, while it is now widely agreed that the Anthropocene is underway,
just what constitutes the Anthropocene – radioactive pollution from
nuclear bombs? chicken bones? soot and carbon from concrete produc-
tion? oceans full of plastic? desertification? – remains in question (Waters
et al., 2014). Moreover, there has been significant debate over nomencla-
ture as a result of these questions about the origins as well as defining
characteristics of the Anthropocene (Haraway, 2015; Malm, 2016;
Moore, 2015; Yusoff, 2016). In Geontologies Povinelli shows that if scho-
lars have been slow to unpack the geontological in the rush to the bio-
political, others have long experienced its effects as a strategy of
governance. In particular, indigenous land claims in Australia,
Povinelli shows, operate at the threshold between ‘Life {birth, growth,
172 Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3)

reproduction} v. Death’ and ‘Life v. Nonlife’. On the one hand, indigen-

ous land claims typically require recognition of the living landscapes of
indigenous life, thereby contravening the Life v. Nonlife boundary, but
as a ‘dumb totemic repetition of the past’ and without an ‘analytics of
existents’ (Povinelli, 2016: 80). On the other hand, this traffic between
bios and geos is presented ‘as a trace of time before the state . . . an inani-
mate Animism . . . the oxymoron of a living landscape frozen in time’
which in turn marks indigenous claimants as genealogical subjects – as
explored in The Empire of Love – and as such as candidates for a likely
extinction.
Povinelli’s exploration of geontology – and the scrutiny that the con-
cept brings to the distinction between things biological, meteorological,
and geological, but also crucially to the intellectual labor that underpins
and maintains these domains and distinctions – provides a recalibration
of sorts for the Anthropocene debate. This is because the geontological is
not something proper to the Anthropocene – as in a merger of bios and
geos born in (or around) 1950. Rather, the geontological is an architecture
of governance that animates the novelty as well as anxieties of the
Anthropocene, and which indeed makes the Anthropocene itself a
remarkable event. For example, the Anthropocenic claim that human
life is (now) also geological life (Yusoff, 2013), and the deep worry that
this ‘also’ entails the extinction of things animate (and the triumph of the
inanimate), plays out on precisely the fault line of geontological partition
– that is, in terms of a fundamental, binary division between life as bion-
tological, resourceful, and self-starting sovereignty and the geological as
unsovereign, bootstrapping-less nonlife. In other words, the
Anthropocene – and crucially debate over how to identify and name it
– might recently have drawn attention to the precarity-inducing traffic
which co-constitutes the bios and geos, but perhaps more importantly
risks newly re-constituting the geontological rift in the sense that the dis-
integration of the bios/geos split calls forth, for so many, a likely future
triumph of the inanimate. In this sense, the Anthropocene might be use-
fully considered a geontological drama not for its disclosure of the intim-
acy of bios to geos but by virtue of its re-dramatization of this interface in
terms of the looming threat of human extinction, and the triumph of a
planet devoid of life (cf. Clark and Hird, 2014). In this way, Geontologies
continues the conversation started in Povinelli’s earlier scholarship on
perseverance, and modes of life which are not-quite extinct – a ‘geon-
tology of the otherwise’ (Povinelli, 2014).
Mat Coleman: Your recent work on geontology suggests a limit to the
usefulness of the term biopolitics, largely on account of its focus on
things that are born, live, and die. There is, you’re suggesting, a life/
nonlife binary that sits at the core of biopolitics, and which as such
misses out on a whole range of existents that straddle, or better, which
confuse, this foundational division?
Povinelli et al. 173

Elizabeth Povinelli: Yes. The argument is that biopolitics always rests in

and on not the governance of and through life but the governance of the
division between life and nonlife. When I say the division between life
and nonlife I am not primarily referring to that which had life and now
does not, but a more foundational division within western governance
between that which supposedly arrives into existence inert and that which
arrives with an active potentiality. The three figures I use to discuss
geontopower – the desert, the animist, and the virus – are obviously
counter-points to Foucault’s four figures, strategies and discourses of
biopower – the hysterical woman, Malthusian couple, masturbating
child, and perverse adult. But, more robustly, they represent the nodal
points in contemporary struggles to make sense of a current destabiliza-
tion of this foundation division. The desert stands for discourses and
strategies that re-stabilize the difference between life and nonlife by
asking how we can stop the drift of life into the inert; the animist dis-
counts the difference between nonlife and life by claiming everything is
alive with potentiality; and the virus uses and ignores the division for the
purpose of diverting its energies in order to extend itself.
But geontopower is not a new power – a power only now emerging to
replace biopolitics. Biopower (the governance through life and death) has
long depended on a subtending geontopower (the difference between the
active and the inert). In other words, geontopower does not come after or
alongside the new geological and meteorological age of the human –
Anthropocene and climate change – nor is it a new stage of late liberal-
ism. The Anthropocene and climate change have certainly made geonto-
power visible to people who were previously unaffected by it – who
shunted its deleterious effects elsewhere. But its operation has always
been a quite apparent architecture of the late liberal governance of dif-
ference and markets in settler colonialisms. The savage slot, as my
deceased colleague Michel Rolph Trouillot phrased it, of geontopower
has operated openly in settler late liberalism and been insinuated in the
ordinary operations of its governance of difference and markets. The
attribution of an inability of various colonized people to differentiate
the kinds of things that have agency, subjectivity, and intentionality of
the sort that emerges with life has been the grounds of casting them into a
pre-modern mentality and a post-recognition difference. Thus the point
of the concepts of geontology and geontopower is not to found a new
ontology of objects, nor to establish a new metaphysics of power, nor to
adjudicate the possibility or impossibility of the human ability to know
the Truth of the world of things. Rather they are concepts meant to help
make visible the figural tactics of late liberalism as a longstanding bion-
tological orientation and distribution of power crumbles, losing its efficacy
as a self-evident backdrop to reason. I explored this operation in the
supposed height of cultural recognition’s embrace of the Other in ‘Do
Rocks Listen?’.
174 Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3)

Kathryn Yusoff: Can I ask you about your use of the term geontopower
and how might it differ from geopower (Grosz, 2012, 2017)? If the ‘onto’
insists on a becoming otherwise of ontology within the formation of
geopower, does this insist that we learn from that arrangement rather
than the other way around? Clearly, the insistence of recognizing the
difference of matter means geopower can’t suture onto the current
arrangements of biopower, yet there are forms of life at stake here. If
we suspend our current obsession that ‘life’ is the agent that is doing all
the work (a notion of life as a category that has sovereignty over every-
thing else) where do we end up in terms of political subjectivity? Or,
another way to ask this would be: if life is such a mobilizing possibility
for a humanitarian politics, why is it such a difficult category in which to
persist for other modes of existences? And, following this, what kind of
claim or antagonism might the persistence of the otherwise have on the
normative? Can it persist in being otherwise? I understand the shift from
an axis of normative to an axis of existence, but what genealogical rela-
tion exists between such existence and normative impulses?
EP: I always turn to Georges Canguilhem and his concept of normativity
here. Canguilhem was, of course, intervening in then contemporary dis-
courses of biology (life). How, he asked, should life be understood philo-
sophically? Nevertheless, what he showed, and why the morpheme ‘onto’
is inserted between ‘geo’ and ‘power’, is that western ontology, and the
epistemological fields it has sprouted, is inflected by – or, more strongly,
defined by – the imaginary life. We should not say ontology as if it were
neutral to forms of existence. Ontology presupposes the division between
life and nonlife – it inscribes this difference into things and our way of
knowing things in the natural and critical sciences. Indeed, ontology
should be rewritten as biontology. Or it should be renamed as the
carbon imaginary: a propositional hinge that joins the natural and crit-
ical sciences and that it has created as separate. Biontology is the true
name of western ontology. And the carbon imaginary is the homologous
space created when the concepts of birth, growth-reproduction, and
death are laminated onto the concepts of event, conatus-affectus, and
finitude.
Propositional hinges aren’t truth statements. They are non-proposi-
tional propositions; a kind of statement that cannot be seriously
doubted, or if doubted the doubt indicates the speaker is or is doing
something other than making a truth statement – she is a lunatic or
being provocative. For Wittgenstein one either remains within an axial
environment or one converts to another environment. In the kind of
conversion Wittgenstein proposes one is not merely repositioned in the
space established by an axial proposition, but moves out of one space
and into another, one kind of physics into another and from one meta-
physics into another (see, for instance, Wittgenstein, 1972: 92). Hinge and
axle rod seem too smooth an imaginary joint, however, and thus the
Povinelli et al. 175

image of the scar would probably be a better image of the homologous

productivity of the space between Natural and Critical Life (although the
conceptual apparatus built into this image is from pragmatology; see
Derrida, 1978). Something is pulsing in the scarred division between
life and nonlife – an ache that makes us pay attention to a scar that
has, for a long time, remained numb and dormant, which does not
mean unfelt.
MC: The sort of ontology you are developing – geontology – suggests
something different from essence in a narrow sense: a multiplicity which
finds its basis in practice, in what ‘actually existing’ bodies get up to,
concretely, as well as the tensions implied in and through this multipli-
city. For example, in your 2012 article in South Atlantic Quarterly, you
discuss ontology in terms of the problem of endurance. Could you
unpack the connections between endurance and geontology for us?
EP: Over the years I have used various different terms to get at the
problem of endurance: geontology, geontopower, geontological power.
And I have wondered whether to use other terms. Why not, for instance,
use the phrase meteorontological power, which might more tightly ref-
erence the concept of climate? Why not coin the ill-sounding term ‘gex-
istent’ given that gexistence might better semanticize my claim that
western ontologies are covert biontologies – western metaphysics meas-
ures all forms of existence by the qualities of one form of existence (bios,
zoe¨) – and that biopolitics depends on this metaphysics being kept firmly
in place? In the end, I decided to retain the term geontology and its
cognates such as geontopower because I want to intensify the contrasting
components of nonlife (geos) and being (ontology) currently in play in
the late liberal governance of difference and markets. Thus, geontology is
intended to highlight, on the one hand, the biontological enclosure of
existence (to characterize all existents as endowed with the qualities asso-
ciated with Life). And, on the other hand, it is intended to highlight the
difficulty finding a critical language to account for the moment in which a
form of power long self-evident in certain regimes of settler late liberal-
ism is expanding to encompass others.
And, more specifically, they are meant to illuminate the cramped space
in which my indigenous colleagues are forced to manoeuvre as they
attempt to keep relevant their critical analytics and practices of existence.
In short, geontopower is not a concept first and an application to my
friends’ worlds second, but a concept that emerges from what late liberal
governance looks like from this cramped space.
KY: I’d like to follow up more on the question of endurance by asking
you about your theoretical work which asks how an ‘otherwise’ might
survive its own emergence. Especially how an otherwise might survive
when the specific structures of liberal recognition reproduce networks of
power that render it monstrous; delineating entities outside of what gets
176 Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3)

to count as a subject, and a life. This is a question in common with those

asked by critical black and indigenous studies about how the governance
of the existing life renders subjects’ existence already non-recognizable
within the dominant forms of recognition. You extend this question to
the bifurcations of life/nonlife to argue for a form of recognition that is
not cauterized by the dominant categories of existence. In this extension
into a geological realm a world of possibilities for being otherwise open
up, but does this traversal require a change of quality in how survival is
thought, given the various ‘survivals’ that characterize inhuman matter?
There is a persistence or survival of sorts in this arrangement of the
otherwise that you argue for amongst aboriginal communities in
Australia; a much longer survival of all sorts of durations than our cur-
rent arrangement of the governance of life and death. What I mean by
this is that there are survivals which are the result of understanding an
arrangement of the geoforces and their distribution within entities that
has endured at least two massive climate events. So, while the persist-
ence is fraught because it is outside of current governing modes of orga-
nizing what gets to count as life, it is a geosocial arrangement that has a
duration that exceeds the duration of that governance. So how do we
make sense of those differences in duration (but not time) that charac-
terize the possibilities for the persistence within certain modes of
existence?
EP: I like cauterize . . . a fairly painful method of sealing an opening in a
body that creates more openings: ‘bite down baby, I am going to have to
cauterize your leg’. The question of what survival means outside the
geontological imaginary is important, I think, because so much of our
current ethical and political vocabulary is organized around the idea of
vulnerability, with vulnerability animated by the image of the woundable
body. Few critical theorists believe this body is prior to discourse or
reachable except through discourse. Bodies are vulnerable because they
arrive already dependent on discourses and others who keep them in
place. I think Butler is primarily interested in human bodies, but
others, such as Jane Bennett, have extended the double-nature of this
claim (that bodies are not prior to discourse and that they are dependent
materialities vulnerable to the actions of others) into the idea of an
assemblage. Bennett notes our ‘flesh is populated and constituted by
different swarms of foreigners . . . the bacteria in the human microbiome
collectively possess at least 100 times as many genes as the mere 20,000 or
so in the human genome . . . we are, rather, an array of bodies, many
different kinds of them in a nested set of microbiomes’ (Bennett, 2010:
112–13). And how our bodies are supported by other equally distributed
agencies such as ‘the wiring and transformers and fingers that regulate
the computer regulations. Wherever we look a swarm of vitalities [are] at
play’ (2010: 32).
Povinelli et al. 177

Two notes. First, the assemblage is of course a fiction we must be quite

careful with. It doesn’t exist in the world as it exists in the nominal,
pronominal and demonstrative dynamics of human logos. To have an
assemblage one has to somehow place an artificial skin – an epidermal
like encasing – around what is in fact a multiplicity of actual and possible
openings. There are not an array of bodies but an array of forces that
language snips and seals, cutting off various necessary connectivities; a
mode of making a body which makes in the process more wounds that
then need to be cauterized, ad infinitum and ad nauseam. The pain is not
because the body has been wounded but because to make the body – or
the assemblage – is a set of cascading wounds. So what we need language
to do is give us an indefinite form of ‘it’ – perhaps ‘thatish’ over ‘thereish’.
The second note turns to your question of time and the assemblage.
I agree with you that duration is a better concept than time when trying
to analyze what is at stake when various modes of existence meet. It
seems fairly obvious to say that a creek or a granite mountain has
endured longer than a specific human governing order – and that the
granite mountain endures because it is durable in a different way than a
human or her mode of governance. Of course, a mining company can
blow a granite mountain sky high as mining companies are doing in the
Appalachia. But left untouched it seems obvious to us that the creek or
granite mountain will remain longer – it will endure – than any one
particular human person and, in the case of the granite mountain,
humans as a species. The granite mountain is a form of existence
(a thatish over thereish) that predates and postdates ‘usish’ over
‘hereish’.
But this is indeed the heart of the problem with assemblages and
bodies, no matter if we think about them through the concept of time
or duration. Quentin Mellaissoux’s arche-fossil is a good example of the
problem. The commonsense of experiencing the fossil in one’s hand as
having existed prior to one’s hand reveals geontopower as a primary
governing force. Meillassoux challenges his reader – you have to admit
that this fossil you are holding is prior to your givenness and to human
givenness. The actual existent is not in your hand, of course; what you
are holding is a material trace of a former form of existence.
So we have a hand and a fossil. On the one hand, the fossil seems to be
composed of something before what the hand is composed of and able to
endure beyond the hand’s span of life and all human hands’ lifespans. On
the other hand, the fossil is nowhere but there in the hand. It is not in a
different time, nor is it enduring over time. It is changing as it moves
across material and discursive substrates. There is no difference between
the fossil and the hand unless we abstract each out of the ongoingness of
their material becoming. Materially the fossil only becomes a fossil as
such if something prior to it settled into it in the right conditions. And
having become thatish it continually changes its shape and internal
178 Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3)

biochemical structure. The fossilish is exposed to its surroundings as

certainly as we are.
But by abstracting it out of its ongoing alterations it is made to work
as a tool for dividing time and people – i.e. it operates as a tool for social
tense – that is, tense-laden discourses that govern by separating peoples
and things into different temporary orders. When Meillassoux asks his
reader, don’t we all agree, that at the minimum, science is making a true
statement when it claims that an arche-fossil existed prior to human
existence, he reminds his reader what she will become if she answers in
the negative. She will find

herself dangerously close to contemporary creationists: those quaint

believers who assert today, in accordance with the ‘literal’ reading
of the Bible, that the earth is no more than 6000 years old, and who,
when confronted with the much older dates arrived at by science,
reply unperturbed that God also created at the same time as the
earth 6000 years ago those radioactive compounds that seem to
indicate that the earth is much older than it is – in order to test
the physicists’ faith. (Meillassoux, 2008: 18)

Or she will become a primitive because, like my indigenous friends and

colleagues, she thinks rocks listen.
But there is nothing less true about claiming we are also rocks and
sediment before and even after we settled into this mode of existence than
claiming that the fossil and the hand are in different geological tenses.
After all, we can stretch human substance back into whatever stuff we
stretch the fossil. We won’t look like we do now. We won’t be what we
are now. We will be dispersed across many modes of existence, which are
only potentially us, then. But neither will the fossil be, nor the thing for
which it stands as an arche-trace. And even now, my hand is potentially
rock holding a rock.
In other words, the mode of being of the rock and hand in relation to
the interchange among existences is constantly being contained by the
sensibilities of geontopower even as in enduring as a claim – they do
listen, they can smell and feel our presence – the otherwise endures
within and against this ‘recognition’. In a circuitous way this way of
thinking about the endurant takes us back to the paradoxical notion of
an assemblage – because what is enduring is also constantly adjusting
and finding its way within the changing biochemistry of recognition – to
keep ‘itish’ otherwise, to keep ‘itish’ enduring.
MC: It seems that you’re making a break with Meillassoux, however. In
Time without Becoming Meillassoux says that rather than an object for
the subject, the arche-fossil poses the problem of a ‘domain of non-cor-
relation as lacking any subject’ (Meillassoux, 2014: 16). The arche-fossil
Povinelli et al. 179

seems apart from, and before, the (representing) subject. I see you
making more of a threshold-style argument.
EP: Yes, I am breaking with Meillassoux in two ways. First, I am arguing
that from any given time coexisting objects are in the same time because
all objects are altering across time. The fossil and the hand, thus, are not
in different times. The way Meillassoux makes his problem appear is by
stating that the fossil in the hand holds the trace of a previous form of
existence that predates the subject – and givenness as such. So we must
ask what this trace is materially and discursively. Why isn’t the trace
oriented to the future or simply to the present – or future perfect –
that might have already happened (fossils and stardust and humans).
Second, I am pushing us to ask why this seems to matter and how in it
mattering is it figuring specific social groups relative to others. We can
pretend this is just a philosophical moment, but the philosophy is aimed
to overcome a political impasse. So we must write our responses relative
to this impasse.
KY: In your discussion of Tjipel (Povinelli, 2015) you highlight how
geological formations are framed as not being able to give account
within liberal structures of recognition, but this account gives the
wrong account of her difference; that the question of geology framed
as a ‘subject’ not being able to account for itself is not the point.
Rather, the point is not to make her like us, but instead that we might
notice that we are more like her. So the question you ask is where can
Tjipel be, if she cannot speak as an entity from within the demos? Where
can she be, if she is placed outside of agency and time? Her difference of
matter will matter to her survival and her difference will include or
exclude her from being able to exist in the current government of
sense. As I understand it, she is placed outside of time, in the same
way that aboriginal peoples are. And yet she is not a biopolitical subject.
What kind of geopolitical subjectivity would then account for her in a
way that ensured her survival?
EP: I agree that when we turn to nonhuman entities the question
should not return to the subject – so I am a little confused why the
question then turns to whether we need an account of a geopolitical
subjectivity. Do you mean a geopolitical subjectivity as distinct from a
geontological subjectivity? I am not trying to develop an account of
geontological subjectivity, but you are absolutely right that many
people are trying to develop such an account. In a recent working
paper, the British anthropologist Martin Holbraad asks two beguilingly
simple questions: first, might there be ‘a sense in which things could
speak for themselves?’ and if so, ‘what might their voices sound like?’
(Holbraad, 2011). We might see this as an attempt to deploy Rancière’s
understanding of politics and policing in the framework of noise and
speech, phonos and logos. So how might geonto-existents be the
180 Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3)

contemporary part that plays a vital part in the demos but plays no
role in its governance?
After all, the question is not whether these meteorological and geo-
logical forms of existence are playing a part in the current government of
the demos. Clearly they already do economically, politically, and socially.
The question is what role is being assigned to them as they emerge from a
low background hum to making a demand on the political order. As the
drama of climate change accelerates and the concept of Anthropocene
consolidates, how will existents such as Tjipel be absorbed into the poli-
cing of life and nonlife, markets and difference or disrupt the material
and discursive orders that prop up these forms of governance? And here
we must ask whether the concepts of logos and subjectivity place a limit
on how or what kind of noise can enter the dialectic (logos) of the demos?
Who can speak and who can only be spoken for (for example, Spivak on
darstellen and verstellen)?
I worry that geontopower – the late liberal governance of the differ-
ence between life and nonlife – is being iterated rather than disturbed in
contemporary critical theories of subjectivity. Rather than dissolving the
human-centered theory of logos and demos, nonlife entities, extensions,
and assemblages are welcomed into the language and habitus of the
demos. The generosity of extending our form of semiosis to all forms
of existence forecloses the possibility of them provincializing us. Think
here of the cunning of recognition – the otherwise is absorbed into the
dominant framework through the recognition that the spacething
marked by or baring this otherwise is not so different that itish can’t
be seen to carry an essentially common element, in this case, subjectivity
and logos. Why isn’t the emergence of this geoecological otherwise doing
the exact opposite: making logos become noise; unskinning subjectivity
and assemblages? What if everything was everything else’s external
organs? We say this. We know this. But how to act politically and eth-
ically in a world encountered in this way?
Because the concept of life is always pressuring the concept of assem-
blage to become em-bodied – constantly apprehending a radical open
field as an epidermally closed one – if the endurant is to act as a substi-
tute for subjectivity it has to be a nonequivalent substitute. Take Tjipel as
an example of paradox. One says, Tjipel is an estuarine creek river. But
to make an equivalent between Tjipel and a thing is a nominal fallacy.
Where is Tjipel? Where is any creek? Is she the sand and/or breeze and/or
roots and/or rain and/or fish fecal? And when these components of and
not of her are away from her are they still her? And is Tjipel also a capital
mine given that within her are potential components of the mining indus-
try – minerals and sluices and ports?
All these proximate distal actual and potential things that Tjipel is are
always within a governance of life and nonlife. For instance, if my indi-
genous colleagues want to protect Tjipel from the state through state
Povinelli et al. 181

means then they must produce a skin for her in the form of a boundary.
They must draw a line on a map. This form of en-skinning – creating an
epidermis, a border, or a boundary – is a demand of the demos. Make
yourself an I is always I-here. Tjipel must be allowed to challenge the very
foundation of the twist of logos and subjectivity if she is to break this
epidermal enclosure. So perhaps we need to make assemblages like sub-
jects in order to be able to assume the position of the subject; perhaps we
must still the essential noise of the assemblage to reorder the political.
But I think we should admit that this political reordering is not politics.
What we have agreed will not endure is what these other orders of exist-
ence are.
We have many other possible reformations of language as noise – we
could radicalize M.M. Bakhtin’s concept of the alien word; Charles
Sanders Peirce’s would be of truth; William James’s understanding of
the concept as an effort that emerges from and is dispersed across
unevenly energized worlds.
MC: You’ve mentioned Holbraad’s work and I’d like to ask you about
the recent ontology turn across the social sciences, which has embraced a
broadly Deleuzian understanding that concepts are tools of experimen-
tation and creativity, rather than ‘waiting for us, ready-made’. If we look
at the ontological turn as recently advocated by anthropologists,
although experimentation and openness are highlighted, its ethnographic
core remains intact. Or so it would seem? For example, the ontological
turn has been described recently by Holbraad, Pedersen and Viveiros de
Castro as ‘an ontological self-determination of peoples’ as well as
‘[leaving] a way out for the people you are describing’ (Holbraad et al.,
2014). This ‘leaving a way out’ approach strikes me as relevant to your
implicit critique of biopolitics in Economies of Abandonment, where you
explore human social life through the prism of the quasi-event – a slow
grind of existence/existents below a threshold of easy theoretical reflec-
tion and explanation, or what you call the ‘wobbly order of the every-
day’. But the concept of self-determination doesn’t seem such a good fit,
as the people you write about never attain a titular status.
EP: I am all for pretending that the ontological term is primarily built on
the work of Deleuze, but I think many of its major proponents in phil-
osophy would disagree. The ethnographic turn to ontology takes many
forms as well. But let’s take the Amazonian literature – the work of
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, but also Philippe Descola, Eduardo
Kohn, and others. What’s at stake in Viveiros de Castro’s rich under-
standing of perspectivism is not a cultural difference but an ontology that
differs from and competes with western ontologies. Over the last few
years, two major issues have arisen with respect to the anthropological
project that calls for an ontological self-determination of peoples. First,
many wonder, myself included, whether academics have already
182 Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3)

conceded to normative epistemologies when the social realities of con-

temporary indigenous peoples are transformed into an ontology such
that a this-ontology can be compared to a that-ontology. More clearly:
if we abstract an ontology out of the multiplicities of social forces cour-
sing through the region in order to compare it to western ontology as
governance through abstraction, we have already given away the house.
It might be that the structuralist history connecting Paris and São Paulo
tends towards these forms of abstraction. And Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro (2015) and David Graeber (2015) have recently engaged in a
cognate debate. As a consequence of this first issue comes a second –
namely, the transformation of social worlds into states, not merely states
of affairs, but state like organisms that anthropologists can then repre-
sent. (It’s why I have never fallen in love with Latour’s idea of the dip-
lomat: the diplomat projects a state formation on those who have no
interest in such – think here of another Amazonian, Pierre Clastres’
Society Against the State.)
This brings us back to our discussion about the relationship between
subjectivity, the assemblage, and endurance. Self-determination demands
a self, a subject of determination. We can either think that this is a
neutral reference – something referring to the essential way the world
is composed – or understand it as a form of governance. What worries
me about self-determination is that it foregrounds the idea of a thing that
does not change. In indigenous Australia this fantasy of a body-custom-
culture-ontology that is something is the means of the governance of the
measure.
If we understand assemblages as composed not of an event that creates
a kind of thing but a series of barely or un-perceptible quasi-events, then
we think something is enduring because we can’t see or don’t experience
the constant wobbling, not enduring nature of various entity-ishes con-
nected across any given terrain. So again: the endurant is not a thing that
endures but the creativity of keeping in place something that is constantly
changing. Clearly this is a paradox. But my colleagues have always
stressed this paradox. Nothing can ever be kept in place but can only
be attended to. That this takes a constant mutual orientation among
things that cannot be things except within this mutual orientation and
aren’t because no one can know how far they stretched nor if they have
leaked – things like sand or ocean spray or radioactivity and chemical
contamination. They refuse the psychotic olive branch continually
extended to them – tell us what you are in essence above and beyond
separate from the world you are inhabiting.
MC: Your most recent explorations under the banner of geontology seem
to be pushing in the direction opened up by object-oriented ontology,
concerning specifically the rethinking of humans as subjectless objects,
part of an array of objects-in-themselves (and not objects put before and
in front of a subject). I see this resonance by virtue of what you have to
Povinelli et al. 183

say about subjects being ‘hailed’, or shaped, by landscapes in particular

ways. This seems of a piece with Levi Bryant’s basic claim that humans
are objects among other objects, and that their capacities are shaped on a
landscape of objects (Bryant, 2011). And yet Bryant’s demotion of rep-
resentation – also more generally in object-oriented ontology – seems to
me to not jive particularly well with the fact that in much of your pub-
lished work readers are asked to consider the mechanics and the effects of
people rendered as objects before specifically European subjects – for
example, the intertwined problems of multicultural recognition, tense,
and difference, which as you put it in Economies of Abandonment,
work to cast certain subjects as genealogical and not properly autologi-
cal, and hence as candidates for extinction, correction, abandonment,
etc. Hence the importance of Fabian to your work. Can you talk to us
a bit about how you see your work in light of these emerging discussions
on representation in object-oriented ontology?
EP: Yes, I see your point. First of all, I think I am working at variance
with Bryant and some of the other object-oriented ontologies. Why? On
one hand, I don’t think that the return to objects is the return to things
because first and foremost it appears to be a return to abstractions –
things that do not depend on human knowledge. Second, geontopower is
not a claim about a power of things independent of the human but rather
a division of things as humans misplace themselves and try to separate
themselves from other things. Third, democracy is itself symptomatic of
the problem – or the parliament of things is symptomatic. Before we have
even gotten to things we have already decided that a certain mode of
governance allows things to be themselves – to have a voice and a say in
how they should be and be governed. A parliament. Perhaps before we
‘allow’ objects to be held together through the forces of democracy – to
be free through the discourses of parliamentary procedure – we might
free ourselves from this idea that the autological subject is the internal
truth of all subjects/objects. The governance of the division between life
and nonlife governs the sensibleness of this sense of this aporia and
paradox. So I would expect most readers to think, sure, but now I am
in this form of existence and want to endure in it – and not just me but
my children and maybe humans in some abstract sense.

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Elizabeth Povinelli is the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at

Columbia University. Influenced by American pragmatism as well as
immanentist continental theory, Povinelli has written extensively on the
problem of late liberal governance, with a specific focus on biopolitics
and indigeneity in the Australian political economic context. Her most
recent book is Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, published in
2016 by Duke University Press. Her prior books include Economies of
Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (2011),
The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and
Carnality (2006), The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and
the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (2002) and Labor’s Lot: The
Power, History and Culture of Aboriginal Action (1994).

Mat Coleman is an Associate Professor of Geography at Ohio State

University. Coleman is a political geographer and works on policing
and immigration enforcement, as well as on oil field life in the US.

Kathryn Yusoff is a Reader in Geography at Queen Mary University of

London, who is writing a book on ‘geologic life’ and the political geology
of the Anthropocene.

This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special issue on
‘Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’, edited by Nigel Clark and
Kathryn Yusoff.