On Cosmologies and Pedagogies

The conversation took place on November 27, 2024 at the University of Amsterdam. It explores the intersections of cosmology and perspectivism, fieldwork and film, the politics of locality and the significance of diverse ways of sensing for pedagogy and creative practices. It specifically engages with neurodiversity, its relation to the decolonization of thought, and the limitations of Western epistemology, emphasizing relationality, experience, and the need for genuinely transformative, open pedagogical fields.

Halbe Hessel Kuipers holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Amsterdam; thesis under the direction of Patricia Pisters and Erin Manning, entitled ‘Perspectives and Event: A Study on Modes of Existence’, defended in 2022. Having worked a lifetime in the experimental laboratory for research-creation, SenseLab, under Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Kuipers was editor of the journal Inflexions and spearheaded its radical pedagogy project on neurodiversity. Kuipers now teaches at the University of Amsterdam and is working on a book on perspectivism and film.

Michael Just is a transdisciplinary artist, founder of Michael Just Office & Studio, Berlin, and PhD candidate at the City University of Hong Kong, School of Creative Media. In 2024, he was a guest researcher at TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, as CityUHK Research Activities Fund Fellow. He is also a Steering Team member at DigitalFUTURES where he co-organizes the Doctoral Consortium on Architecture & Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence. Michael holds MFA degrees from both the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Prof. Daniel Buren) and Goldsmiths, University of London and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York City. Recent teaching includes institutions such as Hong Kong Baptist University AVA and the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou.

Michael Just
Let me start by giving some background from my side. My current project involves fieldwork in villages around Guangzhou, looking into ways of how people coexist with diverse forms of cognition or sensing. Other people, the environment, animals, gods and spirits, religious practices in a sense, although it wouldn’t have to be a religion per se. I am living with families and farmers over extended periods of time. I don’t speak Cantonese myself, so we find ways of communicating outside of spoken natural language. After a while you understand very intuitively. I go along with this flow, merging with their lives in a way.

I’m now in the process of editing the film and getting the chapters together, moving from relationality, villages and the built environment to, ultimately, discussing ways of aligning life and synthetic organisms, artificial intelligence. It’s about this broad spectrum of coexistence, how do we integrate new forms of cognition?

Halbe Kuipers
Very interesting what you say about your work there, and in particular the religion that is not per se religion. The first thing that comes to mind, in view of this and the broad spectrum of coexistence you mention, is the cosmological. The tools used to communicate you mention, they could well be seen as cosmotechnics, right? I mean, to be able to communicate across disparate perspectives by ways of techniques, that seems an excellent definition of cosmotechnics to me.^[1]

This sort of work in between we could say is that of “mediators.” The interesting thing of that term is that Gilles Deleuze uses it in relation to cinema, in particular to modern political cinema in the tradition of Jean Rouch’s cinema verité.^[2] So, this already points at the cinematic role as cosmotechnical mediator.

The notion of mediator is, however, somewhat dubious. It seems to imply it is a concern of media, and thus the concept of medium is put right in the middle of these practices. If this is a problem, it is because the concept of medium, from the philosophy that I come from, holds quite the presuppositions.^[3] These make it anything but cosmotechnical in the sense of communicating across disparate perspectives. That is, the concept of medium, as we have conceived of it in modern philosophy, presupposes a certain separation from the world. By this separation it then also actively reproduces but one ontology, which is the base of our modern cosmology.

The concept, however, can also be termed as “intercessor,” where it picks up on more religious overtones. But Deleuze seems to mobilize these religious overtones in a very different way. They don’t mean to communicate in the sense of translating from one culture and language to another; rather, in the middle, or par milieu, they are more so “inventing culture.”^[4] What you say then on artificial intelligence and new forms of cognition seem to me then to point mostly to the field that such a practice and its techniques creates in the middle.

Michael Just
I should say that, for me, the presence of Yuk Hui was certainly one of the reasons for going to Hong Kong, and this relation between technodiversity and the cosmological does underpin my project. I think that ways of coming together, of coexisting and of renewing are technological, as you just pointed out, so coexistence is a cosmotechnics. I think that it is a technics insofar as different cosmologies develop specific practices of recognizing, integrating and relating to diverse minds, or sprits, for example. This is a question that interests me very much.

The question concerning medium and mediation that you brought up is very interesting, and I think it may have significance to the broader design framework of this conversation. I entirely agree with you, and with this problematization of the medium. The reference to Massumi and Manning in terms of “immediation” is spot on and has been critical for me. If we go back a bit further, we could look at James’s “pure experience” and Peirce’s “Firstness”, the immediacy of feeling^[5]. Working against representation, what interests me is what is produced in moments of relation. Something that I find intriguing in its implications is that being present and being a participant, changes things. Of course, it would be a premise of ethnography that presence makes a difference. Being aware of that, and working through that, has been entirely fascinating. Going back and forth between the film, fieldwork and the writing and looking at them as really intertwined was, for me, a way of approaching a framework of artistic research.

But coming back to what we were just discussing upstairs. I’m sure you know much more about this than I do, I’m not a film scholar myself, but this notion of thinking through the essay film as a language, as performative, film as film-philosophy insofar as it is asking the question of what a concept could be in cinematic terms, is something that I find very appealing.

Halbe Kuipers
Yes, these questions of film-philosophy are very interesting. They are also important as the technologies we’ve crafted make these images proliferate and circulate more and more. This is all the more reason to get an adequate sense and conception of what images are and what they can do.

Again, I follow Deleuze in thinking cinematic thought. Throughout his work on cinema, as well as afterwards when he reflects on what he had done with this work, Deleuze is very clear: cinema always pertains to its own mode of thought, and has always already done so.^[6] This is something of a heretic claim because all along we have conceived of cinema as merely something for us, a machine of representations that is. Because we tend to see it as such, thought would only be on our side of things as we reflect upon, or at best intend towards the images of cinema.

Deleuze says that those who do cinema, the filmmakers, the critics, but also the cinephiles, think blocs of affects and percepts, or simply sensations. I find that a gorgeous idea because it allows for the cinematic, and for that matter any other art practice, to have its own material and thereby its own mode of thought. It refuses to put thought only on the side of supposed capacity to think by favoring the mental per reason and cognition. It rather puts it in the world, that is, in the middle. The cinematic is always an encounter as much as your work is an encounter via the cinematic (but of course not limited to it).

But then Deleuze, in his work with Guattari, distinguishes between the disciplines of art and philosophy. They do not pertain to the same material: respectively sensations and concepts. What I find interesting about this is that it seems to somewhat trouble the currently in vogue notions of film-philosophy and the likes. It seems more radical to me because it says that film does not need philosophy at all to think for itself. Perhaps, then, when we try to give space to more expanded ways of thinking the cinema by propounding a term like film-philosophy, we might end up only reducing it more so. This is a tricky thing, because of course also, in the academic discourses and the whole institutional validation of research, we need to have these spaces because they allow us to think these more radical ideas. I guess there is then a need to affirm such a category as film-philosophy. But as category I don’t think it gives us anything specific to work with, at least not in the first place.

Michael Just
I very much like the idea of the encounter, from many points of view. For me, I guess it follows from an experience-first approach, though it might be worth referring to Peirce again here, for whom experience is “the entire mental product”. The idea that an engagement with the world implies fact-creation I think also means, and perhaps this has, at least ostensibly, specific relevance to image-based practices, that there can be no observation per se. The world is already meeting us halfway, in the words of Barad. Thought in the world, I like that very much.

What interests me about the example of film-philosophy is that it may help us in renegotiating the specific characteristics or boundaries of a discipline precisely in its transdisciplinary co-evolvement with other fields and modes of inquiry. Perhaps one could speak of an intra-disciplinarity, in that way. I’m also reminded of quite extensive discourse in the field of art on medium specificity. For me, medium and method are interrelated, and I would be unable to put them before experience: through acting they emerge. Where then, would we locate the boundaries? But I’m very open to the point you make. This is an open and exciting question, and we can see a similar, perhaps we can call it productive tension, in the relation between art and science.

Do you have a film practice yourself?

Halbe Kuipers
No, I don’t make films myself in the sense of being a filmmaker. My concerns seemed to have always gravitated more towards the academic side of things in terms of concepts. But since my work is with the cinematic, with cinema’s propensity for thought, I do think my practice is incredibly close to filmmaking. In a way we are both preoccupied with what cinema can do, and I think that leads to thinking the camera-eye as much as camera-consciousness. That is, in a full-fledged ontogenetic sense, what does cinema create in the world? At that point it is both, I think, a matter of making images, albeit images of quite a different nature perhaps.

But I would not be surprised if at some point I do pick up the camera. It is just that the situation I am in, the encounters I am living and the concerns I am having, would have to ask or even demand it. I never thought of it as a matter of ‘oh, I am interested in cinema so I should make films.’

Michael Just
You articulate a point that has become very important for me and that I probably only understood better more recently: that the seeming opposition between theory and practice or research and practice is very much misleading. You emphasize ontogenesis and “making”: How would the creation of concepts that propagate, that potentially expand into and operate in the world, that make a difference in the world, be less transformative, or less of an intervention than what is more commonly called practice.

I should say that I don’t have much of a background in filmmaking, rather it was very much a situation as you just described it. Also, I was not familiar with the whole area and context, so I had to start from scratch, find assistance, and then I gradually made connections. In China, there is this notion of rural reconstruction. It is very specific to China because of its cultural roots in agriculture. It is to an extent a government policy but likewise a bottom-up artistic movement. It overlaps with what we would call community-based art or socially engaged art. Artists work in the villages and rural contexts as a kind of a revitalizing practice with a transformative and pedagogical intend, reactivating tradition and relationships, bringing in students, educating villagers, and opening up new ways for them to make their work such as artisan craft economically viable. The way China modernized and specifically urbanized, this unprecedented growth within a few decades, has come at a cost. Environmentally speaking, yes, but rural areas have been affected in many ways because a lot of resources from the villages have been drained as a result of urban growth. There is a sense of restoring village life and culture, of counteracting alienation. I quite like the Chinese notion of the Spirit of Place, in that it leaves open diverse ways of approaching the complexity that is indicated there. But admittedly, my insights here are limited.

Halbe Kuipers
I for one really can’t say much about the conditions there; for some reason life always took me elsewhere. What I can speak to, though, is the process of modernization in relation to the rural and local you speak of, and how this relates to the cosmological questions we began with.

Take the place we are in right now for instance. In The Netherlands of late there have been strong movements to revalue the rural and the local, as in many places in modern society I reckon. Obviously, this is playing out very differently here than it is in China. But what we see here – and this might characterize a common quality across, a tendency if you will, at least here in the West – is this revaluation comes with strong identitarian overtones. Much of it seems born out of a reactionary movement, or is marked by it at least. Locality then becomes little but a war machine for more of the same. In fact, I would go as far as to say that what these reactionary tendencies say they want, in the name of ‘being closer to nature’ and such, is in fact the very stuff that is at the heart of the modern cosmology and, thereby, paradoxically removes us from nature only more despite, or perhaps precisely because of its claims. My main intuition for saying this is that, when indeed reactionary, it does not tend to plurality and relationality at all but rather to the same. It is self-indulgent in the way that Nietzsche speaks of reactionary movements. This, then, has little to nothing to do with nature, and even less with the cosmological.

In this way the current discourses on locality are really problematic. If anything, they require us to start thinking the middle again, or as I made reference to above already, “penser par milieu.” The restoration you speak of then can only go by restoring, that is creating anew spaces and practices in the middle to ward off these reactionary tendencies. We have to because as these discourses make sufficiently clear, supposedly in the name of these territories and their localities, we are once again speaking of closing borders and even deportations.

Michael Just
These are such important points. Without being able to do justice to any of them, let me try and address just a few. I entirely agree: restoration and reconstruction imply what you have just referred to as “creating anew”. I think of this as creative reinterpretation, and I touch upon it also in the conversation with Rick Dolphijn and his notion of coming together, which he draws from Marx. At least in that way we can hopefully avoid the notion of a reinstantiation of the past. I’m also thinking of Viveiros de Castro’s remark: (Amer-)indianeity is a project of the future, not a memory of the past. Can we connect this notion of indianeity to locality and what kind of future is envisioned here? I think doing so might open up possibilities, and they wouldn’t be limited to the Amerindian context. I think of the rural here in this spatial way that Viveiros calls extra-modern, and as such I think it comes close to the plurality and relationality you mention.

You mention The Netherlands. In Germany it is constantly growing.

Halbe Kuipers
Yes, the way it is playing out in Germany is complicated, to say the least. There seem so little conditions for thought, that is a thinking-feeling, as the whole field is haunted by its own past and the suffocating guilt that comes with it.

Michael Just
It’s hard to find a place in Europe that hasn’t been taken over by a mentality of narrow identity and large-scale exclusion.

Halbe Kuipers
In the larger movements of modern global capitalism, perhaps it is also not strange: its promises of individual wealth are powerful, whatever the costs.

Michael Just
In the context of the Chinese villages, gaining more economic prosperity is certainly important for local people. But you can see this also manifest in very strange ways, such as villages turning into theme parks to attract tourists, where culture turns into a commercialized and commodified caricature. It may work in attracting money. But it’s not a restoration, rather a loss of connection to the land and locality, as you mentioned before. It’s a homogenization where the commodity is the invariance. Ultimately, everything is taken over by a framework of short-term economic gain. My point is that, for me, a transdisciplinary artistic approach, integrating architecture and design, would exactly be to focus on this dimension of relationality and simultaneously integrate the basic needs of villagers, which are often economical. I mentioned transdisciplinarity before, and just to point it out again, I mean that the premises and framework of a discipline can change quite radically in its encounter with other disciplines. And to leverage this potential. But this would now also be a different project based on different research questions.

Halbe Kuipers
Of course. The worst would be when these ideas are anything but practical, that is, that they are just more ideals of how things should be that we reimpose ignoring the reality of daily lives and what they need.

Michael Just
I think that is very true. But it also raises the question of who can and how to speak to this specific reality, given that the premise of an activist, socially-engaged position is transformation. Rick sent me this wonderful paper which I briefly mentioned before, “The Land and Us”, combining Marx’ notion of the common and Serres’ notion of sense. I was amazed to see how close parts of it come to the questions I address in my research. It has helped me identify coming together and sensing as key elements and clarified for me the capacity of film to address both from diverse perspectives.

Halbe Kuipers
Right, the question of diverse or plural perspectives is key. What I said about working with concepts as my material rather than film and sensations also relates to this. While the materials are quite different in their practice, at the same time I like to think that they have the same concern for a plurality of perspectives.

In a way they both operate in and by themselves as sort of bridges or portals if you will. Both are fully relational, but then not the commonsensical relations that are connections between things, but rather as the relations of non-relations. That refers back to the disparate or even incommensurable nature of perspectives: these concepts and sensations both create images by which we can see the same things differently. The same thing differently here denotes however not just different interpretations of the same thing, or a different view upon the thing. In the way Eduardo Viveiros de Castro elaborates it, we are here speaking of ontologically different things. If we follow that line of thinking, then the question of sense becomes a radical one of truly creating a novel logic of sense. It always has to pass through a non-sense so to say. It becomes an ontogenetic matter. In this way Viveiros de Castro can speak of “multinaturalism.”^[8]

Michael Just
That’s a wonderful point, and I really like your notion of bridges and portals, perhaps we could add interfaces. Maybe these are ways of approximating otherness without collapsing it, that is without appropriating it. I think we can see some of this thinking informing science as well, which, of course, is struggling to address subjective experience. In physics or biology, for instance, in research concerning cognition in diverse embodiments. It would be exciting to bring philosophers, designers, scientists, artists, … to the table, and we might to an extent be sharing the same questions, just having different ways and methods of approaching them, or different ways of thinking them through.

Halbe Kuipers
I do have to say that often there are limitations in play because of the disciplines we come from and the way that they have been structured. Interdisciplinary work is interesting, but also hard because we have structured our disciplines as of epistemology rather than by the practices and affects they concern. If anything, what I just said with Viveiros de Castro is a strong critique of our modern science and its all too narrow compartmentalization and methods. It is for this reason as much as for the extraordinary way it thinks with the Amerindian cosmologies it engages with, that his work and its thinking is some of the most astonishing I’ve encountered.

Michael Just
I will say the same thing. I’m glad you emphasize the limitations. If we don’t open our disciplines to transformation, we will probably perpetuate the dynamic you point out.

Halbe Kuipers
Exactly. It is for this reason encounters with these kinds of works are, I think, rare. They push thought to the limits, literally. One can only be grateful for such exercises. For me the only other works that I have encountered which were of such a magnitude were firstly that of Deleuze, and then later that of Erin Manning and Brian Massumi. Each of these have in their own right changed everything for me, that is, they have changed my thinking. These encounters were real shocks to thought.

Michael Just
There seems to be something profoundly pedagogical in these experiences of transformation. To be in this metastable position, to have the capacity to be informed, to be taught, that really interests me.

You mention Brian Massumi and Erin Manning. I wonder how you came to work with the SenseLab. Could you talk about it? I think its implications on speculative pedagogy, design and urbanism are so important.

Halbe Kuipers
Of course. I guess it started when I was finishing my research master in media studies here in Amsterdam. At that time, I had been diving into Deleuze’s work as it was a sort of thinking that utterly intrigued me. I don’t think I understood too much of it, but I remember there was a feeling of a thrill, of something radically different to it. As if it was the entry into a world that had so far been foreclosed. With that interest came also many questions of what it was that I was doing here, or more generally, what it was that we were doing in this study, in the humanities, and in academia at broad. Notably I had questions concerning the concepts we used. I found it strange that we were wielding all this theory but that we seemed to have so little sense of what concepts are. As if those questions did not concern us: they were of philosophy, and that was not what we were doing. However, when I was following classes in philosophy, I didn’t really get answers to those questions either.

At the same time, I felt an incredible urge for more practical work, to not have this strange feeling of a separation of theory and practice. We say all these things with all these theories, but they too often feel quite flat, or simply not lived.

So in the second year of the program, I figured I needed to look around a bit to see if I could find something that would satisfy these appetites. I am glad I was rather naïve about it and just went along with the idea this would exist somewhere. By sheer chance someone I had met at a workshop had told me to go look in Canada – Erik Bordeleau, for whom I am always grateful for having steered me there. So I did. I travelled there for several months trying to find an interesting place to study. Unfortunately, the search was quite a disappointment. I didn’t like at all what I found there in the different places, all being remarkably neoliberal, one being worse than the other. But at the end of that journey, I stumbled into SenseLab. Again by luck, as Erik who felt for me after having heard how bad my experiences had been said maybe I should take a look at this research laboratory he was working with.

I remember walking into the space of SenseLab the first time. I had to climb through this giant contraption that was filled with all sorts of materials – it was a remaking of one of Lygia Clark’s artworks I later found out. But the space was strange, and the people there perhaps even stranger. I found it interesting enough to start digging into the writings and research of the people there, starting of course with the works of Erin Manning and Brian Massumi who were running it. I think I came across their works before, but it wasn’t until then that both their works sparked something for me. I remember being in the bus to New York reading Manning’s Always More Than One (2012) knowing at that very moment that I had to work with them. That turned out to be the best choice possible. Evidently, since the choice wasn’t even mine to make as it had made it for itself. Reality verifies itself, James would say.

What I couldn’t have really known at that stage – but I guess this is how these things work – is that the field I would find there was precisely one to facilitate the twofold appetite I had: at once there was an incredible rigorous conception of concepts and this came from a genuinely lived practice of philosophy. While SenseLab was far more than just philosophy, populated also by many artists, having a strong sense of activism, and always tending to a minor politics and thereby trying to engage with modalities of thought of neurodiversity, the black radical tradition, and indigenous cosmologies, it was also all philosophy. That is to say, everything was thought. This makes sense also once you start getting an idea of the process philosophy practiced there. One of the main formulae of process philosophy, as Massumi adequately phrased it, is “what is felt abstractly is thought.”^[9] Counter to everything our Western tradition of philosophy tells us, where it is always tied to some faculty or some specific human operation, here thought literally occurs everywhere. It becomes a concern of grasping its conditions with every event. What this foregrounds then is, to indeed relate it to the pedagogical you justly raise, a pedagogy of the concept. The concern of such a pedagogy is to take the abstractions far more seriously in their complexity. I find this way of thinking very interesting because it allows us to affirm thought in a plurality of modes without reducing it to what we deem it be in advance.

Complex as that may be, at the same time it sets the tone for an entirely practical approach to philosophy and to philosophizing – it is a pedagogy after all. It makes the concepts genuinely material as they are always honed to the lived. At the same time, they become the stuff that sustains a field. I find that one of the most interesting things I learned in all that time there. It is perhaps also one of the most crucial things if we think of what it is that we tend to do in our institutes that make all these claims to thought: without the creation of a field, a middle, there cannot really be thought. This basically means that at large we’ve got it all wrong with the institutes as they tend to create only the forms of fields and not the material that sustains them. Of course, this will still happen as bodies will bring that in there, but the tragic part is then that in some way the fixation on form actually runs counter to the very stuff that allows us to think. It can even go as far as the institute perceiving these sorts of initiates and their fields as threatening because they are wild and unruly. This was definitely the case for SenseLab, but we see this all the time really. Just think of the student protests and the creation of fields there for unlearning and decolonization. In their wildness and unruliness, these sorts of constructive fields are in fact a threat to the institute.

What was also remarkable about my entry onto this field was the learning in respect to the entry and fielding itself. It actually takes time to attune to a field, to start to get a sense of how things move and what its concerns are. To be sure, I am here not speaking of quantitative time as much as I mean a qualitative, intensive time. Attuning is a process, a feeling with, that expresses itself in time. For me that was perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of learning in that it reflexively – or perhaps I should say inflexively since it folds forward into the field again – teaches you what conditions are needed for study. It is also precisely in this sense that I understand Viveiros de Castro’s work and his critique on anthropology’s practice. It is far too easy to think we can just enter onto a different field, engage with a different culture by applying some premade methods and extracting the same forms we do everywhere. It is all about the field that gets made in the middle. And then it is again about what these fields can engender in thought.

Michael Just
That may be the most exciting thing a field could possibly do.

Halbe Kuipers
I could not agree more. That’s also again the question of sociality in a relational sense. It’s just unfortunate that often we construe sociality as merely a cultural phenomenon of humans instead of understanding it in a more expanded sense. Sociality takes place everywhere in between so many other entities and of all processes.

Michael Just
Several years ago, I was in a program in New York City which has a decades long history at this point. It’s connected to the Whitney Museum, and it’s a one-year program for artists, curators and critics. At the time it was still directed by the same person who had founded it in the late 60s. And it was known for its Marxist orientation. Well, Marxist in the sense of Gramsci, Althusser, Birmingham Cultural Studies. I admire a lot of this work, despite having moved on from its philosophical underpinnings. The program was at the forefront of integrating feminism by the mid 70s. It was a shelter for queer artists who were involved in ACT UP and the AIDS crisis starting from the mid 80s. And that list goes on. So, connecting to that entire history by participating is something that resonates ever after, to the extent to which you are receptive and open to being transformed by it.

Halbe Kuipers
Right, and then these fields live by a sort of will to experiment, to speak with Nietzsche. I think that is one of these factors that I find all too often left out as people prefer to be on the safe side of things. The unfortunate part of that is also that without such a will to experiment a field tends to close down, or is simply foreclosed. And worse even, such foreclosing always inflicts violence upon the other as it tends to the dominant forces. It tends to this reactive mode of existence we spoke of earlier. Our question should always be how to opens fields.

Michael Just
I would argue that it is exactly the potential of art, design, architecture and so on to open up that which is continually being closed down. I guess there are various ways to look at this but one might be in that they offer a perspective that isn’t focused on solutions or outcomes but on a continuous elaboration and permutation of processes. By that I don’t mean a return to autonomy but rather the irreducibility of process. We don’t know what process can do, hence it’s a threat, in the way that you described it, to the institution, in the way that it is open-ended, that it might go too far, that it resists quantification. What role do institutions play in this process of closing down fields?

Halbe Kuipers
Frankly, I am starting to belief the tendency of closing down is integral to institutes insofar as they are embodying the modern logic and its subjectivity. What amazes me most in this regard, is how quickly we ourselves will embody the institute and its logic. Despite all our ideals and supposed radical politics, we end up so easily enacting everything the institute stands for. Almost without any hesitation, and practically with no resistance. The past year has made this sufficiently clear again with the institutes extremely poor composing with the genocide in Palestine and the protestation concerning this. It is frightening to see how badly the institute moves with this; in fact, it does not move with it at all as it seems to only ignore or repress it. It is shameful because for all the good intentions it presents, from equality to decolonization, it seems utterly incapable of opening up to create something of a middle. The tragedy there being that genuine study is foreclosed.

Michael Just
You say that in your in text on listening and the decolonization of thought.^[10]

Halbe Kuipers
Yes, this text moves with that question, and specifically how we treat students by not doing so. As far as I’m concerned, we’ve got things all wrong if we keep looking down on our students, that is, if we do not listen to what moves with them and between them. Our general idea remains one wherein we who have positions in the university are those with knowledge; but then you see students point at things and think with things that those in positions seem utterly ignorant to, and you are faced with the utter ridiculousness of this presupposition. We keep repressing the will to power that moves in there and then at some point it becomes too much. It erupts. And then we point our fingers at the students for doing things they are not supposed to. And then it goes fast. You’re standing there at a protest, in solidarity with your students and with the cause and before you know it you have the riot squad on your neck, bashing into the university’s own students and employees. And that is supposedly just fine. The order of the day.

Michael Just
The moment things turn in one way or another violent, well actually at this point even before, that’s when fingers are pointed as you say, when the police are called and when the state apparatus affirms its perceived legitimacy to intervene and territorialize that which has erupted, which has broken out. It disregards the entire history, the entire context of what brought it about, and that is actually a parallel to the whole question concerning Gaza and Palestine that you refer to. And I’m very happy to include it here, because we should be including it. As for Germany, and I don’t know if this is naivete on my side, but I never thought that this would be possible, that we would see this degree of denial. But, of course, rather than being mystified we should remind ourselves of the machines at play.

Halbe Kuipers
And if we are speaking of closing down, then I think we should really start seeing how also on a larger scale this is taking place. The extreme right is taking hold everywhere and with that different strains of nationalism are once again in power. The ethno-state is all of a sudden in fashion again, forgetting everything it stood for and has done in the past. Worse, it is being cheered on by people who are claiming it as against everything it had before done. It is frightening stuff. Or it should be.

I’ve been thinking at this point how to understand that people are not seeing what is moving there. Is it a question of not wanting to see it? Of seeing it and wanting that? Or is it perhaps that they cannot see?

Michael Just
It feels surreal. Surreal, in the sense exactly as you say: can we not agree on a shared reality, a shared story considering such blatantly obvious facts? Or is it just cynical strategy?

Halbe Kuipers
Surreal seems definitely one way to characterize it. But then I remember the words of a good friend of mine who always kept saying that what is for us Europeans surreal, is just everyday stuff elsewhere (he was speaking from the point of view of Brazil). I think the point is to not relegate it to some other plane, of a different order as surrealism would seem to imply: this is reality, and that over there is just something else. Asking whether something cannot be seen in this sense might be an interesting possibility because, as per ontological perspectivism, it tells us that the things we see can be different things, ontologically so. It is like saying that where some see people when they see the images of genocide, others see something else, something that can simply be exterminated not unlike we do with animals. This sort of thinking seems extreme, but when we have politicians outright saying that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian people,’ are we then not indeed dealing with an ontological difference?

Michael Just
If we assume this difference as you describe it, it raises the question of how do you possibly resolve this? I suppose that there’s a certain scale invariance here, whether this manifests globally or in a local community. As creative practitioners, and here I mean, of course, the creation of anything that operates in the world, what are we to do?

Halbe Kuipers
Yes, so perhaps this goes back to what we were talking about earlier. However abstract, the only thing I can keep thinking in the face of this is that we must work to open up the fields again by creating a middle. I don’t see that happening if we keep muddling along trying to fight for the right of existence of certain existents on the basis of a logic that can only exclude by including.^[11]

Michael Just
Exactly. I understand this creation of a middle as regeneration, as creative reinterpretation, that is, as building new stories and finding shared purpose. Creating a middle, does that inform your teaching? How so?

Halbe Kuipers
As I write in that text, for me it is a matter of listening. I treat my classes and the space it takes place in as a field proper, meaning we are constantly engaging with the very conditions of what we do in there, which is ultimately studying. For me, the most important thing in treating it this way is that I don’t bring in any forms in there that are already preconceived and that would set the field in a way that brings in an ordering. So, for instance, I don’t treat my students as of a different nature than myself as teacher; I think there is only a difference in degree here in that certain bodies have more experience than others in relation to studying and specifically the concerns we engage with. In this sense there can well be concerns in which the students are far more experienced than I am, which makes sense because the lived is here a main determining factor and not some ideal forms of what the concern is supposed to be about.

Treating it this way, at least for me, creates a certain openness in the field that more often than not the students, or more exactly their bodies, will hone into and from there feel a potential to engage with it. The interesting part here is also that the forms of engagement or interaction can become quite different: it doesn’t expect everybody to engage with it in the same way. A plurality of expressions can become part of the fabric of studying.

Another aspect of such a pedagogy would be that, since we have foregrounded the bodies, all affects are taken seriously in the class. There is no a priori separating out of what is supposedly important and what should be the subject matter of studying. Of course I bring in all sorts of material, but these are never to determine what should be studied, not in the way of knowledge production nor in the way of correlating experience to them. They are more propositions that operate as “lures for feeling,” as Whitehead calls them. They constantly create activations in the field. This is then a minor but continuous exercise of opening up. I wouldn’t know what else studying would be.

Michael Just
Foregrounding the bodies, as you say, is something I find very interesting and critical. In an art context, to the best of my knowledge, one of the first artists who made listening a pedagogical as much as ethical as much as feminist approach, was the artist Mary Kelly. She makes the point that, not being receptive or not listening when you actually are in a position to do so is, in a way, unethical. And that really informed her entire pedagogical approach. I think what Kelly did there in terms of a concentric pedagogy is quite similar to what Barad later called ethico-onto-epistemology: listening becomes an intra-action, an affective mode of engagement. This is the problem with critique, that it perpetuates the subject-object divide and presupposes a universal epistemology, as such it is blind to different ontologies.

Halbe Kuipers
Yes, I am very impressed by these sorts of initiatives. It is nothing but brave to try and create a field of studying that thrives on a will to experiment. What seems to me essential is that a field and such a will to experiment needs specific concerns. That is, like in this case, there is something of singular importance that the field strives for, feminism being an excellent example. Perhaps we can say that no studying can be done without concerns, and for concerns, in one way or another, there must always be something at stake. I think this is another way of speaking of a minor- or cosmopolitics.

But then we must be aware that such activity always takes a lot. Not only does it require constant work, as we said earlier, it constitutes also something of a perpetual threat to the powers in place. Any pedagogy, in this sense, is always deviant, always looking for lines of flight from what otherwise, that is, normally, constitutes what is supposed to be done and what thus is supposed to be taught. It is precisely for this reason I think we should have infinite sympathy for any attempt to create a field pedagogically. Even when the differences with our own ideas of how to do it might be substantial. I like this idea of sympathy as transversally affirming relation very much. It is a constant work of opening the Self up to the Other.

Michael Just
You touched upon decolonization earlier. This notion of opening up the Self to the Other, and I’m thinking also of the relations of non-relation here, how do they relate to decolonization?

Halbe Kuipers
Yes, I think this relation is crucial in respect to decolonization. I am very fond of the notion Viveiros de Castro mobilizes of the “decolonization of thought.”^[12] He basically says that there can be no decolonization without also decolonizing thought itself. This seems a tricky thing to say because it appears to harken back to some sort of decolonization that only concerns our thinking, as if reflecting upon things is good enough to decolonize. The image of a bunch of white men in armchairs discussing decolonization immediately comes up – and sadly this image is still very real and lives in actuality just about everywhere. Needless to say, this riles up any proper materially grounded activist, poised to set that place with the armchairs on fire as it stands for everything decolonization should not be about. And they are right.

But then Viveiros de Castro’s decolonization of thought might signal something quite different. In my understanding of it, it is precisely pointing at the very problematic conditions we have of thought that lead us to always stage it in a way that ends up as precisely such reflection, and what that very much reaffirms is the power that be. To say we need a decolonization of thought is then, I think, precisely to affirm that thought should not and cannot be limited to such a poor practice of reflection. It forces us to see thought in so many other practices, in so many other activities. It means to precisely free thought from the exceptionally narrow and limited image of the human as we have created it in the Western philosophical tradition and in particular its modern uptake (the latter in particular because it signals the death of God and thereby grants us, by our very own move, the center of the universe). If anything, the decolonization of thought fights for a far more expanded empiricism, and with that with a new materialism that refuses to take the material substrate only as we have ourselves come to see it. In a way this is a major critique on the Marxist strains of thought we have entertained because they tend to negate the multiplicity of matter by assuming it is that which separates itself from us, that is, our thought. It then leaves little place for other perspectives; in fact, it will forcefully assimilate other perspectives into its own ontology. That cannot be a genuine act of decolonization, can it?

Michael Just
I’m reminded of this quote from James: “The passing thought itself is the only verifiable thinker”. If thoughts are thinkers, that is, if they’re in the fabric of experience itself and not a representation of it, we can recognize that there’s no universal point from which thought emerges. That might be an opening for a plurality of ontologies. I entirely agree with your point on materialism, or physicalism, to bring us back to the problems with premises in the natural sciences: it implies a universal cosmology and a universal epistemology. As someone who may arguably not immediately be affected by colonization and its repercussions, I do feel that there’s a certain tension. How to take it on as kind of project without appropriating it? You know this classic paper from Tuck and Yang, who were very clear that decolonization is a repatriation. It has to be focused on land, and the extent to which you move away from that objective you’re doing a disservice to it.

Halbe Kuipers
Yes, I think they are right that it always concerns land. But our question then is, what is land precisely? Before diving into that question though, perhaps it is good to say a bit more on how the affects play a role in such a decolonization of thought. The thing is, I think it is right to say that we are thoroughly and directly affected by colonization from the perspective of affects. I am reminded here of Fred Moten’s incredibly powerful words in The Undercommons when he says, “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?”^[13] The point here is, I think, that we must come to see that decolonization is not for the other as different from ourselves. It is for ourselves insofar as that a live necessarily needs that openness, that is, the other. The other is then no longer a posteriori different from the self, but becomes rather the very conditions for emergence of a self. Or to put it plainly, we need to start seeing that alterity is the very condition for life. This seems to me very much what Nietzsche keeps stressing throughout his work in that decadent life only leads to certain death; there is no life living in reactive modes of existence that close down.

Now how does this relate to questions of land? There is an incredible text by Cherokee scholar and thinker Joseph M. Pierce, “A Manifesto for Speculative Relations,” which is part of the book Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World (2025), a wonderful publication coming out of the Alchemy lectures Christina Sharpe organizes every year. In it, Pierce speaks of land in the most expanded sense. Pierce keeps reiterating that there cannot be decolonization without a repatriation of land indeed; but he also keeps reiterating that land needs to be understood relationally. If I understand them right, the point is that we should not reduce land to brute matter.

My knowledge on these philosophies is limited so I can only try to find conceptions that bring me in proximity. One concept that might do so is Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of “simple location.” The main gist of this concept is that it is a fallacy to assume a thing, anything, has a location that we could pin down in space and time. We could say with Whitehead that it is then a fallacy to assume land can be pointed at as such, that it can be drawn on a map and that’s that. So, we’re then back at the question, what does land express?

Michael Just
I really appreciate the point you make, and I am in complete agreement: it would certainly be problematic to claim an outsider position to the dynamic of colonization, or racism, for that matter, or to assume that feminism only addresses women. They all intersect, and they intersect with environmental crises as well, as Ghassan Hage reminds us, amongst many others. I mention Hage because his concept of generalized domestication might be relevant here, the way we domesticate, we tame wilderness, the “raw” as Lévi-Strauss put it. So, problematizing and expanding the notion of land as you suggest very much seems to me to be the right direction here. The relational perspective on land makes me think of it as an extended, shared embodiment. An associated milieu, perhaps, if we’re moving from technical individuation to generalized individuation, to pick up the term again. It brings me back to Rick’s paper on land, which really works through the land and earthliness, that which emerges, which individuates from the land.

Halbe Kuipers
Rick’s thinking is pervaded with geophilosophy, so I can see how these concerns would resonate, yes. But maybe the concept of simple location can help us specify what is at stake a bit more here.

Whitehead starts by giving us his remarkable concept of the bifurcation of nature. He sees this bifurcation as the core of what creates our modern cosmology, and also all of its problems, including those of land. In short, the bifurcation of nature expresses the nature culture divide as much as it expresses the body mind split, but then Whitehead sees this as a continuous operation. What he means by that is that it in no way is some ontological statement of how things are, but rather that it is an eventful doing that reproduces its own conditions and thus itself continuously. More technically the bifurcation, Whitehead says, is an operation that entails a separation in “the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness.”^[14] The prime example being primary and secondary qualities, which express in exactitude the rift between what is over there and what is here before us. Resisting such a separation, Whitehead says “Everything perceived is in nature. We may not pick and choose. For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon.”^[15]

From this concept he spins out another one, which is that of simple location. He says that the problem the bifurcation of nature creates, amongst others, is that it precisely presupposes that things can have a simple location. This is a fallacy because it irrevocably reduces things to a state of affairs that cannot take into account the proper complexity. A point in case here being, to give an example that is a bit removed from the ones Whitehead gives but is very tangible I find, how we say that memory is in the brain, or for that matter how mind is in the brain. Both these statements are terrible reductions of something that is extraordinarily complex. Or you can look at how we treat nature as something over there: ‘we live closer to nature’. Such a statement says it all already for it makes absolutely no sense since nature is everywhere. At this point we see how simple location interweaves with power structures, and there is then contrary to its claim everything to say for that this is only human, all too human, that is, at the furthest remove from nature naturing if anything.

Michael Just
I wasn’t aware of it. I’m very grateful for that reference. You can look at the entire project of modernization through this notion of simple location.

Halbe Kuipers
Yes, I think that is indeed the case. In line with the work of Viveiros de Castro, what we find with those that are vivid readers of Whitehead, like Manning and Massumi, but also folks like Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, and Didier Debaise, is that their thinking critiques the “modern cosmology.” I mentioned the term in passing just above, but to stress it here, simply stating there is such a thing as the modern cosmology has already major implications. It seems to, finally, put modernity in its place; that is, it gives it the place it deserves, where its universality is only relative to itself. That in turn gives space to other cosmologies, which in their turn give way to different perspectives, ontologically so. This seems to go a bit fast for a movement that literally sets on its head an entire lineage of thinking, but then again this ‘inversion’ is also just that simple. What I find most interesting is that, beyond this particular theory and its philosophy, there are currently many strains of thought who seem to be striving for the same thing, that is, for this inversion if you will. Perhaps the time is ripe for it.

Michael Just
I think this spatial approach to the modern cosmology is very helpful. Viveiros de Castro emphasizes this in his notion of “extra-modern”, which we have mentioned before. You bring up place, which makes a lot of sense and points out Viveiros insistence that there has always been an outside to modernity. So, in one way or another we’re addressing diversity, and thinking of sensing in that regard, this may also be an opening to touch upon neurodiversity. You discuss it in the texts you sent me and it is very pertinent to the topic of art and design pedagogy.

Halbe Kuipers
I’m very happy you bring that up. Basically, everything I have been saying so far, in one way or another, has been affected by what I have learned studying neurodiversity – and I don’t think I am exaggerating by saying that. I mentioned it above already but didn’t give it the space it deserves; my time at SenseLab and all its practices has been marked by neurodiversity if anything. This is not strange considering Erin Manning has been so powerfully thinking with neurodiversity, so of course the field there is weltering in its thought. Manning’s concept of ‘autistic perception’ notably gives an extraordinary interesting way to approach these questions of pedagogy.^[16]

It is maybe nice to give a little anecdote which sets the tone for the, in my view, vital importance of thinking neurodiversity. When I moved back to Amsterdam after my PhD, and started teaching here again, the university made me take the University Teaching Qualification course, which is a sort of basic pedagogy qualification for being able to teach in higher education. There is an awful lot to say about this course, amongst which the question whether this concerns pedagogy at all, but one particular aspect of it is particularly interesting as it relates it to the concerns of neurodiversity. What struck me in this course – which I take symptomatic for pedagogy at large in academia – is that there was no thinking with the body at all. Simply none. What this means for me is that everything that the course offers, and tries to engage with, was honed to reductive ideas of intelligence and at best (or at worst) intention per motivation. The offshoot of such didactics (I prefer to call it such as I genuinely think it has nothing to do with pedagogy) is that everything revolves around forms: forms of teaching, forms of activities, forms of knowledge. At no point in all this will there then be any space for thinking with, and thus learning with, what exceeds form.

Now if neurodiversity tells us anything, I think, it is precisely that the body needs to be foregrounded. Neurodiversity teaches us that every body is always, as Manning insists, a complex of feeling. This implies that its modes of perceptions as much as its active and passive modes of existence can never be reduced to said forms. In this conception, neurodiversity is not a form of the body, as if they are such and such, but is understood in terms of tendencies (which is a bit more than what we could call behavior). A body can have what we can characterize as neurodiverse tendencies, ones that do not meet the norm of how bodies are supposed to act or are able to act; but it can equally have more neurotypical tendencies, one that do move with the general ways in which the world works. Taking as such, bodies are indeed a complex that is always differentially situated on a spectrum between neurodiversity and neurotypicality.

Thinking the body in such complexity, and thereby affirming its plurality, leads to an entirely different sort of pedagogy. All these obsessions with form give little to no space to the lived body and the affects it concerns. From the point of view of form, it seems that the body simply does not exist, or if it does then it is just one form amongst many, which honestly leads to the worst kinds of practices. To see the university grapple with, to give but one example, social safety while it has no conception of the body is short of being a joke. It is trying to think in a minor tone (because that’s what social safety mainly involves) but because it knows only form it imposes constantly the dominant tone. It makes no sense really. Particularly when it comes to these matters, I think we really need a completely different view on pedagogy. In ways I already spoke of it above when I told you how I treat the classroom as a field, but let me give you another example, one that was for a long time a project myself and others were involved with in the laboratory space of SenseLab.

At a certain point we started a practice in the space that was called SenseLab which we called ‘composing.’^[17] Basically, it meant we started playing with everything that was in the space, and we brought in different materials to compose with it further. You can see it as a large atelier of kinds wherein you would always be experimenting with what these materials could do; or if you will, it was an immense playground for crafts not unlike we know it with children. But then the composing always had a subjective aim to it, which was honed to neurodiversity. So, a central question that came with this was, for instance, how composing the classroom differently could condition the conditions differently so different tendencies of bodies could be facilitated. It sounds perhaps a bit abstract, but it was as simple as affirming that a chair and desk does not work for everybody; or that the frontality of attention that normally governs the classroom might work against what certain bodies need to study. So, you take these simple problems and you start working with these materials to see what happens when you create places in the space that would, potentially, make those tendencies find their way.

We always just asked ourselves the question, how would a more neurodiverse classroom look like? Of course, such experimentations do not lead to an ideal situation. In fact, it might be more adequate to say that more often than not it has many frustrating results, or at the least ones that cause friction. But this was, from the point of view the experiment, also part and parcel of it: why assume the given conditions are ideal when they don’t make friction? Does that not assume that any friction and frustration felt by bodies that do not meet those conditions is by definition considered a deficit? Why not turn the tables around (quite literally) and make friction felt in the most basic, given conditions? Take the chairs away and you will find indeed that many bodies experience discomfort. And they are right to complain about it also. But at the same time, we should be aware that for other bodies these very chairs might be what creates discomfort for them all along as their bodies cannot meet the conditions for sitting in them, and definitely not for such long durations as that of a class. If we accept both ends here, do we not find a middle in composing a space, even if it’s only in the tiniest bit, that starts to tend to how studying can be done differently? This obviously implies that we cannot separate out the space, that is the field, from studying.

Fig.1 Spazze, or one iteration of it.

Michael Just
Let me come back to the notion of form you brought up. I understand that you’re saying that, while we can have a multiplicity of forms, what this perspective cannot grasp is formative differentiation – generative process. For Simondon, there cannot be structure per se, rather structure is always tied to operation. Form, here, is thus operational. The notion of tendency you mention is beautiful in that way. I mentioned Peirce before, for whom feeling is immediacy, Firstness. I wonder if Peirce’s notion of habit comes somewhat close to tendency. Habit, I suppose, is a tendency to behavior. What may be interesting to consider here, and what is especially striking in your images, I think, is if we approach this from a (somato-)semiotic perspective. Could we say that the classroom traditionally is structured around signs and that the assumption of a universal interpretability is based on a disregard for complexities of diverse ways of sensing, sensing as fully involving the body? In a way, certain feminist and postcolonial critiques of the Saussurean model would be precursors here. But what is so important about the point you’re making is that from a design, architecture and art perspective, I think this is exactly what we should be discussing when we discuss these practices and the future thereof, or the transformation thereof.

Halbe Kuipers
I think you’re spot on. It’s fully questions of design and of architecture as a practice of such signs. I mean, because it is all involved within structuring, but then in keeping the structuring open, it is practice. A sign becomes effectively an intensive problematization always casting it forward. Practices ‘click’ into this, so to say. Precisely for that reason it invites people of all sorts of disciplines with all sorts of practices also. At this point we are no longer talking about interdisciplinarity, but transdisciplinarity proper.

Michael Just
Exactly. This brings me back to the very beginning of the conversation, this notion of thinking about a village, well any kind of architecture or assemblage thereof, as feeling-first, intensity-first, the potential for relations. I think this framework of neurodiversity and particularly your approach of addressing it, different bodies, embodiments and diverse ways of sensing is very helpful for thinking about cities from a perspective of coexistence. Maybe we should problematize the notion of existence here, which I mean more as a process-relational transindividuation or co-evolution. I quoted the evolutionary biologist Richard Watson elsewhere on this platform but it might be pertinent to do it again here, when he compares “what exists persists” to “what relates creates”.

Halbe Kuipers
I like putting it like that. For me it first of all says that we need to not reduce existence in participation to merely human existence. The pedagogical practice I was just talking about, Spazze as we liked to call it, could also very well be seen as an animistic field. That is, all things there became very much alive in that they continuously participated actively (and here passive or inert becomes active all the same) in the process of studying. How can you not see that the rock you’re holding the entire duration of the class is essential to this process?

The word animism is interesting here. Coming from Viveiros de Castro’s work, the term is somewhat tricky. The thing is that it all too quickly refers back to either some sort of vitalist conception of matter, or, even worse, harkens back to how we in the modern world have condemned other modes of existence as backward – it is good to remember here that the term animism is nothing but a modern invention, that is, a term we came to use to understand, and thereby look down upon, modes of perception in other cosmologies. So yes, Viveiros de Castro is wary of the term and its ontological implications. He prefers perspectives and perspectivism for this reason: to never assume an ontological substrate.

But what is interesting about the term nonetheless, is how it strives to affirm nonhuman forces in the world. This is an aspiration we should be sympathetic to, I think. But I also think we need to push it further, which is what I see perspectivism doing. For instance, it seems to me that animism has little to no way to deal with the reality of more abstract life, like spirits (or, for that matter, concepts as I spoke of them earlier). I think the cosmological I’ve been thinking with from the start tends more to these dimensions. A genuinely expanded empiricism must be able to include such forces.

Michael Just
These are very interesting questions. What comes closest for me, currently, is a Whiteheadian pan-experientialism as radical empiricism. Hence my mentioning Peirce several times, whose Firstness is closely aligned. But I would argue that a pan-experientialism is a perspectivism, which would follow the point you make. I think Yuk Hui has made an interesting argument in that the organic condition of philosophy, the organismic metaphor as he calls it, needs to be rethought, perhaps overcome, in light of cybernetics. This resonates, in a way, with the rejection of an ontological substrate, which cybernetics is indifferent to. That’s why, for me, the question concerning life, or the boundaries, origins or conditions thereof is less critical than that of experience and perspective. In the conversations I had with biologists, but also computer scientists, they realize that whichever we regard as cognition and learning, it may just go much deeper and may be a lot more foundational than we have thought before. This applies to the domain of life as well, where we realize that neurons are adapted for information processing, but all cells may have this capacity, albeit at slower speed. But this notion of cognition, the idea is that it manifests in ways that we’ve not been able to grasp at all. Or we could call it experience, or affect, for that matter.

Halbe Kuipers
Yes, I see what you mean.

Michael Just
This graphic design of the Zhouqian Art Community, which I brought up earlier, is based on a Chinese folk-art image where you see farmers working the fields (Fig.2). And because of this reduction of the image to outlines, the farmers are merging with the machines and merging with the animals and merging with the plants in one continuous pattern. It may connect to the notion of animistic field in that, as you just said, “all things there became very much alive”.

Fig.2 Zhouqian Art Community Graphic Design

Halbe Kuipers
As far as I’m concerned, these are the questions we should be asking. And we are, since we are coming up with more and more concepts that try to grasp such multiplicity. Networks, agencements, or what Whitehead simply calls “organisms”. All in their own way to try to grasp multiplicity immanently, I think.

Michael Just
How do you relate this to agency?

Halbe Kuipers
Frankly, I am not the biggest fan of the term agency. It is a loaded term that seems to have lodged itself dead center in the modern cosmology upholding its image of the human. Undoubtedly these are matters of taste and manners of usage, but certain terms just cling so heavily to many problematic ideas that you end up gravitating away from them. Agency is one of those for me. For a large part this comes from the work on neurodiversity I have been involved with. Manning constantly stresses that agency is one of the main terms that has, and still is upholding the image of the human per neurotypicality. Agency, cognition, volition, intentionality, they all kind of move with that image persisting in some abled configuration of the body. If you don’t meet the standards those terms imply, then by default it is a deficiency, your body is a deficit, and as you don’t meet the standards you might as well not make it to the category of the human all together. Neurodiversity activists have called out for a long time this violent tendency that centers around these terms. And I think they are very right to point this out.

Michael Just
That certainly makes a lot of sense. I guess my familiarity with the discourse is limited. The way I would have used agency and cognition is almost in the inverse way, to counteract notions of a perceived deficit, to subvert notions of passivity. But I very much take your point.

Halbe Kuipers
The movement of neurodiversity – from which everything I spoke of above derives from – has since its incipience in the early 90’s been fiercely resisting the double cooptation that takes place when we try to not exclude neurodiverse bodies from the world. That is to say, this is not a movement that means to say that these people are people just like others in the sense that they people but just with one part or one aspect not in order, not working, or simply missing. The double cooptation happens when we proceed that way because it ends up actually putting the strain on those bodies in that they perceive precisely that part or aspect of themselves as a lack in whatever way. So, neurodiversity actually takes a different approach and says that it is not their mode of existence which is lacking, but that it is our image of the human which is by its presuppositions incredibly limited. And the same would count for other modes of existence all the same, which for instance the work of Sylvia Wynter makes poignantly clear when thinking black bodies in regard to what she calls the category of the human, or simply Man. Whichever the case, cognition is often a stronghold for the image of the human: it sets certain standards of what one needs to be able to do in order to be, if only considered, part of it. It starts with speaking, and reflexively so, because anyone that cannot say ‘I think,’ would already be dumb.

Michael Just
Entirely agreed. It needs to not perpetuate but decenter the human, not reaffirm the brain but locate knowledge in and of the land and thus regard it as not individually but relationally produced. When I speak of cognition, perhaps what comes closest to it is a broader enactivist perspective. But that by definition includes the body, so it is always embodied, embedded, enactive, meaning that this notion of acting, or action through the body is part of any kind of cognition. In that way movement is an intrinsic part of it, and it has a participatory dimension as well. So, you sense, you make sense together, which I think is very interesting. In any case, I think that a neurodivergent perspective as much as indigenous perspectives would be very compatible with an enactivist position.

Halbe Kuipers
Yes, I have no doubt certain theories of cognition do find ways to open up the field to properly problematize its presuppositions. I think it is here also just a matter of what problem one wants to pose on which field. I see what you are speaking about for instance directly relating itself to the field of science, and by that, I mean hard sciences and neuroscience. If on that field, you indeed would have to engage with a conception of cognition. But then on another fields, with again very different concerns and questions, you might want to avoid it because of the problems it carries onto it.

Now I seem to be almost making a case for sheer relativism, and in that a relativism of knowledge and science. But again, I take this to be perspectivism instead. If this difference is crucial, it is because, unlike relativism, it does not presuppose a given ontology from which, indeed, everything would be considered relative. From the point of view of perspectivism, it is the encounter between these disparate perspectives that matters. It is there that a difference is made.

I very much like to think with spirits here as a sort of limit case. Viveiros de Castro tells us that in the Amerindian cosmology spirits are taken very seriously: they are seen as ‘shamanic spirits’ that express the ‘animal ancestors.’ In everyday life, we do not know what we are speaking with until we are able to ascertain what spirit is expressed: when speaking to what seems to be a human, it could well be a jaguar spirit. That also means you do not know what a body can do, that is, what affects it is capable of producing. If you accept such a metaphysics, where do we place cognition? It cannot be of that person since we do not really know which person is acting. Neither can it be of the body in a physicalist sense, because that it can produce other affects necessarily exceeds the functionalism that ensues. While cognition might be a very interesting concept to think with regarding mentality and the body in a certain way, when faced with very different metaphysics it seems to fall quite short. It thus attests to the limits of thought wherein it operates. It doesn’t make it wrong per se, it just attests until where it can go within its perspective. You can then again try to expand in ways that it might incorporate that which is excluded, but at a certain point you need to start asking if that is really productive or whether, considering the field, a different conception is not more interesting.

Michael Just
That brings us back to the simple location. It makes me think of Viveiros de Castro quoting the theologian Vitor Westhelle^[18]. Westhelle says the environmental crisis is addressed only when we realize that in the Christian faith, God became a mammal. God became embodied. Perhaps in that regard, the spirit can only be addressed on the occasion of its embodiment, or rather, when we recognize its embodiment. And this brings us back to the spatial pedagogy of the SenseLab also.

Halbe Kuipers
I think that’s spot on. You began already with speaking of religion without religion, and I think in ways we are back to that now here again. The modern cosmology is one way of understanding a religion without religion. But there are many others, ones that might be more expanded than ours to include spirits all the same. Once we start seeing that, we kind of start seeing it everywhere. One of my favorite examples in that sense is Brian Massumi’s book What Animals Teach Us About Politics (2014). In this book it is all about animals and politics, things that seem to have little to do with spirits. But then somewhere in the middle of all that, Massumi makes this beautiful argument that if we want to affirm a politics beyond the human via animals, then we must start to see with animals also what spirit is offered in their gestures. He just casually brings in this notion of spirit, probably without even thinking of it in the way I was just trying to above. But he gets to precisely the point that has constantly been at stake: It is a singular moment that occurs, and immanent to it a spirit is expressed. For me, those are the kind of moments that speak. Or to bring it back to the refrain we’ve been talking with continuously, it is these kinds of expressions that require listening.

Michael Just
A wonderful note to end on. Thank you so much.

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Footnotes

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