The River and the Steersman Capital Circulation in the Anthropocene

The circulation of capital is a pattern of activity that flows through persons, things and naturalenvironments. How could we characterize this pattern of global capital circulation today? What guidesit and gives shape to it? How in turn does it govern the development of the world that we live in? Andfinally, is there any force that could resist this ruling pattern? If there is, from where would it derive itsorientation and its agency?

I will approach these questions through three different artistic projects, each of which I havebeen involved in to some degree. Two of them retrace the forms of agency and patterns of exchangethat have given material form to the city where I live, Chicago. By engaging with this specific city,these investigations produce insights into global capital circulation. The third project is an ecologicalone, focused on the Paran river basin in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. Here, the artists pay closeattention to the flow, not of money, but of a watershed. They attempt to let a vast system of wetlandsbecome a guide to a new pattern of human organization.

This talk will deal with crude effects of power, but also with more subtle questions oforientation and steersmanship. It is meant to be analytic, but above all, suggestive. There is at present atremendous need for an alternative aesthetics, to render ourselves more responsive to the world we livein. By contrasting the dominant patterns of global development to the far more uncertain promises ofecological activism, what I want to do is to open up a horizon of possibility.

1. The Canal

In the spring of 2014, Rozalinda Borcila and I collaborated on an exhibition called Foreign Trade Zone.It was part of a larger research project in the global transportation industries, entitled SouthwestCorridor Northwest Passage. We began with an historical observation, which is that the early Europeanexplorers were not looking for America at all. They were looking for Asia. They wanted to find a greatriver constituting a Northwest Passage across the continent, and therefore, a navigable route to China.Here is the founding image of circulationist desire. Its all about open water, or at least, liquidity.

In the case of Chicago we are talking about two explorers, Marquette and Joliet, who leftFrench Canada in search of China in 1673. They failed to discover a westward flowing river andinstead found themselves heading south on the Mississippi, confronted by hostile tribes. So they turnedaround, paddled back upriver, and in hopes of finding a short cut home they let themselves be guidedby indigenous people to a portage across the Continental Divide. The portage would take them from thewatershed of the Gulf of Mexico to the watershed of the Atlantic Ocean. All they had to do was dragtheir canoes through a few miles of mud. That mud is now called Chicago. By digging a relatively shortcanal, the two explorers proposed, it would be possible to travel, not to the Orient, but at least fromCanada to Louisiana a voyage of great interest to the French colonizers. Well, it took almost twocenturies to build the Illinois & Michigan canal, and those who did it were not French but Americans.Still, Marquette and Joliets failed trip to Asia marked out the pathway for what would become a majortransportation corridor heading southwest, from Chicago to the ports of California.

Why make art about a transportation corridor? We wanted to grasp global trade as a localreality. We wanted to feel its pulse and get to know its metabolism. In particular, we wanted to graspthe patterns of flow linking the rail yards and warehouse districts on the citys edge to the greatproduction centers of East Asia. How does Chicago fulfill its role as a transportation hub today? Whohandles the goods, and who controls their movement? What are the consequences when a country

delocalizes its manufacturing to another continent? And why are labor relations in the United Statesreaching a breaking point, as the extreme police deployments at simple union actions can attest? Wewanted to intervene right here. Something crucial is at stake in the just-in-time delivery system. Its likea social clock, setting our tempos, marking the flextime of the global economy. In fact, the just-in-timesystem is a form of government, shaping our environments and steering our daily activities.

Lets linger a moment with an aerial view of the BNSF rail yard on the outskirts of Chicago,near the WalMart warehouse. This giant facility is a temporary whirlpool in the great river ofcommodities that now flows from Asia to the West Coast ports, and then throughout the continentalUS, like a Northwest Passage in reverse. From here the Asian goods will continue on in a capillarypattern, by truck, to distribution centers, individual stores and consumers. What you see, in thissurveillance drone video by Steve Rowell, is the new function of Chicago as a hub of global trade. The flow of shipping containers across oceans and continents was one of the aspects we wantedto understand. But we also became intensely interested in the historical process that separated landfrom water, so as to transform a former wetlands inhabited by native peoples into a series of dryownership parcels traversed by a deep canal. There were so many questions: How does marsh becomefarmland? How does a city lot gain value through a speculative property boom? How is the earthliterally remade by the transportation and real-estate industries? What happens to our understanding ofcommerce if we think of it as an extension of the high seas into the dry continents? And where do thewetlands linger on in the present? What lives in the mud? Could we grasp the place we inhabit as anecology, and not as a giant supermarket?

These questions became more pressing when we observed how the city had solved its sewageproblem in the late nineteenth century, through the construction of a much larger canal. The ChicagoRiver system was reversed by the power of engineering. The Continental Divide was breached by theSanitary and Ship Canal, and the water of Lake Michigan was made to flow toward the Gulf of Mexico,in order to carry Chicagos shit away from the financial district. We realized that the Southwest Corridorwas literally part of the citys metabolism, with vast effects on the environment. In fact, the reversal ofthe river system situates Chicago within the present geological age, the Anthropocene. This is the agewhen human activities have become the decisive shaper of the landforms of our planet.

To understand the separation of land from water, and therefore, the emergence of both the drycity and the liquid corridor, we realized that we had to understand the agency of property speculation.The first canal was dug with money derived from the sale of newly created property that would onlybecome valuable in the future, after the digging of the canal. The tracing of private property wasnecessary to offer the promise of a payback for the canal. However, the state also had to back thebuilders in the present, by subscribing to the debt they incurred. At the same time, it had to force theindigenous inhabitants from the land they occupied, in order to clear the way for the settlers who wouldbuy the property not from the state, but from the speculators who bought it first. This doublemovement of protective subsidy (for the canal builders and property speculators) and exclusionaryviolence (for the indigenous peoples) is what made possible the completion of the canal in 1848. And italso made possible the founding of the Chicago Board of Trade in that same year.

The CBOT was erected by its members, the traders, in anticipation of the flows of grain thatwould arrive from the new dry land created alongside the canal. Marshland was transformed intosalable lots and navigable waters. Farms produced the grain that produced a commercial city. And thatwas the distant origin of todays global futures markets, which took on their contemporary form inChicagos financial district. Throughout this process of colonization and transformation of the territory,real constructive activities were guided by the calculation of future profits, for which someone wasalways willing to pay a price in the present. How does this kind of transaction happen? Where does theprice come from? And who or what actually steers the transformation of the territory?

According to the economists Bichler & Nitzan, capitalism is structured around one centralritual. The future earnings of a given asset are estimated using all available information, and then thisfuture value is discounted by subtracting a risk premium, which reflects the chances of losing on theinvestment. In this way, a price is obtained in the present. Thats called capitalization. And this ritual ofcapitalization, initially performed in exchanges and now increasingly performed online by computers,is the decisive moment in the organization of global capital circulation.

As part of our project, we took people out into the city to look at the terrain where thiscalculation of future values and present risks used to be performed. In the early twentieth century, afterthe new canal had been dug, the older one was covered up by railroad quays, which themselves havenow disappeared. The railroads came straight to the feet of a huge modernist grain elevator, which isnow a squatted ruin. This is where information was obtained, at the very site where the abstract valuesof finance were founded on physical commodities. The grain elevator functioned not just as a storagebin, but also as a kind of bank. For each standardized quantity of grain, the farmer received elevatortickets, which served as a kind of money. The tickets could be lent or sold to a futures trader, who inturn would sell to others the right to buy a given quantity of grain for a fixed price on a future date. Thefarms, the canals, the railroads and the elevators had given rise to a new river: the flow of capitalrepresenting future harvests of grain, whose actual value remained uncertain, risky, and thereforespeculative. From the top of the ruined elevator, the squatters told us, the financial district looked likean island, surrounded by the glittering lake and the engineered canal.

2. Kybernetes

Chicago is also the place where I met Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann, and began collaborating withthem on the book Volatile Smile. We exchanged our investigations of the financial sphere, and as wediscussed their art in the light of my theoretical models, it became clear that they had constituted theentire operational diagram of the financial ritual. This kind of diagram was first proposed by FlixGuattari. It includes four components: aesthetic impulses, existential territories, organizational formsand abstract concepts. The interrelation of these components gives rise to agency. Its crucial to realizethat in a complex society all forms of agency are transpersonal, they are assemblages, concatenations.

Lets see how agency takes form in the financial sphere. On the subjective side of the diagram,in the place of what Guattari calls the virtually possible, we can locate the first-person shooters ofcomputerized video games, whom Beate and Oliver photographed in the early 2000s. They express theaffects of predatory desire within a closed-loop information environment. On the same side of thediagram, in the place of the virtually real, we can recognize the devastated existential territories of theapartments whose market value was destroyed by the 2008 crash, which occurred just as the two artistsarrived in Chicago. The real-estate photos have everything to do with the video-game shooters: this isthe moment of the kill, the feast of creative destruction on which neoliberal finance thrives. Yet clearlythere can be no agency unless some new social form emerges from this ruined existential territory.

The thrill of imagined possibilities, galvanized by the existential anxiety of risk and destruction,leads on to a new form of technological organization: the desks of the algo-traders that Beate andOliver photographed in 2010, after the crash itself. Now we are on the objective side of the diagram, inthe place of the actually real. Here a new generation of golden boys fulfills the dreams of the first-person shooters but only on the condition that the old figure of the individual trader in the open-outcry pits should first disappear, dissolving into an actor-network complex of analysts, strategists,mathematicians, programmers, super-fast computers and high-speed fiber-optic cables. In fact, algo-trading only emerged as a dominant force after 2008, under the conditions of tremendous volatilitygenerated by the real-estate crisis. Ironically, the destruction of so many homes, that is, of so manyexistential territories, coincided with the closure of the pits themselves and the shift to fully electronictrading almost everywhere in the world. In these last years, a new form of agency has crystallized.

Only one thing was missing to complete the diagram and it couldnt be replaced by the strange,Dhreresque image of a rhinoceros that appeared in the exhibition version of Volatile Smile at NGBKin Berlin. What was missing were the abstract concepts on which every concrete action in a complexsociety depends. The conceptual moment of the diagram, or the place of what Guattari calls thevirtually real, can be filled in with the cybernetic theory that Beate and Oliver had encountered in theirwork on the military, and that I had been studying in the global communications nets and the financialmarkets. Cybernetic theory enters finance by way of mathematical equations like the Black-Scholesformula, which treats all price information as a single field in a state of dynamic equilibrium, such thatchanges in one set of prices are inevitably balanced out by opposite changes in others. Flows of moneycan then be organized so as to take advantage of the volatility that surges through this unified field. Andthats exactly what algo-trading does. New price inputs, now matter how small, are registered withsensors; and sell or buy offers correct the equation to obtain the desired output. That output is profit, ofcourse. In the diagram of financial agency, cybernetics loops the loop: it provides the operationaltheory for ultra-fast confrontations between dueling algorithms, and its also at the origin of thefeedback environments inhabited by the video gamers.

Only when the diagram is complete can you finally grasp its starting point. The force of theshooter-aesthetic is to set this predatory agency into motion. In the cybernetic dream, every territorybecomes a moving target, every facet of existence becomes a dynamic variable in a patterned flow. Thegoverning technique of capitalization is really very simple. You just aim and pull the trigger.

In Volatile Smile, we have created a portrait of the modern-day kybernetes, a Greek word whichmeans governor or steersman. This is the composite agency that carries out the financial ritual. Thekybernetes is not an individual, but a socio-technical assemblage, whose distant ancestor is theoperations research group configured by the military and the giant corporations during WWII. In thebook, I describe the kind of stripped-down operational team that you find in todays high-speed tradingfirms: a quant on the lam from particle physics; a strategist with a broad grasp of the financialmarkets; a technologist with her fingers on the keyboard; and of course, a billionaire backer or aninvestment fund with a fortune to win or lose. Bring all of these together in a computerized tradingnetwork and you have the kybernetes, who navigates societys course through the great rivers of moneyunleashed by the printing presses and bond markets of todays debt-financed sovereign states.

As you can imagine, I use the word sovereign between quotation marks. When one observeshow the flood of money created by central banks in the wake of the crisis has served only to lift theboats of speculative investors, it begins to appear as though the cybernetic steersman were at the originof the very river he navigates. Sovereignty, in other words, is on the side of the banks. Clearly we arenot living in the era of the gold standard anymore, nor even less, in the industrial economy that Marxdescribed in the nineteenth century. In fact, for the economist Richard Duncan, we are not even livingin capitalism anymore. Duncan claims that since the gold standard was finally broken with the end ofthe Bretton-Woods treaty in 1973, we have been living under creditism. Creditism is the system wheregovernments create money on the basis of central bank debt, i.e. Treasury bonds. This freely createdmoney is then lent it out, twenty to thirty times over, through private bank loans uder the rules offractional reserve banking. The loans, that is, the credit, creates both investment capital and consumerpurchasing power. What this means is that political power, and not the profit and loss of privateindustry, is at the basis of capital circulation today. Now, this really could lead to the end of capitalism,since money, whose scarcity is the disciplinary element of the system, is now created at will by nationalcollectivities. But where does the credit money flow? The problem is that governments are not steeringthis monetary creation. They are not channeling the money into infrastructure, social reproduction, orthe redress of ecological damages. Instead, all that fresh credit money is flowing into the asset marketsof finance, where it is managed by the ritual of capitalization. And so we all bow down and pray, not todemocracy, but to the kybernetes, which is the figure, the entity, that binds our civilization together.

At this point I think one has to ask a basic question. Doesnt this ritual of capitalization amountto no more than an illusion? For Marx, the sums invested in finance are nothing but fictitious capital,

mere pyramids of paper money divorced from any concrete production. Yet the essence of fictitiouscapital, I would argue, is not just to spin out of control during periodic crises that reassert the power ofthe so-called real economy. Thats not what has happened since 2008. Instead, the primary role ofcredit money is to govern material production and reshape that production in its own image, which isthe image of circulation and speculation. And that has definitely been going on, at least since 1973,when financially driven globalization began. We can see the image of finance expressed around theworld in the mirrored skins of skyscrapers, in the shimmering advertisements that adorn them, and inthe coded information that skims over their surfaces, emerging from the vast tapestry of fiber-opticcables that has girded the planet over the last few decades. The aesthetics of capital is right there, andits called the global city. All high-value urban properties are, of course, governed directly by the logicof real-estate speculation, which the 2008 crisis did nothing to erase. If this is fiction, then it createswhat it feigns to be. It embodies its own illusions.

Capital is power, as Bichler and Nitzan say. It is the power to create order, to creorder society.We can see this power at work on all the intimate stages where the gaze of capitalization comes to reston the speculative performances of human beings. The subjects of the gaze that is to say ourselves,the cognitive and affective laborers seek to demonstrate our future value to possible employers orinvestors, while at the same time minimizing in their eyes the risks of breakdown, cynicism, treasonand revolt that are always hidden in our own potentials. As a social order, finance capital is made ordestroyed in these speculative performances, carried out by those who are called upon to embody intheir own flesh some tiny quantum of the entire systems future possibilities. The index of capitalspsychic power is that there has been, so far, no decisive social change despite all the turmoil of 2011.The force of resistance has not yet composed its own agency. It has not yet forged its own ritual. It hasnot yet gathered its own people.

Instead, what we see in the world, beyond the glittering cities, is a tremendous development ofhighly automated extractive and productive industries, along with an unprecedented acceleration of thetechnologies and organizational forms of capitalist distribution. This too is the image of the kybernetes.Ships, canals, container ports, railroads, trucks, airports, endless continental corridors: all of Asia isbeing pushed to the same level of overdevelopment as the US and Europe. The Anthropocene is thisoverdevelopment, built up under creditism. In China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesiathey are literally choking on industrial production, drowning in chemical and radioactive effluents,staggering under the weight of new and alienating cities whose destinies over the next twenty or thirtyyears no one can really imagine. And this great polluted river of production and distribution runs inreverse. It is piloted not by labor or even less by bemocracy, but by money: by fictitious capital.

3. The Wetlands

Imagine yourself on a river bank in the middle of Argentina, with the giant Rosario-Victoria bridgerising up out of a flood. Torrential rains poured down on Brazil about two weeks ago; now the water isrushing before your eyes, carrying its cargo of debris and river weeds and mud. Youre on the outskirtsof the city of Rosario, at the heart of Latin Americas Southern Cone, and in the most fertile part of thePampa Humeda, which is one of the worlds great grain-cultivating regions. Youre also somewherenear the southern edge of the largest surviving system of wetlands on the planet. From here to Paraguayand on into Bolivia and Brazil extends the second major watershed of Latin America, the Rio de laPlata basin, which takes its name from the great estuary which it forms before pouring into the sea. Thevastness and biodiversity of this river system makes it comparable to the Amazon; but it flows throughthe most populous and developed part of South America, and its banks are surrounded by vast GMOsoy fields rather than forest, so its political economy is quite different.

The new bridge, and the causeway behind it that acts as a sixty-kilometer dam in the middle ofthe wetlands, is just one among hundreds of megaprojects whose construction is orchestrated by IIRSA,

the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South American. IIRSA is atransnational economic forum, launched by the Inter-American Development Bank in the year 2000.From its viewpoint, almost everything that was formerly called nature appears as a resource to beextracted or an obstacle to be surmounted. As the Uruguayan sociologist Ral Zibechi writes:

IIRSA is a multi-sectoral project that aims to develop and integrate transportation, energy, andtelecommunications infrastructure... The goal is to reorganize the continents landscape based onthe development of a physical infrastructure of land, aerial, and river transport; oil and gaspipelines; waterways; maritime and river ports; and power lines and fiber optic cables, to name afew. These projects are organized in 12 integration and development axes corridors whereinvestments can be concentrated to increase trade and create chains of production connected toglobal market.... This transformation is linked to the emergence of global factories that operateunder the just-in-time premise. A sort of global automaton has been created by largebusinesses that employ remote-control operation techniques and cover the planet in the form of a network... IIRSA is the South American link to integrate the continent into this process, but in asubordinate manner.

Rosario, with its giant new causeway-bridge over the Paran River, is located at the cusp of twoof IIRSAs major development zones. From east to west runs the so-called Mercosur-Chile Axis,linking the densely populated southeastern seaboard of Latin America to the crucial Pacific ports ofChile, notably through a road-rail link over the Andean mountains known as the Bi-Oceanic Corridor.Here we can see a reiteration of the pattern of North Americas rail corridors to Asia. From north tosouth, however, there is something else going on: IIRSA envisages the Paran river system as a kind ofliquid superhighway, a hydrovia, which could potentially be interconnected with the Amazon basin toform a single circulation system for heavy industry. The kinds of corridors that emerged aroundChicago over the course of two hundred years are now being planned at continental scale for realizationin about two decades. This is the enlarged scale and accelerated time-frame that we have to imagine ifwe want to face the reality of capital circulation in the Anthropocene.

The question is, how could anyone do that? How could anyone think, imagine, desire and act onsuch scales? How could you grasp an entire continent? Or, to ask a variation of the same question, howcould you interact with a bioregion of such vast dimensions as the Rio de la Plata watershed?

Ive been to Rosario before; but last July I had the good fortune to return in the company of AlaPlstica, an art group which has been working with eco-social issues since the early 90s. Ala Plstica isjust two people, Silvina Babich and Alejandro Meitin. Yet there always seem to be many more peoplein everything Ala Plastica does, intricate tapestries of people with many interconnections. Along withCritical Art Ensemble, Sarah Lewison, Eduardo Molinari, Joan Vila Puig, Pio Torroja, MarceloMiranda, Fabiano Kueva, Graciela Carnevale and many others, we traveled together from the coastalzone of La Plata to the River Delta on the edge of Buenos Aires, then up the Paran to Rosario andacross the bridge to the flooded wetlands between Rosario and the town of Victoria. The theme of ourjourney was Watersheds as Laboratories of Governance. And what we were doing was recapitulating and in some way becoming part of the aesthetic, territorial, activist and ecological experience thatAla Plstica has been co-creating with inhabitants of the Rio del Plata basin over the last twenty years.

Ala Plstica emerged as the visual arts wing of a public-space collective that took over anabandoned library building in the university town of La Plata, near the banks of the estuary, in 1991.From the beginning it was a resistance project, both against the lingering repression of the 1970s and80s dictatorship and against the organized abandonment of neoliberalism. Gradually the group felt thenecessity both artistic and economic to extend beyond the traditional conceptions of urban publicspace, and in 1995 they began planting bulrushes along the coastline of the locality of Punta Lara. Onceplanted, the reeds would spread rhizomatically, contributing to water purification and offering a livingmodel of emergent collectivity to those who worked with them. Planting bulrushes and willows was a

way to meet other inhabitants, to participate in the ecosystem itself, to develop new economies and alsoa new artistic practice. These activities led to collaborations with many local cooperatives, notably onIsla Paulina, which is a tiny farming and grape-growing community near the port and petrochemicalcomplex of Ensenada. They also led beyond the immediate locality, to the Delta region north of BuenosAires, which the Paran river flows into the estuary through a dozen different channels, creating alabyrinthine world of forested and inhabited islands. And the Delta itself, of course, was the gateway tothe immense system of wetlands leading north into Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil.

All of this was not simply pastoral, however. The Delta was and still is threatened by theinstallation of gated communities on artificially raised platforms that profoundly alter the cultural lifeof the river, as well as the very flow of the water. In 1996, a treaty was signed between Argentina andUruguay, calling for the construction of an immense bridge across the estuary, from Punta Lara to theUruguayan city of Colonia, which would have caused incalculable damage to the ecosystem. And in1999, a Shell oil tanker ran into a freighter near the town of Magdalena, releasing what at the time wasaccounted the largest fresh-water oil spill in history. Ala Plstica used cultural activities as a vector ofquite successful grassroots organization in the face of all these threats and disasters. At the same timethey developed the concept of an artistic practice that is trans-personal and consists of public thinking,debate and action, all founded on the right of communities to develop visions more sensitive to theirown situations, and to propose alternative realities for the social construction of a territory.

Who designs the territories? And for whom are they designed? These are Ala Plsticas basicquestions. Today they are asking them in collaboration with a transnational network of grassrootsorganizations called the Alliance of the Paran-Paraguay Wetlands. In 2008 they created a hand-drawnmap to express the current scope of their activity: what you see is a tapestry of local and regionalrelationships that suddenly jumps scale to encompass the entire river system of Latin America. Ineffect, the group is not afraid of scientific instruments such as Geographic Information Systemsoffering a satellite view. Whether the connections are made through word of mouth, art or advancedelectronic means, the issue is always that of deepening peoples participation in a vast territory thatturns out in the end to be not so irremediably complex, because, as Alejandro Meitin often says, youfind out that you are already part of it.

There is both an aesthetics and a theory of territory in this work. Clearly it constitutes anotherdiagram of agency, where the sensitivity developed in the work with willows and bulrushes helps togenerate caring relationships with territories wounded by industrial development, and then transformsthe energies of that care into more mediated forms of cooperation that can set up the fractalrelationships of scale called for by contemporary ecological thinking. The question, it seems to me, iswhether this kind of activism could constitute a force of resistance to the all-consuming capitalistmarket and the guiding figure of the kybernetes that we saw earlier. Could the river itself become agoverning force, a figure of regulation, as the artist Sarah Lewison suggested during our trip? Couldthe river, and beyond it, the planetary ecology itself, constitute a figure, an original entity, aroundwhich hitherto unknown kinds of agency could gather, to perform quite new rituals?

To conclude I want to bring one more rhinoceros into the room. Its Bruno Latour, with hisrecent work Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature. Here, the founder ofactor-network theory lays out the conditions for an aesthetic sensitivity to the responses that the planetis now giving to our actions; and he suggests a new kind of responsibility that arises from thatsensitivity. Borrowing from James Lovelock and Carl Schmitt, and completely renewing the concept ofcybernetics, Latour claims that the feedback effects of climate change implicate us within an agencythat nonetheless stands apart from individuals. Through its responses to our actions, it indicates the newterritorial order of the Anthropocene and calls us to assemble as a people on this territory. The agency isGaia, and Latour believes it should be recognized as a political entity indeed, as a contemporaryLeviathan. Lets listen to him as he considers the ecosystems responses to the climate-transformingactions of human beings:

Behind those cumulative responses, it is hard not to imagine that there exists a power that doeslisten and answer. To grant it a personhood, is not to imply that it may speak and think or that itexists as one single substance, no more than you would do with a State, but that in the end it hasto be recognized as a politically assembled sort of entity. What counts is that such a power has theability to steer our action, and thus to provide it with limits, loops and constraints, which is, asyou know, the etymology of the word cybernetic. In that sense, Gaia is indeed a cybernetic sortof being even though, as I have shown in commenting on Lovelock, it is not a technical system, aspace station. It is cybernetic in an old and frightening sense of the word: such a power exerts asort of sovereignty. Since it plays the role of a collective person, that is, to act as a collected body,it should be given a collective name. We do it for France or Scotland, and there is no reason toabstain from doing it for Gaia... To live in the epoch of the Anthropocene, is to admit a strangeand uneasy shift in power to the profit of Gaia taken as the secular aggregate of all those agenciesrecognized as acting back through loops of retroaction.

Is there any chance that at least some of the earths population will come together as a newpeople, the Earthbound, the People of Gaia, who can break away from the rituals of capital circulationand recognize a new principle of responsibility to their territory? I dont think we can answer thatquestion before environmental conditions become more radically challenging, perhaps in the nearfuture, when the long-desired Northwest Passage does open up a liquid channel through the formerlyfrozen polar oceans. In the meantime, I believe that one can recognize, in the practice of Ala Plstica, avery original and very promising diagram of ecological agency.