start teaching to do research like I once did when I was a Ph.D. student, but it’s something that I’m thinking a lot about. I’m trying to collect ways in which we represent the body—not only represent but also project as a sort of common piece of knowledge this idea of “the body.” How do we understand the body collectively, what ways are we constructing to perceive the body? I think one of the becoming-dominant modes of representation is to see the body as not separate and individuated and outside of nature but part of nature, open to it, and kind of an ecology itself. A body has other bodies in it—bacteria, things that we breathe in—so we also collapse notions like ecology and ecosystems across scales. I am an ecosystem, my arm is an ecosystem, you know—everything about me—and I sit within a larger ecosystem and that sits within a larger ecosystem. There’s this issue of scalelessness that I find fascinating, but aside from that, we are constructing this notion of an infinitely open body. But when we do that, because we have the technological capacity to monitor and measure various parts of those ecosystems, we’re also opening ourselves up to increasing monitoring—increasing forms of control. It’s not a coercive form of control necessarily, but through information circulation and so on, we control ourselves, effectively. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about, I don’t have a clear answer to that, I’ve been talking about it as humans “becoming infrastructural,” which I think separates or makes distinct our previously “modern” relationship to infrastructure where infrastructures were about managing bodies and so they were constructed to be understood in a kind of corporeal sense through our movements in the city and we responded to infrastructure. Now I think it’s becoming part of us. We no longer see it in a way. There’s a lot of danger in that, just as much as there are benefits to being able to understand ourselves and understand our impact in the world and all that stuff. L2: Is there some kind of remedy to this, do you feel? R: A “solution”? Yes, I have the answer! L1: Well, I’m curious if you’ve seen other approaches. L2: Or, I guess to add onto that in a way, do you think maybe there is a danger of some kind of neo-romanticism that is in itself reactionary? You know, like, oh now we have to go back and repeat all the mistakes of individualism. R: Well, I’m not sure what you mean about repeating all the mistakes of individualism. L2: Well, just this idea that ecology is “opening the body” or opening things up—and that has a certain effect—but then I feel like the reactionary mode would be to try to reclaim “the soul.” R: I mean, there is that. Again, the different ontologies that are emerging, and have been for a while, the human / non-human / morethan-human—all of these are very useful and this is not to reject them
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