On the forms of sabotage, insubordination, and invisible activity that evade the terrain of politics.
What gets stranded outside the borders of the political? Inhuman Resources develops an account of sabotage, insubordination, and the invisible activities that undermine the ideas of accountability and identifi cation on which representative politics rely.
Drawing from histories of labor, disability, infrastructure, writing, and war, Williams offers genealogies of the tropes of paralysis and sabotage, which leave behind notions of public citizenship to reveal an "inhuman" agency that hinges on the unexpected friction between humans, materials, machinery, and other non-human life. Yet to detect this and move away from fantasies of clarity and visibility, we need to take cues from political and artistic practices that evade such legibility, and are attuned to what happens off-screen and without recognition.
Spanning an ambitious range of subjects—from prison architecture to digital animation, legal history to self-help books, and electrical blackouts to silkworms saturated with toxic dye—Inhuman Resources gathers materials for thinking differently about insurgent activity. This is a theory that does not privilege exodus, pride, or autonomy but instead takes shape inside the very processes, architectures, appearances, and systems it seeks to ruin.
Evan Calder Williams (born 1982 in Portland, Maine) is a writer and artist. His films, performance, and audio works have been presented at biennials, art institutions, and film festivals worldwide. Evan Calder Williams is an associate professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies for Bard College, where he also teaches in the Human Rights program. He is the author of the books
Combined and Uneven Apocalypse;
Roman Letters; and
Shard Cinema. He is the translator, with David Fernbach, of Mario Mieli's
Towards a Gay Communism and is a Contributing Editor to
e-flux journal, as well as a former member of the editorial collective of
Viewpoint Magazine.
