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Rick Dolphijn - The Land and Us: On Sensing, Coming Together and Earthliness

The conversation took place on November 26, 2024 at Rick’s home in Rotterdam. It takes his recent paper “The Land and Us” (2024) as a starting point and reference throughout, exploring a “coming together” of Marx’ notion of the common and Serres’ notion of sense in relation to urbanism and relationships between humans, land, and non-human entities. It emphasizes "earthliness" to rethink urban-rural dynamics, critiquing AI and smart cities as extensions of capitalist control and discussing possibilities for transcoding and reimagining interactions with the environment. The conversation specifically aims to open up creative and pedagogical approaches to these challenges within and beyond institutional frameworks.

Rick Dolphijn was interviewed by Michael Just 

MJ

Your suggestion of your paper “The Land and Us” (Dolphijn, 2024) was very useful. I understand it came out just recently.  

RD

There will be a second part on the sea to be published soon, also in the journal Angelaki. It should be out in February 2025.

MJ

I’m saying this because it offers a very interesting perspective on some of the questions and problems I approach in my PhD research in Guangdong Province. To give you some background, I’m living with families and farmers for extended periods of time, participating in their daily practices such as farming, cooking, social interaction and specifically I’m looking into ways of how they coexist with different beings, physical and immaterial, such as ancestors, gods and spirits. My primary medium is film, so I approach the topic from an artistic perspective. I’m trying to make the leap from village to the integration of artificial intelligence as a potential new form of cognition. You touch upon this at the very end of your paper. We might come back to it later. I read the paper with great interest, and it will inform the writing process I am currently in.

RD

Right, that’s good to hear.

MJ

One question that we could perhaps address over the course of the conversation, specifically from a perspective of design, architecture and urbanism would be the ways in which a paper like yours might translate into and open up new perspectives on the pedagogy of all of those fields, whether this concerns the university, or it manifests outside of the institution, if there is such an “outside”.

RD

Yes, the whole idea of pedagogy is important to the project.

MJ

In the Philosophy of Matter, you talk about a geophilosophy on several occasions, as a true philosophy of freedom for all, human and non-human (Dolphijn, 2021).  It doesn’t come up literally in the paper but I think it is certainly present. Could you talk more about what is a geophilosophy for you?

RD

Deleuze, Guattari and Michel Serres are my main influences in thinking. In the last part of their joint project, Deleuze and Guattari were writing a lot about earthliness in 1000 plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988). There, they have a big chapter entitled the Geology of Morals, where you see that the earth is somehow the starting point for their theories of language and all that. So, they really situate their thinking in an idea of earthliness. In the last book that they wrote together, which is What Is Philosophy (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), there is actually a chapter called Geophilosophy. And they write a lot about how Greece is the cradle of what we now call philosophy, and they linked it very much to the physiology, to the land and the sea, and the whole idea of different islands, and how they connect to one another. So, all of their ideas on what philosophy is and how philosophy happens are very much linked, at least that's what they claim, to how this came about in Greece, 400 BC. I don't think this is a conservative idea or in any way a limiting perspective on what philosophy is, rather it shows us how the Earth is present in our engagement with things.

MJ

How would you differentiate, say, between earth, planet and land?

RD

Well, so I'm not so much talking about the entire planet. I am more talking about just the practice of everyday life, how we are involved in the world around us.

MJ

Yes, more like environment.

RD

I like this notion of earthliness, because when you talk about environment, you think about plants and animals, which is, of course, also part of it. But I think that for long we forgot that, and this is also what Michel Serres means when he says that in philosophy, we talk about the master and the slave, but we never discuss where they fight it out. And I think that for me, that's very interesting. This entanglement with the earth on which we live is crucial for philosophy. 

This is also how I reread Marx. So whereas Marx is often portrayed as a social economist talking in quite abstract terms about things like capital and all that, if you read the Grundrisse (Marx & McLellan, 1973), then you can see that he starts talking about how we are entangled with the world that we live in, referring to the land that grows the stuff that we eat, and where our family comes from, and how the village is organized. Well, that's…

MJ

That comes so close to what I was getting at in describing my project. Earthliness is a wonderful concept to grasp this relationality. In terms of Marx, you also refer to what John Bellamy Foster has called “ecological materialism” (Foster, 2000). Marx’ engagement with nature is certainly underrecognised.

RD

Yeah, I think it is in the end. We need to make a few steps, of course, but in the end, it's also very interesting in resonance with how we are now rethinking the city and the land of the city, and that we move away from modern oppositions, where we had the idea that the countryside is for production and the cities are for consumption.

MJ

I suppose that there are certain perspectives on the city that could be thought entirely beyond this division. In that way, overcoming the division between the urban and the rural would be a precondition for thinking a new urbanism.

RD

Exactly. I think it's already very much questioned nowadays, with all the urban gardening going on and all that. I have a new project also on that, by the way, it's a Horizon project funded by the European Union, entitled CONVIVIUM. It’s a big project, in which we do a lot of research on urban gardening throughout European cities. We'll start in Rotterdam, but we'll also look at other cities.

MJ

Is it happening here in Rotterdam on a broader scale?

RD

A lot. Also, what I really like is that there's a lot of, should we call it illegal, or ‘post institutional’ gardening that all sorts of people practice. Marginal groups just take up marginal pieces of land, and they grow their stuff there, waste land or leftover stuff, and then they just grow things for consumption.

MJ

That's very interesting. What I hope to do in the research is to open up perspectives on new urbanisms. And one aspect, I think, in which moving beyond the urban-rural divide is critical is its strong anthropocentrism. But this raises the question of how to think about cities from radically diverse, more-than-human perspectives.

RD

I think we need to rethink the common here. Marx will say that this as we use it now is a Roman invention. So the idea of the common, of the common ground, as you have it also in the Anglo Saxon world, referring to the kind of strictly organized central part of the city, which is for common use in Dutch (the old word ‘meent’ is used for that), is just as much a property as the land that owns oneself, Marx would say. What Marx adds to this is that in the Middle Ages, the German tribes, coming from a nomadic tradition, use the term very differently. In a much more interesting way in the end. Here the common is a getting together, not an institutionalized idea of togetherness, but, depending on all sorts of circumstances, often concerning changes in the season or of the weather, according to the situation. This idea of commonness is thus not about a very strictly organized plot of land or something like that. It's very much linked with how things are in change. So, what is also connected to this: if a family grows, then you need more land. Then you make use of more land. If people die or move out, you make less use of the land again. I think this is a very simple example.

MJ

The relationship to the land changes according to their need, yes.

RD

in that sense, much more interesting, because it is much more kind of in an open conversation with the land and with other forms of life, which is very different indeed from how the Romans envisioned the common and how it has been institutionalized ever since in Western sedentary societies. It really concerns what belongs to oneself proper. This is not possession, this is property. The land that feeds us.

MJ

In what you mentioned just now, you talk about the common or the commune as coming together rather than being together. The process of coming together.

RD

This is very much Marx. He mentions that an institutionalized Roman form of a community would be a being together. Whereas these communities in the German forests, they come together occasionally, an active coming together. And yeah, when it's not needed, then they won't come together, and then they just live their different lives. It’s intriguing to try to follow this logic of the land and the way this manifest again in the life of plants and animals. Marx referred to the land that one needs to live one’s life, as the non-organic self. I think that's a very interesting way of putting it. I also link this to how, for instance, in ancient Egypt, they made use of the land after the Nile flooded. The land had to be divided anew again. So, every year, there was a new way of dealing with the land, a new way of setting up an environment, not just for humans, but for everyone that lived, everyone that made use of the land.

MJ

This notion of being together and coming together made me think of a quote from the evolutionary biologist Richard Watson. He talks about the difference between what persists exists and what relates creates (Watson, 2023). Persisting is one perspective, but it can’t explain process. The notion of creating in the process of relating is more connected to this coming together, because the coming together has to be newly negotiated in every instance in relation to its, as you were saying, entire environment and diversity of beings. The question you raise of how to come together anew is beautiful.

RD

There is a resonance for sure. For me it’s important to point out in what way we have thought and, perhaps, forgot about the land in how contemporary society has been institutionalized. This is the reason I'm interested, for instance, in these ‘illegal’ ways of farming that nowadays are happening in cities like Rotterdam. It very much has to do with building up new relationships and ways of rethinking how we can work with our urban environments. And it doesn’t have to be about stealing land from the municipality. It’s just about thinking differently about surfaces. Roof gardens in that sense are the simplest example, for instance.

MJ

I’m also very interested in this, and it may bring up the question of modernization. To briefly come back to my research context, China modernized in a very specific way, particularly in terms of urbanization. So, while modernization manifests in diverse ways, its problems seem to an extent universal. You talk about modernization and alienation, and you do so from this perspective of earthliness, the relationship with the land. This seems like such a critical framework for theory and practice in design and urbanism, amongst other fields. And perhaps what you just outlined is a way of reclaiming something that, can we say was lost? Is it a kind of reclaiming?

RD

It never disappeared, but the major powers (state power and capitalist power) have certainly been much more in favor of the idea of possession, possessing the land. So, I make this difference again between possession and property. Property is interesting, it somehow is part of oneself, of the body proper. In Dutch proper also refers to caring for something (proper means clean or well maintained). Possession seems to have little to do with caring. More extraction, exploitation. 

MJ

The extraction of value, any kind of value, certainly is an aspect of modernisation.

RD

The extraction of different kinds of value, monetary value, social, political…When we nowadays think of extraction in monetary terms, we tend to focus on the Western Colonialist history. This is too simple. The extractivist narrative, I would say, should be connected to modernism and the rise of capitalism. And modernism, as Amitav Ghosh and others, already noted, is not just some ideal of the West. It was a global phenomenon whose focus was much more on reorganizing and expanding production and on setting up new energy sources to ensure consumption for the masses. So, the process that China, India and the African continent are going through now is not a Westernization. It’s a modernization in its own right, respectively. China, because of its size, its authoritarian political structure, and, therefore, its uniformity, was able to move fast, at least before Covid. But the narrative has not changed since 1800. Also, when it comes to the new energy sources, like rare earth materials, a similar modernist thinking of the earth is practiced.

The problems we've been dealing with in terms of alienation, and this is indeed an obvious Marxist term, come with a long history of us forgetting about the land, and us not understanding how this non-organic part of the self, which is how Marx spoke of the land, is not part of us anymore. That's obviously happened in China, since the 1990s especially, in an accelerated way.

MJ

The rural reconstruction movement in China is interesting in that way. It doesn't quite exist to the same extent here in in the West. In terms of art, I think we would refer to such a practice more in terms of community-based or socially engaged. It is both a government policy, going back to China as an agricultural society and reactivating tradition. And, likewise, it is a bottom-up artistic movement, working closely with farmers and villagers. The urban farming touches upon this, too, for instance, I see many students in China now taking it on as a research topic. Reconceptualizing and reconstructing the rural, and by extension the urban, post modernization seems to be the key framework here as well.  And I think recognizing alienation, as you just pointed out, plays an important part in this process.

RD

China’s take on nature… Of course, we have been romanticising nature since, around 200 years properly, since German Idealism, since Schelling and the likes. Over here it was very much a counter-culture in response to the rise of Modernism. But of course, in China, there's a very strong Taoist tradition, which has been dominating the arts there since 500 BC. Think of poetry, painting, but also dance and martial arts. Especially in the T’ang dynasty, in my view, all the arts in China were focused on rethinking the arts through the land. So, many poems on food, for instance, had a lot to say about everything that happened in that time. A poem on ‘cold food’, for instance, would always unfold a political theory, a morality, a new sociology.

MJ

Yes, considering the philosophical background is a very good point.

RD

The philosophy of nature has been much stronger in China compared to Western Europe, in that sense. I guess we've been very much formed by our Roman ancestors, who are, in the end, much more about conquering land, ruling it, and about finding a way of maximizing the profit of the land. It is no coincidence that our words ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ draw back to Latin ideas of land, conquering and wilderness. The Greek word that somehow refers to what we consider ‘nature’ is physis. It means something very different.

MJ

I was thinking of the Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage. He has this concept of generalised domestication (Hage, 2017). What he means by it is the broad notion of inhabiting land, of claiming land, as a form of domination for the purpose of extracting value, excess value. I learned about it through Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

RD

As I said, I believe that this is really a heritage of Rome, of how Rome was constructed after the plague. Rome hated the world outside of Rome. And the whole idea was, we must control it, and control it, to possess it, as you already pointed out, to extract some sort of value of it. It was through generals that were given a plot of land at the margins of the motherland after they retired. So, they just had to move north, in prosperous directions. This was the model of growth in Roman times. And I think that Europe has never recovered from that idea of expansion. Especially the European state. The whole idea of the nation state as it was institutionalised in the 19th century, was really built on this notion of expansion and this idea of possessing as much land as possible.

MJ

Viveiros de Castro talks about Terra Nullius, the land as a blank slate, as if that somehow existed (Viveiros De Castro, 2022). Specifically in the context of Australia, where, as he says the settlers didn't see the land, they had no connection, no understanding, no knowledge of the land. But they put flag after flag after flag.

RD

My former promoter, Paul Patton, uses that example. He's from Australia. In his book Deleuze and the Political (Patton, 2000), he speaks of the Mabo case, which was a lawsuit concerning Aboriginal land rights. A very delicate topic in Australian politics at that time, and probably still today. He speaks of this moment of planting the flag, which he linked to Deleuze’s theory of language, as it created a sign… Planting the flag and saying, “from now on this belongs to the British crown” is an ‘order-word’, as Deleuze and Guattari would call it. It was the way a kind of possession was being secured. Of course, the people not familiar with this language had no clue what was going on. Simply planting a flag in the ground means nothing. Except at that moment, by that person, in that land (terra nullius). Then it does. According to post-Roman law. 

A very interesting case, of course. In my PhD thesis, I compared the expansion of Han China and the way the American settlers decided to go west. So, whereas in the Americas, European colonisers started at the East Coast and just pushed their way to the west, conquering and possessing every next plot of land, chasing away the others and planting flags, the Han Chinese were just another minority. But they started living in the centers of many different cities, and somehow, economically, and later politically, they expanded their power. Gaining more money, more influence, intermingling, they grew bigger and bigger and became, in the end, dominant. It's a very different model of expansion, a very different idea of land.

MJ

That is a very interesting comparative perspective on expansion, on growth, for that matter. You referred to Marx several times. I’m more familiar with Marx than Serres but the way you discuss sense and sensing I found extremely useful because I try to approach the village, the city and architecture more generally from a perspective of embodied cognition. I suppose that sensing, sense, involves the body. What are the preconditions for sensing? It would imply embodiment as environmental coupling, is that fair to say? How do we sense?

RD

In my reading, when Serres speaks of our relation to the land, he comes very close to Marx. Serres is a Leibnizian, so when he talks of sense, he would say that the senses are a kind of door, the doors of perception. Through these doors, we engage with and respond to what happens around us. But then the thinking takes place in a blind central room, which makes all relations, in the end, experimental. This ‘monad’, as Leibniz calls it, this closed off world in connection to the entire world, somehow embracing it even, is very intriguing. To give a very simple example, when I kick your leg, for instance, what you feel is not so much my foot, but of course, you interpret what your nerves have communicated to your brain. What you feel is not my action but your own response. 

But in the end what connects them, Marx and Serres, is that they consider the land part of oneself proper. The land as an inextricable part of the self. The land that one feels. When Serres speaks of drinking wine with old friends, wine from the land they once lived, this goes beyond interpretation. There is a resonance, between you, the wine, the land, and now also, with one’s friends, that unites it all. That makes a proper community. 

So, in the end, sensing is not only this fact that your nerves respond to me kicking your leg, but it's also about all the resonances that happen inside of you, or, inside of us together, inside of us and the land together… And then all the histories and the futures are revitalized in this moment of sensing.

This is how Marx speaks about our non-organic self as the land. That the land, in some way, is part of us in the moment. It is an alternative to this Heideggerian negative idea of modern land, in which dams turn lakes into purely economic possessions, profit oriented entities, and forget the richness of the lakes and the richness of how we can engage with the water and its surroundings. Of course, Heidegger has a point here, it happens quite often, it marks our modern experience of the world. But the richness of sensing in that manner is something that Serres, Marx and the other scholars I feel connected to, are very much interested in.

MJ

That’s extremely interesting. It seems that sensing can be thought of on the one hand as a kind of history or historicity, certain trajectories, perhaps, that one can trace back through sensing, or remember through sensing. And on the other as an active construction of possible futures, perhaps specifically through this notion of the accident or the surprise, which makes me immediately reconfigure my environment according to this incident. In enactivism, there is this notion of participatory sense-making. One example is encountering someone in a narrow space where there is this short moment of awkward negotiation of how to pass by each other. So, you're making sense together in this short moment of connecting. I'm wondering to which extent sensing is a kind of communal activity.

RD

I think it's a very interesting idea. And I remember also writing a very short piece on that, once, on how community is always somehow the result of an accident or consequential to an accident, by means of which a community immanently realises itself. Your example of almost bumping into someone is nice, and I guess refers to the same thing. I mean, it also happens when you are in the train, and a train stops because of some technical issue, and that is the moment that everyone in the train starts noticing one another. That you understand “we are in this together”. And then the community comes into existence. You could almost say that, in Serresian terms, a train is a kind of a parasite that prevents the community from happening. Or maybe ‘our time schedule’ or ‘capitalism’ is the parasite. And a community can only happen once the parasite is removed. To come back to the Roman idea of what the community is, this idea of ownership, of state regulation when it comes to the land, in a way is also preventing things, preventing things from really happening, preventing the sensing of one another, preventing different forms of resonances that go in different directions. So, the community is not at work in the organised and defined forms of value that we consider to be of importance. But it's in the moment that this accident happens that suddenly, a new form of togetherness could be realised.

MJ

That’s a coming together. Would you call it a commoning?

RD

A process of commoning should be an active process, this is what we also read in Marx. So, it's not a being together, it's a coming together. But the coming together doesn’t just happen. It somehow needs an accident, or needs something to happen, needs a parasite to be discovered or to be unmasked, the noise has to be filtered out somehow. The noise that we never isolated… well, we heard it, but we never noticed it. The moment that you notice it, then you can get rid of it, and then you can understand, oh, wait, we're together with other people in the train. These are people-like-me, and they have different lives, but we can get to know each other. So, these are almost moments of magic. And when the train starts going again, the community is over.

MJ

The institution has taken over again. But these are very profound questions for art, design, architecture, all these fields and it beautifully relates back to the framework of our conversation. How do you produce, how do you facilitate that?

RD

How do you allow it to happen?

MJ

Exactly, you allow it to happen because you don't have to make it happen. It’s rather about finding ways of creating the circumstances.

RD

Yeah, the conditions. In that sense, I think this rethinking of earthliness is very important for the philosophy of land. I often refer to it because it starts from a kind of, well, I wouldn't call it situatedness. That's the kind of term that Donna Haraway comes up with, which I also find interesting, but for me, it still sounds too sedentary. I am more interested in a nomadic approach, as in rethinking the land as an active engagement with the environments that we accidentally are engaged with. I think that is the key here.

MJ

Then we might have to think about how to approach these questions from a pedagogical perspective. What are possible strategies to facilitate that, within or beyond the institution? Apart from identifying the questions, how do we practice what they imply? And how do we find ways of doing this together as an exercise, a strategy or a model that students can take on and develop for themselves?

RD

I've been very much interested in this question. It’s very much what Prof. Gray Kochhar Lindgren, from the University of Hong Kong, and myself, had in mind when we did our exchanges. Together with my students, I traveled to Hong Kong for about eight consecutive years, and the Hong Kongers came here, all centered around projects on the more-than-human-city. 

MJ

The more-than-human city, for me, is what speculative urban futures imply. 

RD

We took students out of the white cube of the university for them to engage with the environment and with what the city was all about, and try to open their eyes a bit. We gave them a camera, and they had to film for 10 minutes as a group. So that was a very restricted kind of assignment, but it allowed them to really think about what happens in the city, almost from a situationist perspective, but beyond the human eye, or beyond the human ideas of value that they are usually engaged with. Of course, their projects were very much entangled with contemporary theory also.

Nowadays, I'm setting up a series of projects together with Dr. Irena Chawrilska from the University of Gdansk. We call this the More-Than-Human Studies Lab, and we do all sorts of activities related to rethinking the philosophy of land. We are now, for instance, also very much interested in swamps. And this is also a personal thing for me, because I live here in the city center of Rotterdam. The house I live in was built in 1896 which was the first expansion of Rotterdam on the north end. There's a tram going through this street. It used to be a horse tram, but now it's a 40 tons of steel beast, and when it drives by you can feel a wave. You can feel the sphagnum underneath the street, to paraphrase the Situationists. We are living on top of a swamp. 

Underneath this thin layer of ‘civilisation’ is one big organic mass. And I spoke to architects who also build, for instance, next to the Central Station here in Rotterdam, about 100 meters from my house. And they say, they have to deal with the swamp always. They have to deal with the ancient underground rivers that are still flowing underneath the central station, for instance. We closed it off with bricks and cobblestones, and think the swamp is gone, whereas, of course, the swamp is still there. It surfaces with the little plants, the weeds, that grow on the sides of the street. These are swamp plants. So, what we, Dr. Chawrilska and me, are interested in, is to rethink the swamp creatively through different realms of knowledge. Implicitly then, we are also critical of the Modernist idea of draining the swamp, which, of course, also, and not coincidentally, was what our most fascist leaders are very fond of. We are interested in rethinking the swamp in terms of all its mythological and chemical and bio political practices. And, of course, we also bring our students there…to the swamps.

With these projects, I like to work with arts organisations like Sonic Acts, which is an organisation based in Amsterdam that is very much focused on rethinking ecology and contemporary art. We did all kinds of projects where we took students outside of the university for sonic and sensory experiments, to explore the richness of the non-organic self that we lost and that we somehow think doesn't matter anymore. But yeah, it still does, the swamp is still here. As I said, exactly the place where we are right now, if the tram drives by, you can feel it, the sphagnum moves.

MJ

One question that you address towards the end of the paper concerns artificial sensing or artificial intelligence. Within our broader topic and from a more superficial perspective this may be connected to the very limiting and impoverished notion of smartness or smart cities. For me, everything that we've just been talking about is erased when we think about the city as control, as automation for the sake of extracting, bringing us back to the notion of domestication. Automation not for free time, for novelty and this coming together that we discussed but rather for the acceleration of the institutionalized production of value.

RD

Yeah, I would say AI is very much a continuation of our idea of value, of possession, of gaining control. For me AI is almost a Roman exercise in deepening that kind of colonialism. So not the Greek, but the Roman kind of possessing things. Yeah, very problematic, very poor in many ways, this idea of possession as it is practiced by contemporary governments in setting up the so-called smart cities. What they do is, of course, use computers and use all forms of computing to create the kind of value that they're interested in. But this is always reducible to one uniform coding system, which is, of course, how our computers work. It has little to do with the power of sensing, and the power of earthliness, with the richness of thinking around us. Not just human thinking, but the thinking of everything that exists. 

This is not about coding then. Understanding how all these different forms work next to each other, yet somehow in relation to each other, directs us to a term that I very much like these days, it is ‘transcoding’. Transcoding is not so much about understanding the other, which is what, for instance, digital forms of coding are often interested in. A kind of a one-on-one connection. Transcoding is about how this sensing, how this responding, happens all around us. The example that I love to give is the way the drop of water and the leaf of the plant somehow transcode one another, and the way they live according to one another in a very rich and multi directional way. So, it is not about understanding something and therefore creating a kind of value and then institutionalizing it to gain control over the world. It is really about an accidental living with one's environment and responding to it in such a way that, in the end, enriches it in many ways. So, the shape of the leaf and a drop of water somehow resonate and somehow transcode one another and found a way to prosper.

MJ

I structure the last chapter of my PhD around the topic of artificial intelligence in that I think that gaining insight into our own mind, how learning is connected to the environment and evolution and the idea of how we can possibly instantiate this in a synthetic medium, may actually help us address questions like the ones we have been discussing in this conversation in new ways. As much as current AI models may be lacking sensory grounding and environmental coupling, I do believe that there are approaches that are coming closer to this, for instance coupling computation and hardware so that it is locally instantiated.

RD

You talk about Internet of things, applications, for instance?

MJ

There's one group I've been specifically in conversation with concerning active inference. The idea is that we navigate the world in that we actively construct a model of the future based on our environmental sensing and we constantly adapt this model. And there are attempts to structure artificial intelligence according to such principles. One thing that is closely connected is what has been called mortal computation. Mortal, meaning it could die. The idea that something is precarious in the sense that its existence is finite might bring us closer to notions of regeneration, for which a precondition might be this precariousness of existence. Perhaps that can happen in an artificial intelligence.

RD

A kind of death drive.

MJ

That's a Freudian way to put it.

RD

Yeah, the death drive is a very interesting phenomenon, because it means that you deal with the world differently and maybe you sense a bit of urgency occasionally and also make different kind of choices.

MJ

But I suppose if we think about any kind of future of the city, as much as the future of architecture, as much as the future of design... Synthetic forms of cognition, synthetic organisms, or all kinds of new hybrid instantiations of cognition will, in one way or another, be a part of it.

RD

I cannot stop that.

MJ

What are your thoughts on it?

RD

I think it's a continuation of the ways in which states and and capitalist systems have been working with ideas of possession and value that we discussed already. I'm not pessimistic or anything like that. I do think that there are options of broadening our perspective. And I hear the news of researchers from Wageningen University, who experimented with an internet of things application. It allowed farmers to communicate with the tomato and the tomato plant could already tell us ‘I need a bit more iron’ or something. So, before the leaves start hanging down, and before it starts getting these brown stains, the plant could already communicate to the farmer, saying, I need more of this or less of that. An interesting idea, but of course, pure capitalism. But sure, it is somehow expanding our scope in terms of how we deal with our environment.

MJ

It is entirely framed, though, as you say, in a capitalist way. And I suppose for as long as that is the case…

RD

I don't see it end. 

MJ

I agree with that. I still think that there is a potential.

RD

I see a potential to be explored by artists and philosophers. Artists and philosophers should work hand in hand here, philosophers of architecture, philosophers of design, philosophers of anything, especially nowadays, to explore the possibilities of the land anew, and of technology anew. We need to understand the new forms of control and how to play with it, make it more fun, and explore the possibilities of the senses more profoundly. The university plays a key role in this, but that is why we should leave the campus and move to the land and together with artists, explore the possibilities of what can be done today.

MJ

I think that's a wonderful note to end the conversation on. Thank you so much. 

References

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus : capitalism and schizophrenia. Athlone Press. 

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? Columbia University Press. 

Dolphijn, R. (2021). The philosophy of matter: a meditation. Bloomsbury Academic. 

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