Body &

Special issue: Indeterminate Bodies Society

127
The Author(s) 2017
Indeterminate Subjects, Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
Irreducible Worlds: DOI: 10.1177/1357034X17716746
journals.sagepub.com/home/bod

Two Economies of
Indeterminacy

Kathryn Yusoff
Queen Mary University of London

Abstract
Lodged in an impasse between questions of environmental justice and modes of
capitalisation in the green economy, indeterminacy is a vulnerable and porous
relation. Pollution activates a potentiality in the organism to be otherwise, to gen-
erate certain kinds of tumours, mini-deaths or mutations. Toxicity has an inter-
mediary status that launches a mobility of effects that is often fragmented through
sense organs, affirming forms of non-identity in biopolitical relations. Organisms are
receptive to such bodily reconfigurations precisely because they are open to the
material communication of the world. In contrast to the hidden labour of inde-
terminacy in capitalist modes of capture, this article crafts an analytics of inde-
terminacy as an interjection in the politics of environments. Through dispersants in
the Gulf of Mexico and military bees, two economies of indeterminacy are discussed.
Drawing on Georges Batailles notion of political economy, I argue that what is
required is an economy of radical inequivalence; an excessive engagement with the
possibilities of indetermining forces to make fleeting marks.

Keywords
Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, ecology, indeterminacy, subjectivity, toxicity,
value

The position of the in-between lacks a fundamental identity, lacks a

form, a givenness, a nature. Yet it is that which facilitates, allows into
being, all identities, all matter, all substance . . . . There is a certain
delicious irony in being encouraged to think about a strange and
curious placement, a position that is crucial to understanding not only
identities, but also that which subtends and undermines them, which
makes identities both possible and impossible . . . (Grosz, 2001: 912)

Corresponding author: Kathryn Yusoff. Email: k.yusoff@qmul.ac.uk

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org
2 Body & Society XX(X)

Without Location
Indetermining forces subtend all identity formation and material
communication in ecological relations. In a milieu of extensive envi-
ronmental degradation and the capitalization of biotic subjects, this
article develops a set of forays into indeterminacy. Inscribed into
capitalist modes of production as natural capital, biotic subjects are
no longer the standing reserve for the transformative work of human
labour, but these entities are now framed as a participative labour
resource within human economies (Yusoff, 2011: 2). Through the
examples of two recent environmental quasi-events (Povinelli,
2011: 13) the use of dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and
the caurterization of bees in insect bomb detection the contours and
directionalities of these economies of indeterminacy will be dis-
cussed. With these examples and Georges Batailles concept of a
general economy, this article opens the question of how to account
for the imbrication of material communication that is in-between
biotic subjects and environments; an in-between-ness that governs the
possibility of sovereignty and sense. Questions of nonhuman labour
within the economy place the consideration of a sovereignly life (and
I say sovereignly not sovereign to not reinforce a notion of an idea
subject or body), as secondary to the affects of biopolitical arrange-
ments. In various ways life is taken a/part from itself yet persists in
this parting as something in-between the possibilities of a sovereignly
disposition (and how things are made to persist in the reproduction of
unsovereignly conditions). These fractures in material communica-
tion might be called queer genealogies; that is genealogies with
impossible lines of descent that frustration of an empirical mark
through the instability of subject-object positions. Affirming queer
bonds and their fractured genealogies in subjective modes suggests a
practice that offers indeterminacy as a site of political possibility.
This acts as a rebuttal to the employment of indeterminacy as political
impediment around ecological and social justice issues.
Tethered to restricted empirical and juridical ends ends that
refuse the in-between of subjectobject or subjectsubject relations
that constitute the very interdependence of environmental relations in
the first instance environmental knowledge must necessarily oscil-
late between recognizing the sovereignty of an organism and the
material interdependence of environments. It is this indeterminacy
Yusoff 3

that subtends biotic subjects, that both allows ecologies to flourish

and the rupture of an organisms sense of itself as an organism
(through the unworking of toxicity on sense) (Chen, 2012; Yusoff,
2013). Toxicity has an intermediary status that launches effects that
are often mobile and fragmented through sense organs and across
bodies that have accumulative environmental legacies. Within the
context of toxic relations and subject-object boundaries that overflow
the grid of causality, the indeterminacy of toxicity inscribes the
possibility of both bodily and subject formation (Alaimo, 2016). The
explicit aim of this article is to craft an alternative economy of
indeterminacy to the current economy of indeterminate effects of
capitalist accumulation in ecologies, which variously manifest as
endocrine disruptors, anthropogenic climate change, pollution, ocean
acidification, geological destratification. I use the term alternative
economy to signal that this is a project of the otherwise (Povinelli,
2001, 2012a); it categorically posits an alternative, expanded analytic
of indeterminacy against capitalisms reliance on an economy of
indeterminacy in the dissipation and amelioration of its environmen-
tal, social and political effects; thus, indeterminacy is understood as a
hidden labour in the functioning of capitalist economies. However,
this is not an attempt to read another, more celebratory history of
capitalism through its genealogy, with the aim of liberating some
overlooked minor trail of resistances while still tying a political
project to those pragmatic ends. Rather, the existence and political
functioning of one economy of indeterminacy (in capitalism)
demands the crafting of another in social theory to both interrogate
the logics of the former and demand the possibility of the latter
(Berlant, 2007).
Yet a project of the otherwise must first resist the organizational
strategy of a project, as something with ends and a regime of accom-
plishment that always subjects the possible to another labour or
utility (Chen, 2012). The first commitment is to the rupture of the
organizing structures of power and a profligacy of experience, which
suspends the generalized equivalence that is established in market
values or utility in knowledge economies (this is also the trial of
languages of description that they must also make the same com-
mitment to the rupture and suspension of generalized equivalence in
their modes of description). In this suspension of equivalence, the
otherwise becomes possible, if precariously so. The analytical
4 Body & Society XX(X)

economy of indeterminacy that I want to talk about is one that under-

cuts the scripts of determinacy, and resists reproducing its economic
or affective architectures. This is not an article about solutions, but
rather it is a project of recognition without end; in which something
presents itself, where something indeterminate and incommensur-
able might be allowed to come near and not be immediately incor-
porated into a schema of valuation or signification (Yusoff, 2013).
Resisting the urge to put everything to work be it microbes in oil
spills, trees in carbon sinking, biodiversity in offsetting forestalls a
moment of incorporation long enough so that something else might
tentatively emerge. In this analytic, I explore what happens if we
dream with the tight claustrophobia and containments that break
apart being, rather than imagine the release from this condition (into
some ideal subjective life). As the geochemical materiality of envir-
onments form affective infrastructures where pheromones, PCBs
inhibitors, changes the chemical intra-actions of life forms, and in
the morphologies of bodies, they redirect and reorganise sense. In
following indeterminacy, I stay with the vectors of disarray and
disattunement of sense as an increasingly organizing affective archi-
tecture in material worlds.

Forays into Indeterminacy: Corexit1 9500 and 9527

The use of Corexit1 in the Gulf of Mexico 2010 oil spill brutally
elaborates on economies of indeterminacy (Figure 1). There are a
number of indeterminacies at stake that relate to questions of justice
(human and nonhuman): there is the work of 2 million gallons of
Corexit1 as the dispersant of oil, which brings about a kind of
making-indeterminate of the spill, dissipating an estimated 200 mil-
lion gallons of oil into ecosystems; there is the visual displacement of
the oil from the surface as an unsightly slick into a water column or
plume; there is the labour of bacterial agents (Gabrys, 2013: 208) in
the consumption of oil in its degradation; there are the proprietary
chemical properties of Corexit1 that were not subject to full public
disclosure and thus have indeterminate compositions; there are inde-
terminate effects of bioaccumulation across species for indefinite
timescales and the sub-lethal effects that bodies carry which affect
reproduction, immunity, sense. Against this economy of indetermi-
nate effects that must be borne as toxicity, is the structural and
Yusoff 5

Figure 1. Gulf of Mexico seawater with MC-252 oil floating on the surface
(right). Using the prescribed amount of Corexit disperses the oil in the
water (left).
Source: Wade Jeffrey PhD, UWF.

planned indeterminacy on the part of BP of literally dispersing the

liability for the oil spilled, so that the size of the spill is reduced and
the material basis of litigation is reduced. Awareness of the affective
economy of the spill led to BP instructing workers (and the 170,000
people directly exposed during the spill) not to wear respirators
because it looked bad. To this scene must also be added the stock-
piling of Corexit1 by BP, and the need to discharge such stocks
given the bans that existed in 18 other countries, prohibiting its use
because of toxic effects known since the 1969 Santa Barbara spill
(see LeMenager, 2014: 56) and in the 1989 Exonn Valdez spill
(where the average age of death of workers involved in the clean-
up is 52 years old; Shaw, 2013).
The Material Safety Data Sheet for Corexit1 9527A, Corexit1
9500 states that it causes: Injury to red blood cells (hemolysis),
injury to the liver, upper respiratory tract irritation, central nervous
system effects, nausea, vomiting, anenesthetic or narcotic effects,
drying of the skin leading to discomfort and dermatitis, chemical
pneumonia if aspirated into lungs following ingestion (quoted in
Shaw, 2013). Endlessly unworking itself as a determinable substance
6 Body & Society XX(X)

and unworking the bodies of organisms, Corexit1 is literally a pro-

cess of dispersing the boundaries and cells of organisms, perforating
bodily boundaries so that the carcinogenic and mutagenic effects of
the chemicals in the oil can work into the body. This unworking, that
resists determination, means that the substance is also in a process of
differing from itself, so that it cannot be recognized as such; while it
simultaneously makes organisms unrecognizable to themselves (they
no longer have a coherent consistency in the continuation of a body
of sense). So how to approach a politics of the indeterminacies of
Corexit1 when the indeterminacy under consideration and its utili-
zation is a constitutive part of the capitalist economies of fossil fuel
extraction and its material indetermining?
The prioritizing of evidential basis for environmental prosecution
that is secured on a stable object disables the possibility of critique,
because critique finds itself without an object, the matter under con-
sideration has already dispersed; its effects are inseparable from the
effects of the oil itself, and through its integration with the ecological
environment, it has become part of its forms of exposure (one study
found that Corexit1 increases the toxicity of oil by 52 times) (Figure
2). Sometimes what is left is to dive in and see what floats up this is
what the biologist Professor Susan Shaw, Director of the Marine
Environmental Research Institute did enduring the affect of that
questioning; as a question that opens up sensation and calls for
another language of accounting for.

As the boat entered the slick, I had to cover my nose to block the
fumes . . . . Near Rig No. 313, technically a restricted zone, the boat
stopped and I (wearing a wetsuit, with Vaseline covering exposed
skin) jumped in. Only a few meters down, the nutrient-rich water
became murky, but it was possible to make out tiny wisps of phyto-
plankton, zooplankton and shrimp enveloped in dark oily droplets.
These are essential food sources for fish like the herring I could see
feeding with gaping mouths on the oil and dispersant . . . (Shaw, 2010:
unpaginated)

As a scientist who has worked on toxicity for over twenty years,

Shaws protest was made without recourse to empirical scientific
data as such,1 but to the experience of encounter and exposure, using
the description of a cloud of death to orientate our sensibility
towards a (politically and policy-based) interruption in the use of
Yusoff 7

Figure 2. A worker cleans up oily waste on Elmers Island, just west of

Grand Isle, LA, 21 May 2010.
Source: Petty Officer 3rd Class Patrick Kelley DVIDSHUB [CC BY 2.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

Corexit1. She continued to argue for the banning of Corexit1

because of how it multiplies the toxicity of oil by delivering oil into
the body, the dispersant transforming the oil into small micelles that
can penetrate through the interstitial spaces of matter (see Shaws
Gulf EcoTox project). For Shaw, the Gulf oil spill was not just
another spill, but a chemical experiment with the whole region, in
which the dispersant-oil mixture was more toxic to wildlife and
people than the oil alone because of the increased exposure to hydro-
carbons and the synergistic toxicity of Corexit1 and oil components.
She continued to work to highlight the chemical poisoning of work-
ers (see DAndrea et al., 2013) and those in proximity to the site of
the spill, yet at the time BP refused to admit any health claims due to
insufficient evidence and instead spent $195 million on a campaign
advertising BPs ecological credentials.
8 Body & Society XX(X)

Appointed to the Department of the Interiors Strategic Sciences

Working Group, charged with assessing the consequences of the oil
spill, Shaw drafted a Consensus Statement signed by prominent
ocean scientists opposing the unprecedented application of Corexit1
dispersants in the Gulf. She subsequently launched Gulf EcoTox, an
independent, region-wide investigation into the effects of oil and
chemical dispersants in the food web, and was one of the few scien-
tists allowed to collect samples from heavily oiled areas during the
high exposure period. Despite such work, Corexit1 was approved by
the Environmental Protection Agency and remains standard operat-
ing procedure for spills. Shaws diving into death her intoxication
tied sensibility to Corexit1s effects, even as it draws away from it
into the radical incommensurability between the possibility of sense
to be sensible to that which is outside of it or exceeds it (and to the
sense of other organisms differential experiences of such phenom-
ena). Like Blanchots notion of exposure to the outside as a limit-
writing that is not about recuperation but about limit-experience, the
process of pushing towards and questioning the indeterminate, yet
toxic effects of exposure mobilized a politics around Corexit1.
Shaws dive into the plume of dispersant could be seen in
Batailles political economy not just as a project of recuperation
where all the externalities are accounted for (although this is part
of a more expansive economy); its force derives from the way in
which such an act seeks a change of register, and forged a different
kind of communication with the material world. As the dispersant
and oil become an indeterminate body-load of the sea; of microbial
life; of the absorbent capacities of plants; of sea life and sea deaths;
this heterogeneous toxicity obviates the possibility of accounting,
precisely because it is shared so resolutely through the indetermina-
cies of porous bodies: sea, microbe, rocky shore, worker, local
community.
Such material communication is a form of what Bataille would call
non-knowledge that is concerned with the impossibilities of that
share; of who bears the biggest and smallest share; of what certain
entities can bear (and survive); of the infinitesimal expressions of
that event as an experience. Shaw, in giving herself over to the dive
through this dispersant, is not trying to reap any kind of quantifiable
accounting, but she is privileging the communicative possibilities of
the incommunicable, which is not lost to communication but
Yusoff 9

becomes a form of communication through this act of exposure; it

both motivates and mobilizes a politics of concern. What her dive
named was the very injuncture between different kinds of indetermi-
nacy in this event. Through contact and contagion of those overlap-
ping wounds, one with another, there is a moment of intensive
exposure that becomes the basis of a communitive engagement. In
no way does Shaws dive equate to the full exposure of the body-load
of this spill (which will remain ultimately unknowable), but there is a
momentary shedding of the (in)difference in being,2 so that a wild
material communication can take place. In this zone of indetermina-
tion, exposure is the suture of communication; she lays herself open
to a communion with nonhuman communities that are beyond the
possibility of accounting for, and this becomes the site of other
communications and political petitions for human communities that
share this exposure. It is a participation with the world through
wounds. In this process-based ontology, being-affected is forged
through entering the processes that other organisms are subjected
to, or incorporated within. In this sense, determinacy does not coin-
cide with indeterminacy, there is no neat cut that creates a decisive
split; rather, there is a third term that spirals away from the determi-
nate, yet comes back at it without recourse to the possibilities of a
genealogical account, but with a poetics charged with the emotional
currents of toxicity and intoxication.
As mutagenic and carcinogenic disruptors the body-load of pol-
lutants affect the ability of an organism to be what previously it
was, there is a need to articulate a politics of sovereignty and the
rights of an organism to the integrity of its body without privileging
ideal bodies or species forms. While much literature on nonhumans
stresses the interdependence/or dependence of life forms on each
other, perversely, such questions are not well served by stressing
relations per se as a relational approach prioritizes an externality that
compromises the recognition of the internality of the organism (an
essential, but not essentializing bodily integrity), which needs to be
defended against its porosity to other beings and their effluents. The
action of Shaws dive affirms nothing but this impossibility and
surplus of exposure; but such fragments of affect can be brought
back from this indeterminate space to build a politics. In this space
indeterminacy is a passage between a route of inheritance and the
potential for community (across human and nonhuman difference) in
10 Body & Society XX(X)

the traversal of the situated distinction between entities. As Blanchot

argues: We must try to recognize in this shattering or
dislocation a value that is not one of negation . . . . An arrangement
at the level of disarray. An immobile becoming (Blanchot, 1993:
308). In this sense, the indeterminate fragment, the orphan quality of
these experiences that lack a coherent epistemological or ontological
body, is not unaccomplished; friendship towards such indeterminate
subjects turns towards another mode of achievement that opens ques-
tioning towards an otherwise. It is without guarantee, without unity,
but with promise for the possibility of something that has escaped but
left its (barely) visible marks through bodies. As in Blanchots writ-
ing [t]he fragmentary . . . is a spectral demand that does not exist as
such, but which, beyond aesthetics or ontology, continues to inscribe
itself . . . never grasped as such but always effacing itself as an impos-
sible trace: a trace of the impossible (Hill, 2012: 31). This trace of
the impossible launches political possibilities.

Forays into Indeterminacy: Bee-based Bomb Detection

The second foray into indeterminacy turns to the issue of bodily
containment and the labour of sense. The olfactory training of bees
by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has,
according to DARPAs website (Kosek, 2010: 662), been used to
locate mines and weapons of mass destruction. The Hybrid Insect
Micro Electromechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) programme is
aimed at developing technology to provide control over insect loco-
motion, just as reins are needed for effective control over horse
locomotion (DARPA). It is hoped that HI-MEMS-derived technol-
ogies will enable many robotic capabilities at low cost, impacting the
development of future autonomous defense systems. Amid a whole
range of experimental cyborg research projects, the bee assemblage
attempts to provide compact platforms that use highly efficient bio-
logical systems developed over millions of years of evolution in
microbotic missions. The website goes on to state that:
The basic technology developed in this program will also serve as a
biological tool to understand and control insect development, opening
vistas in our understanding of tissue development and providing new
technological pathways to harness the natural sensors and power gen-
eration of insects. (www.darpa.mil/)
Yusoff 11

Figures 3 and 4. Bee bomb detection units.

Source: Los Alamos National Laboratory.

So what exactly is a bee in this tightly coupled tissue-machine-

insect interface (see Figures 3 and 4)? Such bee-based apparatus
constrains the emergence of the organism to a point where the bee-
subject-object has no sovereignty of being. It remains a part of an
aperture of a more dominant machinic defence system. The compo-
nent part that is played by the organism is in deference to its own
possibilities of becoming (for it will either expire in its work or that
work works against its own possibilities for being). How can we
think about these parts of bodies: does the part take a/part the
possibilities for being, reconstitute them only in relation to their
productivity in the war machine? Clearly the machineinsect inter-
face is imagined as a thing, not a being, and becoming a thing entails
a process that facilitates the break in being a whole biotic subject. As
an organism moves from thing into machine, the performative rela-
tions of its parts in bomb detection constitute it; it is the movement of
a being into its partial objectification, as a series of parts, and as a
mode of subjectification. This raises a series of questions about what
a body can do and be a/part from itself.
The ethical call that such organ-trading provokes is about over-
coming the thing-like existence of circuits of value that value a part
apart from itself, its bodies interests in an economy of biotic
subjects. Clearly an ontological shift is needed here that is not about
biotic subjects and bodies per se but about the contingent emergence
of subject/objects or intra-objects within the context of military appa-
ratus. But this shift cannot only be about determining indeterminacy.
12 Body & Society XX(X)

What this process of parting a bee-body does is to make the organi-

zation and definition of the parts of the bee become exchangeable, so
that it may function as an organ without a body. But the part is
intrinsic to the action of parting the organism, the bee, this bee, from
itself, because it is defined (determined) through its expendable part,
but clearly this expenditure is not for the bee. The consideration of
life outside of its parts becomes secondary to the biopolitical arrange-
ments. This bees labouring part is tested to obsolescence. In making
this part a bomb sensor, the bee is driven apart from itself. The
construction of its part and its equivalence is common to all the bees
who continue to labour after the death of this bee (which of course
has already happened). The bee becomes machinic (in Deleuzes
terms), not as prosthetics per se, but as component, bit, hard/soft-
ware, folded into living machines, submitted to technological
arrangements (Pritchard, 2014).
As Deleuze and Guattari suggests:
War contains zoological consequences . . . . Any animals can be swept
up in these packs and corresponding becomings . . . . That is why the
distinction we must make is less between kinds of animals than
between the different states according to which they are integrated
into . . . war machines. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 243)

Jake Kosek (2010) argues that military interests and ideas become
inscribed in the bees physical and social life. There are also com-
plex forms of internal cannibalism set to work in this military work
that works against forms of sovereignty and survival. For a short
while, the bee lives on, lingering in a body that is being undone by
the very organ of sense that constitutes the possibilities of its sense-
world; divided from itself, but unable to do anything else but die in
this division, this bee is separated from the possibility of a world
through the rearrangement of its bodily and sensing capacities.
What is a political project in relation to this bee? To reconcile it to
itself to make it sovereign as bee? To condemn these practices that
make such a thing that bears no relation to itself (that is to take an
ethical, moral or rights-based stand)? To understand the parting of
parts (and the imaginaries of a whole body that constitute the former
scene? This is to try to understand the parting of parts and the pro-
cesses of fragmentation that make parts function as parts without
recuperation of some sort reconstituted whole). Or, to begin to
Yusoff 13

understand what kind of machine requires the indeterminacy of bod-

ies to function? The difficulty becomes how to talk about this parting,
while resisting the invocation of a continuous or unbroken notion of
the organism as a body. Avoiding nostalgia for the bee as whole body
or as a fragmentary organ without a body, we can see the bee as
already undone, prescribed by its capabilities. The bee part could
also be a place to make a politics of radical multiplication that has the
promise of making the bee something that is not so easily divided
from itself or made exchangeable. Such a politics must involve the
revaluation of value within another system of valuation; without such
a revaluation of value everything is incrementally lost in the equiv-
alences the bee is already subjected to.
A pragmatic distinction can be made between animal/insect/
microbe and machine, but the employment of these organisms indi-
cates that there is no difference in imagination between these subjects
which are defined by their work. In this labour, the nonhuman
becomes other than itself (as a being no longer continuous with its
own being) through the discontinuity with its interests (being sepa-
rated from itself and the conditions of its potential flourishing).
Thinking with the indeterminate effects of these orphaning qualities
(and their orphaned subjects), something might be gained by refusing
to be systematic in our analysis. The abandonment of the organism as
a coherent point of reference for bodily politics both engenders an
engagement with heterogeneity (different modes and qualities of
bodily life within life) and undercuts the recourse to the inviol-
ability of a sovereign body. Letting go of the perceived sanctity
of a body to pursue its own interests could open a much more
diverse way of doing ethics in terms of bodies/organs/sensorial
capacities and their rights, but to do so also runs the risk of
invalidating the ethical pragmatism that accompanies a right that
is defined through that bodily integrity (that we might wish to
claim for others and as our own). While there is an extensive
literature on both explicitly recognized and implicitly practised
rights in relation to nonhumans, it is worth mentioning that envi-
ronmental litigation can only be mobilized in relation to damage
done to a person, via a nonhuman, landscape, resource, etc. Such
litigation cannot be raised for damage against nonhuman life on
its own terms, where no causal link can be shown to impact
human persons (with the exception of Ecuador, where legislation
14 Body & Society XX(X)

has been changed to recognize the flora and fauna as nonhuman

persons, precisely so litigation can be raised against foreign
multinationals).
Our imagination of a sovereign body both hinders and helps
forge an ethics of apprehension: it hinders in its partiality (the
recognition of a normative body); it helps in its surge towards a
questioning of what might or might not be necessary for an
organism to be on its own terms (a non-essentialized autonomous
being). Imagining the loss of a dimension of life that allows a
being to intensify itself might seem pointless. These bees, con-
fined in their casings, bring into view a cruelty, while typifying
an invisible world of suffocation that loads bodies with various
forms of exposure, toxicities and slow deaths. But these bodies
remain impervious to what such languages would make of them.
Language, in this instance, is a selfish capture of hope; the hope
of description and what it witnesses and allows; pitted against the
smooth and ordered incorporation of organisms into the rhetoric
of defence, entertainment or chemical work. In a general econ-
omy, such partitions require a disorderly language; a language
that is taken apart from its self; a language that represents dis-
continuity with the systematic. The veracity of language on its
own terms rarely renders sufficient engagement for the thing
that is witnessed, but it does hold within it the power of creating
an affective sensibility that can radically adjust orientation in the
world, and this has potential for the radical redescription of what
is going on. To think excessively about these creatures . . . to let
them hang over our dreams, in their confinement, is to recognize
the potential for unworking that such experiences offer. There are
no concrete outcomes, but sensibility is potentially political in so
far as it is a site that unearths resistances that row against a
current of reductionism and subjective enclosures.

Toxic Legacies
Indeterminacy of toxic effects within ecologies raises the question of
how you seek to obtain environmental justice without recourse to the
social reproduction of the constitutive exclusions of a fixed and
stable identity for biotic subjects. When more environmental acti-
vists are murdered worldwide than any other kind of political activist,
Yusoff 15

an account that speaks to the violence and vulnerabilities of

entangled ecological relations is a precarious form of communica-
tion, spoken across the unity of exposure. Relations of material force
and description in subjectobject and subjectsubject boundaries
constitute both the possibility of shared harm and the possibilities
of material communication between biotic subjects. Therefore, this
infinite and discontinuous ecological relation must necessarily refuse
a circuit of adequation even as it strives for recognition of the
shared material conditions of subject formation. Indeterminacy
partly escapes the explicit empirical mark that constitutes evidence
precisely because it is already lodged in a body that is becoming
something else in other forms of sense, mutation and evolution
within and outside an organism. Thus toxicity highlights a more
foundational agreement between biotic subjects and how they are
co-constituted by indeterminate forces, even as it throws this relation
into question.
The material conditions of communication, which constitute the
possibilities of biotic subjects to be sensible to one another and their
environments, are infinite and discontinuous relations without loca-
tion or certainty. Yet this indeterminate relationality is a co-
constituting volatility between that is subject to specific material
interventions on organisms and environments. Harm to this vulner-
able relation launches the demand for environmental justice into the
world as a breach in this agreement or unity. The disclosure of
environmental harm on biotic subjects is temporally discontinuous
and not necessarily coterminous with the environmental event itself
(e.g. spill events have latent toxic legacies). Laying open political
possibilities for environmental justice requires both an account of the
indetermining effects of toxicity in unworking biotic subjectivity and
one that moves to an affirmation that is entirely other (and acknowl-
edges the porousness of identity formation). These are the two econo-
mies of indeterminacy.
Environmental (in)justice exhibits a classic post/neocolonial
dilemma of how to account for power relations without reinstating
their descriptive and ordering logics that further restrict the possibi-
lities of generating a language that is not tethered to the continued
production of that power. Environmental impacts are also materially
actualized through colonial relations, in the form of environmental
racism (the siting of waste sites, pollution of indigenous land and the
16 Body & Society XX(X)

reinforcing of relations of settler colonialism) and continuing neoco-

lonial exploitation in the extraction of resources. Yet, in the field of
science studies, attentiveness to reproductive logics (of addressing
power on its own terms) is often subsumed under the desire for an
efficacy of political will and for speaking a language that is equiv-
alent to the field of critique (i.e. remaining bounded by science as the
adjudicator on reasonable claims). This is what the philosopher
Quentin Meillassoux (2008) calls correlationism, or argument from
the circle, where epistemic requirements exclude that which cannot
be spoken about, that which cannot be justified, precisely because of
the ends that that thought is tied to (i.e. to secure a political inter-
vention through scientific languages that establish a coherent object
of concern). Such speaking wants to seek justice for the object of
concern and this is its utility or the reason for this work. Such work is
also suspicious of how other languages might interrupt, obscure or
even work against that which is at stake, speaking in languages that
are not seen as reasonable or actionable (i.e. one must not weep but
prosecute). What would it be to develop an alternative economy of
indeterminacy that could both hold harm to account and depart from
that form of accounting into another order of experience that shatters
the logic of the former while cleaving to the principle of giving just
account?

Capitalism and the Otherwise of Indeterminacy

Economies of capitalism rely upon alterity (or environmental extern-
alities) to mobilize growth, yet their promise is of just exchange of
fair and open trade, where surplus is always reinvested and never
wasted. Thus, the promissory quality of capitalism is grounded in the
possibility of exchange (and thus, exchange-ability) without excess,
and it is this logic which is mapped into the new green economy. The
promise of exchangeability and equivalence are increasingly applied
to nonhuman worlds and informs the modes of subjectobject-
ification in biodiversity or carbon offsetting and ecosystem services,
where one entity site, organism or ecology becomes substitutable
for another. As Rebecca Comay argues, capitalism distinguishes
itself by its official ideology of just exchange (1990: 67). Contrary
to the calculus of equivalence and recuperative logic that marks
capitalism transactions is the figure of the gift. She says:
Yusoff 17

the gift would mark a point of incommensurability which would

challenge the ideology of adequation and reciprocity on which capit-
alism must depend. It would upset the homeostatic order of restitution
and exchange, introducing a measure beyond calculation, exposing
the prevailing ideology of just exchange between equals as just the
mask worn by the system to cover up the real inequities of the day.
(Comay, 1990: 678)

If there is the gift on one hand and equivalences on the other, where
does this leave the secreted and indeterminate gifts of capitalism;
such as massive planetary change, acidification, climate change and
the indeterminate legacies of extinction, sterility, pollution and toxi-
city? If the planetary gifts of capitalism cannot be subject to restitution
and exchange (you can exchange carbon, but not climate change; you
can exchange ecosystem services, but not extinction), then there is a
missing economy of indeterminacy at play that is intrinsic to, and
subtends, the possibility for exchange in the logics of capitalism. What
this drive to equivalences in ecologies sets up is the notion that there is
nothing that cannot be incorporated into this economy of exchange
forests, jungles, oceans, atmospheres, ecological processes and future
possibilities, all can become sinks, stores or repositories of risk (in the
case of nuclear waste) and thus, capitalism posits a limitless horizon
of conversion without remainder (or, its end is always recursive).
In contrast to a restricted economy of capitalist modes of
accounting, a general economy of accounting for the imbrication
of environmental relations means going beyond the topical
assemblage of relations to ask questions about orphan qualities
in asymmetrical relations and speak about scattered narratives
rather than deductions through the entanglement of epistemic and
ontic relations. This signals an uncomfortable withdrawal (for
some scholars) of the heterogeneous as situated knowledge rela-
tion, and a return to the heterogeneous as a speculative mode;
because indeterminacies can only ever be spoken as abstracted/-
ing claims; which lack distinct originary conditions and ends,
even as they mark the materiality of bodies, places and processes.
At the same time the heterogeneous must be sustained in its
difference against homogenizing claims of exchangeability and
general equivalence in capitalism, which organizes the precarity
of beings towards exploitation (where ecologies or organisms
18 Body & Society XX(X)

may become targeted and made to work in new ways to compen-

sate for the ongoing destruction of other ecologies, such as oil-
spill-eating bacteria) (Yusoff, 2011).
Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that the quality of this heterogeneity
involves the revaluation of value within another system of valuation:
We have to value value without measure. Bataille formulated this by
calling value heterogeneous: the homogenous is the exchange of
values, in a general equivalence. To be value proper, value must be
heterogeneous to this equivalence . . . the heterogeneous is not in the
business of usage or exchange: its a matter of experience. (Nancy,
2012a: n.p.)

Nancy argues that it is this generalized equivalence that forces

every element of our existence to circulate equally (Nancy,
2012b: n.p.) that must be countered. What is required, according to
Nancy and Bataille, is the crafting of radical inequivalences; an exces-
sive engagement with the shifting possibilities of sensibility to identify
and become sensible to other economies of value. This means that the
work of critique has no guarantee of an axiomatic relation to justice;
because although desire for justice launches the critique into the world,
it must be without measure, and thus more than the ends of justice (this
is the only way, ironically, that it will come close to that call of justice);
the hope is that in the shattering of the circle of adequation there
might be the release of something into being that is more liveable.

Two Economies (According to Batailles Accursed Share)

The two economies of indeterminacy (of capitalism and gift) pull in
opposite directions (one towards the wasting or exploitation of
shared relations, the other towards generosity); both are tied by the
same figurations of excessive causality, incommensurability, radical
alterity in material terms, as well as the epistemic illegibility of the
full count of those interdependences. In this sense, both these econo-
mies share something in common, yet they speak (in as much as these
indeterminate forces speak at all) to very different ontological
arrangements; on the one hand, capitalism is sustained by ecological
indeterminacy, in so far as the indeterminacy is crucial to how capit-
alism functions; on the other hand, ecologies, as a bundle of inde-
terminate forces of potentiality, are not sustained by the activities of
Yusoff 19

global capitalism. Indeterminacy cuts both ways. Co-present in the

political environmental milieu, these two economies share both vec-
tors of possibility (for gains and ecological potentiality) and of stag-
nation (for negative growth and the dual possibilities of loss). These
two economies share the same plane of production, yet they act
differently on it; one towards intensification and the other blunting
the possibilities for those modes of intensification (which we might
call flourishing or a sensibility beyond capitalist gains).
Turning to a consideration of the excessive demands of indetermi-
nacy is appropriate to our current epoch of excess (named the
Anthropocene), which is characterized by the remainders of global
projects that eschewed the acknowledgement of excess, while simul-
taneously constituting forms of synthetic, biological, mineralogical
and atmospheric imbrication that are now so intimate in their toxi-
cities that there is no external identity to this excess. These imbrica-
tions of the chemical, biological and fossil fuel revolutions are not
just effective at the level of organisms and any reconstitutions, but at
the level of sense in general or bodies politic; that is, they constitute
a planetary milieu that makes any desegregation between originary
conditions that science and industry act on, and the work of their
indeterminate processes through ecologies that is, the making of
bodies an impossible project of description. Our contemporary
atmosphere is, in part, a product of capitalist relations (although it
is not reducible to or controlled by these relations). Any thought of
what indeterminacy is must avoid the nostalgia of reconciliation that
might return us to a coherent uncontaminated body or a body that is
not already in the flux of material communication. This scene has no
restitution, where every choice involves a trade-off between forms of
extinguishment and survival (Povinelli, 2012b), and where value
becomes the arbiter of the im/possible. For Inuit women, this is posed
as the decision of whether to eat seal meat and contaminate breast
milk with the high loads of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) that
seal fat carries, or to abandon one of the few cultural practices that
has not yet been fully erased by settler colonialism and dispossess
their children of that corporeal practice of an otherwise.
The two economies of indeterminacy are characterized by what
Bataille called a general and restricted economy. In brief terms,
Batailles project was the mapping of these two types of economies
through a proliferation of contexts, positing the restricted political
20 Body & Society XX(X)

economy in industrial society against the general economy of expen-

diture without utility (an example of which might be the sun that
gives without return). He suggested thinking in terms of a general,
rather than restricted economy to expand the terms of inquiry into that
which might seem excessive to the formation of knowledge, but
might, in the end, turn out to be a crucial relation on which it depends.
The core of Batailles lifelong knowledge project was to consider that
which often got placed outside of knowledge formation because it
seemed surplus to various projects of utility (relevance, legitimacy,
epistemic orderings, political will) and to systematically engage with
this excess to see how it functioned to offer other economies of
engagement (that were systematically excluded by those orderings).
His interest was in the eschewing of the teleological impulses of
political ends to better serve them by other means. At the very least,
such an argument for the consideration of a general economy might
be politically pragmatic given the consistent impossibility of envi-
ronmental justice or social scientific critique to deliver adequate
justice to affected communities, despite their best intentions to do so.
The project of a general economy was not just an exercise in the
location of knowledges other, as Bataille was explicitly concerned
with the consequences of rationalizing the exclusion of excess (and its
inevitable accumulation) that could often result in violent social and
environmental eruptions such as fascism or ecological war. A general
economy demands that analytics of indeterminacy are not tethered to
political ends. And, by forsaking this immediate political gain, Bataille
argued that another kind of relation may come into view. The demand
for a fuller knowledge economy was motivated by what he saw as the
perils of a restricted economy characterized by constitutive exclusions,
which he saw manifesting at Auschwitz, Hiroshima and through eco-
logical catastrophe. His argument was that it is the very transmutation
of excess without end that alleviates its stockpiling. It is the very
rationalized exclusion of what is considered excess that ferments into
disaster and this excess finally becomes squandered in violent clashes.
For Bataille, [c]hanging from the perspectives of restrictive economy
to those of general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican
transformation: a reversal of thinking and of ethics (Bataille,
1988: 25). Thus, a general economy is not just a project of incorporat-
ing excess into the restricted economy (such as the formulation of
ecosystem services to give value to the hidden labour of ecologies
Yusoff 21

in the functioning of capitalist economies), but it is the very transfor-

mation and disruption of subjecting everything to modes of utilization.
While we cannot speak of indeterminacy within a restricted economy,
we can speak of its effects on bodily matter and forms of subjectifica-
tion, without being able to locate them as empirical marks that are
stable enough for the duration of judicial testimony (aka Bhopal,
Exxon Valdez, Niger Delta, etc.). What Bataille argues is that we must
trust the truth of this excess (which we know already to be true), and
its fleeting concretization in the experience that is its testimony, rather
than look for some stabilized object outside of this experience.

Blind ethics
While the forays into indeterminacy discussed issues of non-identity
and radical inequivalence in biopolitical relations of indeterminacy,
I want to move to question how this disjuncture in relations can be
thought as ethics and experience. A short history of relations might
go like this: (1) a relation is a thing between entities in which ethics is
a form of exposure between them. In the positivist or atomistic
model, thought has denied the importance of relations between enti-
ties and prioritized a kind of methodological individualism: the enti-
ties themselves are the absolutes, from which relations proceed; (2)
relations are co-inventions of or co-evolutions between entities,
where nothing exceeds nor precedes relationality, in which ethics
is a form of contagion or cut (an infection, interference, promissory,
provocation); or (3) relation is both less than and more than relating,
relating has an undercut in which there is antecedence and survival,
in which ethics is blind or speculative (indeterminacy can be under-
stood as the interiority and excess of the knot of relation).
One political possibility could go: (1) minimize indeterminacy so
that relationality can be brought to the fore and justice served. Justice
must be able to face the law it must be a subject/object that can
come before the law and be recognized (this is one of the proble-
matics of environmental justice, that it requires an empirical trace
that is uncorrupted by the indeterminacy of matter, which is diffi-
cult). But visibility has a price; making visible is a form of exposure
and involves the creation of new entities, such as the enrolment of
indigenous peoples as national citizens as a condition of their ability
to contest their marginalization and lack of sovereign rights.
22 Body & Society XX(X)

Becoming a biotic subject in ecosystem services means going to

work, being off-set or on a Red List. Forms of institutionalized
incorporation (political, sovereign, cultural, economic) condition the
terms of coherence and participation of those that are categorized as
indeterminate within these economies.
Another, (2) ethics-by-contagion, must proceed on the basis that
we are never generous enough; our generosity must overflow this or
that encounter, it must strive towards an ethics in general while never
losing sight of the specificity in which vulnerability is opened. But
here there is a problem: if the very coming into being is not a visible
event; or the indeterminacy that is at stake survives and remains
latent within the encounter/phenomena, it is interior to the coming-
into-relations; this model of ethics privileges intra-actions as-event.
The imperative here would be to build institutions and practices
around exposure that lessen violence, while acknowledging that in
the opening of exposure is also the recognition of the condition of
exposure in general (of being bound to and with a mutuality/material
sociality across human and nonhuman life, which sometimes means
being bound by toxicity). Alternatively, there is ethics-by-
accountability, in which ethics is the representation of forms of rela-
tions that are under-represented or marginalized. Such an ethics is
effective but limited in scope. If we can only be accountable for what
we can evidence or that which can be brought to relation, the sphere
of attention is limited to only some of the world. Everything that is
asocial or indeterminate (i.e. most of the world to which we have a
radical asymmetry) is excluded.
Contra to both these models, (3) blind ethics is an orientation
towards experience built through indeterminate forces or, in Batailles
terms, the non-knowledge of ecologies. Again, this ethics needs to be
excessive, but it hovers without location in a place that will never be
brought fully to relation or representation; blind ethics operates in the
realm of a general economy (sacred, violent, exuberant, irreverent,
irresponsible) and cannot be held to formal account as a relation. Like
the blind, such an ethics cultivates an intensified sensibility of an
otherwise; it seeks to be wilfully sensible to that which is excluded
in a restricted (relational) economy (that which is indeterminate, has a
queer genealogy and is non-productive). Such a blind ethics cuts both
ways; it undercuts relationality as an ethical project, yet its political
will might substantiate an alternative economy of indeterminacy to
Yusoff 23

that of capitalism. So, rather than think relationality as a co-production

between the apparatus and entities (where entities do not precede or
survive relating), we might see all sorts of survivals and slow deaths in
what the entity could become; as both antecedent and bound to, or
obliged, before individuation. Then relationality can be thought as a
spacing not between entities, but an unfathomable indeterminacy that
contains elements of undecidability and of indetermination.
This is a distributed subjectivity and its virtualities, are an untimely
mediation an orphan quality produces an irreducible interval
between terms. Grosz puts it precisely:

What does it mean to reflect upon a position, a relation, a place related

to other places but with no place of its own: the position of the in-
between? . . . The space of the in-between is that which is not a space, a
space without boundaries of its own, which takes on and receives itself,
its form, from the outside, which is not its outside (this would imply
that it has a form) but whose form is the outside of the identity, not just
of an other (for that would reduce the in-between to the role of object,
not of space) but of others, whose relations of positivity define, by
default, the space that is constituted as in-between. (Grosz, 2001: 912)

Indeterminacy is not just a diffraction through relations, but a

spacious interiority/alterity within the phenomena that are things-
in-relation. Such a relation is blind the grafting of one point of
view onto another but always folding back, threaded through with
indeterminacy, estranged, yet ready to be flung away as excessive
to the event of relationality. The interval measures all that is in-
between the very interruption of the coherence of a being that
possesses its own body that which separates becomes the relation
as untimely mediation between an insensible subject and an irredu-
cible world. This other kind of relation, Blanchot argues, is a multiple
inasmuch as it cannot be determined or returned to the one, to the
organism or ontological whole. Rather, he says, it is a mobile-
immobile relation, untold and without number, not indeterminate but
indetermining, always in displacement, being without a place (Blan-
chot, 1993: 67, italics added). So there is no such thing as an indeter-
minate relation as ontological condition, but only the play of
indetermining relations; inasmuch as indeterminacy both releases and
generates the call for another order of relation. It might be said that
indeterminacy is what occurs to identity. Think here of the effects of
24 Body & Society XX(X)

PCBs on polar bears, the way in which new forms of (deformed)

sexual organs and cannibalism grow within sensibility to give a mon-
strous presence to the diffusion of PCBs through arctic environments.
This kind of monstrous imbrication, of reconfigured sensibility as the
effect of indeterminate, unaccountable processes (within a restricted
economy), highlights a broken trajectory of becoming. Pollution acti-
vates a potentiality in the organism to be otherwise, to generate certain
kinds of tumours, mini-deaths or mutations.
The organism is receptive to such reconfigurations of sense and
bodily configuration precisely because it is open to the material com-
munication of the world and drawn to the making-otherwise of sense.
However, the indeterminacy of effects is so distributed, temporally
and spatially, that we can only await its presenc-ing its manifesta-
tion as actual harm in an autopsy report. Or, rather, the trace can
only make its presentation at the withdrawal of being (what is left in a
body); so it is beyond any justice as such, making the question of
representation redundant to the demand, after the fact. The appear-
ance of an accountable trace is also the site of rupture in being, so
much so that the sense of being is torn from itself. This ontological
insurgency is both the possibility and retardation of indetermining
forces to open up or close down the breach in being and bodily matter.
The difference between these two economies of indeterminacy is
irreconcilable, but both name a mobility in identity without presenting
a distinct identity as such, and both share a historical milieu, so they
challenge each other for the right to political and material possibility.
Often this indetermining force has a trembling presence, its
speech-act is a stutter, inhibiting what identity is and can become
like endocrine disruptors that have some repeatable expressions, but
exist mostly in an unknown relation to biological developments of
the body they disrupt and effect without having a proper location or
site of fixed determination. Such disruptors are not without expres-
sion in behaviours and bodies, but their causation is diffuse within a
larger field of mutation. Or the effects are not linear or predictable.
Often such environmental indeterminacies seem to have such a dis-
persed or atmospheric quality; they involve, more often than not, a
leaching or bleeding in or out of an organism. Thus, the manifestation
of this indetermining force is actual, but it does not possess a secure
location or identity from which to proclaim its harm; it simply rup-
tures, fragments. Often such forces are expressed as a disruption to
Yusoff 25

the stability in which an organism persists in affinity with its milieu

as something more or less consistent in its rapport. These indetermin-
ing forces are virtual, in a Deleuzian sense. For Deleuze: What we
call virtual is not something that lacks reality but something that is
engaged in a process of actualization following the plane that gives it
its particular reality (Deleuze, 2001: 31). In this sense, indetermin-
ing forces are a becoming-in-determinate; they take the body away
from the sovereignty of sense.
Thinking with indetermining forces offers an opening into ecology
that begins somewhere other than with the organism, a normative
body, the subject, the thing-in-relation, yet it nonetheless retains a
relationship to the formation of subjectivity and interdependencies that
are a result of indetermining forces. These forces are the very condi-
tions of possibility of material communication. The openness of bodily
matter to becoming other is subtended by indeterminacy; in both
evolutionary and exuberant terms, which are organized towards pos-
sibility, becoming-more, always already outside itself in the search for
material communication. Arguably, indeterminacy is one of the most
important questions of environmental justice and yet one of the risk-
iest. Staying with the indeterminate and affirming its non-identity is
another way of questioning an account of power and its affective
infrastructures. This is not an alternative to the hard work of pragmatic
politics, but the conditions of how indeterminacy functions constitute a
missing part of the economy of environmental relations. Turning
towards indeterminacy is a mode of orientation and sensitivity to its
habits, its in-between-ness and affectual qualities are understood as a
political possibility that opens into a new sensibility of response.
Let us gamble on the future: let us affirm the indeterminate relation
with the future as though this indeterminacy, by the affirmation that
confirms it, were to render the thought of the Return active. (Blanchot,
1993: 280)

Notes
1. Scientific data was the basis of Shaws expertise, and she went on to
conduct scientific inquiry, but the primary focus of her dive was to draw
affective attention to the use of the dispersant.
2. It is interesting to note that Bataille sees egotism as an indifference to
communication.
26 Body & Society XX(X)

References
Alaimo S (2016) Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in
Posthuman Times. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Bataille G (1988 [1949]) The Accursed Share, vol. 1, Consumption,
trans. Hurley R. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Zone Books.
Berlant L (2007) Slow death (sovereignty, obesity, lateral agency).
Critical Inquiry 33(4): 754780
Blanchot M (1993) Infinite Conversation, trans. Hanson S. Minnea-
polis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Chen MY (2012) Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and
Queer Effect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Comay R (1990) Gifts without presents: Economies of experience
in Bataille and Heidegger. Yale French Studies 78: 6689.
DAndrea MA, et al. (2013) Health consequences among subjects
involved in Gulf Oil spill clean-up activities. American Journal of
Medicine 126(11): 966974.
Deleuze G (2001) Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Boyman
A. New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze G and Guattari F (1980) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press.
Gabrys J (2013) Plastic and the work of the biodegradable. In:
Gabrys J, Hawkins G and Michael M (eds) Accumulation: The
Material Politics of Plastic. London: Routledge, 208227.
Grosz E (2001) Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and
Real Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hill L (2012) Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A
Change of Epoch. London: Continuum.
Kosek J (2010) Ecologies of empire: On the new uses of the honey-
bee. Cultural Anthropology 25(4): 650678.
LeMenager S (2014) Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American
Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Meillassoux Q (2008) Time without becoming. Paper delivered at
Middlesex University, 8 May.
Nancy JL (2012a) An experience at heart. Trans. Fragile Keys
(http://fragilekeys.com) unpaginated.
Nancy JL (2012b) LEquivalence des catastrophes (apre`s Fukush-
ima). Paris: Galilee.
Yusoff 27

Povinelli EA (2001) Radical worlds: The anthropology of incom-

mensurability and inconceivability. Annual Review of Anthropol-
ogy 30: 319334.
Povinelli EA (2011) Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging
and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Povinelli EA (2012a) The will to be otherwise/The effort of endur-
ance. South Atlantic Quarterly 111(3): 454475.
Povinelli EA (2012b) A conversation with Elizabeth A. Povinelli.
Trans-Scripts 2: 7690.
Pritchard H (2014) Bio-computational touch Troubling at trans
practices. In: Proceedings of Trans What? Trans Art Conference
2013. Available at: http://www.transart.org/trans-what/files/2014/
01/pritchard_making_casper.pdf (accessed June 2017).
Shaw S (2010) Swimming through the spill . . . New York Times, 29
May. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/opin
ion/30shaw.html
Shaw S (2013) Reckless endangerment: The Gulf Oil spill revisited
Susan Shaw at TEDxMidAtlantic. Available at: http://www.youtu
be.com/watch?v72sCg-X0zE4.
Yusoff K (2011) The valuation of nature: The Natural Choice White
Paper. Radical Philosophy 170: 27.
Yusoff K (2013) Insensible worlds: Postrelational ethics, indetermi-
nacy and the (k)nots of relating. Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 31(2): 208226.

Kathryn Yusoff is a Reader in Human Geography in the School of Geo-

graphy, Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include
critical theory and environmental change, feminist geophilosophy, political
aesthetics, and extraction. Her current research is focused on Geosocial
Formations and the Anthropocene (with Nigel Clark in Theory, Culture &
Society 34), and she is writing a book on Geologic Life, which examines
how geologic forces subtend social relations.
This article is part of the Body & Society special issue on Indeterminate
Bodies, edited by Claire Waterton & Kathryn Yusoff.