Inhuman Resources

On the forms of sabotage, insubordination, and invisible activity that evade the terrain of politics.

What gets stranded outside the borders of the political? Inhuman Resources develops an account of sabotage, insubordination, and the invisible activities that undermine the ideas of accountability and identification on which representative politics rely.

Drawing from histories of labor, disability, infrastructure, writing, and war, Williams offers  genealogies of the tropes of paralysis and sabotage, which leave behind notions of public citizenship to reveal an “inhuman” agency that hinges on the unexpected friction between humans, materials, machinery, and other non-human life. Yet to detect this and move away from fantasies of clarity and visibility, we need to take cues from political and artistic practices that evade such legibility, and are attuned to what happens off-screen and without recognition.

Spanning an ambitious range of subjects—from prison architecture to digital animation, legal history to self-help books, and electrical blackouts to silkworms saturated with toxic dye—Inhuman Resources gathers materials for thinking differently about insurgent activity. This is a theory that does not privilege exodus, pride, or autonomy but instead takes shape inside the very processes, architectures, appearances, and systems it seeks to ruin.

Evan Calder Williams is Associate Professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. He is the author of the books Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, Roman Letters, and Shard Cinema. He is the translator, with David Fernbach, of a new edition of Mario Mieli’s Towards a Gay Communism, and his essays have appeared in publications such as Film Quarterly, Frieze, Estetica, The Italianist, World Picture, Cultural Politics, and The Journal of American Studies. He was part of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine and is a contributing editor to e-flux journal.