– Pujita Guha and Abhijan Toto for the Forest Curriculum
Published in ‘Institution As Praxis’, Carolina Rito and Bill Balaskas (eds), Sternberg Press 2020

As we began to write this text, student protesters in Hong Kong are clashing with police in what  many see as a desperate last stand. They are being brutalised and beaten; their bloodied faces stomped  on by heavy jackboots and riot gear.1 Closer to home, students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University,  New Delhi have been attempting to defend their university against increasingly vicious attacks from  the current, fascist government, an ever spiralling concoction of funding cuts and cuts to student  numbers, academic and political censorship, and privatisation and fee hikes, all of which alludes to a  public university system in jeopardy.2 Universities have increasingly become a battleground the  world over—a frontier of our increasingly privatised present. And yet, as we stand alongside our  colleagues, shoulder to shoulder, we also attempt to think through the university as a form, its architecture and its façades, its inheritances and its legacies.  

In many places across the global south, the university is a colonial inheritance—for Hong Kong and  for India they are an inheritance of the British imperial imagination—and, in fact, it could be argued  that the colonies gave form to the university in the imperial country too.3 The university bears the  legacy of an Enlightenment structuring of knowledge: a categorising, cataloguing restrictive impetus,  a disciplining of thought.4It has always been a space that excludes those for whom long ages were  spent outside of the definition of the human (women, people of colour, and other non-humans). The  gradual, grudging admission of us became a process of producing supplements to a rigid body, and our  lives—in inhabiting this body—unfolded and negotiated varying degrees of precarity.5 

The university remains part of an economy of extraction and accumulation of knowledge. It extracts  value from those and that which it studies and delegates the circulation of knowledge to regimes  governed by an exclusive logic of expertise. This logic always attempts to disentangle and to separate  the figure from the ground. With his feet firmly on the ground, the university-educated, enlightened  man is a well-grounded individual—his expertise rooted in years of fieldwork.6In a world of constant  flux and precarity, this separation between figure and ground indicates a self-contained stability, an unrecognition of all the forces that enfold us and with which we could never be intimate. How then  might we ground knowledge, or indeed grind it down for dispersal? How might we imagine the production of knowledge and its circulation as entangled processes? What protocols are we to develop  that would allow us to encode entangled forms of responsibility into the processes of knowledge  production? To reorient ourselves towards another way of instituting the university otherwise  requires us to imagine another mode of producing such protocols, one that does not attempt to extend  a logic of governmentality, but rather, is able to introduce contingency into this process. Imagining  the university otherwise is not, therefore, about universal protocols, but rather about working from  events and situations of encounter, to produce enfoldings resonating in multiple directions. 

What then is it to move beyond discipline? The supplementary logic of the pluri- or the  interdisciplinary continues to presuppose an already existing model of disciplining that might be  gently (or sometimes perhaps not so gently) reformed to move towards some immanent form that  allows the body to survive, to absorb the infections from within.7 To this, rather, we propose  ―indisciplinarity‖ as method. Indisciplinarity is a term we borrow from artist, activist, and media  theorist Jessika Khazrik.8 To move indisciplinarily is to move away from praxis; it is to shift towards  the emergent. To move indisciplinarily is to move with the rhythms of the ―undercommons‖; to not  replicate their form into one that becomes governable, but rather to create situations of enactment and  also of potentiality.9It is here that we turn to forms of artistic research as a model for indisciplinary  thought—to view these forms as not merely devices for the production of artworks, but rather as  possible templates for collective speculation. It allows us to imagine expertise otherwise—no longer  bound by inherited knowledges—and to recognise expertise in multiple registers, and in different  forms—in care work, in indigenous knowledge, and embodied knowledge, amongst others.  Indisciplinarity is an unruly ―skidding‖—it calls upon a method and a frame and simultaneously  demands its combustion and dispersal. And yet this combustion is not consumption, nor a self absorbing decrepitude. It is the event of emergence; the moment we potentiate our forces and our  intensities are led astray. It is this skidding that we take seriously, a form of praxis that allows us to  spatialise knowledge production and yet be askew in relation to disciplines, to knowledge, and to  epistemes.  

It is in this spirit of askewness, that we turn to Zomia: an aberrant landscape that enacts a spatial  embodiment of indisciplinarity. Zomia is a zone that coincides with the forested regions that lie in  the altitudes above 300 metres, including northeastern India, the Chittagong Hill Tracts of  Bangladesh, the borders between Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and perhaps— according to our willingness—stretches into the tropical jungles of the Malay peninsula and the  Cordillera Central mountain range of the Philippines.10 When colonial cartographers wanted to map  Guizhou in southwest China, they especially noted how ―vexingly numerous and ill-disciplined‖ the  landscape was.11 They furthered that the landscape would require a ―pile of documentation,‖ miles of description that could attest to the milieu’s vitality, its teeming forth with information and life.12 However, extending beyond a singular emphasis on its structural vexatiousness, the Zomian forests  augur a spatial indisciplinarity, which is neither modern transnational conduct—bound to the  arbitration of the colonial cartographer—nor a Cold War regional/area studies approximation. This indisciplinarity weaves together the margins of all the nation states it traverses, encompassing a  shared history of civilisational refusal.  

Zomia is a ―zone of refuge,‖ a site that inheres the precarious and yet anarchist existences of those  who flee the conscriptive regimes of the adjoining lowland valleys and the rice producing states  whose plantations attest to disciplinarian regimes in and of themselves.13 Bracketed between a history  of (counter)insurgency and the animism that guides the forest tribes, the Zomia forest speaks to an  indisciplined history—limpid bodies, aswangs, and hidden tree trunks that perform an opaqueness,  unready to surrender to an ―enlightened‖ search for truth.14 Attuning to the vexatiousness of the  forest is not a mere reconfiguration of the senses to a differential phasing of every hoot, rumble, or  vein that glides through the forest. We understand the forest as a conceptual space that evokes a  perceptual challenge—demanding of curious onlookers a (re)attunement, a perceptual rewiring to  acclimatise to the dense, labyrinthine maze. A (re)attunement to the forest opens us up to the  otherwise imperceptible rhythms of nature, which remain hidden and almost simmering in the realm  of the subliminal, if not the realm of the forgotten. Attunement exceeds its status as mere  technological mediation of our phenomenological selves, opening us up to a world hitherto unknown and moving towards radical interconnectedness that more fully acknowledges the role of materials  and the different life forms that make up a shared cosmological vulgate. Attunement performs an  ethical inclusion of the other: it intends to open out, reach out, and listen to space that is increasingly  under duress. Attunement, thus, is a necessary act with which we resonate with the forest and bodily  (re)orient ourselves towards an otherness, aligning with an other. Attunement is a recalibration  towards a history that leaves its fading mark amongst the trees, miscegenates with the soil, and yet  attests to its fossil-like timelessness.15 As a site that inhabits the multiple scales of history and cosmological thought, Zomia is the terrain  from which to queer the Anthropocene—a geological proposal that posits the ―human‖ as a singular  species inheriting a damaged planet.16 It is to challenge this pervasive ―planetarity‖ of the discourse and the insistence on species and planetary singularity that we turn to Zomian cosmologies as ways  to reformulate our ecological subjectivities.17 

What, then, is cosmology? It is deixis; a simple grammatical function by manner of which we orient  ourselves to anything that is not us—a ―this,‖ a ―that,‖ a ―there,‖ a ―here,‖ and a ―who,‖ ―when,‖ ―what,‖ ―how,‖ or even a ―why.‖18 And yet, to keep this indisciplinarity alive, a Zomian deixis is not  a grounding in truth or a search for lithic permanence. It is much like the forests’ ever-entangling  vines, webs, and lichens—a method of constantly resituating ourselves, constantly combusting and  redeveloping, revisiting and retuning our orientation to that which is not us and yet with which we  are familiar or intimate. A Zomian cosmology is about relationality but, true to an indisciplined  method, it is not a frictionless transition between actants, scales, and propositions. Just as fractals that  awkwardly sit together make for an un-extractable crystal, an indisciplined cosmology fidgets and  shifts, discomfited by the power hierarchies that find their way into the forest. A Zomian cosmology, then, is not a reduction to a materialist proposition regarding the planet, or even its astronomical  extension. It is how we formatively relate to life and matter, the indisciplined relationships between  science and myth, history and geology, and humans and non-humans—the plenum for all interspecies  communication in this world.  

If cosmology is about communication, on what basis of exchange is this communication premised?  And—far more fundamental even—how do we value exchange or value itself? To return to our  extractivist obsessions, how could these exchanges be non-alienating, their figures and tokens  enfolded in a Zomian cosmological indisciplinarity? To reconfigure communication in a Zomian  cosmological ethos would be to reimagine value as an ―event in itself,‖ a collective expression that  moves, shifts, and mutates in time.19 To move across worlds is to move with varying rates of  exchange. How, then, does our currency (or currentness) transform in the course of these jumps?  How do we render interoperability across worlds, as shamans do? How do we move with  communities and with stakeholders in knowledge? And how do we learn to assert that  commensurability cannot be taken for granted? Rather, every act of commensuration must be viewed  as an event, produced through the active assent and consent of each of the parties involved. Thusly, situations of co-implication or of mutual stakeholding might be produced. These relationalities are  not imagined as a network—in a linear relation—but as intersecting terrains. To move across these  terrains—and in learning from the denizens of Zomia—requires us to shape-shift, perhaps even  become monstrous. And perhaps this askew expression could be the indisciplined  disjuncture/conjuncture of currencies—a spatialisation of knowledge forms where each currency carries ―the senses and flavours of the community issuing and backing them‖ into the cosmos.20 Perhaps this cosmological currency would detail the textures of the ―local expressive forces‖ and  accrue a ―pile of documentation‖ akin to the Zomian landscape.21 These cosmological revaluations would help us catalyse new calibrations between the quantitative  and the qualitative, between how much we endow currency with—i.e., how much we value currency  itself, and what expectancies and affordances it had to offer—and how much we endow currency with—i.e., the rates of valuation and exchange it enables in everyday practice. Cosmological  revisions, therefore, entail the very redistribution and revisions of the value of the constituents that  are deemed valuable for extraction and exchange. A Zomian cosmology endows currency with life— with denotation and difference—inasmuch as it no longer sees nature as the standing reserve of pure  extraction, ready and malleable to the service of the modern world. A Zomian cosmology sees nature  as vitally powerful, in terms of kinship and non-alienating relationships, which would no longer  appropriate questions of vitality to neoliberal needs.  

A revision of what cosmological value is—of what fundamentally constitutes nature and culture— could in turn produce the necessary indisciplinarity in the university, undermining the schism  between the humanities and the sciences, which are embodiments both of the qualitative and the  quantitative, and the subjective and the objective respectively. And these schisms have been a  violence fundamental to the birth of the modern university itself. At such a time in the history of the  university, when epistemes of science and technology accrue public validation, government funding  (often tied to military and security systems); we believe that the value not just of the humanities  needs to be restored, but also the value of a non-humanist humanity itself—a Zomian cosmology  instituted to the university itself. What might be of value is not the exploitative demands on labour  that the university institutionalises, but life itself. As we finish writing this text, armed police and  paramilitaries, in an attempt to control and throttle anti-state protests, are storming Muslim-majority  university campuses in New Delhi and Aligarh—the Jamia Millia Islamia (national Islamic  university) and Aligarh Muslim University respectively—attacking their students, illegally detaining and assaulting them in prison, and firing bullets as well as teargassing a library, mosque, and  hospital.22 Some people who had been praying or studying in the library have lost their eyesight or limbs and a few remain missing, feared dead. What is lost in this situation is the fundamental belief  that the state and the university could guarantee rights to ethnic or religious minorities, endow value  or life to what it—the state, that is—considers non- or unworthy of life or living itself? At the same  time, we raise our voices in solidarity with similar students who suffer and protests in Chile,  Colombia, and other places. At times like this we must affirm our commitment to the urgent as much  as the necessary and begin our work from the points of entanglement between the two. It is precisely  from these points of entanglement that we will be able to work towards forms of ―emergent  instituting.‖ To reiterate: this means to work from events and situations of encounter in order to  produce enfoldings resonating in multiple directions, a topology of inflections, a Zomian landscape.  

1 Lily Kuo and Micheal Safi, ―Hong Kong: Police Say Surrender is Only Option for Protestors,‖ Guardian,  November 18, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/18/hong-kong-protests-up-to-800-trapped-as police-lay-siege-to-university.  

2Soumyabrata Choudhury and Heba Ahmed, ―Why Is JNU Vital to Public Education and Discourse in India? A  Student and a Professor Argue for the Institution,‖ Firstpost.com, November 21, 2019, 

https://www.firstpost.com/india/why-is-jnu-vital-to-public-education-and-discourse-in-india-a-student-and-a professor-argue-for-the-institution-7682251.html. 

3 Alastair Pennycook, English and the Discourses of Colonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).  4 Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Vintage Books, 2010 (1969)).  5Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005).  

6 Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media (Durham and New York: Duke University Press, forthcoming). 

7 Here, we mean both the ―rigid body,‖ but also the gendered and racialised hegemonic body, upon whose position  the current form of the university has been predicated.  

8Personal conversation with Jessika Khazrik, September 2019. 

9Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor  Compositions, 2013). 

10 James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2009).  

11 Ibid., 1. 

12 Ibid.  

13 Ibid., 1–40. 

14 Aswang is an umbrella term for shape-shifting monsters in Filipino cultures.  

15 While we understand the word ―miscegenation‖ and its history, as people of color we understand the need to  miscegenate in a world that wants to keep things pure. We accept racial difference—as a cultural and social  production—as a fact: there is no getting away from it. Miscegenation, then, is an act that is to be redeemed, not  condemned. We are seeking to validate such miscegenation in a world that conscribes, borders, and polices. We also  support the use of the word in the context of Adivasi (indigenous) and Dalit (lower caste) movements in India,  where upper caste existence is always considered in terms of ―purity.‖ The lower castes—who are also called  ―untouchables‖—have been pushed aside or made to remain aloof within the caste order, in scriptures and in  practice, while the upper castes lead a life of extractivist exploitation and existential ―purity.‖ Miscegenation, thus, can be seen as a radical act of existing, a belief in entanglement in a world obsessed with so-called purity. 16 Paul J. Crutzen, ―Geology of Mankind,‖ Nature 415 no. 23 (January 3, 2002): 23, 

https://doi.org/10.1038/415023a. 

17 Our notion of ―planetarity‖ derives meaning from legacies extending from colonial and, later, Cold War  expansionist, technological/mediated imaginaries, which sought to map the planet as a whole, thus birthing cultural  and popular notions of the planet as a singular geophysical and, by extension, cultural, and philosophical entity. It  glosses over lived and historical difference while accounting for connectivity through satellite and other  communication forms. For more, see: Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ―Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth,‖ Public Culture 26, no. 2 (April 2014): 257–280. 

18 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ―Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in  Amerindian Ontologies,‖ Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 463–468.  

19 Erik Bordeleau, ―Zero Degree Project for Cooling Off Capital – Part 2: Elements for a Cosmo-Financial  Proposal,‖ Medium.com, July 15, 2018, https://medium.com/economic-spacing/zero-degree-project-for-cooling-off capital-part-2-elements-for-a-cosmo-financial-proposal-8370dccc737d.

20 Ibid. 

21 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 1.  

22 The Citizen Bureau, ―What Happened in AMU During the Night of December 15,‖ TheCitizen.in, December 17,  2019, https://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/en/NewsDetail/index/9/18025/What-Happened-in-AMU-During-the Night-of-December-15.

This text is available in:

Institution as Praxis, Carolina Rito and Bill Balaskas (eds.), Sternberg Press (2020)

How are curatorial and artistic practices advancing new research methods? Institution as Praxis—New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research explores new curatorial and artistic practices that contribute to the expansion of institutional, practice-based, and collaborative research methods. This publication offers an overview of how creative practices are modifying the ways we think about both knowledge production and research in the cultural sector and in academia. This exploration enquires the invention of manifold research methodologies and contributes to think of strategies to de-universalize and de-neutralize the rigid epistemic schemata of inherited disciplines. Designed as a platform of aesthetic and intellectual exchange, the speculative interface of cultural practices has radically changed the way we consider how research qualities in curatorial and artistic practices have developed. Institution as Praxis aims to identify and advocate for a multiplicity of practices taking place across the cultural sector that do not only engage with the quest to deliver cultural activities (e.g. exhibitions, events), but generate new modes of knowledge production and research in the field of visual culture, art, and the curatorial.
This publication is part of a broader research strand initiated by Carolina Rito at Nottingham Contemporary. Institution as Praxis examines new modes of knowledge production and research in the field of visual culture, art, and the curatorial.


Contributions by: Bill Balaskas, Michael Birchall, Mélanie Bouteloup, Carolina Cerón, Anthony Downey, Pujita Guha and Abhijan Toto for the Forest Curriculum, Joasia Krysa, Vali Mahlouji, Je Yun Moon, Andrea Phillips, Emily Pringle, Carolina Rito, ruangrupa (farid rakun and Leonhard Bartolomeus), Nora Sternfeld, Sian Vaughan