Book review of 'Experimental practice: Technoscience, alterontologies, and more-than-social movements' by Dimitris Papadopoulos

• Main Author: WOODS, Orlando
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/2787; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4044/viewcontent/Experimental_practice_technoscience_alterontologies_and_more_than_social_movements.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Experimental Practice is one of the latest incarnations of Duke University Press’s 36-part ‘Experimental Futures’ book series; a series that intends to question, to provoke, and to provide an innovative theoretical starting point for a radical reimagination of the contemporary world and its unfolding futures. From the outset, then, Experimental Practice is positioned as a challenge to preconceived ideas of social, political and economic structures and justices. Materiality and matter provide the theoretical groundings from which this challenge is launched. Through them, Papadopoulos articulates a new understanding of the interdependencies of the human and nonhuman worlds. Through them, he also develops an understanding of ‘alternative ontologies’; or, as he puts it, ‘alterontologies’, of everyday life. These alterontologies guide his critical exploration of normative techniques of knowledge production, and of everyday socio-political practices. Perhaps as a stylistic rejection of such normativity, Experimental Practice is a self-professed work of ‘social science fiction’ that switches between the poetic and the scholarly in a coherent and evocative way. An example of this can be found in the closing two sentences of the Introduction (p. 10), which state:Something else, something existential is at stake here: alterontological politics is a possible way to survive a world that is disintegrating through human action. Alterontologies may be a way to escape humanity.