Inhuman Resources

Politics tends to count only what can be seen, named and held to account. Evan Calder Williams asks what falls outside that frame: the sabotage, insubordination and quiet, unrecorded activity that representative politics has no way to register. Inhuman Resources builds its argument through genealogies of paralysis and sabotage, drawing on histories of labor, disability, infrastructure, writing and war. Set aside the idea of the public citizen, Williams argues, and a different kind of agency appears. It is an "inhuman" one, driven by unexpected friction between people, materials, machines and other forms of nonhuman life. Spotting it means giving up the fantasy that everything important is clear and visible, and learning instead from political and artistic practices that stay illegible and pay attention to what happens off-screen, without recognition. The book's examples range widely: prison architecture, digital animation, legal history, self-help books, electrical blackouts, and silkworms soaked in toxic dye. Out of this material Williams assembles a way of thinking about insurgent activity that does not rest on exodus, pride or autonomy. It is a theory that takes shape within the processes, buildings, appearances and systems it aims to wreck.