Dušan Kažić interviewed by Clémence Seurat

NO ONE
HAS EVER PRODUCED
ANYTHING

ENG
PostScriptUM
Kataložni zapis o publikaciji (CIP) pripravili v Narodni in univerzitetni knjižnici v
Ljubljani
COBISS.SI-ID 104735747
ISBN 978-961-7173-10-9 (PDF)
Dušan Kažić interviewed by Clémence Seurat

NO ONE
HAS EVER
PRODUCED ANYTHING
As part of the Post Growth art-science research project initiated by
Disnovation.org, Clémence Seurat spoke with French researcher Dušan Kažić,
who invites us to imagine agriculture and a world without production, breaking
with the paradigm underpinning modern political ideologies.

Kažić is a plant anthropologist and research associate at Pacte research centre

in Grenoble, France. He recently published Quand les plantes n’en font qu’à
leur tête. Concevoir un monde sans production ni économie (La Découverte,
2022), in which he describes the many types of relationships that farmers
form with the plants they grow. He draws from extensive fieldwork to present
an original study offering a window into little-known agricultural realities.

5
 Anthropology of Plants

CS: During your field research, you interviewed farmers who spoke about
the wide variety of relationships they maintain with their plants, outside
the bounds of utility and production. You describe the different modes
of existence 1 exhibited by plants, which are shown to be intelligent,
communicative, suffering beings, whereas modern science tends to reduce
them to productive beings. How does what you describe lead us to think
differently about agriculture?

DK: When we talk about relationships in our “modern” world, we generally

mean relations between humans, or between humans and animals. We
assume that there are no relationships between humans and plants, which
is why the empirical sciences, sociology and anthropology have been silent
on the matter. No one ever mentions the sociology or anthropology of plants.
I have purposefully taken the title of plant anthropologist to convey the
message that in our world, there are indeed relations between humans and
plants. My work sets aside naturalistic epistemology to describe the animated
relationships between farmers and their plants. The goal is to break with the
paradigm of production – a key concept in economics – in order to conceive
of and imagine agriculture without production or the economy.

Plants are often ontologically reduced to an object of production, that is to

say an inert, stupid object without agency, whose purpose is to “feed through
production”. I aim to free plants from this naturalistic framing by proposing
that we no longer consider them as beings to be produced and consumed, i.e.
to no longer see them solely as edible beings. That enables me to establish
other modes of existence for plants.

I have been able to show that farmers animate plant life in several different
ways. For some, plants are beings of love, beings of companionship, beings

1 A concept taken from the anthropologist Bruno Latour and the philosopher Étienne
6 Souriau.
DISNOVATION.ORG, Life Support System (Ecosystem Services Estimation Experiment, part of the
art-science research project Post Growth, 2018–ongoing). Still from the Louvain-la-Neuve live stream,
25 October 2021 at 3 p.m.

of intelligence, while for others, plants are beings of domination, of labour, of

learning. That enables me to approach agriculture from a radically different
angle, not through the paradigm of production but through the paradigm
of relation with plants as animated beings. That’s why I talk about an
“agricultural turning point” – it’s a major theoretical and political shift.

Today we are witnessing new farming practices in which people are putting
their hands back into the soil and recognising other living beings. Although
they have yet to envision agriculture without production, as that paradigm
is deeply ingrained among Westerners. My argument is this: no farmer has
ever produced anything, whether they grow on 100 hectares or 1 hectare. No
farmer can reduce their daily labour in the field to a relation of production. That
is impossible, because production is an abstract economic concept defined
as the transformation of resources through capital and labour. It’s a concept
that only exists in economic narratives. I defend the thesis that farmers
have never been in a relation of production with plants and animals, but
rather in a relation of co-domestication. In concrete terms, this means that 7
 farmers domesticate plants and animals, and, in turn, that plants and animals
domesticate farmers. This has gone on since the invention of agriculture.

It’s not a matter of good or bad production, or being productivist or not. This
false distinction essentialises the relations of production and leads to the
mistaken belief that humanity cannot live without production. In reality, no
farmer has ever produced anything in the field and no one has ever produced
anything at all. The choice is between producing or living with living beings.
The difference lies in the quality and intensity of the bonds formed with
animals and plants.

Speculative Ethnography

CS: Could you describe your working method and how it offers a serious
approach to practices and stories that defy modern categories?

DK: My working method is speculative ethnography, which achieves several

aims from a theoretical and epistemological standpoint. The key concept is
the story. 2 It’s a very important notion that underscores the fact that the
sciences also tell stories about the world. In a story, the narrator is situated – a
positioning that is the opposite of relativism, which claims to be everywhere
but is actually nowhere. Whereas situating oneself signifies that everything
is not equivalent.

In my work, I tell stories – I craft realities that incorporate my field of

research.3 The aim of speculation, to quote Émilie Hache, is to “keep a door
open to possible futures other than those which are currently presented

2 A concept taken from the US philosopher Donna Haraway, who herself took it from
feminist science-fiction writer Ursula Le Guin.
3 Following on from the speculative thinking of Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Vinciane
8 Despret, Sophie Houdart and Émilie Hache.
Live stream from Louvain-la-Neuve, 14 December 2021 at 3 a.m.

to us as inevitabilities which we must all come to accept.” 4 One very good

illustration of this idea is the concept of production, which is presented as
the only future possible for humanity and that, whatever happens, humans
must produce to eat and the forward march of humanity must continue. So
I endeavour to describe relationships between farmers and plants, while also
speculating, to craft new realities in this world and impart readers with the
feeling that it truly is possible to imagine worlds without production.

That entails seeking to tell interesting stories. This is where writing, style,
narration and framing are fundamental – style counts just as much as
substance. When I’m doing fieldwork, I mainly look for interesting stories
that I can make more interesting through speculative ethnography. During
my thesis, I stayed for a week with Frédéric Chaize, a farmer who lives near
Roanne in central France. He has a two-hectare plot of organic crops. I was
starting to get discouraged because my notebook wasn’t filling up – I really
couldn’t think of anything interesting to jot down. We were constantly

4 Hache, É. (2015). The futures men don't see. In Debaise, D., Stengers, I. (Eds.), Gestes
spéculatifs. Les Presses du réel. 9
 interrupted by the slugs invading his field. They were everywhere: in the
greenhouses, under all the plants. They were eating and destroying everything.
I felt like I was in a horror film. But it was out of the question to kill them, as
an industrial farmer would have done, because Frédéric Chaize believed that
they had the right to live and eat in his field. So we spent hours and hours
picking slugs off the plants. And they would invariably come back. It was
enough to drive you crazy. Then, one morning I saw Frédéric Chaize a few
metres away from me with a slug in his hand. I asked him what he was doing
and he replied that the slug’s trail of slime was soothing his chapped skin.
I immediately grasped the exceptional aspect of this scene, which had the
makings of a powerful story about the caring relationship between Frédéric
Chaize and the slugs. Then he told me that he had discovered the remedy by
observing the plants whose leaves had scarred from the slime deposited by
the slugs that had eaten them. If we build a story and speculate a bit, we can
say the plants taught Frédéric Chaize that the slime could soothe his hands.
We enter a new reality in which the plants are not beings of production but
beings of learning. It’s a story of multi-specific learning.

The Work of Plants

CS: Dries Delanote, a farmer who you met during your research, describes the
same paradigm shift that you propose: “In intensive and industrial organic
farming, the plant is not allowed to work. It’s given more and more and more
food. It’s like with a child – if you feed them without making them work…
well, they end up getting fat. The same goes for plants. They’re not given
the chance to capture energy, do real photosynthesis and put down roots.
Plants aren’t robots! You have to let them work.” Could you expand on this
concept of the “work of plants”?

DK: That excerpt shows the potential to tell completely new stories. From a
methodological standpoint, the first thing to do when you hear unusual stories
10 is to avoid interpreting what is said as representations, metaphors, symbols, or
Live stream from Utrecht, 6 March 2022 at 4 a.m.

speaking styles, and forego labelling such accounts as anthropomorphic. Such

interpretations are precisely what prevents you from creating new realities.
Instead, you have to understand what people say literally. When you take
Dries Delanote’s statement seriously – and he’s not the first or the only one
to say that plants work – that changes everything. Why? Saying that plants
work is an ontological issue. Sociologists, in particular sociologists of work,
are the heirs to the conception of work as an exclusively human prerogative.
And in that view, work is obviously governed by a relation of production. What
happens when farmers say that plants and animals work? They radically
undermine the naturalistic ontology which asserts that only humans work.
By taking their remarks into consideration, I show that we are confronted
with an ontological conflict between farmers and sociologists of work, in
which the latter are not willing to admit that living beings other than humans
can work. Taking this point seriously requires a complete rethinking of the
question of work. It’s a very inventive perspective that is much more radical
and original than criticising the destruction of the job market by capitalism
or neoliberalism. When you put forward that sort of argument, you actually
share the same ontological conception of work as those whom you criticise, 11
 which means that you don’t budge the epistemology an iota, while the farmers
make a gigantic leap.

Through speculative ethnography, I proposed considering plants as “seasonal

workers” to do justice to the work that they carry out in the fields. The idea
was to undermine naturalistic ontology and epistemology in my own way
before imagining a post-production world. The concept aims to outline a new
type of relation with crops. It’s also the reason why I came up with the notion
of “inter-species work”, which merits being fleshed out and expanded, for
example by studying plants’ working conditions from one field to the next.

A World without Production

CS: In an article published in AOC,5 you write that “capitalists ontologically

strip living beings until they are reduced to ‘resources’, which they then
transform into ‘products’ and ‘commodities’”. What perspective do you
propose to counter this idea of resources, which deanimates living beings?
How do we move away from a world structured around production?

DK: That article proposes a break with the past world in which production
forms the basis of the two modern political regimes, capitalism and socialism,
which are only conflicting on the surface. In reality, they share a common
epistemology which holds that we must produce to feed humanity. In that
view, production forms our materiality. But the true materiality of our world
lies in relations between humans and other-than-humans. In writing that
“capitalists do not seize the means of production to create wealth through
private property – the commonly accepted definition of capitalism – rather,
capitalists, aided by private property and the concept of production, reduce
their relationship with the world to create wealth”, I argue the exact opposite
of what Karl Marx thought. In my eyes, critical theory is sadly mistaken in

12 5 Kazic, D. (2020). Le Covid-19, mon allié ambivalent. AOC.

Live stream from Utrecht, 2 April 2022 at 7 p.m.

its analysis of capitalism, in thinking that capitalists produce commodities.

That’s not the case! Capitalists manufacture lots of animated things with
which people engage in different types of relationships. For example, if you
tell my two sons, who are six and eleven, that the tablet they use to watch
cartoons is a product or commodity, they will tell you that you’re nutty.
The economists deanimate all these animated things with which we are
connected by renaming them products or commodities. The same reasoning
holds for the living world: through the concept of production, the economists
deanimate living beings to make them into a resource. They practice a policy
of deanimating the other-than-human world. I propose animating plants to
counter this policy because we cannot engage in a sense-based relationship
with resources or commodities. So that is one solution to the question on
how to move away from production: by animating living beings to maintain
relationships with them and to live with them.

13
 De-economising the World

CS: Post Growth identifies growth as the intersection of current crises –

political, ecological and existential – that are making our world unliveable
and our ways of being in the world untenable. We see the consequences every
day. You go a step further in that critique by pinpointing production, and
economics more broadly, as the problem preventing us from conceptualising
our coexistence with living beings. The “economic disciplines”, as Bruno Latour
chose to rechristen the economic “sciences”, present a considerable paradox:
they overlooked the materiality of the world in their reasoning yet consider
nature as stock. How do we break free from this economic paradigm?

DK: You talk about post-growth, and I talk about post-production, a term
I’m fond of. We live in an era of seeking ways of living with plants instead
of producing to live. The term “post-production” refers to a new type of
materialism that does not forget about other living beings, or rather, it
attempts to form a connection with them by showing the issues that arise
when we live with them.

The first thing to do, which is so simple yet so difficult, is to stop believing
what the economists say. It doesn’t matter whether they’re neoliberal or
Marxist, right-wing or left-wing – they all agree on the fact that we need
to produce to feed humanity. Become an economic agnostic is crucial to
imaging worlds without production, connected with other living beings. I
would say here that growth is not the problem because it’s only a unit of
measurement that cannot exist without the concept of production. I think
the true problem is that the world is viewed through the lens of production;
as our supposed materiality, it takes precedence over our relations with
living beings and severs us from the other-than-human world. Economics
convinces us that we cannot live without production. So we produce and will
continue producing until there is nothing left to produce. And in the end,
we will understand that we should have lived with living beings. I obviously
14 hope I’m mistaken. We’re in the midst of a tragedy, caught in an infernal
Live stream from Linz, 10 December 2021 at 10 a.m.

alternative between production and protecting the environment, instead

of living with it.

Production is a concept that emerged in the 18th century with the physiocrats,
who were called economists. They posited that the goal of agriculture was
to produce for the wealth of nations, and that the other mercantile and
industrial sectors were sterile. Before their time, farmers had never heard the
word “production” and lived with living beings, plants, the land and their daily
problems. What did the liberals and Marxists do next? Instead of critiquing
the concept of production, they expanded it across society on the grounds
that commerce and industry were also productive sectors. That is why we
now say that agriculture produces, industry produces, scientists produce,
humans produce, plants produce – everyone produces! By an irony of history,
the liberals weren’t the ones who naturalised the concept of production; it was
Karl Marx with historical materialism, which analyses the socially determined
modes of production even though no one has ever produced anything. He
posited, like the physiocrats, that all humans produce to satisfy their dietary
needs, even though humans, like other species, somehow manage to live 15
 with the other-than-human world. Karl Marx has left us ungrounded. When I
see all the people on the left who hold him up as a crucial author for thinking
about the future of the world, I laugh and I cry at the same time, because
for me he is the person most responsible for our failure to move forward
and imagine new worlds. Karl Marx tricked the entire left, because all that
it can hope for now is to destroy capitalism one day, to seize the means of
production and usher in socialism. The left is caught in its own trap, stuck in
a critical perspective rather than an imaginative one for changing the world.
And it believes, like the right, that the economy and production are what
sustain us, and not other-than-humans. It’s truly a tragedy.

The World After

CS: The global shutdown caused by the Covid-19 crisis appears to illustrate your
point: production was stopped for months, at a standstill, but life soldiered
on. Yet the economy continues to dominate the discourse and government
actions during the current health crisis, with life and health balanced against
the economy and growth. The state has intervened as a super-manager-
administrator to save the economy but not the workers; life and society even
less so. It has assumed the role of minion6 to the capitalist economic machine.
Do you see paths forward that could make this period the start of something
new, rather than an anomaly, for example through the post-production that
you advocate?

DK: The economy continues to dominate the discourse of our political leaders
because they believe we cannot live without it. Yet there is no reason to believe
so – that would be like saying that we cannot live without anthropology or
philosophy. What’s happening today is that we constantly confuse Economics,
the discipline invented in the 18th century – which I write with an upper-case
E – with the sphere of the economy – which I write with a lower-case e –

6 Pignarre, P. and Stengers, I. (2011). Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (Andrew Goffey,
16 Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan.
Live stream from Linz, 10 December 2021 at 11 a.m.

meaning this fictional, autonomous space that is supposed to be everywhere

and nowhere simultaneously alongside the political and scientific spheres.
Neoliberal and progressive economics on the political left and right all agree
on its existence, and cannot imagine – even in their dreams! – a world without
the economy. But there is no reason to believe in this purely fictional sphere.

I have a little mental exercise for you: when someone starts talking to
you about economics as a fundamental activity, replace “economics” with
“anthropology”. That reveals how nonsensical the argument is. Unfortunately,
we have been “economised” for over two centuries; we have been made to
believe that the economy takes precedence over all the rest. To move away
from economics, we really have no choice but to redescribe the world anew, in
connection with the other-than-human world, by no longer believing economic
narratives. In reality, nothing in the world is economic.

I sincerely believe that the social sciences have a fundamental role to play in
getting us out of this. The problem is that, as Isabelle Stengers reminds us,
the social sciences are disconnected from invention and relate to the world in 17
 a way that is more critical than explicative or experimental. The vast majority
of social science does not relate to the world creatively, preventing it from
imagining the world of the future. I contend that it is better to speculate and
animate than to criticise capitalism and productivism. Criticism reinforces the
dominant realities. If you criticise capitalism, you reinforce its existence. If you
criticise productivism, you believe that the relation of production constitutes
our materiality. To move away from economics, which should instead create
new realities that tell stories. I would even say that we need to enter into a
reality struggle. There is no point in criticising production if we do not follow
that up with new realities that demonstrate we can do without it. If the social
sciences shifted toward an inventive, imaginative outlook, and miraculously
became agnostic in terms of economics, then yes, I think there’s hope.

18
pp. 19-21 : Harvesting a square metre of barley, performance, Ars Electronica Center, Linz (AT), 2021 19
20
21
Dušan Kažić interviewed by Clémence Seurat
NO ONE HAS EVER PRODUCED ANYTHING

PostScriptUM #42
Series edited by Janez Fakin Janša
Electronic edition

Publisher: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana

www.aksioma.org | aksioma@aksioma.org

Represented by: Marcela Okretič

Translation: Ethan Footlik

Proofreading: Baruch Gottlieb
Design: Luka Umek
Layout: Sonja Grdina

All images: DISNOVATION.ORG, Life Support System (Ecosystem Services Estimation

Experiment, part of the art-science research project Post Growth, 2018–ongoing) | http://
lss.earth

pp. 19-21
Photo: Ars Electronica / Martin Hieslmair

(c) Aksioma | All text and image rights reserved by the authors | Ljubljana 2022

Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and

the Municipality of Ljubljana

Published on the occasion of the exhibition:

DISNOVATION.ORG
Life Support System
aksioma.org/life.support.system

Aksioma | Project Space

Komenskega 18, Ljubljana, Slovenija
20 April–20 May 2022

Part of Tactics & Practice #12: New Extractivism

aksioma.org/new.extractivism
 Felix Stalder

ESCAPE VELOCITY.
COMPUTING AND THE
GREAT ACCELERATION

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