31
environments in new ways, through active political means, rather than subconscious or habitual
practices. This is the “making the links political” that Stengers discusses, but outside of a
parliamentary setting. These links encompass all the relations that constitute an environment, all
the immanent connections among practices that congeal into something resembling a whole.
Cosmopolitical practices predominantly offer challenges to constituted environments,
calling into question their current arrangement, but also affecting and possibly altering these
environments through practices. As part of the environments they constitute through their
effects, cosmopolitical practices are plugged into all the other relations that go into an
environment. Every action is potentially a challenge to other entities and practices caught up in
relations, putting actors into a test of strength with each other. The challenge comes as a
challenge to a particular set of arrangements that sustain an environment as it is. The challenge
need not offer a solution, as Stengers suggested (challenges when solutions are reigning), but
merely threaten and menace the existing status quo. As Jane Bennett suggests in a different
register, the question “may reside most significantly in one’s response to the assemblage in
which one finds onself participating—do I attempt to extricate myself from assemablges whose
trajectory is likely to do harm? Do I enter into the proximity of assemblages whose conglomerate
effectivity tends toward the enactment of nobler ends?”
56
Posing a challenge to the
environments we find ourselves in, and acting in response to those questions, represents
cosmopolitical practices and the possible means of resistance to existing practices.
Nonhumans play the central role in cosmopolitical practices, as it is the relations among
nonhumans and with humans that constitute cosmopolitical practices, that produce the
organization of environments that we are. Questions that ask what type of relation is desired
56
Jane Bennett, “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” Public Culture 17(3):445-65.
464.
Convention