events
reading groups
contact
As disciplines, philosophy and critical theory are connecting sources for theoretical reflection that foster interdisciplinarity across fields, as their reference ties together contributions to wider intellectual histories. The CHASE Early Career Network for Philosophy and Critical Theory (phi-net) is a space to represent this collective exchange with a view to adapt and incorporate perspectives from all contributors to accurately represent the interdisciplinary scholarship that arises from engagement with these disciplines in all fields across the arts and humanities.
phi-net’s programme provides an opportunity for training and development for all researchers seeking to adopt topics and methods in philosophy and critical theory into their research, including researcher-led workshops, film screenings, and an annual postgraduate conference. Our programme is organised in collaboration with the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought (CPCT) at Goldsmiths, and the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI). We are supported by the CHASE doctoral training partnership.
phi-net is co-coordinated by Anna Titov (University of East Anglia, Philosophy), Grace Marshall (Birkbeck, History) and Jack Morson (Goldsmiths, Literary and Critical Theory).
Provocation for 2026-7: Against Frictionlessness
phi-net’s programme for AY 2026/27 considers friction and frictionlessness through three lenses: ecology, capital, and poetics. Taking up objects, super-objects, flesh, parasites, diamonds, shipping containers, seams, data, rhetoric, ground, and the other, we ask: how can we grasp friction as an affective, aesthetic, or ontological category? And how has its classification evolved up to our historical-critical present? How does philosophy and critical theory account for desires for and aversions to friction? How does friction(lessness) figure in our political ideals and alternatives, in our hopes and fears?
What we reach, among other things, is friction as method, an encounter with resistance and objection that is productive at its conception. As friction finds itself as the immanent condition for energetic production in the sciences, so it is the home of concepts.
I
In a discussion on the systems theory notion of top-down operations of agents atop one another, i.e. the agents that are humans acting down onto all others, Levi Bryant concludes in Democracy of Objects that “the world does not exist”. The concept ‘world’ for Bryant is a false attempt at conceptualising a “totality”, or a oneness and unity in which relationality abides by the intrinsically hierarchical structure of the human at the top, always perceiving the other in a non-reciprocal fashion. The concept ‘world’ is a “super-object”, and we ought to shed the “harmonious unity” that this concept implies for its necessitating the primacy of some over others. A more disparate view, from a metaphysics of objects first, we do not come to a separation of mediator from world. We are at odds with them as they are with us, a relation based on friction that closer defines Being and that within a world.
Elsewhere Merleau-Ponty offers an ontology of flesh, la chair, as exactly the unifying relational concept of world that perhaps Bryant wished to warn us about for its collapsing of distinction and therefore opposition in relationality. Merleau-Ponty’s ontological unity of Being is grounded in a corporeal relation, as it is “…the body belongs to the order of the things as the world is universal flesh.” The body passes through the self and world in a flesh relation, collapsing dualisms, opening a path of least resistance in relating to the other, which ultimately excises the possibility for friction. Flesh is smooth, relations slip right through (off) it.
Flesh appears to be directly upholding Bryant’s super-object. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes that “the flesh is an ultimate notion”, it is “not the union or the compound of two substances, but thinkable by itself”, an element of Being that hearkens to a unity. Yet the unit is a contentious notion. Michel Serres writes in Genesis that “for us [things] seem to enjoy a bit of the status of Being only when they are subsumed beneath a unity”, concluding that “the irreducibly individual recedes like the horizon” if we are to allow Being to unfold before us as it is in its immanent possibility for relationality over a static fixedness. The individual is as the many are as the whole is not. The world does not exist.
Is the world not a world of nature? Are we to shed the concept ‘nature’ alongside the world? Science attempts to affirm the world and nature’s existence through reduction, as Bruno Latour writes in The Pasteurisation of France, concluding that “nothing can be reduced to anything else” if we are to affirm Being over observation. Observation in science is already on shaky ground as is evident in the split between quantum mechanics and classical physics. As Alfred North Whitehead asserts, the web of reality is mirrored in the dynamic relationality of the quantum world. The particle is constantly encountering others, relating to them, “rubbing against” them, and in this friction is its Being.
Reducibility is a phenomenological concern, as reduction is a phenomenological method in itself, the cobbling together of relations between the perceiving subject and its world after the epoché, the suspension of one’s natural attitude, suspension therefore of the world and its nature among other things. To suspend is to ‘frictionalise’ perception, to pluck out the subject and assess its lived-in mediation of the world for ways in which it can be superseded. Reduction becomes irreduction, the fixed unit becomes dynamic multiplicity. Scientific reduction therefore cannot account for ecological relation. The senses in perception signify the grounding of the subject in its embodiment, with the body’s solidity is its physical assertion ‘up against’ others.
As the worldly capacity for friction becomes smoothed out, so do the concepts of ‘world’, ‘nature’ and ‘object’ in themselves. Objects resist (obicere), but we find ourselves encountering resistance (objection) less frequently in the late Capitalist move towards virtuality. Resistance can arise through a parasitic disruption, as posited by Michel Serres in The Parasite, who on the order of things writes that “if some equilibrium exists or ever existed somewhere, somehow, the introduction of a parasite in the system immediately provokes a difference, a disequilibrium.” What is proposed is parasitic friction as ecological method, an encounter with resistance and objection that is productive at its conception. Nature is not “over there”, as Timothy Morton writes in Ecology Without Nature. Ecology is the manifold possibility of things affecting other things, rubbing against each other to spark relationality (and frictionality).
As friction finds itself as the immanent condition for energetic production in the sciences, so it is the home of concepts. As Serres asserts, “the difference is part of the thing itself, and perhaps it even produces the thing”, making reference to Derrida on difference at the origin of meaning in différance. It is in productive friction that our relation to nature is disclosed.
II
In 1667, a forgotten chemist called William Simpson weighed in on public-sphere debate about diamonds. Why was it, he asked in his treatise on fermentation, that some diamonds 'do by a gentle frication shew their lustre in the dark', and others 'are not onely luminous, but also electrical of a needle after frication'? The alchemical mysteries of the diamond informed a broader interest in friction, noteworthy for its role in the processes of transmutation – like magnetising, illuminating, enkindling – that occupied natural philosophers. Friction smoothed and oiled these processes in obscure ways.
Or did it obstruct and drag? While Simpson lustred diamonds, the new science of hydraulics sublimated another kind of 'friction'. The idea that the blood circulated continuously around the body in a closed system became a model for circulatory models of the economy, proposed by eighteenth-century French physiocrats and, later, nineteenth-century economic scientists. Trade 'like blood should circularly flow', John Donne argued in his case for free trade (1667): flow emerged as an unassailable metaphor for vitality and growth, key to the analogous biological and economic systems governed by political economy.
For Marx, what was distinctive about capital was that it derived value from constant motion, moving between money and commodity. David Harvey draws on the hydrological cycle, with its phases of condensation, crystalisation, and precipitation, to develop a 'flow model' for visualising this idea of 'value in motion'. Capital, therefore, lives by eliminating friction: it must 'strive to dear down every spatial barrier to exchange', expanding its spiral by the 'annihilation of space by time'. Marx's 'annihilation' is the figure of flow, but it resounds with the figure of friction. Harvey describes the 'dream' of capital, 'to operate in a frictionless spatial world'.
The shipping container has emerged as the image of this frictionless dream. Alan Sekula's Fish Story charted the elision of the sea-obstacle through photos of the spaces of the global fishing trade. In one image, the corrugated rectangles of shipping containers stack on top of one another, the 'mundane and omni-mobile boxes' stretching out into the ocean horizon. With the ship-deck below them invisible, they are dislocated to abstraction, textureless units slicing through years of heavy ocean. Mark Fisher and Justin Barton returned to the image of the shipping container in their 2015 audio essay, 'On Vanishing Land'.
The ocean horizon is broken by a huge rectangle... the container ship becomes perceptible as part of what is beyond the horizon, what is out there has got away with something, what is out there is capital, the latest form of capitulation, whatever you call it … ordinary and grossly engorged…
Capital's frictionlessness is also its weirdness, its insurmountability. Yet friction also 'refuses the lie that global power operates as a well-oiled machine', writes anthropologist Anna Tsing. Attending to friction doesn't only lead us to the dream of capital, but also to the continuous rupture of that dream. Capital is not smooth, but textured by breakages and seams – hand- and foot-holds for critique. Geographers Gregson, Crang, and Antonopoulos take up 'friction' as a way to rethink logistical power under capitalism: ‘the difference between logistics as idealised and as practised … [the] inefficiencies, rupture points, glitches and displacement'. In doing so, they allow friction to usher us towards Fisher's weird outside, a space where the anomaly becomes the diagnostic. In the outside, seams and rupture points offer a truer account of capital than its frictionless dream.
III
The taste for frictionlessness, for what is smooth, painless and freed from attachment, may well be an alternative shorthand for the optimal economic and societal selfsameness that is commonly called neoliberalism. We hear the negative of this desire resonate in the famous response by Margaret Thatcher to Jacques Delors’s proposals for European integration: ‘No. No. No.’ We detect an optimism for it in the context of the rise of information and communication technologies, where in Bill Gates’ 1995 book The Road Ahead the Internet is hailed as ‘a new world of low friction, low-overhead capitalism’. And we find its ramifications in the recent emergence of a friction-free ‘virtual reality’, conceived by big actors like Silicon Valley and Meta as a therapy for the dysphoria that attends our many-minded and interlinked world.
Is this attempt to overcome the pathos of friction discernible in literary and theoretical texts? At the advent of literary and philosophical modernity, Friedrich Hölderlin inaugurated a practice of ‘hard jointure’ (harte Fügung), a style of poetic construction that interrupts ‘the frictionless sequence of logical connection’. A century and a half later, that practitioner of disjointed syntax will be the preoccupation of Heidegger, whose philosophical interpretation ultimately de-aestheticizes friction in favour of a concern for the founding of being, mired as this is in what T. W. Adorno describes as ‘pathos of origin and praise of immobility’. Faced with the philosopher of being’s self-ensconcement, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations are instructive: ‘We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!’
Philosophical and literary texts of modernity have also drawn their pathos from the question of relation to the other and in ways that call for renewed attention. ‘Hell is other people’, the memorable line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (1944), for example, helps frame Lauren Berlant’s On the Inconvenience of Other People (2022). Berlant notes how ‘the sense of friction’ the other produces ‘girds the affective life of racism, misogyny, ethnonationalism and other modes of population disgust’, as well as how ‘the vertical hierarchies of privilege capture and recast the tone of ordinary social frictions to naturalize, weaponize, and calcify a self-interested defensive/projective dynamic.’ In ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ (1964), Derrida responds to the problem of otherness in Levinas’s claim that the other cannot be encountered without a minimum of friction or violence. For Derrida, since the other as other is unattainable, it exposes a certain friction internal to discourse and knowledge itself: ‘Discourse, therefore, if it is originally violent, can only do itself violence, can only negate itself in order to affirm itself.’ In other words, this self-violence is necessary in order for discourse to produce itself, to speak, to be.
In taking up friction, we invite ourselves to trace shifting figures for ecology, poetics, and capital – and to sound out new ones. What are the figures of friction/lessness in our ecological–poetic–capitalist moment? How can thinking along the lines of matter, its textures and affordances, orient us as critical subjects under this regime? How can we peel back the ideologies which adhere to motion, flow, and the smooth in order to disrupt, reimagine, and reorganise?