What is an economy of forces? It is a political map: it outlines the limits of what is possible and thinkable, with the aim of challenging them, crossing them, sabotaging them.
Bodies, alone or in packs, materialize lines of force through their strict multiplicity of tensions, contours and intensities, giving us a situated perception of force: it is a force of grasping, of ejaculation, of blending, of assembly, of division, of crushing. Force over force.
Force is a tensed muscle, an overflow of fluids, a flexion that knots itself with other bodies, overflowing between the human and beyond the human. Because force, in its boiling capacity, is precisely what blurs the distinction between the human, the animal, the vegetal and the astral, in order to entangle them and increase them as energy, squander them in excessive expenditure, or accumulate them in overflow.
This economy of forces also relies on artifacts to make these contortions possible—to let flows pass, to shape muscles, to invent communities, to venture into landscapes, to evoke dreams. Masks and costumes cease to be foreign skins to become instruments of passage, threshold devices, mechanisms of conversion.
An economy of forces is a practice that allows us to transform ourselves, to unrecognize ourselves, to form alliances.
With what force does a community, a rebellion, a combat stance, a state of trance, a call to collective desire arm itself?
We cannot isolate an economy of forces from a general economy: one that unfolds in houses, beds, and public squares. A space where energies—and their map of forces—have been altered in recent times, calling for new political-erotic-affective experiences, for the collective and vibrant resonance of a shared body, for the occupation of space and the reclamation of time itself.
What is an economy of forces? It is a way of giving account of an excess already underway, one that corporeally reinvents what we are, that trains new muscles, that folds itself to new surfaces and textures, that becomes part of energies it did not previously recognize as its own, that dares to move outward. Exuberance is a form of beauty that lets itself be carried along by the collective imagination of a community inventing itself here and now.
Text by Verónica Gago.
