No One Has Ever Produced Anything

As part of the art-science research project Post Growth, initiated by the DISNOVATION.ORG – a working group aiming to question the dominant techno-positivist ideologies – Clémence Seurat spoke with French researcher Dušan Kažić. Kažić, a plant anthropologist who has studied the many types of relationships that farmers form with the plants they grow, invites us in this conversation to imagine agriculture and a world without production. The misconception that humanity cannot live without production is deeply rooted in our societies and has the status of common sense. Through the concept of production, economists deanimate living beings in order to make a resource out of them. Thus, we can begin to move away from production by animating living beings in order to maintain relationships with them and live with them. We live in an era of seeking ways of living with plants instead of producing to live. We need a new type of materialism that does not neglect other beings.