ABSTRACT
Weapons, such as pistols, are profound, more or less mundane techno-moral objects of conflict, destruction and war. The use of weaponry unfolds a way of dealing with differences, the enactment of the ‘either-or’, for which the production of victims is part of the solution. In this chapter, the authors are interested in whether and how the techno-moral victimology of weaponry can be redesigned and become a playful and non-violent source of engaging with differences. This chapter discusses the performance of ‘artful contrasts’ (the art of porcelain and chocolate pistols) that: 1) re-contextualize weapons, and; 2) rematerialize weapons whereby techno-objects of war may compose novel ‘percepts’ (Deleuze & Guattari) and enact disruptive but playful scenarios, creating events of hesitation, affection, doubt, questionability, insecurities, uncertainties and controversies. The chapter engages with such artful contrasts in everyday spaces (e.g. in restaurants or play grounds, family life) ‘bringing into disclosure an ingredient (e.g. violence, weapons and war-like situations, power relations, desires and imaginations) that both belong to the territory and connects with an outside against which this territory protects itself‘ (Stengers, 2008: 42). The chapter draws on video-ethnographic and photographic material from Lee Schultz’s work as well as from an ongoing collaboration of Schillmeier with Lee Schultz which visualizes and discusses the presence of violence in social spaces where it is meant to be absent. As such, the chapter unfolds the collaboration between art, cosmopolitical sociology and empirical philosophy to experiment with the art of cosmopolitical practice. The latter tries to provoke affective relations that aim ‘to “slow down†reasoning and arouse a slightly different awareness of the problems and situations mobilizing us’ as Isabelle Stengers (2010) has put it. The collaboration with art suggests a speculative, cosmopolitical research agenda as a playful and nonviolent form of intervention that disrupts the fragile normalcy show of the every-day and the lures of the ‘either or’.
