Review of Daniel Halliday (2018) The Inheritance of Wealth (OUP)

Philosophy

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and the Right to Bequeath Daniel Halliday, The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and the Right to Bequeath, Oxford University Press, 2018, 235pp., $45.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780198803355. Reviewed by Blain Neufeld, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 2021.02.02 A significant obstacle to the realization of the free and equal status of all citizens within democratic societies is the inheritance of wealth -or more precisely, the intergenerational accumulation and transfer of wealth within families. The extreme wealth inequality caused by flows of inheritances can render a de jure democratic society a de facto aristocracy, wherein individuals' life-prospects are determined largely by the economic class into which they are born. Because of this, liberal egalitarian justice demands limits on inheritances. John Rawls, for instance, recommends that intergenerational bequeathments and gifts be taxed, so that individuals can acquire only limited amounts of wealth through such processes over the courses of their lifetimes.[1] Rawls's treatment of inheritance is quite brief, and there has been little discussion of the topic by other egalitarian philosophers over the two decades since the publication of Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. This is surprising, given our "new The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and the Right to Bequeath |... https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-inheritance-of-wealth-justice-equality-an... 1 of 10 3/3/21, 2:13 AM Gilded Age" of extreme wealth inequality.[2] Thankfully, Daniel Halliday's excellent book helps to fill this lacuna. Of special philosophical interest is Halliday's attempt to integrate elements of "luck egalitarianism" within a "social egalitarian" framework. This endeavour is both misguided and unnecessary -or so I shall suggest below. I nonetheless recommend this book enthusiastically to anyone interested in questions of distributive justice. Hopefully it will prompt further examination and debate of this important topic. I. The first chapter of Halliday's book provides an overview of its main themes and theses. A primary concern is "economic segregation." In an economically segregated society: (a) individuals belong to groups that are distinguished by different levels of wealth (say, the "top 1%" versus the "next 19%" versus the next four quintiles); (b) there is little movement by individuals between groups during their lives; and (c) members of different groups enjoy different levels of opportunities (educational, professional, etc.) and political power. Liberal egalitarian justice requires the elimination, insofar as it is feasible, of entrenched class hierarchy. The arbitrary inequalities among citizens based on the economic groups into which they are born violates liberal justice in much the same way as group-based inequalities based upon race, sex, sexual orientation, and religion. The book also aims to integrate two rival views of egalitarian justice. Halliday's liberal egalitarian framework is novel in that it is a social egalitarian one that purports to incorporate certain core luck egalitarian ideas. He claims that "neither approach works especially well if used alone but that they work well when combined in the right way" (p .5). (As I explain later, I do not think that this integrative project is successful; however, I also do not think it is necessary for Halliday's other main positions.) A third key claim of the book is that liberal egalitarianism can best address the problem of inherited wealth via what Halliday refers to as the "Rignano scheme" (this scheme is drawn from the early twentieth-century work of the Italian theorist Eugenio Rignano). According to the Rignano scheme, "inheritance can be taxed at a greater rate when it rolls over -when it gets passed down more than once" (p. 7). The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and the Right to Bequeath |... https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-inheritance-of-wealth-justice-equality-an... 2 of 10 3/3/21, 2:13 AM What this means, roughly, is that if Albert creates 100 dollars of wealth during his lifetime, he should be able to bequeath most of that to his daughter Beth. However, if Beth retains most of that wealth, say 80 dollars, much of that (perhaps all) should be taxed away if she bequeaths it to her son Cassius (so Cassius would receive little or nothing in second-generation inheritance). The low tax rate imposed on only the initial transfer has two justifications. First, it gives Albert an incentive to work hard (so that he can pass on some wealth to Beth), but it also creates an incentive for Beth to avoid idleness (since she must create new wealth if she wishes to bequeath any to Cassius). Second, the Rignano scheme may encourage the development and dispersal of new wealth throughout the population, thereby fostering the growth of the middle-class (bequeathments of "old money," in contrast, have no similar positive effects, and hence can be taxed away). Chapter two discusses the views of early liberal writers on inheritance. The positions of John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, and John Stuart Mill are outlined and evaluated. Chapter three focuses on Mill's utilitarianism and the Rignano scheme, as formulated primarily in Rignano's The Social Significance of Death Duties. Halliday explains that Rignano was working within Mill's utilitarian framework, and recommends that we repurpose the Rignano scheme for liberal egalitarianism. Liberal egalitarianism is concerned with securing and maintaining the free and equal standing of all citizens over time. This requires preventing or breaking up economic segregation, and the Rignano scheme can help do this. Halliday develops his egalitarian framework in chapters three, four, and five. Since my main criticism of the book concerns his attempt to integrate elements of luck egalitarianism into a social egalitarian framework, I will save my discussion of these chapters until the next section. Chapter seven addresses libertarian views. It is not clear to me why this chapter is included in the book. Halliday writes that "there is more to be gained from using libertarian insights to develop the views that I have already defended, rather than being drawn into the broader fight between egalitarians and libertarians" (p. 162). But since libertarianism is incompatible with liberal egalitarianism, including Halliday's version, I cannot see what utility these "insights" might have. I would The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and the Right to Bequeath |... https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-inheritance-of-wealth-justice-equality-an... 3 of 10 3/3/21, 2:13 AM have welcomed some explanation of how liberal egalitarianism might perhaps revise and appropriate them. The final chapter is the most "applied" of the book as it considers alternative tax schemes and argues that the Rignano scheme is to be preferred over viable alternatives for addressing the problem of economic segregation. Halliday emphasizes that a just tax scheme must satisfy a (Rawlsian) criterion of publicity, and that alternative schemes must be evaluated against each other rather than against some perfect ideal, with the recognition that any scheme when implemented will be imperfect (pp. 186-88). I found especially interesting Halliday's comparison of his proposal with Thomas Piketty's endorsement of a wealth tax (pp. 201-204). The two proposals have different targets: Piketty's wealth tax concerns the staggering wealth of a small class of elite rentiers, whereas the Rignano scheme addresses more general economic segregation. Halliday concludes that the two proposals consequently are compatible. This is an interesting claim, I think, and worthy of further consideration. II. As mentioned earlier, in chapters three, four, and five, Halliday tries to formulate a version of liberal egalitarianism that integrates luck egalitarianism and social egalitarianism. I think that this integrative endeavour is unsuccessful. First, some background. Two families of liberal egalitarian conceptions of justice have emerged over the past few decades: luck egalitarianism and social egalitarianism (the latter also is known as "relational egalitarianism"). Both families share a common ancestor: the account of justice presented in Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Luck egalitarians have understood their project, at least in part, as developing the implications of Rawls's comments on the "moral arbitrariness" of the distribution of unchosen social and natural advantages in Theory[3] into a distinct approach to theorizing about justice, one that is egalitarian in nature but also sensitive to individual responsibility. According to luck egalitarians, the aim of justice is to neutralize any disadvantages that people are born into or acquire as the result of brute luck, disadvantages for which they are not responsible and The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and the Right to Bequeath |... https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-inheritance-of-wealth-justice-equality-an... 4 of 10 3/3/21, 2:13 AM consequently do not deserve. In a fully just luck egalitarian society, people would fare well or poorly solely in conformity to those decisions and actions for which they are rightly responsible. But despite helping to inspire luck egalitarianism, Rawls's own conception of "justice as fairness" is a form of social egalitarianism. While not all social egalitarians endorse justice as fairness, they generally follow Rawls's "constructivist" approach to thinking about justice.[4] According to this approach, broadly speaking, principles of political justice should be understood as rationally constructed in order to satisfy the requirements of reciprocity among free and equal citizens under conditions of relative scarcity. A fully just social egalitarian society, then, is not one that "neutralizes luck," but rather one in which citizens relate to each other as social equals on the basis of mutual respect, and freely govern their lives on conditions fair to all. Halliday's view is primarily a social egalitarian one. He explains some of the key problems with luck egalitarianism, especially as applied to questions having to do with inheritance, in chapter four. For instance, because of its single-minded focus on the distinction between "choice" and "circumstance," what Halliday terms "naïve luck egalitarianism" implausibly condemns "all inheritance no matter its size." So naïve luck egalitarianism condemns as unjust the inheritance of "my grandfather's old beer tankard" (pp. 77-78). After dispatching naïve luck egalitarianism, the more nuanced views of theorists such as G.A. Cohen, Kok-Chor Tan, and Ronald Dworkin are discussed and criticized. Ultimately, Halliday holds that luck egalitarianism, by itself, is unsatisfactory because of its focus on whether or not individuals "deserve" their conditions and holdings: the view cannot address the problem of group segregation and inequality, including economic segregation. Chapters five and six discuss economic segregation and how inheritance helps to maintain it over time. "Economic segregation," Halliday writes, "is a type of social segregation that occurs when groups have their boundaries defined by economic difference rather than by (e.g.) racial or religious difference" (p. 102). Halliday points out that it is not just inequality of wealth that is a cause of social segregation. The intergenerational transfer of wealth facilitates the hoarding of nonfinancial -The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and the Right to Bequeath |... https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-inheritance-of-wealth-justice-equality-an... 5 of 10 3/3/21, 2:13 AM social and cultural -capital. Social capital "consists in valuable knowledge and opportunities," whereas cultural capital "consists in certain behavioural norms or dispositions" (p. 107). According to Halliday, the significance of inheritance owes much to the way in which intergenerational transfers help groups maintain their accumulated nonfinancial capital, even if nonfinancial capital is not transferred down the generations simply as an automatic consequence of the transfer of wealth. (pp. 107-108) Those who inherit wealth, or know that they will eventually, can devote considerable resources and time to providing their children with the means for superior lifeprospects. Valuable cultural capital can be transferred through the cultivation of "prestigious" hobbies and skills (violin-playing or fluency in a foreign language), as well as education and more general patterns of behaviour (accents, confidence when interacting with authorities, and so forth). Social capital is secured via access to elite schools, internships, job opportunities, and the like. These forms of nonfinancial capital reinforce each other: those who possess cultural capital can exploit effectively their social capital. Moreover, these advantages reinforce themselves over generations: parents who already possess cultural and social capital can transfer it to their children more readily than those who do not. The discussion of these processes in chapters five and six -and the difficulty, if not practical impossibility, of overcoming them without wealth redistribution, including restrictions on inheritances -is insightful and important. Halliday notes that social egalitarianism is committed to two core claims about justice, one "negative" and one "positive." The negative claim is that "equality requires the elimination of oppressive social hierarchies." The positive claim is that justice requires that social institutions be reformed or designed "so as to create a genuine society of equals" (p. 105). Inheritance flows facilitate economic segregation, and economic segregation is a social hierarchy that thwarts the creation of a society of substantively free and equal citizens. Consequently, the social egalitarian case for regulating inheritance, whether via the Rignano scheme or some other form of taxation, is straightforward. Citizens cannot relate to one another as The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and the Right to Bequeath |... https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-inheritance-of-wealth-justice-equality-an... 6 of 10 3/3/21, 2:13 AM equals if they live in a de facto aristocracy, that is, a society that (to a great extent) allocates economic opportunities and political power based upon citizens' unchosen classes. The social egalitarian view looks sufficient to justify the regulation of intergenerational flows of wealth. Yet Halliday contends that luck egalitarianism also has a role to play: "luck cannot be eliminated from an egalitarian diagnosis of what is objectionable about unrestricted inheritance," he writes, "Inheritance is unjust when it allows some people to enjoy brute luck advantage, but the specific kind of brute luck advantage is understood in terms of group membership" (p. 152). So, while social egalitarianism helps explain why economic segregation is unjust and measures should be taken to eliminate or reduce it as much as possible, including regulating inheritances, it needs to be supplemented with the claim that it is unjust that some people enjoy superior or inferior life prospects simply in virtue of having been born into one economic class or another. I think that this attempt to integrate luck egalitarianism and social egalitarianism misconstrues the nature of social egalitarianism's objection to social segregation. Social egalitarians are aware that it is a matter of "luck" that, for instance, some people need wheelchairs to get around adequately and others do not. But this is not why justice requires the adequate provision of wheelchairs to all citizens who need them, and that public and commercial spaces must accommodate them. Such accommodation simply is necessary for equal citizenship -- "correcting" for brute bad luck has nothing to do with it. When someone is born into a family in which there is considerable inherited wealth -in which one's parents themselves inherited or will inherit wealth, and thus can secure competitive advantages with respect to social and cultural capital for the person in question -this is indeed a matter of "luck," insofar as that person did nothing to "deserve" that place within the social hierarchy. Likewise, someone born white and male in a racist and patriarchal society did nothing to "deserve" that privileged position. But it is not the luck in such cases that is the problem; rather it is the hierarchy. Social egalitarians aim at the elimination of economically segregated hierarchies altogether, whatever their source, because hierarchies prevent The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and the Right to Bequeath |... https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-inheritance-of-wealth-justice-equality-an... 7 of 10 3/3/21, 2:13 AM egalitarian social relations -just as they aim at the elimination of raceor sex-based hierarchies. Consequently, I do not think that social egalitarianism "needs" to embed any luck egalitarian component into its framework -- "anti-luckism" simply is not a concern of social egalitarianism. (Being born poor, non-white, and/or female are not "misfortunes" for which one should be "compensated.") The Rawlsian version of social egalitarianism, for instance, holds that social equality involves ensuring that the principles of justice that are to regulate the most important social institutions of society, its "basic structure," enable citizens to live and interact as both equal subjects and co-sovereigns. Hence those principles must satisfy what Rawls calls the "criterion of reciprocity." According to Halliday, "reciprocity is not the only concept that Rawls used to derive the requirements of justice and . . . he did not actually invoke the concept of reciprocity when alluding to why justice might require restrictions on inherited wealth" (p. 90). This is a misinterpretation, though, as it fails to recognize the foundational role of reciprocity in Rawls's theory. The criterion of reciprocity is the "intrinsic (moral) political ideal" of justice as fairness[5] -indeed, it justifies the use of the "original position" device to formulate the principles of justice as fairness.[6] Consequently, reciprocity does justify Rawls's overall conception of justice and the restrictions on inherited wealth that he thinks are required by that conception. Justice as fairness is the most reasonable conception of justice because it best satisfies the requirements of reciprocity.[7] Once we see that social egalitarianism (at least of the Rawlsian variety) is committed to reciprocity, and economic segregation violates the requirements of reciprocity (as expressed in the principles of justice), then the case for regulating the intergenerational transfer of wealth is straightforward -as Rawls's own brief recommendations indicate. There is no need to appeal to any form of luck egalitarianism. Moreover, the social egalitarian case is not only sufficient, but its "second personal" constructivist character, focused on reciprocity, cannot felicitously be merged with the assumptions of luck egalitarianism.[8] III. My comments have focused primarily on the aspect of Halliday's view with which I The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and the Right to Bequeath |... https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-inheritance-of-wealth-justice-equality-an... 8 of 10 3/3/21, 2:13 AM disagree. Nonetheless, I think that the analyses and arguments presented in this book are interesting and important. I learned a lot from reading it. Halliday certainly is correct that justice requires the regulation of inheritances, and the Rignano scheme is an intriguing proposal for how to do so. Hence, I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in contemporary issues concerning distributive justice. [1] See J. Rawls (1999), A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Harvard University Press), pp. 245-246; (2001) Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Harvard University Press), pp. 160-161. [2] See, e.g., T. Piketty (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press). [3] See Rawls (1999), pp. 63-65, 87-89, 274. [4] Some social egalitarians, like Elizabeth Anderson, refer to "contractualism" rather than "constructivism" (see E. Anderson (2010) "The Fundamental Disagreement between Luck Egalitarians and Relational Egalitarians," Canadian Journal of Philosophy (Supplementary Volume 36): 1-23). Everything that I say about constructivism can be restated in contractualist terms. [5] Rawls 2005, p. xlv. [6] See Rawls 2005, pp. xlviii-xlix, 450. [7] See Rawls 2005, pp. xlvi-xlvii. [8] See Anderson (2010). The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and the Right to Bequeath |... https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-inheritance-of-wealth-justice-equality-an... 9 of 10 3/3/21, 2:13 AM C O L L EG E O F A R T S A N D L E T T E R S › D E PA R T M E N T O F P H I LOS O P H Y › Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Department of Philosophy 100 Malloy Hall Notre Dame, IN 46556 USA email@example.com © 2021 University of Notre Dame The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and the Right to Bequeath |... https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-inheritance-of-wealth-justice-equality-an... 10 of 10 3/3/21, 2:13 AM


Philosophy

In this short essay, I sketch the contours of critical new materialist and posthumanist interventions in memory studies & critical theory via the more-than-human Memorial 22/3.

More-than-human Conversations BLOG SERIES: Dr Evelien Geerts on "The more-than-human materializations of violence, remembrance, and times of crisis" ON 3 MAR, 2021 BY MACHINIC ASSEMBLAGEIN MORE-THAN-HUMAN CONVERSATIONS BLOG SERIES More-than-human Conversations BLOG SERIES: Dr Evelien Geerts on "The more-than-human materializations of violence, remembrance, and times of crisis" – The Posthumanities Hub The Posthumanities Hub is more than just a research group. It is a lively research environment across various borders, a platform, and a network of networks for postdisciplinary and more-than-human humanities, for philosophy, arts and sciences, informed by advanced cultural critique and creativity. It is also a space for discussions, transversal dialogues, synergies and conversations. In order to go beyond the format of seminars, workshops, classes and traditional publications, in 2021 we have decided to create another venue for these fascinating, inspiring and – at times – challenging ideas, namely, The More-than-human Conversations BLOG SERIES, which will surely serve as an appetiser for anyone interested in what more-than-human humanities and feminist posthumanities research might mean. It is thus our pleasure to present the first instalment in this BLOG SERIES, written by the Hub affiliated researcher, dr Evelien Geerts (University of Birmingham) and entitled 'The more-than-human materializations of violence, remembrance, and times of crisis'. The more-than-human materializations of violence, remembrance, and times of crisis By Evelien Geerts When the Posthumanities Hub members were recently asked to write a blog post on their current research projects, I felt a sudden-albeit also slightly caffeine-driven-rush of excitement that almost immediately turned into feelings of blind panic, as my multidisciplinary work tends to be rather rhizomatic in nature. Having been trained as a philosopher and critical theorist in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States, I have explored fields as diverse as écriture féminine, difference philosophy, queer theory, feminist science studies & STS, and critical pedagogies-fields that, at first sight, seem to be all over the place, discipline-wise, but actually share a Harawayan (1998: 578) preference for "epistemological electroshock therapy". These fields and their critical epistemology-steered methodological frameworks therefore offer excellent theoretical, yet also praxis-embedded, tools with which we may challenge and deconstruct the still alltoo-traditional, anthropocentric discipline of political philosophy. This penchant for the critical epistemological-which, in my regard, cannot and should not be separated from the ethico-political, as it, to echo Donna Haraway's words again, "matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts" (2016: 101)-is probably what drives all my thinking-doings (see Geerts & Carstens 2021). The implications of how phenomena, acts, and events are conceptualized, and what ethicopolitical connotations these conceptualizations might carry, is in addition to Haraway also underlined by Judith Butler's (1993 and 2009) philosophical attachment to processes of framing and (non-)mattering-the latter being a crucial theme in contemporary critical theories that highlight the role of how a gendered-racialized-sexualized capitalist logic of (re)productivity steers this (non-)mattering (see e.g., Chakravartty & Ferreira Da Silva 2012, Chen 2012, Cooper 2008, and Halberstam 2011)-and Karen Barad's (2007: 185) agential realist notion of "knowing in being". Especially the latter agential realist idea expresses the sentiment that philosophizing always already takes place within the world, and that there is thus a relational entanglement between the material, the idealistic, and the environmental that should be acknowledged when creating theory. Thought itself, together with its practitioners, should thus be carefully attuned to-and in tune with-these worldly connections, and responsibly integrate and articulate knowledge claims made. These three foregoing elements-the critical epistemological, an attentiveness to framing, and knowing in being-not only reveal the situatedness of the researcher and the research project in question, but also point at their theoretical-practical limitations, such as the fact that critical cartographies (see Braidotti 2011)-and even more Foucault-inspired genealogical projects-cannot encompass every point of view and tidbit of conceptual thought out there. And it is this awareness of the particularity of the cartography that the geopolitically situated researcher can sketch out, which connects the Posthumanities Hub Seminar on critical new materialist cartographies and interventions I delivered in November 2020 to the research I am doing now in the context of the Urban Terrorism in Europe (2004-19) project at the University of Birmingham. The above-mentioned cartographical monograph-in-the-making on critical new materialisms consists of a critical theoretical, explicitly non-nihilistic exploration of theorizing various contemporary crisis modes, such as the arrogance written into the Anthropocene, the rerise of fascist, now often post-truthfilled, politics, and global terrorism-modes that could all be regarded as interconnected existential assemblages driven forward by neoliberal extractive capitalism-from the ground up. The present research I am undertaking delves a bit deeper by zooming in on various phenomena that are connected to urban terror-inducing acts and events of political and counterterrorist violence on the European Continent. Yet, this study is still driven by a critical epistemological, materialist, and specifically Braidottian (2012, 2013 and 2019) new materialist way of thinking-meaning that special attention is paid to the macro webs and micro encounters of power as potestas and potentia, control, and surveillance that the human, more-than-human, non-human, and the dehumanized are all part of and also agentially resisting against. Employing critical new materialist-which for me includes those new materialist theories that are driven by feminist, queer, and critical race studies interventions (see Geerts 2019 for an overview, and more specifically Bennett 2010, Chen 2012, Puar 2012, Shotwell 2016, and the earlier-mentioned Haraway, Braidotti, and Barad)-posthumanist, field philosophical (see Brister & Frodeman 2020), and post-qualitative inquiries (see Lather & St. Pierre 2013, Somerville 2016, and St. Pierre 2020) and conceptual frameworks, the current study on urban (counter-)terrorism consists of three layers, namely, looking into the more-than-human materialization of political violence, remembrance, and the potentially critical pedagogical praxes and teachings that can be deduced from livingwith(in) times of terror-affected crisis. Pushing for an alternative critical new materialist reading of urban (counter)terrorism as a material-semiotic phenomenon with affective, haunting qualities-qualities that by the way cannot be completely captured by theories that either solely center the lived experience of the human subject or stick to representationalist framings that continuously rip the knower, phenomenon-to-be-discovered, and knowledge produced apart-allows us to theorize something that already partially escapes our often too rigid regimes and strictly demarcated imaginaries of intelligibility. A more-than-representationalist, more-thanhuman reading furthermore provides us with the opportunity to better map the affect-laden lived experiences, intricate networks of power, inequalities, and exclusions, and legalpolitical structures that those (in)directly involved in (counter)terrorism are inhabiting and impacted by. Analyzing a variety of lively assemblages that arose during and after the Paris 2015 and Brussels 2016 attacks, micropolitical data that are linked to people's lived experiences, memories, and remembrances-and the artefacts that are affectively charged with the latter-are zoomed in on through the diffracting of Derridean (i.e., memories as traces), Deleuzoguattarian (i.e., memories as politics-infused micromaterials), and Baradian (i.e., memories as worldly tracings) perspectives. One of the assemblages that will be examined in this study, is the more-thanhuman Memorial 22/3, which is located in Brussels' Sonian Forest and has been designed by the architect Bas Smets (see Divisare 2020). This particular memorial site was constructed to honor the 32 victims that died during the 2016 Brussels attacks that took place at Brussels Airport in Zaventem and the metro of Maalbeek and was visited once by myself at the start of December 2020, when the Belgian COVID-19 measures were rather strict, but did not forbid nature outings. Other more traditional commemorative memorials have been created since 2016 as well, of course, including a monument near Schuman and the Parc du Cinquantenaire in the city center of Brussels, a commemorative mural by Benoît van Innis at the Maalbeek metro station, which acted as a follow-up mural to a more grassroots monument that had been constructed right after the attacks, and artist Moustapha Zoufri's Flamme de l'Espoir (Flame of Hope)-a beautifully-designed, apparently meant to be impermanent, monument that barely received any media attention, because of its location in the since 2016 stigmatized Brussels municipality of Sint-JansMolenbeek (see Schneider 2016). What makes the 22/3 Memorial so fascinating in contrast to the foregoing monuments is precisely its non-urban location and the nonattention-drawing manner in which it has been built, as one can also see on the set of architectural sketches and my own set of emergent methodology-driven Narrative Clip pictures.[1] Images 1 & 2 (above): ©Bureau Bas Smets 2020 (in: Divisare 2020) Images 3–6 (above): ©Evelien Geerts 2020 The monument is first of all not that easily locatable-there are no special walking routes announced when you enter the Sonian Forest via Watermaal-Bosvoorde, for instance- and the construction as such is also not immediately recognizable as a memorial. It simply exists with(in) the natural, more-than-human landscape, and exactly because of its inconspicuousness and environmental embeddedness, most passers-by do not seem to engage with the monument at all unless they have developed some kind of personal relationship to it. Each of the victims is moreover said to be symbolized by a silver birch tree and a block of Belgian blue stone-two very concrete, material objects that could be regarded as representing cyclical renewal (as birch trees lose their leaves, but are quite sturdy) and death (as most tombstones in Belgium are carved out of Belgian blue stone). It is interesting to note that the overall inconspicuousness of the memorial is underlined by the fact that there are only two tiny, very serene commemorative plaques to be found a couple of minutes away south and north of the memorial. The serene atmosphere that the memorial furthermore affectively provokes, clashes with the more sensationalized commemoration narrative that is still upheld by the Belgian media today; a narrative that by the way has always focused more on the perpetrators and their acts than on the victims and their families. Using the critical new materialist approaches named earlier, this project will examine the more-than-human materializations of violence, remembrance, and times of crisis in more detail by zooming in on the Memorial 22/3 by means of the following questions and set of topics: • How are processes of knowing in being activated in and by critical new materialist theories on worldly crisis events? • How can we further reflect upon processes of artistic representation and representation's limits in the context of critical new materialist theory, e. g., how can one for instance truly 'represent' and give form to pure, intelligibilitytranscending violence and carnal affects, such as trauma, but also anger and grief? • How do we approach these artistic-commemorative processes of (re)materialization, e.g., what is being rematerialized here exactly, and what is the material-semiotic message attached to the natural materials chosen for this monument? Does one wish to rematerialize life, death, or both, and how does the bio-/necropolitical come into play here, given that the perpetrators are absent from the memorial itself but are at the same time still haunting the processes of commemoration, remembrance, and even public archiving of grief and other affects? • And how can we use the Memorial 22/3 assemblage to help us think through processes of attribution and (de)humanization, e.g., for whom are these memorial sites designed, and who gets to be included in them and how? And do post-terrorist (if there even is such a term) more-than-human memorial sites carry any messages about national identity and (exclusionary) citizenship? I am hoping to explore all of the above, plus what more-than-human memorials such as the Memorial 22/3 could teach us, pedagogically and ethico-politically speaking, in the upcoming year, while also cartographically sketching out the conceptual resemblances between (counter)terrorist lockdowns and COVID-related lockdowns in Belgium and France in relation to a second, related research project. Notes: [1] Gathering from the main text, it is clear that my work is driven by poststructuralist philosophies that take the problem of the limitation of power-laden representational processes and theories seriously. Although this project will also employ field philosophical perspectives, these field philosophical research trips and visits will not be steered by a fixed, a priori-decided methodological framework. I will in fact use a more emergent methodological approach, which is in line with Deleuzoguattarian, critical new materialist, and post-qualitative philosophies. During the above-mentioned December visit, I actually used a lifelogging tool-a so-called Narrative Clip-that randomly takes shots and short video clips instead of merely snapping shots myself. This forced me to let the tool or apparatus itself-and the potential failures that go along with experimenting with new tools-also play a role in the knowledge producing process. See Get Narrative 2017 for more information about the tool used. References: Divisare (2020, July 17). Bureau Bas Smets: Memorial 22/3. https://divisare.com/projects/427934-bureau-bas-smets-michiel-de-cleene-memorial22-03. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2011). Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd edition. Columbia University Press. Originally published in 1994. 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Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. University of Washington Press. Geerts, E. (2019). Materialist Philosophies Grounded in the Here and Now: Critical New Materialist Constellations & Interventions in Times of Terror (ism). Unpublished PhD dissertation. UC Santa Cruz. Geerts, E., and D. Carstens (2021). Pedagogies in the Wild-Entanglements between Deleuzoguattarian Philosophy and the New Materialisms: Editorial. Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 2(1): 1–13. Get Narrative (2017). Narrative. http://getnarrative.com/. Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press. Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies,14(3), 575–99. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lather, P., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). Post-Qualitative Research. International journal of qualitative studies in education, 26(6), 629–633. Puar, J. K. (2012). 'I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess': BecomingIntersectional in Assemblage Theory. PhiloSOPHIA, 2(1), 49–66. Schneider, O. (2016, November 08). Brussels attacks: sculpture inaugurated today in Molenbeek in memory of victims. The Brussels Times. https://www.brusselstimes.com/brussels/39958/brussels-attacks-sculptureinaugurated-today-in-molenbeek-in-memory-of-victims/. Shotwell, A. (2016). Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. The University of Minnesota Press. Somerville, M. (2016). The Post-Human I: Encountering 'Data' in New Materialism. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29(9), 1161–1172. St. Pierre, E. A. (2020). Why Post Qualitative Inquiry? Qualitative Inquiry. First published online on 12/06/2020. Dr. Evelien Geerts is a multidisciplinary philosopher and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham, where she is involved in Dr. Katharina Karcher's ERCfunded Urban Terrorism in Europe (2004-19): Remembering, Imagining, and Anticipating Violence project. She is also a Posthumanties Hub affiliated researcher and a PhEMaterialisms member.