Creating the semi-living: on politics, aesthetics and the more-than-human Deborah P Dixon Although geographers have remarked on the aesthetic and political character of a tech- noscientific biology, there has been an accompanying tendency, following disciplinary trends and social theory more broadly, to read these as being separate issues at the analytic as well as substantive level. Whereas the former becomes read as a matter of artistic practice and appreciation, or visual appraisal, the latter is considered to be the exercise of power through discipline and regulation. Here, I draw upon Rancie `re’s The Politics of Aesthetics (2007, Continuum, London) to make a stronger claim for the role of the aesthetic, wherein a political regime is understood to be comprised of a ‘distribution of the sensible’ that orders what can be seen and what can be said about it, that determines who has the ability to see and to speak, that organises the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time, and that locates the identity of the quick and the dead within a grid of intelligibility. Political struggle is necessarily aesthetic insofar as it is an attempt to reconfigure the place not only of particular groups, but also the social order within which they are embedded. For Rancie `re, artistic practices are but particular ways of making and doing; they can have a distinctly political function, how- ever, in the way that they reorder the relations among spaces and times, subjects and objects. To animate this discussion I draw on examples from critical BioArt that address the more-than-human world of Semi-Living Objects. From overt manifesto to ironic commentary, the practices, understandings and artefacts that comprise BioArt work to challenge the political, economic, cultural and ethical contexts within which a modern- day technoscientific biology operates. Key words aesthetics politics BioArt parody irony more-than-human Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Wales SY23 3DB email: dxd@aber.ac.uk revised manuscript received 29 May 2009 Introduction . . . aesthetics is not the theory of the beautiful or of art; nor is it the theory of sensibility. Aesthetics is an histor- ically determined concept which designates a specific regime of visibility and intelligibility of art, which is inscribed in a reconfiguration of the categories of sensi- ble experience and its interpretation. (Rancie `re 2006, 1) That there is a vibrant body of literature within geography on the entanglement of artistic practices within complex webs of power relations is unsur- prising: the discipline has a history of using as an entry point into the analysis of both human and non-human phenomena, as well as the relations among them, their surface aesthetics (Tuan 1989). Studies on the metaphysics of intimacy and dis- tance invoked within the production of art (Crouch and Toogood 1999; Gandy 1997; Hubbard 2003; Paterson 2007), for example, as well as the cultural politics of musical performances (Smith 1997) and aural art installations (Butler 2006; Cameron and Rogalsky 2006), have all expanded upon the role of space and place in the artistic realm. As Cant and Morris note, ‘[i]n all these works, aesthetics, poli- tics, social meaning and landscapes have been bound together in a multitude of ways’ (2006, 858). Taken together, they have also problematised geog- raphy as a ‘peculiarly visual discipline’ (Driver 2003, 227) by virtue of their emphasis upon the range of sensory apparatus brought to bear in artis- tic practices and appreciation. What is more, a flurry of collaborative projects between cultural Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 34 411–425 2009 ISSN 0020-2754 Ó 2009 The Author. Journal compilation Ó Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009