What unites us are several fundamental commitments: the first being an affirmation of alienation as a necessary, cognitive and pragmatic “state” to be mobilised for any substantial change to take place at the scale of the normative. The perspectives that arise from “alien” encounters could mitigate against the way the familiar obstructs the effects of new knowledge. Alienation can never be a “total” thing — it expresses a relation between things/people/activities — so any talk that we are “totally alienated” is rubbish. Such a statement disavows this definitive relationality! One of our main issues is the ossification of norms as facts — when plastic norms become naturalised as a truth of biology, physiology, ecology — or even certain economic orders. In order to disentangle the two, we require a state of “alienation” from those inhibiting normative modes, to construct new ones that operate as a collective horizon for navigating the desire of what we do want as a social body. This generative alienation is a means for thinking through the social, technological, economic, ethical and sexual ramifications of new knowledge(s) — rather than falling trap of alternativeless naturalization. We embrace the power of plastic norms as a counter-hegemonic project, provided they are seized as plastic — that is, subject to re-invention. We can’t simply advocate for a politics celebrating the margin anymore, we require a thinking and pragmatics at a scale of the so-called “total” (and therefore naturalized) global scale of the neo-liberal modus operandi. This scale, in our view, can only be navigated and put to other functions when we can properly think the planetary complexity of 21st Century life — a scale that requires thinking from the nano-second to the geological, which is surely an alien proposition given unaided human phenomenology or intellection.