Scu of criticalanimal studies makes a really great observation in response to my post on nested objects and politics:
“Political engagement can be thought as engagement in which objects at a smaller level of scale attempt to engage an object at a higher level of scale with the aim of pushing that object at a larger level of scale into a different basin of attraction. The issue here is one of how individuals that compose a larger scale object can act on that object without simply reinforcing its existing basin of attraction.”I guess part of the question is one of engagement. Not sure what you mean by that term, but I also think that folks who don’t exactly fit the term engagement are pretty interesting (and here I mean people who propose exit/exodus as a major political tool). As Deleuze and Parnet put it, “Nothing is more active than fleeing!”
“The second problem is that even where a new sub-multiple or object is formed through an alliance, and even where this object is intense enough to push the larger scale multiple of which it is a part into a new basin of attraction, this new basin of attraction is itself highly unpredictable.”
Of course. This fits in with what Stengers has shown as a difference between a demonstration and an experiment (I expect you know the difference, but if not: a demonstration is when you do something that you are fairly sure you know what the outcome will be. An experiment entails doing something that you know carries with it a risk of something completely weird happening. Galileo dropping a hammer and a feather is a demonstration, the first time we set off a nuclear bomb was an experiment). Politics, as opposed to policy, is always an experiment. Also, there is always something about a revolutionary action that exceeds instrumentality (whatever problems I have about Negri and his work aside, his book Insurgencies is really excellent on this point). This is sort of like a quotation from Gramsci that I can’t find right this second, but it goes something like this: Communism is the only movement that is fighting for a society that it cannot envision. (That’s way off from what he said, but you get the point).
I have nothing more to add. This pretty much says it all.
