I’ve finished the initial draft of my article for the journal Identities. It’s entitled “Politics and Parts: Onticology and Queer Politics”. It’s a Frankenstein construction melding Luhmann, Maturana and Varela, Ranciere, Deleuze, Badiou, and OOO. I hate to ask this, but I received a lot of responses to my last post. For those who are interested in seeing an initial draft please email me and I’d be happy to send it along.
August 30, 2011
August 30, 2011 at 1:50 pm
Levi, thanks for sharing this, I have to and will give it a closer/slower read but if you will indulge a first impression I find the either or of say governance vs political troubling, and would think that contingency/difference is as Derrida taught always already at work/hand. Also I would think that in the social realm these kinds of project-ions to coherence/object-ivity to say a military unit have more of a performative/poetic/perspicuous function than a representational one which may serve political/reform-ational ends but which might also serve to cover up, smooth over, on the ground differences/improvisations. if one does careful in the midst observations/interactions with groups they are not very stable/uniform much as say an individual’s “health” is a process/achievement in flux and not a steady/given state.
http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/08/foucault-contra-a-circular-ontology-of-the-state.html
August 30, 2011 at 3:00 pm
Hi dmf,
Based on what I argued in my post on cellular automata (http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/the-game-of-life-cellular-automata-and-objects/) I don’t think there’s much disagreement between us. Cellular automata develop, evolve, and change in all sorts of ways. Their structure is open ended, malleable, and topological rather than geometric. Everything I argue in the paper is against the notion that objects are “steady-states”. This should be clear from the manner in which I deploy autopoietic theory and systems theory which are resolutely opposed to anything like a steady state. I disagree with respect to your worries about the difference between governance and politics. Governance is a process in a system that strives to maintain a particular organization against change, regulating elements and their relations. That’s not politics because politics always raises the very question of how things should be organized and what should count as an element. Those engaged in governance are not engaged in politics but the prevention and the erasure of politics. This doesn’t, of course, entail that governance is bad and politics is good, only that governance is not politics.
August 30, 2011 at 3:57 pm
“Governance is a process in a system that strives to maintain a particular organization against change, regulating elements and their relations. That’s not politics because politics always raises the very question of how things should be organized and what should count as an element. Those engaged in governance are not engaged in politics but the prevention and the erasure of politics.”
this isn’t Disney but it is a caricature, I’m all for amplification as a means of creating moving images but let’s not confuse it with how things unfold in daily life. Someday maybe we can all try and work our way through an actual case history in hopes of seeing/understanding what unfolds and how.
August 30, 2011 at 4:22 pm
dmf,
Of course their can be hybrids and interrelations, but the concepts need to be articulated in their most abstract, pure form prior to dealing with these issues. Take the example of a college. The role that the administration plays is one of governance, striving to insure that professors conduct themselves in a particular way, that classes are conducted in a particular way, that certain protocols are followed, and so on. That’s governance and the reproduction of this particular object. However, a person can be hired on as dean (thereby becoming a member of the administration) or elected by faculty to a particular position and begin to engage with that system of governance in ways that challenge how its organized, that contest the way in which elements (students, faculty, administrators, grounds keepers, etc) are counted and related, and that strives to produce a different organization. That would be an instance of politics. The point is that politics is generally rare and unusual rather than the rule. For the most part the organization of systems is treated as the way things are and the way things are done and as the default natural way things ought to be. Reproduction of that organization with evolutionary drift is the way things generally go, rather than politics that challenges the very form of that organization and what counts as an element within that system. There’s nothing Disneyesque or caricatured about this, but rather it’s the way things generally are.
August 30, 2011 at 5:23 pm
Levi, you kind of did this with your example of how rules of thumb of the road get formalized into laws, but would it not be foolish to drive as the driver’s manual tells one to obey the law, and while there are academic/Dean’s policies/vision-statements/ten-year-plans for how a school is run the relationships that actually unfold are not ever so monolithic/coherent or otherwise mechanized/uniform. And is the new revolutionary Dean really coming out of pure novelty or is s/he working to establish/conserve what s/he takes as the true heart/matter of the institution? As Derrida taught despite intentions and attempts for conservation/quality-control/uniform-codes there is always already drift/splitting/change happening, the question here seems to be are we taking such into account or not?
So yes people generally act as if there is some Natural Law at hand, behind/above, their practices (especially if they are called to account for them) but in fact such practices are largely ad hoc and to some degree always personalized and improvisational, and such attitudes of ethical denial don’t mean that there is in fact such an Author-ity at work. Now as to why people rarely take active stands for reform (or otherwise take personal responsibility) I think this is a vital existential/political question but more one of what Heidegger would have dismissed as mere anthropology than a matter of ontology.
I have raised a related point/query at:http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/08/academic-publishing-economic-parasitism.html
August 30, 2011 at 8:37 pm
dmf,
I just don’t understand your argument nor recognize my position in what you’re attributed to me. I think you fail to understand what an autopoitic system is and how they reproduce themselves across time. They do not do so through rote formalisms or laws as you seem to suggest and as you claim I am suggesting. They evolve and develop in all sorts of ways. None of that is in dispute. This doesn’t change the fact that such systems have defined elements (various identities) and more or less defined hierarchical relations among those elements. Autopoisis is the way or processes through which those elements are reproduced in time and the way these relations are reproduced in time. For example, there are all sorts of processes by which capitalism produces owners of the means of production (an element), workers or wage labors (an element), and relations between the two. This is subject to all sorts of drift and change but the basic pattern remains. Operations organized around reproducing these relations and elements are forms of governance. Governance is not a leader or overseer, but the set of processes and mechanisms that reproduce this organization. You might not have noticed, but capitalism is extremely flexible, dynamic, amd subject to all sorts of evolution. That doesn’t make it any less an autopoitic system that reproduces certain elements and relations between these elements. Politics, by contrast, is that moment where the elements and their relations themselves are called into question.
August 30, 2011 at 8:42 pm
And to repeat, there’s never a centralized authority behind any system of governance. That’s a crucial point. It’s the system as a whole that’s doing, not a particular element in that system. Moreover, you seem to miss the whole point about naturalization. I am not claiming that governance systems ARE natural and inevitable. That’s an illusion. i’m claiming they are EXPERIENCED this way and this experience contributes to maintaining these forms of organization. You must have missed the repeated point I’ve made that every system harbors anarchy, has a CONTINGENT organization capable of being otherwise, and perpetually encounters the threat of entropic dissolution.
August 31, 2011 at 12:06 am
At the risk of venturing into forbidden territory, I’d like to echo Mr. Bryant’s point about contingency. Naturalization – a process, not a given – requires the type of hyperrelationality that both Bryant and others have recently criticized as a pillar of conservative philosophy, and an idea that contravenes reality. While the “always alreadiness” of dmf’s Derridean drift gives lie to attempts at naturalization, it nonetheless fails to account for the motility of any given idea, much less entire systems. Sure, capitalism has a performative component to it. So does my cheerleading team. And yes, there’s splitting occurring in the relations spurred by both capitalism and my fellow cheerleaders. The question Bryant gets at (I think; I haven’t read his article, only this thread) is why putatively hierarchical systems are unstable and how this can effect change, provided that the organization of the system – the interactions between its component parts – are viewed as contingent, not hyperrelational. To argue otherwise is to say, in my opinion, that movement of and within systems is nothing more than an endless exchange of simulacra, in which politics devolves into a type imposed, pseudo-Baudrillardian nihilism.
I’m so, so sorry if I’m entirely off base. I found this blog through my instructor’s site, and he’s been encouraging me to become more than a lurker. Please let me know if my comment is inappropriate.
August 31, 2011 at 12:55 am
Great comment Marisol. I love the term “hyperrelationality”. I’m stealing it!
August 31, 2011 at 2:06 am
Thank you! It’s Kris Coffield’s term, from his recent post on object-oriented ontology and the Constitution – which was spurred by one of your posts, I think. On a different note, I really appreciate how open you and other OOO’ers are with people, on your blogs and in the interviews I’ve read at Kris’s site. We had a mini-discussion about this in class today, with regard to building academic relationships. A couple of years ago, when I was a freshman I took a philosophy of law class with a friend in an effort to disprove the stereotype of airheaded cheerleaders. When she and I disagreed with some of the professor’s claims in our paper proposals, he said, and I quote, “I wouldn’t expect cheerleaders to understand serious philosophy anyway. It’s not what they do.” Moving beyond the arrogance of that statement has taken a while, and the openness of yourself and others has certainly helped.
August 31, 2011 at 2:21 am
Marisol,
I’m deeply suspicious of the idea of “expertise” or the idea that specialization in a particular area should entail that only they should speak. People who say such things are just assholes, not people who possess superior knowledge. Cheerleaders know a lot of things about the virtual proper being of bodies that I don’t know and have an experience of social organization (both amongst themselves and the crowds that they’re seeking to form and cultivate local manifestation in) with which I’m not familiar. Philosophy is potentially everywhere.