Readers will find a copy of the paper I presented at the RMMLA Deleuze panel in Reno, Nevada here (warning pdf). In the paper I try to develop a critique of the premises underlying those orientations of political theory that call for the need of a void to respond to the question of how change is possible. In place of these theories, I draw on Marx, Latour, Deleuze and Guattari, and Botanski and Chiapello, calling for a network or assemblage based approach to questions of how change is possible… An approach that would both focus on the microstructures of assemblages, how they are disassembled and reassembled through interactions among agents (the social does not explain but must be explained), and how it might be possible to locate new immanent potentials within these assemblages. I think the arguments have a long way to go– how much can you develop in a conference paper, really? –but it’s a start.
Larval Subjects . 
November 18, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Just wanted to say I really enjoyed this paper – that there is a great deal of potential further development in the ideas sketched there is a good thing, not at all a limitation of the piece, which does its job of both organising the existing discussion of possibilities for change, and opening a new path for critical work. Are you not planning on publishing this in a formal way?
November 18, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Thanks NP. I hadn’t thought about publishing as I still think a number of the formulations are a bit too loose and I need to do a better job situating the role of the void in Zizek and Badiou in terms of structuralism. Alas, a work in progress.
November 18, 2008 at 9:11 pm
I liked the paper too. However, could you say a bit more about how post-structuralists like Deleuze understand networks as opposed to how structuralists understand, well, structures. At a certain point, it sounds like they are different names for the same pomme de terre. I can get behind networks and assemblages being “things” of change, while structures are usually talked about as quasi-eternal forms. However, what is to stop us from saying that a network is structured, not according to an identity with some sort of totality, but according to its symptomatic deadlocks/exclusions/slippages? I’m thinking of Zizek’s very rudimentary lesson in commodity fetishism in the first chapter of The Sublime Object of Ideology
You know Zizek then goes on to quote Marx on commodities A & B, and then tie that into an allusion to the mirror stage. All of this falls very neatly under the conventional structuralist rubric, but it’s the point about misrecognition that perks my interest. Zizek says misrecognition occurs as a structural effect, though this really does not pre-suppose a “structured network” (i.e. what I take to be the conventional structuralist line) anymore than it pre suppose that “this property also belonged to it outside of its relation with other elements.” That is to say, the misrecognition is about the “structured network” as much as the individual element, though that means we aren’t stuck having to unravel the “structured network” anymore than we are stuck having to stabilize the individual element. They are both “structural effects,” whose unified expression is the symptom. With my Buddhist hat on, subject and object are “structural effects” caused by ignorance (avijja), whose symptomatic expression is suffering/dissatisfaction (dukkha).
It confuses me then where this notion of networks you associate with Deleuze takes issue with the idea of structure you associate with Zizek, Badiou and perhaps an earlier Lacan.
November 19, 2008 at 1:56 am
[…] a very nice response to my paper on assemblages and networks, Joe Clement remarks, I liked the paper too. However, could […]
November 19, 2008 at 6:49 pm
[…] for food, often failing, leading little time for anything else. Thus, as I argued in “Towards a Critique of the Politics of the Void“, perhaps the burning question of political philosophy is not that of how a subject of the […]
November 22, 2008 at 4:25 am
[…] to pretty much everything he’s written this week, but I’ve narrowed it down to these two posts on networks vs. […]
November 25, 2008 at 8:03 pm
I just wanted to say that I enjoyed your paper. Some questions come to mind as I read it, but I read it fast and under the influence of other thoughts occupying my thinking.
But anyhows;
I really enjoy the turnaround concerning agency and the question of social change with the aid of Latour. That is really helpful, along with your focus on how social networks et cetera are made durable via interactions and communication (stop focusing on only interpretation). That could possibly lead to more writing on the machinic assemblages-(or content)-side of things in analysis of social movements.
I was also thinking on the comments in your paper on “incorporeal changes” and attributions to bodies. Maybe Deleuze’s reading of Hume could be of help here, where he postulates the role of institutions as positive means of articulating “expressions” or attributions. Maybe it comes close to your reading of Deleuze’s rhizomeanalysis and care for singular problems.
Another thing that comes to mind is the question of how “something” becomes a political subject (the problem of mobilization?); not the subject of politics. Here I find it quite hard to locate good works on the production of political subjects. Of course there is Charles Tilly’s work, but given your impasse about the visual and passional registers of bodies it would be interesting to probe further into this area.
And, to end this “comment” – I am doing some writing on the fair-trade movement and networks related this area of the economy. Would you consider fair trade to be a candidate for social change being a new assemblage working for social change by very concrete means: sites of engagements and also constructing new trade-routes and organizations.
Well, just some thoughts, I will continue to follow your work.
January 15, 2009 at 8:32 am
[…] irresolvable when posed in this way. I invite Mikhail to use his hermeneutic skills in reading my paper critiquing these positions to get a better sense of what I’m after. I see these positions as […]
February 5, 2009 at 1:13 am
[…] my view, this myopic approach generates a series of false problems and ineffectual forms of practice. Readers of Adorno and Horkheimers’s “Culture […]