a few more thoughts on Nick’s ideas

I’ll LINK TO NICK’S LECTURE as well.

Though I wasn’t in the audience to hear what the criticisms were, I would guess that the call for piece-by-piece reform is what bothered some people. And it’s not surprising that people of a committed militant stripe would read that as a manner of caving in to the present actuality, but…

What I like about Nick’s lecture is that it allows a possible way to get out of the rut into which these discussions tend to fall. That rut can be seen in Badiou, I’m afraid, where you are either mired in the state of the situation and simply going along with whatever happens, or you are jumping entirely out of the world. There is no redemption in the play of forces between things; the human subject must magically tear a hole in the world for anything worthwhile to be possible. All of this is too reminiscent of bad ontologies that I see to have even the least appeal as a political doctrine. (Though just to clarify, I’m actually a fan, in principle, of Badiou’s “events” in a way that even most Badiouians are not.)

But the idea of the political actor as someone who contracts networks by closing off parts of them is one that has some potential. One of the real problems with Latourian actor-network theory is that, despite Latour’s disclaimers, there is a sense in which this theory tacitly identifies might with right. The winners are the winners and the losers are the losers, and there is no way to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy among winners and losers. If Pasteur fails to persuade enough actors that he is right, then he is simply a failure, not a neglected visionary.

I’m just sort of thinking aloud here, about Nick’s claim that contracting oneself from networks is a good description of political action… And another thing that has troubled me in Latour’s ontology is the idea that stronger connectedness is better. He does interesting things with that, but the other side of the story often gets neglected. Many important moments in life are those where we disconnect. Many key moments in intellectual history are like that too. Connection can corrupt and weaken as well as strengthen and proliferate, as can be seen even from homely anecdotes such as the need to turn down a social invitation to finish a piece of writing.

So yes, I think Nick is right that the notion of disconnecting is important, and also agree with him that that disconnection need not be a severing of oneself from the cosmos as a whole. (I haven’t read Dominic’s book yet, but it sounds like I would disagree with it for the same reason that I disagree with Heideggerian Angst: I don’t think the idea of humans as transcenders is a good one. It’s been around too long and has too little to do with reality.)