Everything is Not Connected

That’ll be the title of my February 2 Berlin talk. While it would be grammatically clearer to say “Not Everything is Connected,” the more colloquial title I’m using implies the double sense I mean: both “Not Everything is Connected” and “Everything is Non-Connected.” Both are true, depending on how you look at it.

Holism has now evolved from a formerly minority position into a sort of universally accepted cracker barrel wisdom, good for scoring easy points on fossilized and oppressive reactionary patriarchs who are supposedly naive enough to miss the way in which “everything is connected.” The problem is that this is an idea once but no longer liberating. Ideas have lifespans just like humans, and just like humans they can fall into a robotic decadence. My wager, as Badiou would put it, is that interconnectivity is a spent force, and that the intellectual theme of our time will be the recovery of a more robust and weirder model of autonomous individual things. In the meantime, however, there is still a group frenzy underway to annihilate all such things, whether by smashing them up into tiny little elements, or calling them a false depth wrongly posited beneath relations, effects, and events.