(For some reason, this didn’t go out over Google Reader, so I’m re-posting it…)
The Speculative Realist blogosphere has been abuzz over the relationship between ontology and politics. Nick Srnicek’s post at Speculative Heresy – and the many comments on it – provide a good entry point to this discussion. Nick has wisely redrawn his initial arguments in ways that represent the counter-arguments quite well, so that both (or all) sides seem smarter and more clear-headed coming out of the process than going into it — which is what good philosophizing should be about.
The key, as he presents it, is to define politics in a viable and useful way: is it just about relations between humans and other humans (as he first assumed), or is it about ‘the way of being-with amongst entities’, ‘the act of deciding exclusion and inclusion,’ ‘the space of the im/possible’ (a Derridean formulation that needs more clarification, so see Nick’s elaboration on it), or something else. Nick argues that “if we’re not careful, everything becomes politics, and nothing gets changed. Art becomes intrinsically political. Ineffective protests become political (rather than spectacle). Writing blog posts becomes political! Politics – if it is to mean anything, and if it is to escape the nihilism and apoliticism that Nina rightly criticizes – must have a narrower definition than these neutered conceptions of the political.”
I agree with Nick that the definition of ‘politics’ should not be fully subsumed within the definition of ‘art’ (or ‘philosophy’ or religion’ or ‘science’ or ‘nature’ or anything else) — losing the distinctiveness of each of these terms renders the world less distinct and gives us a weaker grasp on things. But art, philosophy, etc. can still be political, and identifying overlaps between these categories can do important work for us.
Politics, to my mind, is about relationality — ‘the way of being-with amongst entities’, ‘the act of deciding exclusion and inclusion,’ etc. — but it doesn’t just describe that relationality; it affects it. Something becomes political to the extent that it effects change in relations, and specifically in power relations — that is, to the extent that it opens up, closes down, or somehow reorients or reconfigures capacities (one’s own and/or others’) for acting and for effecting change in the world.
This seems circular, but I’m trying to be consistent here with a process-relational ontology. To say that ‘politics’ is about ‘effecting change in the ways change can be effected’ is to render politics open in a world that is itself open. If voting cannot effect change, then it is not (any longer) political; or rather it is negatively political to the extent that it closes down the possibility for change, for instance, by creating the illusion that one is making change when one isn’t. Politics, by this definition, consists of those adjustments, negotiations, and struggles by which we reconfigure power in the world (where power is not just ‘power over’ but power-to, power-with, etc.). This can be done through art or philosophy, i.e. through the expression or conceptual formulation of new or different ways of relating, to the extent that these then affect actual relations in the world. But it is not identical with them.
And it can be not only between humans, since humans aren’t the only entities acting within a shared world. But humans have been pretty effective at changing others’ capacities for acting on their worlds, so politics – cosmopolitics, in Stengers’ terms – should today be about the nonhuman as well as the human .
Nice post, and I like your definition of politics. Something I’ve been struggling with lately is the definition of Power. In your formulation, I suppose I’m thinking of “Power Over” more than the other forms you mention. What is it? Where does it come from? How can we resist it, or change it (how can we be our most political)?
How would SR or D&G or Connolly or any of them answer those questions? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks,
Jeremy
Thanks for the comment, Justin. That’s a big question.
I would say that power emerges directly out of the relationship between agents (autopoietic, agential entities). When such a relationship takes on more complex and concrete, materially embedded forms – through culturally institutionalized mediations such as rituals, city walls, agricultural surpluses, the specialization of tasks, weapons and armies, constitutions, etc. – then it becomes possible for power to get ‘fixed’ in imbalanced and hierarchic formations.
Over time these have evolved according to certain loosely definable patterns that can be studied in relation to the history of human dwelling and subsistence practices, socio-ecological systems, etc.
Michael Mann’s two-volume The Sources of Social Power is very good at giving a sense of this history. D&G add an emphasis on the bio-psycho-social dimensions of all of it.
Thanks, Adrian, I’ll look into Mann’s books. I would agree that Power emerges out of relationships between agents. Initially, when I was trying to conceptualize a network theory of power, I thought it might have something to do with connections. In a “scale-free” network those with more connections could be said to have more power in a way. We can see this on the web where sites with a lot of traffic and in/out links tend to influence the discourse more than others. Individuals or groups could gain power, then, by building their own networks or by putting themselves in an institutional position with pre-formed connections (i.e. those which you describe such as the Presidency of the US, corporate CEOs, etc.). I’m not familiar enough with NT to think of any critiques of this conception on my own, so I imagine there are plenty. But it’s a start, at least.
The other thing is that power seems to have an inward pull – it attempts to propagate by making others into itself (capitalism is really good at this). It is a homogenizing force. The most political act, then, (at least in terms of resisting power) is in propagating and promoting difference. I think D&G, Hardt&Negri, Escobar, and even Bateson would agree with that. How to do it is the next question. For that I’m interested in Graeber’s concept of Counter-Power, briefly discussed in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. It’s a lot to think about, though.
Thanks again!
Jeremy
Adrian,
I’m glad to here this voice in the blogo-wilderness. As a Spinozist of course it is impossible to divorce any valuational, epistemic (and as you say, relational) act from ontology. Ontology is made up of just this kinds of differentials. A political decision, at core, if we are not simply to recursively run around in a circle of political designations, has to be a change in relation and the power to act. And for a Spinozist, this involves the liberation of others, including other beings (non-human, and perhaps even abiotic). The liberation of all things must be dovetailed to our liberation of others and ourselves on the political level.
kvond – I like very much the way you phrase that Spinozist ethic (/politics). It seems very common-sensical, yet radical at the same time…
Jeremy – I do think that power can also differentiate (territorialize/striate, in D&G’s terms). But I agree that those names all valorize difference, though for Deleuze it’s more like a first principle, while Escobar is more context-sensitive/dependent, and Bateson may be in a somewhat different category – maybe it’s just that he’s such a thoroughly systemic/holistic thinker and is PRE-poststructuralist about it, unlike the others.
Adrian, while it is not the Spinoza I immediately favor – it needlessly truncates the comprehensive thinking of unities and relations that ground the resolutions of “small questions” – you might find this ecological take on Spinoza of interest:
Anthony Paul Smith (Nottingham/DePaul), “The Ethical Relation of
Bodies: Thinking with Spinoza towards an Affective Ecology”
Audio Recording (30:22): http://spinozaresearchnetwork.wordpress.com/2009/10/26/spinoza-and-bodies-audio/
The emphasis is upon Urban Ecology and System Resistance thinking, as well as deconstructing the role of “guilt” in the ideology of ecology, in favor of a kind of urban affective health.
Great post and great comment! I’m very much interested in D&G’s ‘vitalism’ and would suggest that Deleuze’s distinction between ‘combat’ and ‘judgment’ in the late essay ‘To Have Done With Judgment’ is useful in this connection, supplying discussion of ‘combat-against’ and ‘combat-between’ that might be motivated towards ‘eco-political’ debate in a manner that usefully ties Nietzschean and Spinozist concerns with force/power (puissance and pouvoir). Taking us beyond any normative sense of the organism as a self-preserving system (a la traditional ‘active vitalism’) and into a Nietzschean one that recognises bodies as the composition of forces that draw as much from ‘that which hurts us’, “The combat-between is the process through which a force enriches itself by seizing hold of other forces and joining itself to them in a new ensemble: a becoming” (this is, of course, a clear exposition of D&G’s ‘passive vitalism’).
Another way of saying the same thing? Or a strategic valencing that might enable us to rethink human-biotic relations beyond the myth of ‘natural balance’?