Networked Realities/

/Unexpected Parallels?

BEYOND UNIVERSALIZING GLOBALITY ‘The struggle against capitalism which cannot be reduced to the struggle against neoliberalism, implies practices of multiplicity. Capitalism has invented a single, one dimensional world, but that world does not, ‘in itself’ exist. It requires our submission and our agreement in order to exist. That unified world is opposed to the multiplicity of life. It is opposed to the infinite dimensions of desire, of imagination and of creation to justice. That is why we believe that every struggle against capitalism thatis trying to be global or all-encompassing remains trapped in the structure of capitalism itself, that is, globalism. Resistance should start from and develop multiplicities…”

- Inaugural Manifesto, Network for Creative Resistance, Miguel Benasayag

PLACE-BASED GLOBALISTS: Speaking in myriad voices, they use languages hard to translate into our current political lexicon: (1) They work locally, in the everyday, and in the present

connecting in intricate networks to build new worlds globally;

(2)  They move in the micro- political terrains of culture, subjectivity, and modality, employing myth and multiplicity to make it impossible for the macro-political to dominate them;

(3)  They evade and work against all tendencies to

universal or global logics spatially, temporally and conceptually in order to make possible a truly global space for freedom and justice.

GLASSES OF MODERNITY?

?

“We will walk then the same path of history, but we will

not repeat it; we are from before, yes, but we are new.” – Subcomandante Marcos, The Fourth Key, 2001

“…like a bolt of lightening capable of illuminating subterranean molecular cooperation, hidden by the everyday inertias that are imposed in time and space through domination and subordination. To take lightening—insurrectional—moments as epistemological moments is to privilege the transience of movement and above all its intensity, in order to encounter what lies behind and below the established forms. During the uprising, shadowed areas are illuminated, albeit fleetingly.”

(Zibechi, 2006: 11)

Since no revolutionary war machine is at present available and there is no

way to get a good grip on reality, the collective subjectivity is so to speak,

tripping: from time to time it has the “flashes.” It sees things, and then it

stops. There was the autonomist movement in Italy… and then we pass on

to other things. But it’s all going to come back. All these flashes don’t mean

that there is a total incoherence in the subjectivity but simply that an effort

to is being made to perceive something which is not yet registered,

inscribed, identified. I believe that the forces which today rally around the

peace movement are the same which, in other phases will rally around the

ecologist movement, around regionalist movements, around ex numbers of

components of what I call the molecular revolution. What I mean by that is

not a cult of spontaneity or whatever, only the effort not to miss anything

that would help rebuild a new kind of struggle, a new kind of society

(Guattari 1996:90) .

Nuestra lucha es epistémica y política (Luis Macas, CONAIE leader).

The social movements in Bolivia are about “the total

transformation of liberal society” (Aymara sociologist Félix Patzi Paco, Chapel Hill, November 17, 2005).

“The buen vivir is not only social and economic … it is

also epistemic. … The buen vivir opens up the possibility to conceive of life, and live it, in an other manner, una manera ‘otra’”… concebida desde la diferencia ancestral pero pensada para el conjunto de la sociedad”.

DEFINING ONTOLOGY

*) Any way of understanding the world must make assumptions (which may be implicit or explicit) about what kinds of things do or can exist, and what might be their conditions of existence, relations of dependency, and so on. Such an inventory of kinds of being and their relations is an ontology. (Scott and Marshall 2005 qtd in Blaser 2011, 3).

  2) “Ontologies do not precede mundane practices, but rather

are shaped through the practices and interactions of humans and non-humans…Hence, ontologies perform themselves into worlds—thus I use the term ontologies and worlds as synonyms.” (From ANT) (Blaser 2011, 3)

 

3) “ Ontologies must be understood as the total (i.e. including discursive and non-discursive) enactments of worlds. In this sense, myths are neither true nor false; they engender different worlds which have their own criteria for defining truth” (ibid :3).

ICT DEFINITIONS OF ONTOLOGY

An ontology defines a common vocabulary for researchers who need to share information in a domain. It includes machine-interpretable definitions of basic concepts in the domain and relations among them.

Why would someone want to develop an ontology? Some of the reasons are:

·         To share common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents

·         To enable reuse of domain knowledge ·         To make domain assumptions explicit ·         To separate domain knowledge from the operational

knowledge ·         To analyze domain knowledge

UNDERSTANDING COMPUTERS AND COGNITION (WINOGRAD AND FLORES, 1986)

Every questioning grows out of a tradition—a pre-understanding that opens the space of possible answers. We use the word tradition here in a broad sense, without the connotation that it belongs to a cohesive social or cultural group, or that it consists of particular customs or practices. It is a more pervasive, fundamental phenomenon that might be called a way of being. ...It is not a set of rules or sayings or something we might find catalogued in an encyclopedia. It is a way of understanding, a background within which we interpret and act. We use the word tradition because it emphasizes the historicity of our ways of thinking—the fact that we always exist within a pre-understanding determined by the history of our interactions with others who share the tradition . (Winograd and Flores : 1987: 7).

POLITICAL CULTURE

Every society is marked by a dominant political culture …a political culture is the particular social construction in every society of what counts as ‘political.’…political culture is the domain of practices and institutions, carved out of the totality of social reality, that historically comes to be considered as properly political (in the same way as other domains are seen as properly ‘economic,’ ‘cultural,’ and ‘social’). The dominant political culture of the West has been characterized as ‘rationalist,’ universalist and individualist.

(Alvarez and Escobar 1992: 8).  

BEYOND BINARY THINKING

It seems that the making of a new political imaginary is underway, or at the very least a remapping of the political terrain. Coming into being over the past few decades and into visibility and self awareness through the internet, independent media, and most recently the World Social Forums, this emergent imaginary confounds the timeworn oppositions between global and local, revolution and reform, opposition and experiment, institutional and individual transformation. It is not that these paired evaluative terms are no longer useful, but that they now refer to processes that inevitably overlap and intertwine. This conceptual interpenetration in radically altering the spatiotemporal frame of progressive of politics, reconfiguring the position and role of the subject, as well as shifting the grounds for assessing the efficacy of political movements and initiatives

(Gibson Graham 2006: xix).

FOUR MAIN CULTURAL PRACTICES DEEPLY SHAPED BY THE “RATIONALISTIC TRADITION” :

 The belief in the concept of science

 The autonomous individual

 The naturalization of ‘the [dis-embedded] economy’

 The belief in ‘objective reality’ (seeing ourselves as modern subjects in control of an objective world we can manipulate). Knowledge is best gained from detached distance.

 The unquestioned belief in development, progress, growth, linearity.

These elements constitute ‘the default setting’ of modern life (David Foster Wallace: an ego-centered worldview). They are most profoundly naturalized in our culture. Like fish swimming in sea water.

From Arturo Escobar 2012

From Arturo Escobar 2012

Becoming Molecular Minor Micro-political

Being Molar Majoritarian Macro-political

DELEUZE VS GRAMSCIAN KNOWLEDGE/POLITICS

The revolution clearly needs a war machine, but that’s not a State apparatus. It also needs an analytic force, an analyzer of the desires of the masses, absolutely—but not an external mechanism of synthesis. …The most important thing is not authoritarian unification, but a kind of infinite swarming: desires in the neighborhoods, schools, factories, prisons, ..Its not about a make-over or totalization, but hooking up at the same plane at its tipping point. As long as we stick to the alternative between the impotent spontaneity of anarchy and the hierarchical and bureaucratic encoding of a party organization, there can be no liberation of desire.

(Guattari qtd in Deleuze 2004: 267).

ASSUMPTIONS IN MODELS OF THE POLITICAL

  Future orientation. Teleology. Change is progressive.

 Scientistic: Formulaic: dogmatic.  One. Universalist.   Ends over Means.  State distinct from Social.  Hierarchical Order versus Dispersal  Culture distinct from Politics/Power.

HACKER ETHIC?

Hackers create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but new things. In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new world out of the old.   (Wark 2004, 21).

A NEW THEORETICAL PRACTICE?

“Thought lags behind nature” (ATP 5). “…the categories with which reality is thought of and

reflected on remains, with a few exceptions, Eurocentric" (Zibechi 2012: 11).

“We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much…Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes.” (ATP 15).

THANK YOU!

Many thanks to all those who comprise the assemblages and multiplicities—knots of nodes of nets of relationships– that have produced this talk.

Arturo Escobar in particular!

I take full responsibility for any of its shortcomings.