Networks, scale, sustainability

This morning at the Rethinking Marxism conference we went to a panel on “agrifood alternatives” (F6 on your programs). The talks were interesting, and the Greek guy actually talked to the audience about what he knows rather than reading a paper, which was nice. I had to step out for the one on family farm feudalism, but Rachel, who grew up on a family farm in family farm country, said she got it wrong by reading the organization of farm labor through a formalistic egalitarian ethic rather than understanding the trade-offs, reciprocities, constraints and affordances of the cultural form ethnographically.

One of the issues for the panelists was the sustainability of independent organic farming. There seemed to be some agreement between the two practical panelists that smallholder farming was only sustainable with substantial exchange networks enabling distribution of knowledge, goods and labor. This has historically been true, of course; either holdings are large enough to integrate essential resources and functions, or smaller units have to find ways to pool. Over lunch we talked about things like churches, Granges, barn raisings, guilds, Rotary Clubs and so on as this kind of partial or comprehensive networking institution for local communities. Tocqueville’s ’secondary powers’ and Durkheim’s ‘professional ethics and civic morals’ are examples in different contexts of the idea that there have to be ways of organizing community effort and resource between the household and the state.

There’s both some mythology and some truth to the idea that these kind of networking processes were self-organizing in traditional agrarian societies. When we say “capitalism” we are often using a shorthand to designate the kinds of networks that are created by markets. Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ points to a dynamic that is at least in principle self-organizing, albeit manipulable by savvy operators. The challenge for marxists and other critics of either system is to figure out how to make network formation more intentional and egalitarian, without losing the affordances (stability, prosperity) of the old self-organizing networks.

Off to another panel, on the economics of art.

The werewolf and the silver bullet: ANT/Gramsci, pt. end.

As I’ve said recently I quite agree with Duncan that “if intellectuals want to be politically useful in some way, as intellectuals, some of the more useful things they can do are 1) provide an adequate analysis of current social, economic and political conditions; 2) start generating concrete proposals for social, political and economic alternatives.” If we take these to be worthy goals, the blog medium is promising for both.

It should be noted that marxists have historically been reluctant to do 2), going back to the young Marx’s scathing and perhaps counterproductive dismissals of the ‘utopian socialists’ with their neat little plans for ideal worlds. In this sense although the communist telos remains definitive in marxism and creates some distinctive categorical limitations, marxism and ANT have been consonant in a theory of practice for which networks and structures must be actively assembled rather than posited as givens.

It is possible to extract just this sort of theory of practice from Gramsci’s journalism and prison notes; he does some of that work himself, although presumably his plan to turn the Notebooks into a finished text for the ages included more such. But the thing to remember is that Gramsci’s practice was praxis (it was theorized), so extracting the theory from it and setting it aside as a thing in itself is not (yet) gramscian praxis. Gramsci’s theory of practice emerges from and depends upon its actual deployments, in the same sense that Bourdieu resisted extractions of his theory from his concrete studies. There’s a certain amount of making it up as we go inherent in ANT/Gramscian praxis; as the Notebooks show, everything is in play, from popular literature to philosophy and from party politics to the organization of work.

Ultimately the point I want to get at with all this ANT/Gramsci stuff, and it may not be all that new or interesting, is that neither ANT nor Gramsci authorize a practice oriented toward killing the werewolf with the silver bullet. There’s no single, focused problem, nor is there a single, focused solution. Of course this does not mean that ‘it’s all good’ as we go about the business of making the world a more pleasant place, but it does suggest that a flexible, recursive distribution of analysis and action is more likely to move us along, because it’s the only thing that ever does.

ANT/Gramsci, pt. 6: Networks, nodes, relations, alliances

Because of the way the blog medium arose out of the interactive affordances of the internet, each blog, post and comment creates a node in a possible network of relations and alliances. Or they can just sit there doing nothing but taking up space.

Whether networks actually come of blogs depends to some degree on their content, and to a large degree on the work of authors and readers to create, maintain, intensify and extend links to other nodes. One of the first things I figured out is if I didn’t want to be just another odd online hermit muttering alone in my own cave, I’d have to go out and drum up business by finding other blogs with dimensions of affinity and making comments suggesting connections. (This can be a pleasure in its own right, of course.) Sometimes folks follow the trail of breadcrumbs and sometimes they don’t, sometimes they like what they find at the end and sometimes not. Over time, though, there tends to be an accumulation of readership and participation.

To shift metaphor, a blog is a bit like a gravitic mass. If it just sits in one place its pull is limited to the stuff that happens to wander by from the depths of outer space. But if it gets on a trajectory and visits other star systems it has a better chance of encountering capturable bodies, ranging from close orbiters to eccentric comet flybys; or even to get caught itself in a multi-gravitic system, like a group blog or a stable multiblog network. So anyway, dynamic motion and a certain weight of presence are important; connections don’t just happen because we’re nice people and our moms like us.

(For some reason Moby seems to think being made of stars helps ya get hot babes.) Btw, from the standpoint of this analysis the current series of posts has been a fail, attracting very little traffic or commentary [thanks to you who did!] and no links. So far Dead Voles has had its biggest days with posts that can be interpreted as gossip. This too is community-building, albeit negatively. Rather than moaning about this the next step might be to reflect on what it is about that communicative mode that attracts attention and participation so well, then find a way to inflect the dynamic for good purposes.

As I’ve already mentioned, the blog medium is not well-suited to enforcing orthodoxy, but it can work well to assemble alliances of affinity. It’s a good way to find and hook up with people who share interests and agendas. This is both a strength and a weakness. Communities’ tendency to create and maintain narrow, exclusionary biases can just be amplified and propagated. But if the community affinities remain open to negotiation and revision there’s an opportunity for the whole to become emergently more than the sum of the parts. I’m afraid I’m not saying much more than the creation myth of Web 2.0 here….

ANT/Gramsci, pt. 5: Emergency!

I mentioned in pt. 3 that Gramsci’s goal of a homogeneous collective revolutionary consciousness might itself be what he called an ‘Enlightenment’ error. And in pt. 4 I poked some fun at the distinctive wigglings of Left intellectuals hoist on this petard. The problem is a fundamentally doomed and therefore frustrated command-and-control model of political action. With Actor Network Theory we get closer to something that can illuminate politics’ unintended consequences by showing how multiple actors in various modes at various scales bump and ooze their way into particular emergent configurations and trajectories.

Emergence is not linear. What you can hope for in non-linear dynamics is outcomes (themselves moments in longer-term emergent processes) somewhere within a range of possibility. Momentum builds, tipping points are reached, little causes produce big effects. In the more ‘ethnographic’ notes in the Notebooks Gramsci shows this happening for capitalism and begins to theorize it for communism. But because in the more synthetic notes he premises capitalism and communism as the procrustean beginning and ending points, there’s only so far he can get with it before defaulting to stretching and cutting expedients. This is a cautionary tale for ANT/Gramscian blogging praxis. The trick would be to keep your options open and your feet moving, that is, to build links across a range of sites and to nudge it all toward tendential assemblages with lots of little angular pushes. Sort of like herding cats.

Guest post: Chuck Dyke on Edgar Morin

By Chuck Dyke, Temple University. This is a draft of an essay scheduled for publication. All rights reserved.

NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT
The dread of nothing is pretty ironic. The average density of the universe comes out to a couple of hydrogen atoms per cubic meter, so almost nothing is what we’ve got: cosmic minimalism; a huge canvas with a few specks on it. Fortunately (one supposes) at small scales the specks aren’t spattered evenly. Some places the almost nothing has clumped up into the something.

In the same vein, they tell us that the whole shebang is just a particular configuration of the quantum vacuum. Then they tell us that the quantum vacuum, while being nothing, is far from being nothing. Nothing is unstable, so at incredible rates and in incredible profusion it reconfigures itself, as if there were a manic quantum Jackson Pollack in a meth frenzy: swish, swoop, splash and drip. Out of the frenzied blur of combination and recombination came space and time, the possibility of painting and sculpture, and the possibility of music – eventually. So here we are. And for all that, we’re still in the quantum vacuum; and as it expands, faster and faster, it appears, it gets ever more vacuous.

To help me think about vacua, voids, emptiness, and the meaning of nothing, I’d like to enlist the help of Edgar Morin. He’s not all that widely known or remembered these days. That’s a shame, since among writers of the 20th Century he may well provide more that we could profitably learn than most of the others. At a time when arguably the most critical problem facing us all is that of coming into some viable harmony with the planet we live on, I don’t think it would be wise to ignore one who has taken such a deep look at our place in earthly existence. Because his work is so wide ranging, I won’t embark on a silly attempt at a synopsis of his work. Rather, we’ll sample him, and dwell on a few passages useful for the route we want to travel. In fact, we’ll confine ourselves to one of the most central topics in Method: Opening [notes omitted].

The context for understanding opening is embedded in the following:

Thus, the key idea is evident: the environment is permanently constitutive of all the beings which feed in it; it permanently cooperates in their organization. These beings and organizations are, therefore, permanently eco-dependent.
But, in a paradox which is proper to the ecological relation, it’s in this dependence that the autonomy of these beings is woven and constituted.
Such beings can build and maintain their existence, their autonomy, their individuality, their originality only in ecological relation, that is to say in and by dependence on their environment; whence the alpha idea of all ecological thought: the independence of a living being necessitates its dependence with respect to its environment. (p. 202)

For example, the give and take between independence and dependence can go like this: The more I’m willing to engage with my natural environment productively, the less dependent I am on other humans and their institutions. I avoid these dependencies by opening up to the environment through my productive interaction with it – by gardening, for example. But then the wheel turns, I become dependent on the environment, the whims of weather, and so on. You can’t outrun the dependency no matter how hard you try to close yourself off from it. You can only create the illusion of independence. The alternative is to examine the patterns of interaction – the openings – that are ultimately inevitable.

ANT/Gramsci, pt. 4: Left intellectuals and the correct line

In a post at Crooked Timber on the history of the terms ‘politically correct’ and ‘liberal fascism’ John Quiggin writes

At least since the 1970s, the description “politically correct” or, in Australia, “ideologically sound”, had been used within the left to mock those who were excessively concerned with doctrinal and linguistic orthodoxy. The story of how “political correctness” turned from an inside joke to a Marxist-inspired assault on All We Hold Dear is reasonably well known. Bernstein traces its emergence as a pejorative to a conference by the Western Humanities Conference held, appropriately enough, in Berkeley.

Ha! I used to live just south of Berkeley, cosmic epicenter of well-intentioned impotent righteousness. In the comments John Emerson muses

The phrase I remember, used seriously within some Marxist groups, was “correct position”. It was used seriously by people who thought that solving the dialectical questions came first, and and that before these were solved, any political activity was opportunistic and doomed. It was used jokingly within this same groups by those of a more activist sort. One guy told me how, after a succession of Trotskyist splits, his group had ended up being of about 50 people in one room—but they had the correct position. And then he laughed uproariously.

I think that a lot of the ideologues of that time did not actually believe it, but just were trying to make a stand against the amazing sloppiness of the free-lance left.

Later the term “politically correct” came to be used internally to label the minute rules of cultural politics within the left. At the beginning the term was sometimes used by old-school macho leftists to ridicule the newer feminists and gay liberationists. But the personal cultural politics really did get extreme.

Scylla – sectarianism. Charybdis – sloppiness. With a touch of genius – both.

Can actor networks fix this? Well, given commitments to sectarianism or sloppiness, no. But otherwise a flexible orientation to alliances may offer both an analytical grasp on the conditions, configurations, operations, strengths and weaknesses of whatever situation one might want to change; and an activist grasp on actors likely to share and/or obstruct the agenda.

The new Dead Voles

Regular readers may notice that the blog template is new. The change is in honor of the blog’s new author! Asher Kay is stepping back from his own blog, spoonerized alliterations, where he’s currently going out in a blaze of glory. Asher has vowed never to blog again. In the past he has written with swashbuckling intelligence and blood-curdling wit on culture, politics and philosophy. I’m looking forward to seeing what he doesn’t write on here.

I’m really excited about it, but don’t tell Asher. He’ll just get a big head and strut around like he owns the place.

Tentative Album Cover

Comments are welcome. Does the finger look “just photoshopped enough”?

ANT/Gramsci, pt. 3

I need something or two short, pithy and on-point to frame my talk, perhaps even to pass out to participants. To both validate and complicate the idea that the blog medium can participate in the assembly of networks of Gramscian praxis, consider this from the Prison Notebooks, Q 24 (also in Selections from Cultural Writings):

The unitary … elaboration of a homogeneous collective consciousness demands a wide range of conditions and initiatives. … A very common error is that of thinking that every social stratum elaborates its consciousness and its culture in the same way, with the same methods, namely the methods of the professional intellectuals. … It is childish to think that a ‘clear concept’, suitably circulated, is inserted in various consciousnesses with the same ‘organizing’ effects of diffused clarity: this is an ‘enlightenment’ error. … When a ray of light passes through different prisms it is refracted differently: if you want the same refraction, you need to make a whole series of rectifications of each prism.

It may be that the goal of a homogeneous collective consciousness is itself an ‘enlightenment’ error; in view of the revolutionary terrors of the last century, a dangerous one. The balancer here is Gramsci’s understanding of the diversity of consciousness, culture and methods that must be honored with “a wide range of conditions and initiatives” rather than bulldozed with domineering dogmatic intellectualism. This is the preparatory work of the ‘war of position’ for hearts and minds among the ‘forts and pillboxes of civil society’ that must precede the more classically revolutionary ‘war of maneuver’.

Thinking then in terms of war of position, Gramsci encourages us away from a singular magic bullet approach and toward a plural strategy of initiatives and methods responsive to diverse conditions. Oppositional consciousness is not an existing thing but, as John Law says in explaining ANT, the contingent product of network-ordering relationships among objects, “better seen as a verb — a somewhat uncertain process of overcoming resistance — rather than as the fait accompli of a noun.”

There are ways in which the blog medium, which in itself encompasses “a wide range of conditions and initiatives,” is well-suited to the work of resistance-overcoming network construction, if not the construction of homogeneous collective consciousness. And there are ways it’s not. But that’s for a following post. Any thoughts?

ANT/Gramsci, pt. 2

This is the actual title and proposal as submitted to RM.

ANT and Blogging as Gramscian Praxis

Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks were not written for public consumption. Nevertheless, they often read like blog posts, little condensed nuggets of information and analysis linking to a wide range of observations, readings and reflections. As praxis, they point to Gramsci’s understanding of the operations of hegemony across an immense and crosslinked field of structures and relations and the need patiently to respond in kind. Nevertheless, in their current form the notes are not easily ‘activated’ as praxis because their targeting is distorted by their removal from context.

In this paper I propose to participate in the growing conversation between Marxism and Actor Network Theory by thinking through what Latour’s concepts of alliance and network might offer to an understanding of how to activate Gramscian noting as praxis through the blog medium.