Costelloe-KuehnMemo39

=Memo39: Political Implications= This memo should describe the political implications (broadly conceived) of your main and sub arguments. What kinds of change is your text likely to call for and help mobilize? Consider, here the many kinds of change laid out on the "Imagining Change" memo template (recalling that this template can also be used to orient ethnographic engagement, seeking to understand how your interlocutors imagine likely and necessary change.)

(1)By documenting collective political action, multiple perspectives on the meaning of "political action," and the many ways it "works" (and doesn't) today, I will provide "examples," that will hopefully inspire. This could be useful for younger folks who have never "participated" and older folks who have become disillusioned by the "failed revolutions" of the '60s, and all sorts of other folks.

(2) "document and analyze" communication practices that are doing well; disseminate these practices as 'best practices'; participate in shaping and developing these practices myself, especially in the area of "collaborative experimental science communication" (asthma files).

(3) elicit multiple and partial articulations of what 'good' and 'democratic' information flow(s) look like. policy implications?

also, broader significance:

My dissertation will illuminate particularly promising points of intervention, offer practical recommendations for local practice and broader policies, and contribute to the refashioning of STS scholars as “public intellectuals” that can “speak out” on critical issues (Stevens 2008). Documentation and analysis of new media use in relation to environmental issues in India and the United States is important today because:
 * Information production and circulation is crucial for dealing with complex and critical environmental issues
 * Globalization produces both new threats and new possibilities for addressing these threats
 * There is an urgent need for innovation in new media practices and communities
 * “Development” and “modernization” are putting unprecedented ecological strain on relatively powerless communities in India.
 * “Old” media are in crisis. Increasing consolidation – especially since the Federal Communications Commission’s 2003 decision to drastically relax media cross-ownership rules – has produced a corporate media ecology that is more beholding to advertisers and powerful interests and less accountable to the wider public.

and some notes on the "politics" of "describing" how power "works"
in reading terry eagleton's "after theory," i was snagged by his argument that "late Foucault... renounced all aspirations to a new social order." could this be true? i seem to remember Foucault, badly paraphrased, saying something along lines of "i have been called a pessimist. i have been accused of implying that there is "nothing to be done," given my accounts of power as pretty much consuming everything and appopriating all resistance. but in fact i am something of an optimist. there are //thousands of things to be done//."

Rabinow, question to Mark Poster, following the latter's talk on "Foucault, Deleuze and New Media": "Foucault's books always stop in the past... one of the reasons for this is that Foucault wanted us to think... he was not giving us the answers to what's going on today. He was posing a problem and giving some genealogical lines in which it would be possible to rethink something important and significant about the present."

Then I came across Baudrillard's critiques of Foucault on the [|Foucault blog], where he talks about Foucault's "non-normative" stance, and accuses Foucault of mirroring the language of that which it criticizes.

“Foucault’s discourse is a mirror of the power relations he describes. Its strength and seduction lie there, and not in its ‘truth’ index….. No, its strength and its seduction are in the analysis which unwinds the subtle meanderings of its object, describing it with tactile and tactical exactness, where seduction feeds analytical force and WHERE LANGUAGE ITSELF GIVES BIRTH TO THE OPERATION OF NEW POWERS. Such is also the operation of myth, right down to the symbolic effectiveness described by Levi-Strauss. Foucault’s is not therefore a discourse of truth but a mythic discourse in the strong sense of the word, and I secretly believe that it has no illusions about the effects of truth it produces.” (Baudrillard, Forget Foucault p.30 - My Emphasis)

on how power "works," and continued from mailman.lbo-talk.org discussion:

"...Following from this, Foucault's theories cannot call something dysfunctional. It presumes a perfect positivity, a perfect functionality all the time. I say the prison system is fucked, most would agree with me from a common sense perspective, you tell me, following Foucault's theories that its completely functional. This is a sort of functionalism. However, its a sort of functionalism that ALWAYS assumes the object is functional - there are no pathologies! Murder rate rises by 500%... no problem, its part of the system."

"This is an impossible way to theorise society. I mean, I'll take a perfect example: hyperinflation under Mugabe. A Foucauldian would have to admit that this was not a failure at all. This was perfectly functional in the context of the web of power-relations in contemporary Zimbabwe. This is of course true. However, to maintain this you have to adhere to a relativism which crosses the line into total absurdity. To call Foucault's theories cynical would be an understatement. They prove so detached from reality as to be completely meaningless."

harsh words...

some even see Foucault as "adhering to and even celebrating a politics of neoliberalism" (Poster talk). Foucault as advocate of the New World Order???

Poster: "the serious error... of those who argue this position is their need to find closure in Foucault's political views... intellectuals must have totalized political views, answers to the large questions of where we are going... Foucault resisted this impulse, preferring to develop "tools," as he called his works, that might clarify issues for participants in movements. Decisively, he rejected firm answers to the old question "what is to be done. As a specific intellectual, he advocated far more modest roles for the theorist..."

final note: i think sometimes criticism can "work" precisely //by// mirroring what it cricizes. like Kafka. or like hip-hop that "repeats with a difference." or the Situationists' "spectacles."

**Deleuze:** What I've been interested in are collective creations rather than rep­resentations. There's a whole order of movement in "institutions" that's independent of both laws and contracts. What I found in Hume was a very creative conception of institutions and law. I was initially more interested in law than politics. Even with Masoch and Sade what I liked was the thoroughly twisted conception of contracts in Masoch, and of institutions in Sade, as these come out in relation to sexuality. And in the present day, I see Francois Ewald's work to reestablish a phi­losophy of law as quite fundamental. What interests me isn't the law or laws (the former being an empty notion, the latter uncritical notions), nor even law or rights, but jurisprudence. It's jurisprudence, ultimately, that creates law, and we mustn't go on leaving this to judges. Writers ought to read law reports rather than the Civil Code. People are already thinking about establishing a system of law for modern biology; but everything in modern biology and the new situations it creates, the new courses of events it makes possible, is a matter for jurisprudence. We don't need an ethical committee of supposedly well-qualified wise men, but user-groups. This is where we move from law into politics. I, for my own part, made a sort of move into politics around May 68, as I came into contact with specific problems, through Guattari, through Foucault, through Elie Sambar. Anti-Oedipus was from beginning to end a book of political philosophy.
 * Negri: ** //The problem of politics seems to have always been present in your intellectual life. Your involvement in various movements (prisoners, homosexuals, Italian autonomists, Palestinians), on the one hand, and the constant problematizing of institutions, on the other, follow on from one another and interact with one another in your work, from the book on Hume through to the one on Foucault. What are the roots of this sustained concern with the question of politics, and how has it remained so persistent within your developing work? Why is the rela­tion between movement and institution always problematic?//