°Nyet
Perhaps as another way into some of the questions that have been flowing through various discussions - new internationalism, communism proper, state racism, telecommunism, and likely some more posts I can’t recall offhand - I thought it might be useful to emphasise the other element to this discussion.
Namely: democracy, on which there is much more here. But I’ll underscore that it’s in democratic politics that biopolitics converges with the contractual, where calculability (and the national accounting of rates of exploitation) becomes generalised as political subjectivity tout court, and the proliferation of borders becomes a condition of the semblance of politics as such.
And, in the context of this contemporary exhaustion of politics as such by democracy, I think it’s useful turn to some of the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, Mario Tronti, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Roberto Esposito, Deleuze and Guattari, and not least of all, Marx, for the means to think the different senses of politics - of politics and the political, as the French idiom would have it, of the irreducibility of politics to its mandated populist (and nationally-constituted demographic) expressions, of the assumption that subjectivity, political action and address should always be erected on the terrain on ‘the people’ and whatever (Westphalian, Wilsonian or other) connections between them.
Clearing the space for politics to begin, in other words. Though, it will have to surely be a politics without propriety, if not impolitical. But, definitively, it begins with a ‘no’.
On a related note, here is Anthony Iles “Remnants of Democracy”, reviewing Bruno Latour’s and Peter Weibel’s Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy:
The unified body of ‘the people’ is predicated on the divided body of the foreigner and the subaltern. Frustratingly, Latour employs this as an argument for rather than against mediation. ‘Making Things Public’ is proposed as the study and improvement of mediators, material and human. There are no end of examples of the failures and aporias of scientific and democratic thought, but none that could not be solved through better mediation through closer understanding of the things that animate and are animated by networks. It is a myth that the politically challenged should feel that they owe democracy anything when it is precisely the system of democracy that strips them of agency, disempowers and excludes them. Then what exactly they owe democracy is a moot point that Latour nor his colleagues are prepared to discover. The smoothing of the material world into so many things elides the reality of material as property, commodity, use or exchange value.
The rest of Anthony’s article is here.
