Cosmogeographies of difference Latour Deleuze Badiou Thanos Gkaragkounis
‘Cosmo-geographies of difference: Latour, Deleuze, Badiou’ Thanos Gkaragkounis
The importance of difference in AT • Where to start? • Latour: ‘in the middle of things’ • What can I do in the middle of things? • Assemblage Theory says: ‘unfold’ • Is ‘unfolding’ an idealistic or an empiricist theory? • It is neither; or rather it is ‘both/and’; it is perfectly materialist, though not in the dialectical or Marxist sense, and it is certainly idealistic but not in the Kantian sense • Assemblage can be thought either in terms of Actor Network or as pure Assemblage Thinking:
Actor Network Theory: an Epistemology • Latour’s draws on uncertainty: • The 1 st rule of ANT based on the recognition of the importance of uncertainty: • Follow rather than explain (the actors) • 2 nd rule: no group only group formation (identity always in the process of being made) • 3 rd rule: action overtaken : an actor is not always conscious of what made him/her act this way or about other actions that have had an impact on his/her action • 4 th rule : objects can act too, not only humans • 5 th rule matters of fact versus matters of concern (objectivism revisited) • 6 th rule: writing risky accounts
Assemblage Thinking: epistemologies • • Bodies without Organs (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988) Emphasis is placed upon becoming rather than being Becoming is relevant to association, network and assemblage For Deleuze being is about a point whereas becoming is pointless Becoming does not mean imitation though It means simply ‘constant transformation’ And it is here that Assemblage Thinking chimes with becoming; Assemblage Thinking is about the externality of relations which condition but do not determine the elements that take part in these relationships
Assemblage Thinking: materialities Becomings fold, unfold and refold In terms of politics this signifies a micro-politics of difference Under the lens of Assemblage Thinking difference is made Difference is made of other differences The final aim being always: to differentiate The latter takes Assemblage Thinking from politics and places, on to the terrain of ethics; • Promote, sustain and cultivate moralities that will respect these differences • AT is not about a usual politics and ethics therefore; • AT allows to move from politics to micro politics; from ethics to liquid morality (have I been moral? ) • • •
Assemblage Thinking: from Ethics to moral ambivalence • It should be therefore understood: • No secure ground on which to lie our ethical judgements • No secure ground on which to base our political alliances • No secure ground on which to trust our personal engagements • No secure ground on which to build our economic institutions • No secure grounds on which to found our scientific progress • No secure grounds on which to make our artistic revolutions
Everything you were always afraid of, is happening • • • no foundations; no uncontested meanings; everything is ambivalent; variety of interpretations; philosophy is but an other ‘language game’ science is serving neoliberal capitalism arts are commodified low quality products love (of course) is always given in exchange for something (money usually) Is not that scary?
Alain Badiou: from ANT (Epistemology) and AT (epistemologies+materialities) to the Event (ontology and truth) • Is there any possible way to eliminate ambivalence, difference, liquidity, indetermination, contingency and the externality of relations with which Assemblage Thinking is related? • Actually no, but this is not always bad news. Why? Because Assemblage Thinking is not about the relativity of truth but mostly about the truth of relations. • So what is a truth? • Without further ado we define truth: ‘The new that happens under the responsibility of the event to which a subject declares its fidelity’ (Alain Badiou)
The event • For Badiou truths exist in four domains: science, love, art and politics • Philosophy’s role is nevertheless not to prove its truth, but to facilitate finding the truth that happens in any of the other four domains. • Badiou’s philosophy is an ontology based on mathematics. • Opposite to the event stands the situation (current status of a condition of things to which the event has not yet been disclosed). • The event in other words is a break, rupture, a revolution something altogether different, from whose revelation and onwards no one can think of the situation in the same way any more.
The event What kind of ontology is Badiou’s ontology? It is based on mathematics and specifically Set Theory It is non-representational in that it starts that of which it speaks Badiou draws on Plato ‘s philosophy in order to support: the one is not and by implication (there is no being of the one) what is not one should be the many that is the other of the one and that means that the many are • being thus is multiple and everything starts from difference (multiplicity) • Being is a multiple of multiples • • •
The event: the new that happens • Inclusion and belonging • Not everything that is included in the situation belongs to the situation • So there is always something that escapes presentation: representation • Being therefore is always exposed to: void, excess and the indiscernibility of an undecidable event that comes from nowhere heading to the unknown
Subject • The subject is or deserves the name from the time it recognizes an event to which it declares its faith • This is the condition of truth (true politics; true science; true love; true art); • being faithful to what comes after the unfolding of an event
Conclusion • The world is messy but that does not mean it is an illusion • More importantly that should not frighten us • ANT points in the direction of a flat ontology of connections, relationships and transformations where everything is being formed as a network but in a way that matters • AT takes a leap forward enhancing connections and networks but also stressing the importance of these materialities for subjectivities (subjects) • Finally, Theory of the Event highlights the importance of bringing together these matters and these subjects through the mediator of truth explaining in other words why love, art, science and politics still matter (at least for some of us)!
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