Sinthome has been writing some beautiful reflections at Larval Subjects recently, reflecting on the general theme of how communicative interventions can open political possibilities, and also asking how the kinds of relationships and discourses that arise around blogging might be understood, when thought in this light. My schedule right now is too frantic to chime in, but I wanted to put up a pointer to Sinthome’s posts, and also quote a passage from the most recent:
The formation of groups and movements, of multitudes, does not itself address the real of antagonism. However, without the formation of multitudes the real of antagonism has no fighting chance of being engaged at all. In this regard, I think there is an ethics of communication that isn’t simply an ethics of how we communicate with others. It is an ethics that treats it as imperative that we do speak and write because if we do not that speech will not have taken place and will leave no trace. It is an ethics in which one occupies the place of a radio tower, linking to those things which you have found of interest, and repeating what others have said that you find to be of importance. It is an ethics that we have the courage to think that perhaps others have not heard, that perhaps what seems so obvious to you isn’t known or obvious to others and therefore is worth inscribing, so that someone else might pick it up and put it to work. And finally it is an ethics that engages the themes of others, varying those themes, so they might continue to be vital and alive, creating other possibilities for others to vary them yet more. In this way I believe that communities of sentiment might be born, which might, through some improbable miracle, have a genuine impact at the level of practice, how institutions are organized, how problems are solved, and how power is organized.
Several elements from Sinthome’s vision resonate with themes in my own work (without holding Sinthome responsible for my own clumsy translations): the notion of the materiality of communication - of how we might transcend the perceived dichotomy between thought and practice; the push for a form of communicative ethics that moves beyond the procedural, and points toward a more substantive normative ideal; the reach for a substantive normative vision that is not prescriptive, but generative; the appeal to the potential for communities of sentiment. At some point, I want to pick up on these issues, in relation to a theme I’ve been meaning to write on from Adorno - the concept of critique as the embrace of a noncoercive moment within the search for truth, which grounds both a personal imperative for action, and also a recognition of others as subjects who must, in the end, act for themselves… But more on this when I feel a bit less like an object myself… ;-)
