Isabelle Stengers “Beyond Conversation: The Risks of Peace”
by Adam Robbert
From Process and Difference (pp. 248 – 249):
I have called “cosmopolitics” the kind of experimental togetherness that makes peace a challenge and not the condition for a polite conversation. “Politics” recalls that this proposition stems from our Western tradition that linked what it abstracted as “reason” with what it invented as “politics,” which has meant, since Plato, the problem of who is entitled to speak and on what grounds when the question of our common destiny is at stake. The prefix “cosmo” takes into account that the word common should not be restricted to our fellow humans, as politics since Plato has implied, but should entertain the problematic togetherness of the many concrete, heterogeneous, enduring shapes of value (SMW, 94) that compose actuality, thus including beings as disparate as “neutrinos” (a part of the physicist’s reality) and ancestors (a part of reality for those whose traditions have taught them to communicate with the dead).
Cosmopolitics defines peace as an ecological production of actual togetherness, where “ecological” means that the aim is not toward a unity beyond differences, which would reduce those differences through a goodwill reference to abstract principles of togetherness, but toward a creation of concrete, interlocked, asymmetrical, and always partial graspings. To take the very example of what Deleuze calls a “double capture”—a concept Whitehead would have loved—the success of an ecological invention is not having the bee and the orchid bowing together in front of an abstract ideal, but having the bee and the orchid both presupposing the existence of the other in order to produce themselves.
“the success of an ecological invention is not having the bee and the orchid bowing together in front of an abstract ideal, but having the bee and the orchid both presupposing the existence of the other in order to produce themselves.”
This really says it all!
But actualy there’s nothing to presupose, just because are your sensorial inputs who construct basicaly your (direct) experience, and your own living, feeling, thinking, and languaging Being
)) The paradox of angels sex is renown just now in our 21th century, when science has found alreday the way of reconstructing herself, just as we see in that splendid blog and so many places today. But we feel still so many times the sensation of that the symplectic thought of phenomenology, after taken in autopoieis, thru neurophenomenology, by maturana and varela, and used so splendously by Margulis and Lovelock… We all have all, could be the “lema”. We all have all science. The barrier between paranormal / extrasensorial / supernatural / superpowers… and what actualy science have found and published in scientific papers, have already surpassed the quality control for the necessary test for being correctly aplied within our lifes today, and in that way, going out of this, not economic, but epistemological crisis, that has been alredy fortunately solved in thousands of scientific papers, from hundreds of disciplines or and subdisciplines, whose authors only reach to see a certain or and small part, or angle, of all the radical influences, for our present and future lifes, of all that 21th century scientific revolution that converges, so elegantly, in t throughout this formula: apocalipsis (optimistic, etymological meaning) = 1/ hiden curriculum, or, plus, invisible learning, or, plus, collective unconscious, common sense , commons’ sense, all these trends converging in shamanism, as a anarcoepistemological revolution, feeding also in “Una epistemología del Sur”
When we shall change, definitely, from “parallel-lecture-classrooms”, to talking 15M circle, we will re discover the new, o.o, in the old…
In that way the brains, mainly of teachers, would more and more thinking like a mountain, and left and right brains, connecting themselves, will re connect left and right bodies, a forgotten splendid example, or and model, living model, of what zoologists use to exige with strengh to their students…
Naturaly, we also are bilateraly simmetric, animals, Naturaly…
was listening again to her talk with Rorty and Haraway and when Rorty was pointing out that the everyday distinction between abstract and concrete is to just ask for an example and not available to further use as a philosophical distinction, IsSt added that the example one is asking for is one that will make her “feel” it and this recognition of rhetoric seems key to me, the task of politics is to make phenomena like global warming real to people and not just to make accurate models, which is why the latest round of Latour videos are striking. I would suggest that Wittgenstein’s work on aspect-dawning and perspicuous presentations/reminders might be helpful along such lines, has anyone read Mulhall’s On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects?
I haven’t read the Mulhall book. But yes, I think you are correct, the central question is how to “feel” a distributed phenomenon like a climate change in one’s lived experience. This is surely stretching the limits of what the mammal brain can do, which is why I feel so strongly (with Stengers) that we need a period of wild concept-creation in the hopes that we might be able to use one of those concepts as a mediator between the ecological world-at-large and the world of daily experience.
Yes, yes it does Andre!
Great points Dirk. In a sense I believe (with Rorty) that all theory is rhetoric. Models too. Language helps us coordinate brain function and imagination while the consequences play out in our actions. I like the notion of ‘resonance’ here to covey the tangibility of language and thought as affective force. We might even be willing to say (metaphorically) that cosmopolitics is about evolutionary harmonics. How are we to create or perpetuate or amplify the symphonic masterpeice of this wild cosmic event?
Yes — “the tangibility of language and thought as affective force” is a very nice statement. In one sense, language and thought are models — abstractions of a more complex world — but in another, language and thought are real actors in the world, producing real effects not reducible to their status as phonemes, syllables, or syntaxes.
sorry if I have posted this before but it seemed appropriate:
http://www.janushead.org/8-2/lingis.pdf
As you can probably tell, I’m generally a fan of the things you throw this way, dmf. Also, I kind of like crowdsourcing the material that ends up on this blog.
This was a great book, Adam. I remember drawing on it while drawing up plans for my dissertation, although I never actually cited it. (There was another one in the series that I did use with an essay by Peter Ochs, but I can’t recall the title.)
Regardless, please check out some of the other essays in that book, other than the Stenger’s piece. They are all quite good.
Yes, I have the book on my shelf. It’s a great collection and I find myself reviewing it often.
http://hearingvoices.com/news/2012/04/hv008-the-earth-sings/