Battles

“The performativity approach makes it possible to exhibit the struggle between worlds that are trying to prevail; it makes the struggle for life between statements visible. Each statement, each model, battles to exist. But the Darwinian metaphor stops there. In reality this struggle between statements is a struggle between sociotechnical agencements. It is not the environment that decides and selects the statements that will survive; it is the statements that determine the environments required for their survival.”

-Michel Callon, 2007 (“What does it mean to say that economics is performative?” In Do Economists Make Markets? Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Pg 332)

epistemologically otherwise

“if we embrace epistemological relativism we neither have to give up our concern for proper ways of finding out about the world, not…abandon our political and ethical commitments.  To be a relativist – to recognize multivocality – implies no obligatory commitment to immorality or opportunism.  Neither does it necessarily lead us to indifference to distribution.  Rather…it may lead us to an important form of intellectual caution: the sense that all knowledges are shaped, contingent, and in some other world could be otherwise.”

-John Law, 1991 (“Introduction: monsters, machines and sociotechnical relations” In A Sociology of Monsters.  New York: Routledge.  Pg 6

Wherefore art thou, politics?

“The second set of problems is global: it appears as a systematic use of various forms of extreme violence and mass insecurity to prevent collective movements of emancipation that aim at transforming the structures of domination…I do not hesitate to speak of a politics of global preventive counterrevolution or counterinsurrection.  But from another angle this ‘politics’ is really anti-political, because in a nihilistic way it leads to the suppression of the very conditions necessary to build a polity…the fields of politics and violence – a violence that seems to lack rational organization, not excepting self-destruction – are no longer separated.  They have progressively permeated one another.”

-Etienne Balibar, 2004.  (We, the People of Europe.  Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.  Pg 116-7 & 125)

General ripening

“By maturing the material conditions, and the combination on a social scale of the process of production, [the concentration of capital] matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of production, and thereby provides, along with the elements for the formation of a new society, the forces for exploding the old one”

-Karl Marx, 1867 (Capital Volume 1.  New York: The Modern Library.  Pg 552)

A big if

“If emancipatory politics is to meet the challenge of neoliberal capitalism, politics needs to be retheorized not as a science or set of objective conditions but as a point of departure in specific and concrete situations. This means rethinking the very meaning of the political so that it can provide a sense of direction but no longer be used to provide complete answers. In short, such a politics entails that we ask why and how particular social formation have a specific shape and come into being, and what it might mean to rethink such formations in terms of opening up new sites of struggles and movements…In the absence of such languages and the public spheres that make them operative, politics becomes narcissistic, reductionist, and it caters to the mood of widespread pessimism and the cathartic allure of spectacle or the seductions of consumerism”

-Henry Giroux, ‘The Poltics of Hope in Dangerous Times’, 2004 (The Terror of Neoliberalism. Boulder CO: Paradigm. Pg 133-4)