Re: [-empyre-] Tactics and Strategies

[Danny Butt <db@dannybutt.net>]

Hi Ryan, Renee, all - and thanks for this interesting discussion (as  
always Ryan!):

On 15/10/2006, at 12:18 PM, Ryan Griffis wrote:

> i guess my question isn't whether continuously going back to the  
> drawing board is an option, but what information/desires/needs we  
> use to decide when to reassess/redesign/rework. i think you're  
> right, that notions of "success" and "failure" are too elusive and  
> problematic to be tactically useful. Can we discuss what the stakes  
> are in non-zero-sum terms...

I appreciated Renee's remarks that "success" and "failure" are hard  
to come to grips with. This is where I wonder whether on some  
occasions Latour, in his desire to avoid the negative, runs  
paradoxically into a different type of idealism around the contextual  
and tactical, one that I see reinforced by the focus on tactics in  
the wake of the "failure" of larger movements.

Of course, we know longer-run goals do not always offer the  
appropriate short-term solutions in and of themselves, and there is a  
certain "tactical" or specific response to an opportunity that  
inevitably takes place in the production of work, and this is  
critical to its uptake. But when I  think of artists who have been  
mentioned (like deGeuzen or General Idea) I also think of longer- 
duration platforms for work, and the establishment of organisational  
networks and identities that lead into longer-run questions of  
political change. And I would say that the work of critique has a lot  
to offer here, in understanding the relationship between external  
institutions/political processes and one's own sense about what is  
useful to achieve. I mean, one's theoretical critique of a particular  
social process (e.g war/militarism) may not always be what you want  
on a bumper sticker, but to understand how oneself is implicated in  
war and militarism might allow you to make better bumper stickers,  
and also to develop a sustainable platform for generating bumper  
stickers and other related works.

The question of what it is pragmatic to do, then is quite a personal  
and specific one for me, but always located in these broader social  
processes we try and make sense of. There's a passage from the  
excellent Judith Butler book I'm reading (Undoing Gender) which   
seems relevant to this dynamic in respect to these social processes  
(she is talking before this about the possibilities for transgender  
and intersex recognition in a binary gendered system, a situation  
where "failure" to succeed with political change doesn't affect the  
necessity and drive for this change):

"Not only does one need the social world to be a certain way in order  
to lay claim to what is one's own, but it turns out that what is  
one's own is always from the start dependent on what is not one's  
own, the social conditions by which autonomy is, strangely,  
dispossessed and undone.

In this sense, we must be undone in order to do ourselves: we must be  
part of a larger social fabric of existence in order to create who we  
are. This is surely the paradox of autonomy [...] Until those social  
conditions are radically changed, freedom will require unfreedom, and  
autonomy is implicated in subjection. If the social world... must  
change in order for autonomy to become possible, then individual  
choice will prove to be dependent from the start on conditions that  
none of us author at will, and no individual will be able to choose  
outside the context of a radically altered social world. That  
alteration comes from an increment of acts, collective and diffuse,  
belonging to no single subject, and yet one effect of these  
alterations is to make acting like a subject possible."

x.d

--
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