The Banana Peel Project

Politics is the continuation of war by other means.

-Michel Foucault

What is politics if not strategy?  In politics, we work with what is available in order to achieve what is possible.  But resources are not unlimited.  Nor is everything possible.  So how do we decide what we can accomplish given the limits defined by history, by bodies, by the hard substance of the physical world?  If politics is war—against the world, against each other, against our selves—then what strategies are available to us?  What kinds of tactics are likely to work?

Impossible strategies are those which are seen as unreasonable, impractical, unsustainable, unwarranted, or all or some of the above.  To attempt to rearrange the social order with resources that we lack is understood as utopian at best and suicidal at worst.  And this is not merely a philosophical problem (if the terms “merely” and “philosophical” can be uttered together at all).  This is a practical problem.  How do we move forward, how do we avoid falling into the traps we have been laying for ourselves since the dawn of thought?  How do we turn the movement of the mass of history, a landslide of cultural sediment, against itself?  Is modernity vulnerable to a judo throw?

We need maps, diagrams of the distribution of the weight of history and language and things.  Something must be simulated, understood in its uniqueness and particularity.  We must—in theory—reproduce the fear, fragmentation, liquidity, and agony of history in order to understand precisely what it is that we are after as we seek political strategies.  We must, as Lawrence Grossberg writes, “fabricate the real in an attempt, not to represent or mimic it, but to strategically open up its possibilities, to intervene into its present in order to remake its future.”  Doors must be opened.

But we must also choose to walk through those passages opened up by philosophical work, by the exercise of thought on thought.  Political change does not happen automatically.  A revolution in politics does not automatically follow from a revolution in consciousness; the “greening of America” or anywhere else is not a historical inevitability.  Neither can the cultural field be transformed by the simple imposition of new legal or religious forms (it is, in fact, ethics that constitutes the real site of reform—but the genealogy of ethics has yet to be completed).  Keeping them separate is the real source of our imprisonment, because the more we see politics as something “out there” and culture as something “in here,” the more incapable of action we become.  “Its every objective thought leaves the subject harnessed like an armored beast in the shell it tries in vain to shed,” warned Adorno.  We brag of our captivity as freedom.

So political choices, the strategies we see as possible and practicable, are also cultural choices.  Aristotle knew that “man is a political animal,” but somewhere along the way we seem to have forgotten.  Laws and traditions and technological artifice are inscribed within the body, and this body is all we have.  Without the eyes and hands that your mother and father gave you, it would be difficult to get very much done.  “In our time,” Langdon Winner reminds us, “techne has at last become politeia—our instruments are institutions in the making.”

Political change and cultural change will happen together.  The only question is whether we are going to have a say in what that change will be.  I say we already do.