Recipe for RED TECHNOPOLITICS
Serve collaborative blog with modes for thinking and practicing technopolitics experimentally, while stirring in solidarity with other critical engagements, present and past.
Why an online recipe? To supplement F2F, to think provisional thoughts with others, to offer thinking as a form of gifting, and to interrupt the limiting and demoralizing modes of production we encounter daily in the neoliberal academy.
What is this? A vat, an assemblage, a reactor. What might we do here? Try on thoughts, offer gifts, remix, remind, re-assemble, refract, and reboot.
Serving suggestions:
We suggest thinking technopolitics with manifold histories of capital/ production/economy together with sex/reproduction/liveliness. Study technopolitics in worlds plural, rather than abstracting to caves, to labs, or epochs. Care about engagements with those worlds when we track the refractory processes that generate technoscience. Recognize technoscience as a strategic congealment of the same lines of force that precipitate other elements of the manifold present (although different subsets might be at play in different strategic alignments and intersections).
We suggest thinking “Red” as a way to nonreductively put capital formations into the re-mix of technopolitics. To think “Red” mix property (as relations with discrepent
genealogies) AND practices(as relations with discrepent genealogies) AND
desires (as relations with discrepent genealogies) AND counter-conduct
(as relations with discrepent genealogies) AND subjectivations (as relations with discrepent genealogies) — such that the ANDS matter as much as the discrepent genalogies. We hope to think red as an attention to folds within folds, relations within relations, things refracting with things, without the economic as the final instance, but with formations of capital as a necessary AND. Red is not Marxism with a capital M. But Red unfaithfully draws on left thinking of many stripes to follow the ANDS. Red is historicizing the very terms both capital and political economy conjure.
Suggested Utensils:
Start with “technopolitics” because it signals the extensiveness of a politically constituted technoscience in the world. Technoscience is ordinary, it is not a special case.
Add “politics” to supplement “techno.” This recipe doesn’t work by assigning technoscience to culture –or the social – because that would let technoscience off the hook in ways that consequentially make it available for omission, demonization or fetishization. Put technoscience on the hook. Hook it politically, historically, materially, theoretically, discursively, and playfully.
Ponder what it mean to theorize the technopolitical: Does doing politics with technoscience show the political in the heart of technoscience? No. Best not to theorize under the assumption of pure heartedness in the first instance, so that the accusation of contamination is not even on the table, not in this fermenting vat. Rather try to think the technopolitical as we think the political economic: thinking of the political as an “economy” (as strategy of relations); thinking the economy and the political as co-generated; and at the same time thinking “politics” in molar terms as the problematization and interruption of war, imperialism, capital, heteronormativity and other deadly congealments.
Remix tools in unfaithful fashion, from a variety of critical political genealogies rather than subscribing to a single pedigree. Offer thought experiments to others. Do mongrel theorizing towards rigorous cobbling, and serious play. Rather than invoking an ethic of innovation, envision collaboration as extensive in time and space. Marx, Foucault, Haraway, Fanon mixed with piracy, generic drugs, Gross Domestic Product and stem cells in our theoretical bioreactor. Regulate that!
This recipe is:
Not epochal
Not doing gender analysis
Not fetishizing the new
Not determinism
Not faithful to the texts/fathers
Assemble some of the following ingredients for serious conceptual play:
- Capital/ Production
- Sex/ Reproduction
- Value/devalue
- Subjectivation
- Forms of life and matter
- historical ontologies/materialities
- Relational and distributed becomings and affects.
- aggregates
- Worlding
- Action/ refraction
- Economy
- manifold
- sprig of parsley
CONCOCTING MODES OF “THINKING WITH”
As a prompt for thinking together, this recipe hopes to foster an ethic of gifting through refraction, reassembly, rearticulation and other reiterative makings. We want to retake the “re” in red! Concoct by:
·Tracing the reiterative histories that conjure technopolitics as multiply extensive with worlding,
· Experimenting with methods in generative altercations with discrepant genealogies of critique.
· Diagramming the territorialization of technopolitics as national, colonial, imperial, postcolonial and other domaining and temporalizing formations.
· Prompting refraction by mixing current dissatisfactions with lineages of disobedient histories and critical observation. “See red” with feminist political intellectual Marxian Deleuzian anti-imperialist ferment open to remixture.
TO REFRACT, BAKE UNTIL DONE:
reFRACKting the Neoliberal Academy
REfrACTing — theorizing “power” reiteratively and relationally as action acting upon capacities to act.
reFRACTION—valorizing the fractional — avoiding epochal generalizations.
reFACTING – Rigourous historicizing of fact-making
REfrACTIONARY—we know what we don’t like, even if we don’t know what we do.
Written on March 5, 2008
Kavita Philip and Michelle Murphy
