Supervalent Thought: On Potentiality

Link: On Potentiality, #1 « . . . . . . . Supervalent Thought.

I think I think that there is no politics without loss, without a serious shifting of the terms of living of the sort that produces incompetence at life, an incompetence we can look forward to if we can bear it but that has to be lived at best awkwardly, at worst, dramatically. Potentiality discourse feels too sunny to me. There, we are already all potential. Our solidarity is structural and comes from a thing we cannot be rid of: the vital right to belonging as such. At the same time, though, the work of solidarity, the activity of being not just in existence but in desire together, requires being in the room with the possibility that people don’t share your objects or your imaginaries, and that people will have to give up different things to get to the place of the better good life that you’re risking making imaginable, let alone available.

Comments

[patrick j. mullins]

No offense, dear, but I absorbed the message before getting it through my head that somebody else wrote it, the link somehow didn't register. All I can say is how thankful I am you didn't write it, because till I finally found the link, I was about to write "Have you been drinking?"

[Jodi]

Well, my answer would have been yes, but that doesn't have much to do with my appreciation for the passage cited. There are academics who put a great deal of stock in the idea of 'potentiality' as a theoretical panacea or solution. The author rejects that view and I think she's right. I also think she's right to point out that politics involves a loss (some might say compromise, limit, line that excludes some things) and that solidarities are not immanent but have to be made.

[patrick j. mullins]

"There, we are already all potential. "

Oh yes, but not yet already incompetent. THAT we have to work toward and while it bypasses potential and leaves us with a lingering since of inadequacy, it yet is a noble way of living both poorly and awkwardly within the future 'better life' which we may or may not achieve by giving up whatever may or may not be good in the present life (which all those in solidarity agree is BAD!!!) They never quit having babies, though, even though I think babies are grounded in immanence. Solidarity with them does not have to be made, it is born.

Oh well, such things are unavailable to me. I've known others to take digs at Dorothy Parker, but somehow 'A day without Talullah is like a month in the country' is still something I'm going to take into my brave new future of living incompetently, whether awkwardly or dramatically.

And we see once again the dangerous public nature of blogging: It is as yet impossible to prevent my and other wicked people's discoveries of such things as "an incompetence we can look forward to if we can bear it but that has to be lived at best awkwardly, at worst, dramatically. Potentiality discourse feels too sunny to me." So incompetence is the only alternative, this cannot be questioned. She says that, in this discourse, 'politics is banished to being just one vector of the human negotiation of life'. Then she wants 'many idioms'. But it IS only 'one vector' if she wants many idioms, and was anyway, whether or not she wanted them. So it's new that politics 'involves a loss'? I think one might safely say that everything involves a loss, if only because one had to make a choice of one thing over another. But big deal. I wouldn't like her any more than she'd like me.

[old]

I think you're too bitter against Negri, etc. I feel like something of a Partisan of the Foucault-Deleuze-Negri, anti-statist camp (though I haven't read enough of Deleuze at all). Still I I am also learning a lot of great stuff from Badiou-Zizek and don't quite get the level of rancor from Zizek and partisans of Badiou-Zizek. Haven't got to read the section on Foucault, Iran yet in Lost Causes, but was happy to at least see a bone thrown with right step, wrong direction or something of the sort.