Nature As Resignification, Nature As Resignation (and Other Topics)

Promoted and adapted from the comments.

Despite the fact that I've been too busy with teaching to devote too much time to the blog I've been lucky to get some really provocative comments to the rather random blog-posts I've managed to craft this last couple of weeks. At the close of a comment appended to the recent Zizek discussion, "DanT" -- a newcomer to Amor Mundi as far as I can remember -- asked this question: "So, how do theories of representation deal with the 'natural,' (i.e that which surprises, which exceeds representation) and how do we have a post-structuralist approach to issues of livelihood?"

This could scarcely help but set me to thinking... I replied:

I am very interested in your description of the "natural" as "that which surprises, which exceeds representation" -- since for me the "natural" tends to denote instead something more dire and drear; namely, the customary. For me the "natural" tends to signify a nostalgic and anti-democratic political impulse, while your more sublime construal of the "natural" seems to signify the emancipatory dimension at the heart of resignifiability. You see resignification, say, where I see resignation... Of course, neither of us is "right" or "wrong" so much, it's just that interesting differences will ensue from our emphases.

This reminds me very much of the difficulties of discussing the relations between the literal and figurative dimensions of language. To be a competent speaker of a language is always to be able to discern when one is speaking a language as opposed to translating it, for one thing, but competence also demands we know how to mobilize nonstandard usage in still-meaningful ways. It is interesting to me that accounts of figurative language will tend either, I., to attribute a special vitality, a viscerality, an endlessly generative catechretic power to the figurative dimension of language (as against the dying into literal usage that happens when a metaphor grows dim through customary usage), or, II., they will tend to attribute such force (in terms of correspondence, if they're naive, or pragmatic goodness, if they are a bit more sensible about it) to literality while consigning figurative language to the register of decorative effects or triggers of affect. When I teach the distinction to my students I am always careful to stress the traffic between these conceptions rather than a preference for one over the other.

Now, I've loved too much Wilde for too long and I've loathed too many bioconservatives for too long to affirm your own more sublime characterization of the natural over my own characterization of the natural as always a nostalgic clinging to custom -- but it is plain that there is much to be said for the useful traffic between these two conceptions as well, and for much the same reasons...

I know that comment of yours was hardly the one to which you would expect or want me to respond. It just happens to have provoked some enjoyable speculation is all.

As for your other points [and for these I recommend readers dip into the comments themselves if they are interested], I agree that the global politics of climate change and sustainability are a prime candidate for incubating global solidarity. The complementary politics of catastrophic and existential risks should incubate global solidarity as well.

Of course, I would like to think peer-to-peer models of policy deliberation, collaboration, technodevelopmental assessment, representation, criticism, and accountability could also have a hand in this -- but I am well aware of the dangers of neoliberal/neoconservative accommodationism inhering in such a hope. Certainly, those of us who know better (as Michel Bauwens seems to be, among others) need to be quite relentless about disarticulating peer-to-peer formulations from facile libertarian appropriations, whether in market-anarchist, neoliberal, neoconservative, coporate-militarist, or even in "deep" ecological versions.

I personally think that democratic world federalism (through reform of the UN or through other means), and a global basic income guarantee are also likely sources for global radical/social democratic mobilization. Finally, I suspect that genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive medicine will either inspire a global social democratic federalist polity or these developments will preside over a class struggle rewritten in the dreadful image of speciation.

I notice that lately I have seemed to put more and more weight on the idea of consent -- competent, informed, nonduressed consent -- as a key value that adjudicates the progressive agon between autonomy and diversity, and that provides for a thick "positive" construal of freedom that lends itself to appropriation from a number of broad stakeholder positions. No doubt, the difficulty is to avoid the amplification of "consent" into something like a Habermasian "ideal speech situation," on the one hand, while avoiding its easy reduction into an apologia for facile market contractarianism, on the other.

And this takes me back to the dual worries I oscillated between in my little fantasia on Zizekian themes in the first place -- between a real concern with market accommodationism for one thing, and then for another an equally real concern with the kind of radicalism that demands violence of a kind that is simply out of the question in our own technodevelopmental era and hence invites a despair that is ultimately indistinguishable from the very accommodationism it would explicitly repudiate.