Some useful threads from Paolo Virno's Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation:
The potential dangerousness of the human animal is also what makes it possible to innovate. The ability to imagine/create "that which can be different from the way it is" creates chances to danger and creativity. Truly radical evil has the same root as the good life. Institutions only protect us if they part of the same dangers they try to protect us from.
Contemporary political institutions function as a permanent state of exception. The multitude (the One of many) is the fundamental form of political existence. Virno proposes the ideas of the katechon (that which restrains and contains without destroying) as the institution that best adapts itself to the permanent state of exception.
He choose jokes as a model for creativity. Whoever coins a joke does something new. Every joke contains the norm and a fragment of the state of exception. He looks at Freud (jokes, dreams as source of information), Aristotle (phroneis, fallacies) and Wittgenstein (semisolid, semihard nature of rule that is the test and the rule) in depth.
He suggests the joke or the fallacy, which points to the rule/norm while breaking/changing/playing with it and points to the fact that whole meta structure of rules/norms, as a model for how political innovation might happen. The creative moment of the witty quip is also the same type of thinking that Virno wants for our politics. The creative political move can come up with a third way. To use his example of the exodus: not staying in slavery with Pharaoh, not rebelling against Pharaoh- but going out into the desert.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment