As part of the Architecture and Situated Technologies Symposium, the iDC mailing list is currently discussing networked publics and autonomy, and today Grant Kester chimed in with this kicker:
“[O]ne can hardly turn around in the current art and media theory world without bumping into a veritable sea of ‘rhizomes,’ ‘multitudes,’ ‘immaterial’ or ‘precarious’ workers, ‘nomads,’ and Spinoza and Leibniz references without end. This new canonical formation has lent itself, in application, to a certain style of thinking (nominative, grandiose, generalizing, speculative, taken from a quasi-global distance), which parallels the tendency already evident in continental theory to universalize specific modes and moments of historical change (May ‘68 being the most typical, but also Turin in the ’70s) as a kind of ethical and methodological template for all subsequent political transformation.
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The very success of this paradigm (as evidenced by the remarkable popularity of Hardt & Negri’s Empire) has led, perhaps inevitably, to a formulaic application of it. Rather than beginning the analysis of a given project, historical event, etc. with a close analysis of it’s context, it’s contradictory and multivalent actualities, we search for illustrations of rhizomatic power, nomadic displacement, ’swarming’ behavior, and so on). As a result it can be harder for us to grasp what is genuinely new or different in a particular moment of practice. I much prefer readings in which the theory itself is complicated, tested, and even challenged, through its proximity to practice, even as the practice is illuminated by a given theoretical paradigm. Too often the works of Deleuze, Negri, Nancy, Badiou, Ranciere, Virno, etc. are used in a quasi-theological manner, rather than being interrogated and complicated in their own right. Theory is, or should be, a tool, not a liturgy.”