Temporary Services

There is no longer any social necessity for human beings to be treated as mechanical elements in the productive process; that can be overcome and we must overcome it by a society of freedom and free association, in which the creative urge that I consider intrinsic to human nature, will in fact be able to realise itself in whatever way it will. [...] If we are thinking of social transformation or social revolution, though it would be absurd, of course, to try to sketch out in detail the goal that we are hoping to reach, still we should know something about where we think we are going, and such a theory may tell it to us. [...] It is of critical importance that we know what impossible goals we're trying to achieve, if we hope to achieve some of the possible goals. And that means that we have to be bold enough to speculate and create social theories on the basis of partial knowledge, while remaining very open to the strong possibility, and in fact overwhelming probability, that at least in some respects we're very far off the mark. - Noam Chomsky in conversation with Michel Foucault, 1971

I think critical theory can learn something from this position, and from experimental science (as far as I understand it anyway). In physics, it seems to me, that the best theoretical physicists and the best experimental physicists would make Foucualt happy - they never allow themselves to feel too confident about the axioms they deal with, and test everything again at every chance. I think of Richard Feynman especially when I say that, but I'm sure if I knew more about other good scientists (lauded and invisible both) it would apply to them as well. So the best physicist is in a sense, a wonderful post-structrualist: self-reflexive, metacritical, ready to deconstruct in the face of ritual and common sense. What Chomsky opines to Foucault, though, and what I think is often the missing frosting on the cake of deconstruction, is this kind of boldness to say "okay, we have a pretty good idea what we're after, lets take a step forward and be ready to shift directions along the way." Chomsky is talking about constructing theories - but what he's after is an out-of-the-laboratory wielding of shaky theoretical terms like justice for example. As ready-to-break as the concept may be, we have to be bold enough to push it beyond its limits into practice and action - always looking to the laboratory for the new ready-to-break model.

I'd like to try to tie together a few ideas that seem to me to resonate well together. To start, here's a list:

• Cageian free play. Cage's zen aesthetic of no-aesthetic or maybe, all-aesthetic, was futuristic - he was invested in the idea (that is becoming material) that technology would bring society into a position where its primary activity could be peaceful and spontaneous free play, rather than a struggle for survival. I wouldn't call it so very different from Derridian free play, though Derrida might be utopian in a different sense - the practical impractical utopian.
• Empire and the network of the multitude. Negri and Hardt set the stage for free play - or, at least, the potential for it. Empire is built on an infrastructure that could support free play, but while a push towards the repurposing of Empire is imminent it is probably in its infancy.

Activist culture, I'm happy to observe, when it isn't apathetic (that's an odd too-common phenomenon, apathetic activism...) is wonderfully and loosley pointed in the above direction. The network is the operative concept in art and culture it seems - and this network is exactly the infrastructure I mentioned that is giving up so much promise of an in-this-lifetime (maybe) free play. Check out the group Temporary Services for evidence.

I listened to an interview with Michael Hardt (Empire co-author) a night or two ago, and the interviewer asked him why he and Negri were so recklessly optimistic. He pointed to a long tradition of communist and activist optimism - of treating defeats as the seeds of victory. He brought up Marx's metaphor of the mole burrowing and burrowing with every action, positioned to break to the surface. I'm optimistic.