I confess that when leafing through Emanuele Braga's fascinating and
dense pamphlet, I immediately felt that I had a text in my hands that I
particularly needed. And not only because there is (finally!) an
enlightened syncretism between science, philosophy, art and political
activism. But above all because he knows how to talk to us about
post-syndemic contemporaneity with clarity and, I would say, with that
streak of optimism that the "Spinozian" Negri taught us. ---- The
syncretic approach, which we could define as "critical interference"
(Sampson 2017), I believe reflects well the intellectual and militant
path of the author, who is at once an artist, philosopher and activist.
Among the numerous international projects in which he has collaborated,
the Milanese experience of MACAO stands out, a true political laboratory
and point of reference for independent art.
The integration of looks is certainly not a mere aesthetic operation, or
an eclectic divertissement. Nor even a tactic for not positioning
oneself, considering that the text clearly defines the space in which it
wants or does not want to position itself. No, eclecticism is a method,
a contaminating and generative way of thinking, capable of establishing
illuminating analogies. Some metaphors bear witness to this: "riding
means being able to stay within a movement that does not entirely depend
on me, but which if I don't know how to listen in the right way expels
me and immediately declares me incompatible". Or again, in reference to
dance: "the point is the displacement of the acting subject outside the
intentional ego".
Already from the few lines that I have proposed you can perceive the
ontological fluidity in which the author immerses us, in line not only
with the principle of indeterminacy, but also with the very making of
the Political. And it is in this parallel between science and politics
that one of the central intuitions of the text emerges, which falls on
the reader like a cold shower. Be careful - Braga tells us - because
that science that we thought was dull and pedantic, determined and
solid, in reality has no longer existed for over a century. It's just
that we probably didn't realize it! And yes, because our common sense,
the very way we perceive reality, doesn't go very well with the idea of
an indistinct space. And the reality that emerges from quantum physics
is anything but something pre-determined. It is a system always open to
the unpredictable, to deviance. And isn't this generative fluidity - the
author asks - a fitting metaphor for the way in which the Politics is
reproduced? And again, doesn't it more faithfully describe the
relationship of interdependence between the cosmos and the individual,
or between the human and the non-human?
Here Braga offers us a leap that is ancient and modern at the same time.
To grasp the fluid and interdependent nature of reality
(counterintuitive not for him but for our limitations) we need an
effort, a practice, a constant exercise aimed at "relearning to see the
world", as Merleau-Ponty recommended. In this tension we capture both a
(neuro)aesthetic/artistic aspiration and a "spiritual" one in the broad
sense. I am thinking of eastern philosophies, but also of philosophical
schools such as stoicism or scepticism, so as not to go too far. These
are karst combinations, hypothetical, but which nevertheless relaunch
explanatory analogies. The rereading of reality implies a "suspension of
judgement", a Husserlian epoché of skeptical origin. Here the epoché is
not limited to denouncing the gap between reality and "the dead end of
representation", but becomes a constituent possibility of deviance, or
rather the guarantee that reality, starting from its subatomic
particles, contains an unpredictability, a structural tendency to
mutation, to the generation of ever new meaning. And generation is
maximum precisely where turbulence and instability are created, in a
dialectical relationship always tense between entropy and negentropy.
The central point is therefore to subvert a rigidly normative worldview,
to abandon the anthropocentrism on which both our dominance on the
planet and the capitalist fetishism of goods are based. But this means
admitting that the relevant part of political work must be internal to
our own subjectivities. In the wake of the courageous Laura Conti, who
in This Planet dared to challenge the thought of the reviled Malthus to
criticize Marxist thought, Braga also touches a raw nerve here when she
states: "the problem is not solving needs but reinventing our needs and
redefining our values." As if to say: it's not just about increasing
wages or pulling the handbrake: the point is not austerity or degrowth.
The question is more "scientific" than moral, to quote Laura Conti's own
warning, when she promoted Ecology not out of do-goodism but for
objective reasons. Likewise, the question posed by Braga is structural:
"our subjectivities have rooted the construction of need in the
fetishistic desire for something that allows us to have something else".
Therefore, if the process (artistic? political?) of "re-signification"
of the world must pass through the questioning of values and disvalues,
as such it can only be a collective process, organic to both society and
the surrounding cosmos. Braga warns us of the risks of identity
politics. The use of "micropolitics", in fact, does not equate to
turning in on oneself, nor to giving up "macropolitics". It is rather a
question of identifying those molecular places where "the constituent
power from the point of view of organic life" resides, and intersecting
them in new and unpredictable ways. This outlines a "federalism of
struggles" which, while respecting the specificities of each struggle,
connects them in the name of ecological anti-capitalism. And Braga
reminds us of several struggles, thus revealing the militant nature of
the text, which I believe is more at ease on the barricade than on the
desk: think of the intersection of workerism/ecology in the battles of
the GKN, or between ecologism and feminism in indigenous claims.
These are ideas, trajectories and intersections from which we have a lot
to learn, to rethink the present and relaunch the future.
Riccardo Riccieri
E. Braga, MOLECULOCRACY. Ecologies, Conflicts, Turbulence. BLACK 2023.
166 pages, 13 euros.
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
dense pamphlet, I immediately felt that I had a text in my hands that I
particularly needed. And not only because there is (finally!) an
enlightened syncretism between science, philosophy, art and political
activism. But above all because he knows how to talk to us about
post-syndemic contemporaneity with clarity and, I would say, with that
streak of optimism that the "Spinozian" Negri taught us. ---- The
syncretic approach, which we could define as "critical interference"
(Sampson 2017), I believe reflects well the intellectual and militant
path of the author, who is at once an artist, philosopher and activist.
Among the numerous international projects in which he has collaborated,
the Milanese experience of MACAO stands out, a true political laboratory
and point of reference for independent art.
The integration of looks is certainly not a mere aesthetic operation, or
an eclectic divertissement. Nor even a tactic for not positioning
oneself, considering that the text clearly defines the space in which it
wants or does not want to position itself. No, eclecticism is a method,
a contaminating and generative way of thinking, capable of establishing
illuminating analogies. Some metaphors bear witness to this: "riding
means being able to stay within a movement that does not entirely depend
on me, but which if I don't know how to listen in the right way expels
me and immediately declares me incompatible". Or again, in reference to
dance: "the point is the displacement of the acting subject outside the
intentional ego".
Already from the few lines that I have proposed you can perceive the
ontological fluidity in which the author immerses us, in line not only
with the principle of indeterminacy, but also with the very making of
the Political. And it is in this parallel between science and politics
that one of the central intuitions of the text emerges, which falls on
the reader like a cold shower. Be careful - Braga tells us - because
that science that we thought was dull and pedantic, determined and
solid, in reality has no longer existed for over a century. It's just
that we probably didn't realize it! And yes, because our common sense,
the very way we perceive reality, doesn't go very well with the idea of
an indistinct space. And the reality that emerges from quantum physics
is anything but something pre-determined. It is a system always open to
the unpredictable, to deviance. And isn't this generative fluidity - the
author asks - a fitting metaphor for the way in which the Politics is
reproduced? And again, doesn't it more faithfully describe the
relationship of interdependence between the cosmos and the individual,
or between the human and the non-human?
Here Braga offers us a leap that is ancient and modern at the same time.
To grasp the fluid and interdependent nature of reality
(counterintuitive not for him but for our limitations) we need an
effort, a practice, a constant exercise aimed at "relearning to see the
world", as Merleau-Ponty recommended. In this tension we capture both a
(neuro)aesthetic/artistic aspiration and a "spiritual" one in the broad
sense. I am thinking of eastern philosophies, but also of philosophical
schools such as stoicism or scepticism, so as not to go too far. These
are karst combinations, hypothetical, but which nevertheless relaunch
explanatory analogies. The rereading of reality implies a "suspension of
judgement", a Husserlian epoché of skeptical origin. Here the epoché is
not limited to denouncing the gap between reality and "the dead end of
representation", but becomes a constituent possibility of deviance, or
rather the guarantee that reality, starting from its subatomic
particles, contains an unpredictability, a structural tendency to
mutation, to the generation of ever new meaning. And generation is
maximum precisely where turbulence and instability are created, in a
dialectical relationship always tense between entropy and negentropy.
The central point is therefore to subvert a rigidly normative worldview,
to abandon the anthropocentrism on which both our dominance on the
planet and the capitalist fetishism of goods are based. But this means
admitting that the relevant part of political work must be internal to
our own subjectivities. In the wake of the courageous Laura Conti, who
in This Planet dared to challenge the thought of the reviled Malthus to
criticize Marxist thought, Braga also touches a raw nerve here when she
states: "the problem is not solving needs but reinventing our needs and
redefining our values." As if to say: it's not just about increasing
wages or pulling the handbrake: the point is not austerity or degrowth.
The question is more "scientific" than moral, to quote Laura Conti's own
warning, when she promoted Ecology not out of do-goodism but for
objective reasons. Likewise, the question posed by Braga is structural:
"our subjectivities have rooted the construction of need in the
fetishistic desire for something that allows us to have something else".
Therefore, if the process (artistic? political?) of "re-signification"
of the world must pass through the questioning of values and disvalues,
as such it can only be a collective process, organic to both society and
the surrounding cosmos. Braga warns us of the risks of identity
politics. The use of "micropolitics", in fact, does not equate to
turning in on oneself, nor to giving up "macropolitics". It is rather a
question of identifying those molecular places where "the constituent
power from the point of view of organic life" resides, and intersecting
them in new and unpredictable ways. This outlines a "federalism of
struggles" which, while respecting the specificities of each struggle,
connects them in the name of ecological anti-capitalism. And Braga
reminds us of several struggles, thus revealing the militant nature of
the text, which I believe is more at ease on the barricade than on the
desk: think of the intersection of workerism/ecology in the battles of
the GKN, or between ecologism and feminism in indigenous claims.
These are ideas, trajectories and intersections from which we have a lot
to learn, to rethink the present and relaunch the future.
Riccardo Riccieri
E. Braga, MOLECULOCRACY. Ecologies, Conflicts, Turbulence. BLACK 2023.
166 pages, 13 euros.
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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