Re: <nettime> [EXT] Re: Thoughts on coups

[Andreas Broeckmann <ab@mikro.in-berlin.de>]

Sean, Brian, others, thank you for the interesting and engaging 
contributions. (Some of it gets a bit cryptic since it refers to 
political discourses that are not immediately apparent, at least to this 
reader, but that's generally OK for a most-of-the-time lurker.)
Sean Cubitt wrote (Nov 24, 2020 at 3:53 PM):
>     Any 21st century politics has to be formed by an alliance of the
>     excluded - human, ecological and - I would add, though it needs a
>     longer argument - technological.

(25.11.20 um 01:19):
> Rancière argues that politics occurs when the excluded demand a part in 
> their governance - a demand that changes government permanently (as 
> women and ex-slaves have done already). It is unthinkable that oceans 
> and mountains should have a seat in government, just as it was 
> unthinkable for women - and still is unthinkable for migrants - to have 
> a say in how they are governed. The unthinkable has to be thought.
I wonder whether you could expand on this a bit; I understand the 
argument (I don't know whether you would call it posthumanist, for lack 
of a better word I would), but i cannot get my head around the idea how 
the anthropo-logical systems of political representation, of governance, 
could be transformed into systems that would encompass nonhuman beings, 
incl. technological, as equals.
You are imputing that all of the following: women, ex-slaves, migrants, 
oceans, mountains, [technics], are all "excluded" in a way that can be 
overcome. I would maintain that what may have been unthinkable for some 
people in some places in some past (that women, ex-slaves, migrants 
would have a say in how they are governed), is of a different order, not 
only because it relates to the way in which humans treat other humans 
(thus an intra-anthropological issue), but because these once excluded 
individuals and groups can speak for themselves in a human language.
I agree that all humans must factor the oceans, mountains, trees, etc., 
into the way they live on the Earth (some do), and I also agree that 
capitalism systematically treats these as cheap or free resources. (But 
maybe it is not only capitalism, but homo sapiens in general? What has 
brought about and sustained the non-nature-exploitative civilisations?)
But I wonder what the "voice" of the oceans, mountains, trees is going 
to be. Will that "voice" be the storms, the droughts, the fires? Or will 
it be the voice of human scientists (some of whom search for the 
sentience of trees and stones, while others support geo-engineering, and 
yet others look for the next site for open pit mining)?
And then there is the question of how the "technological" is brought 
into the alliance of the excluded...
Regards,
-a
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