Thinkin on [POL]

1.       “If the moderns have something to be proud of, it is that they have been capable of extracting this contrast against all the evidence supplied by other regimes of truth”

1. As a semi-modern, a hybrid, I feel respect for this mode that the moderns have managed to make work at an ever extending scale.

The good politician expresses in her talk an ambiguity, a certain fishiness, a space for something not yet there, which may come, depending also on who will be mobilized to push along different directions.

It is also a challenge for us, the representees: do we expand by contacting through the politician the aspirations of others? Or do we allow the political talk change us in something "better", as when a politician inspires us?  Whatever it is, moderns have  made it work.

[POL] can come in contact with [HAB] under different felicity conditions. In the negative felicity condition people “do the motions”, talk about politics, but they do not participate in the political cycle. In the positive felicity condition, participation in the [POL] cycle is like a training field. Here and there opportunities emerge that deapen the political wisdom of the participant.

The Political cycle has to run again and again, sometimes by the same people (who have to keep positive the felicity conditions of [HAB]), sometimes from a new generation, that has to learn to participate in it: it has to enter in a learning trajectory starting from the rudiments. I am jealous.

2.

P

“We win our political freedom gradually” Pg 345

“This Circle has been celebrated under the name of autonomy. But to be autonomous you need to focus on issues, affairs, topics that force you to circle around them. It is contradictory—a torture worthy of Tantalus— to expect politics to take this autonomous circular form and deprive it of issues around which to turn. But if the Circle is pursued obstinately enough, if it is constantly taken up again, if we pass time after time from multitude to unity and from unity to multitude, we gradually become, in effect, those who receive from on high the orders that they have whispere from below to their representatives. We are no longer heteronomous; we become proud of our autonomy.”

Here he speaks about the birth of autonomy.  Learning needs to take place. But if we deny the process of this learning to others, if other countries come and stop the political cycle from going on (because it cannot be that their autonomy goes against our interests, especially if “we” are the salt of the earth, as moderns feel themselves to be), they can keep others in constant failure.  Learned helplessness. It may be better to be somewhere in the border of Europe (like Finland) than in a crucial route (like Greece)

33. 

4.       [POL] is expensive, it is very time consuming and people need to be fed in order to continue speaking in the agora. [POL] is also coveted. If need be, it is easy to think how one could go for other forms of “us” for the masses and other forms of “us” for the elites.:

“You are born here and you are entitled to all these rights. You may vote if you want to. Or you can trust that you will be represented anyway since your representatives are French like you: here see the identification papers”

What other possible forms of "us"?  there is an “us” created by a call ([REL]) and an “us” created legally [LAW].  We may follow these other ways of forming a collective and forget about [POL].

4. 
It seems to me that [POL] refers to two collectives at the same time: those people that come together around the common issue and the college of those who represent them.

I imagine it as the two circulations to the heart. In the MOE book (as I understand it) all attention is centered on the one cycle. The one that has to do with the representees and the representing one. 
Yet:
“And if it is quite true that a large part of the political institution seems to respond rather to the injunction “Eat or be eaten” (if the memoirs of statesmen are to be believed, this would seem to be the most indispensable of maxims), what we have here is, as always, an intersection between two forms of reason that must not be confused with each other [MET.POL].  The term “balance of power” is part of the overly facile metalanguage to which it is time to add its modality so as to avoid confusing [MET] power with [POL] power.”

How can [POL] be distinct from the fight in its inner sanctum of the college of representers?

I asked a friend of mine and told my about those representers who see in the inner sanctum the opportunity to energise themselves, to get personal gains, to feel the point through which all the others have to pass. Still there are those who in the process of negotiating they are aware of the presence of a "common good" which they feel they serve. They appreciate the experience of seeing the common will (and common good) immerging in the meeting and negotiations of representatives. Is this another part of [POL]? Is it a meeting point between [MOR] and [POL]?

Politics can break in both ways: both in the moving from participants to representatives and back and within the college of representatives, in the fight for “who will be those who represent” ( Who control the inner offices).

5.
As [POL] gets realized in various places the ratio between the number of representees and the college of representers varies. But increasing the number of representers lessens (for some people, especially those who wait to be [MET] amorphosized through power)  the attractiveness of being representer, it lessens its [MET] power (for good or bad).

So representers may push for making [POL] too expensive, for cases of emergency: The cycle stops, the college of representers may shrink as a result of [REP] pressures.

One should not only think on what directions the collective moves but on the consequences that this will have for the survival of the [POL] cycle as well. 

There  is a balance of danger that should keep the [POL] cycle running efficiently (too much security and too little security put it in danger). Perhaps one should search for the presence of the "proper measure" in the felicity conditions of all modes.

6.

7.       Pg 345

“there is no grouping other than this movement of collection, no reserve on which we could count, no identity, no root, no essence, no substance on which we could rest.”

Latour here preaches for a nationhood rooted in historicity (not blood, or values per se). Nationhood is like a living tradition, like a game of cards where an older generation gradually raises from the table and a new generation “takes the hand”and continues playing with it.