We no longer know how to think about politics.

 

“Political” is appended to various terms to communicate something of the methods and literatures of the disciplinary communities engaged in its theory and practice:
 

• Political Economy

• Political Theory

• Political Science

• Political Theology

• Political Philosophy

 

But, as Wendy Brown wrote of democracy, we find that politics “has historically unparalleled global popularity today yet has never been more conceptually footloose or substantively hollow”. This is in large part because those engaged in the theory and practice of politics have inherited the political terminology and imaginative horizons—democracy, nationalism, capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism—from the particular struggles characteristic of Enlightenment-era revolutions and the Industrial Revolution in 19th-century Europe, as well as their subsequent outworking in the nation-building and imperial projects of the 20th century. Even more fundamentally, the Westphalian system of nation-states continues to serve as the language through which sovereignty is expressed, while the concept of “nation” is unstable and ill-defined. The very premises of political community—of the “We”—are contested in an era of rapid cultural, informational, and demographic change.

 

At the root of this change is the orthogonally cross-cutting role of technology. As John von Neumann observed in 1955, “the great globe itself” is in a rapidly maturing crisis stemming from technology’s relationship with geography and political organization. In our time, it is the advent and mass adoption of protocols (e.g., TLS, TCP/IP, PGP, HTTPS, S/MIME, BTC/LN, DID/VC, zk, etc.) as global social infrastructure that has destabilized the demarcations between center and periphery which reliably categorized the 20th-century world order. In addition, the ease with which politically agnostic capital can identify and engage in jurisdictional arbitrage has dramatically accelerated the pace with which peripheral geographies become the sites for both value generation and capture. 

 

Unlike during the 20th century when Von Neumann and Schmitt wrote the words in the epigraphs above, it is no longer the case that technology is simply in service to determined political powers. There has been a countervailing societal force, at least since the final decades of the last century, that comes from within the sprawling networks of scientists, engineers, creatives, and builders who fill the companies, governments, and garages from which innovation comes. People who have taken it upon themselves to conceive of and to produce accessible, indeclinable power for other people and their societies—technological power (e.g., FOSS, PGP, Linux, Chaumian eCash, BitTorrent, Hashcash, Bitcoin, Qubes, Verifiable Credentials, Nostr, mixnets, etc.) that makes no promises or guarantees, but whose functions are inspectable, whose effectiveness is verifiable, and whose achievements are composable far beyond the initial visions and capacities of their first creators and thus affording new and transformed social projects that generate a fabric from which individual and collective sovereignty are both practical and sustainable.

 

As the logistical flows of people, ideas, and property continue to accelerate through the build-out of these infrastructures, the tensions among persons, societies, and states begin to take on new forms that open up the possibility of a reconsideration of philosophical assumptions that have been marbled into the inherited metaphors and concepts that constellate political economy. With this as our common setting, we invite papers explicitly engaging the contested ideas behind the impasses and opportunities of this moment.

 

Continuing what was started in the 2013 Pedagogies of Disaster conference (proceedings published here), The Department of Eagles (Departamenti i Shqiponjave) has partnered with The Observatory of the Philosophical Environment to reconvene in 2023 to engage the question of the form and efficacy of political economy in an era marked by an unsettling of its conditioning terms (history, tradition, modernity, democracy, identity, hierarchy, capitalism, sovereignty, citizen, state, society, etc.)—terms that are at the heart of the question of social and political organization, societal and civilizational projects, and the renewed great powers conflicts and economic competition that daily fills the news and our feeds.

 

Potential formulations of research questions include:
 

“The Political”

• How do we demarcate the domain of the political as such? How do political phenomena appear (structural, quasi-structural, contingent, etc.)? Is there a meaningful difference between the phenomena under inquiry in the various disciplines of the political (Science, Economy, Theology, Theory, Philosophy)?

• What are the common and competing motivations and standards of objectivity in eidetic (Husserl) and hermeneutic (Dilthey) interpretations of the human sciences and how do these relate to thinking the political as philosophy or even to thinking political philosophy as science?

• The influence of religion or theology on political thinkers of the recent past is evident (Masaryk, Husserl, Stein, Schweitzer, Shestov, Schmitt, Patočka, Strauss, Havel, Taubes, Derrida, Dugin, etc.). There have also been many recent academic texts directly using religious sources to make political arguments or to recount the formative place of religion in the contemporary history of philosophy. What part does religion or theology play in the theory and imagination of new political philosophy? How might the antithesis between the Enlightenment and Romanticism be overcome?

 

Technics and Sovereignty

• What is sovereignty for? How do authority, responsibility, and sovereignty relate? How has self-sovereignty been, and how might it be, conceived?

• What is it to be governed? What is it to be ungovernable? Can one fruitfully conceive of self-sovereignty in terms of destituent power – a power that precludes the reproduction of governance and remains invisible to or one step ahead of or entirely deactivates the machine of the sovereign exception that the state, by tradition and force, arrogates to itself?

• As the modes of governmentality available to the Westphalian sovereignty of the contemporary nation state are increasingly dominated by extensive modes of surveillance and necropolitical technics, the question of sovereignty as such is thrust to the fore. At the same time, technological and computational advancements have created the possibility of truly decentralized and uncapturable modes of self-determination and administration, thus, in some ways, fulfilling Foucault’s dream of a “socialist art of government” – a bureaucracy that cannot fall prey to fascism. What are the contemporary guiding concepts necessary to navigate this technical arms race between state and society? How does the way we conceive of the history of technics play into this?

 

The Human and the State

• How might political philosophy conceive of the “state of exception” in a manner that does not presume it to be a prerogative of the state? What recourse do civil society and sovereign persons have in the face of state insistence on the exception?

• In what ways might Öcalan’s democratic confederalism contribute to a reformulation and expansion of non-statist political theory and practice (Proudhon, Thoreau, Bookchin, Spooner, Tucker, Rothbard, etc.)?

• As David Nirenberg, Director of the Institute for Advanced Study, recently said, we “…need a better understanding of the human if we are to survive. If the human is not entirely reducible to logic or algorithm, then that understanding cannot come from mathematics and technology alone. What quests for knowledge can produce it? What kinds of inquiries, collaborations, and research institutions are necessary if humanity is to ‘keep pace’?”