event mechanics

I’ve been reading Michael Polanyi‘s book Personal Knowledge (1958). Some aspects of Polanyi’s work have been popular in organisational studies primarily due to his conceptualisation of ‘tacit knowledge’. I have been reading Polanyi’s work for the purposes of the article I am currently writing on an ‘economy of know-how’. Maybe I’ll write another post engaging with how organisational studies have used Polanyi’s ‘tacit knowledge’, at the moment I need to finish this article I am writing.

The subtitle of the book Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy indicates Polanyi’s general program of locating affirmation as a central element of the discovery and development of scientific knowledge. Indeed, instead of a heuristic of doubt or a suspension of belief, Polanyi argues for a heuristic of passion premised on belief. Although deployed in any number of occasions in his argument the character of passion is a given and is nearly always described in terms of its function. In those occasions where Polanyi does discuss the character of this passion it is largely through analogy with what he calls the inarticulate intellect of animals and also in the context of instinctual drives. Silvan Tomkins’s work on the ‘analog’ ontology of affect as compared to the ‘digital’ ontology of drives enables contemporary readers of Polanyi’s to explicate what Tomkins calls a “co-assembly of affects” as characterizing the motivational drive of the ‘passion’ he describes.

For Polayni, ‘intellectual passion’ is an integral element in the process of scientific discovery and development of scientific knowledge. He argues that “into every act of knowing there enters into a tacit and passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and that this coefficient is no mere imperfection, but a necessary component of all knowledge” (329). The passion coefficient of knowledge is necessary for the process of discovery. In his discussion of explorers , Polanyi describes commitment to belief as an integral element of intellectual passion that is satisfied by discovery. The explorer enjoys a “daring anticipation of reality” (327). He isolates this as the creative dimension of scientific progress, and this creative dimension relies on ‘heuristic passion’:

“We have to cross the logical gap between a problem and its solution by relying on the unspecifiable impulse of our heuristic passion, and must undergo as we do so a change of our intellectual personality. Like all ventures in which we comprehensively dispose of ourselves, such an intentional change of our personality requires a passionate motive to accomplish it. Originality must be passionate.” (151)

Polanyi argues that the gratification of instinctual appetites (hunger, sex and fear) is a manner of verification. There is a parallel to intellectual passions in that “all passions animating and shaping discovery imply a belief in the possibility of a knowledge of which these passions declare the value” (183). That is, Polanyi suggests, a (not infallible) ‘competence’ of intellectual passions is to recognise truth. The satisfaction of intellectual passions is a kind of verification of discovery, as discovery “terminates the problem from which it started” and “leaves behind knowledge” (183). The knowledge is expressed as part of the ongoing development of an “articulate framework” (183).

He argues that the interpretative framework built upon previous discoveries is changed by future discoveries; hence it is “logically impossible to arrive [at future discoveries] by the continued application of our previous interpretative framework” (151). This insight is troubled, however, by his use of ‘recognition’ in the process by which problems are identified:

“To see a problem is a definite addition to knowledge, as much as it is to see a tree, or to see a mathematical proof—or a joke. It is a surmise which can be true or false, depending on whether the hidden possibilities of which it assumes the existence do actually exist or not. To recognize a problem which can be solved and is worth solving is in fact a discovery in its own right.” (127)

There is a contradiction of discovery based on ‘recognition’. This is not a question of mere semantics, but relates to the functioning of ‘intellectual passion’ itself. Useful here is Deleuze’s development of a post-Kantian philosophy of the Idea as essentially ‘problematic’ instead of ‘regulatory’. That is, without regulatory universality ideas become problematic, and ‘recognition’ in the way Polanyi discusses it here is no longer straightforward. Polanyi himself argues that radical manifestations of this process of breaking with conceptual frameworks dissolves a “screen” between us and things and in doing so dissolves the subjective into experience itself as a form of radical contemplation distinct to our normative experience of experience: “as observers or manipulators of experience we are guided by experience and pass through experience without experiencing it in itself” (209). Perception itself is co-assembled though experience…

Polanyi is primarily concerned with the freedom of intellectual passion necessary for scientific discovery. There is an “essential restlessness” of the human mind expressed through the scientist in terms of pondering new problems and discovering solutions to them (209), but it is not only the scientist that enjoys that satisfaction of discovery. The scientist, in Polanyi’s analysis, is concerned with the “natural order,” while another, for example, the technician or technologist, although working within a similar framework of discovery, has a far more focused heuristic passion.

“He follows the intimations, not of a natural order, but of a possibility for making things work in a new way for an acceptable purpose, and cheaply enough to show a profit. In feeling his way towards new problems, in collecting clues and pondering perspectives, the technologist must keep in mind a whole panorama of advantages and disadvantages which the scientist ignores. He must be keenly susceptible to people’s wants and able to assess the price at which they would be prepared to satisfy them. A passionate interest in such momentary constellations is foreign to the scientist, whose eye is fixed on the inner law of nature.” (188)

The constellation of interests organized around the focused heuristic passion of the technician is in part determined by the set of material advantages afforded by a technology; what Polanyi calls a technology’s “operational principle”: the rules by which a technology “teaches us actions undertaken for material advantages” if we “imputed [in the technologist] the purpose of achieving the consequence of this action” (186). My interest is in ‘know how’ which describes a form of knowledge that engages with such ‘operational principles’ and their material instantiation in a particular technological state of affairs. Unlike the knowledge of qualified technicians however, ‘know-how’ is the accumulation of partial understandings, but full appreciations of such “operational principles”. I call ‘enthusiasm’ the heuristic passion that is in-acted as a constituent element of the experience of discovering the operative principles of technology.

Over the weekend I led a session as part of a workshop camp training youth media advocates for ReachOut.com. ReachOut.com is an advocacy group that seeks to raise awareness about issues relating to youth mental health and suicide, and is part of Inspire.org.au. I was very happy to donate my Saturday morning and the couple of days it took to put together my session. Like most people, I’ve had some personal experience with a loved one struggling to overcome the ‘black dog’. It has been good to see depression and mental health issues receive proper media attention over the last few years as struggles with mental health issues transcend social and cultural boundaries.

In my session I introduced the youth advocates to the concept of a ‘complex media environment’. It builds on well established concepts within media studies from key figures such as Marshall “The medium is the message” McLuhan (see this video of McLuhan in Australia from ABC Open) and Neil “Media Ecology” Postman. The key outcome from my session was to get the advocates to realise that as media advocates they are no longer simply ‘consumers’ of media content, but nor are they properly ‘producers’ within the media industry. Instead, they are somewhere in between, what I described as being ‘operators’.

ReachOut.com’s own media advocacy kit for the workshop was put together (EDIT: 13/12/11) under the direction of co-manager Nathalie Swainston by Phoebe Netto and it is a brilliant practical guide for working with journalists and other content producers within the media industry. For example, it presents the well known values of news worthiness (timeliness, proximity, impact, etc) in an inverted form so media advocates know how to position their message so as to be useful for journalists working on producing a story.

I built on the media advocacy kit by reaching out to the youth media advocates’ existing mode of engagement with the media — as mostly ‘crticial consumers’ — to point out ways this could be extended and intensified so as to spot and plan for ‘opportunities’ for their message. I focused on two methods for doing this. The first involves working within the constraints of the journalistic ‘news cycle’ and also tracking the rhythm of the media activities of other social institutions, such as governmental authorities or the NGO sector publishing relevant reports.

The second involves appreciating the strucutral dimensions of the media industry. The commercial media industry basically operates as an ‘apparatus of capture’: it produces content so as to ‘capturre’ an audience, and then sell this audience to advertisers (or others). The questions the media advocates need to work through are, what sort of audience can I help produce and who would want the traffic/metrics/listeners/viewers/readership that my message can help deliver? The session after mine was delivered by the lovely and talented Pheobe Netto (who also took the phone camera snap above during my presentation!) and it was about the practical skills of crafting one’s media message. The ‘complex’ bit of the ‘complex media environment’ comes from the structural changes that the Australian media industry has undergone over the last decade or so. There are increased opportunities for engagement for those with the necessary skills to turn out good copy for many media outlets.

One of the qualities of this complex media enviroment that I discussed in my session was the way media stories can cascade across multiple channels and platforms. Most people are familiar with the concept of an ‘echo chamber’, but a more general example of a similar phenomenon is the way various media outlets will pay attention to what other media outlets are reporting on. This doesn’t only happen amongst competitors (or ‘co-opetitors’) but also sub-jacently related channels, such as local radio stories picked up by larger ‘talkback’ radio, picked up by print journalist, picked up by TV journalists, etc.

I think it was a very good day and the feedback I’ve received from participants is that they found my session to be very productive.

Ex-Prime Minister, Paul Keating, has had a number of news pieces recently published about his career and work in light of his new book After Words. His invocation of Kant is absolutely striking. Can you imagine any contemporary political leader drawing intellectual inspiration from Kant?

Keating is isolating the tension between modernist, rational scientific progress and the passion — what Kant called Enthusiasm — required to mobilise a population so as to achieve the challenges posed by progress. He suggests that:

The great changes in civilisation and society have been wrought by deeply held beliefs and passion rather than by a process of rational deduction.

And, furthermore:

[The] greater part of human aspiration has been informed by individual intuition and privately generated passions, more than it has through logic or scientific revelation. [...]
When passion and reason vie with each other, the emerging inspiration is invariably deeper and of an altogether higher form. One is able to knit between them, bringing into existence an overarching unity – a coherence – which fidelity to the individual strands cannot provide.

Another way to frame Keating’s Kantianism is in terms of a positive view of aesthetics in politics. Benjamin and others were deeply suspicious of the aestheticisation of politics as they argued it inevitably lead to fascism. Keating’s remarks do not advocate an ‘aestheticisation of politics’, but neither does Keating follow Schiller in advocating for Spieltrieb (or the ‘play drive’ or ‘play impulse’) over industrious enterprise. Rather, if we turn to Schiller’s text from which Keating derives his opening quote “On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters” we see that Schiller is exploring a tension between the impetus of political action, as an expression of freedom, derived from ‘laws’ as compared to those derived from ‘forces’ both at the level of society and the individual:

The misfortune of his brothers, of the whole species, appeals loudly to the heart of the man of feeling; their abasement appeals still louder; enthusiasm is inflamed, and in souls endowed with energy the burning desire aspires impatiently to action and facts. But has this innovator examined himself to see if these disorders of the moral world wound his reason, or if they do not rather wound his self-love? If he does not determine this point at once, he will find it from the impulsiveness with which he pursues a prompt and definite end. A pure, moral motive has for its end the absolute; time does not exist for it, and the future becomes the present to it directly, by a necessary development, it has to issue from the present. To a reason having no limits the direction towards an end becomes confounded with the accomplishment of this end, and to enter on a course is to have finished it.

Schiller is in part talking about ‘self-interest’ (wounded self love) and the circular logic of applying reason to ‘definite ends’, that is, of an inability to think or imagine beyond the horizon of possibilities that consitute the current political juncture.

Schiller is also in part talking about Kant himself. In an earlier section of his letters, immediately before the passage quoted by Keating (in a slightly different translation of “On the Aesthetic Education of Man“), Schiller describes Kant’s reaction to the French Revolution, in part, as having a ‘noble enthusiasm for the weal of humanity’:

How tempting it would be for me to investigate such a subject in company with one who is as acute a thinker as he is a liberal citizen of the world! And to leave the decision to a heart which has dedicated itself with such noble enthusiasm to the weal of humanity. What an agreeable surprise if, despite all difference in station, and the vast distance which the circumstances of the actual world make inevitable, I were, in the realm of ideas, to find my conclusions identical with those of a mind as unprejudiced as your own! That I resist this seductive temptation, and put Beauty before Freedom, can, I believe, not only be excused on the score of personal inclination, but also justified on principle. I hope to convince you that the theme I have chosen is far less alien to the needs of our age than to its taste. More than this: if man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to Freedom. But this cannot be demonstrated without my first reminding you of the principles by which Reason is in any case guided in matters of political legislation.

Beyond a politics derived from the legislation of reason, is a conception of understanding derived from the interplay of ‘nature’ and ‘reason’ within which dwells ‘aesthetics’. (Steven Shaviro has been discussing this for a number of years.) Keating expresses this in some of the closing remarks in his interview with Paul Kelly of The Australian:

This is not to say that rationalism isn’t important and good. It is. But left to itself without the guidance of higher meaning and a higher concept, rationalism can be mean and incomplete. I say if you simply live on rational policy and briefing notes you are not sufficiently informed.
You need a higher calling or some inner system of belief – here I mention Kant and the inner command that tells you what is true, what is right, what is good. The inner command must be the divining construct in what you do.

For a leader, then, the challenge is one of guidance. For a population being lead it is a question of enthusiasm — not in a quasi-fascistic manner that celebrates violence against protesters, for example — by an enthusiasm inflamed in a population so that the population mobilises to faces the challenges of a future articulated by political leaders. A compromise to maintain leadership, with no sense of what challenges need to be engaged with by a leadership or a population, is what we have at the moment. To appropriate Marx, current generations make their own progress, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from a possible future that they are striving towards.

Shay O’Reilly has an article on the Campus Progress online media outlet that critiques comments made by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker magazine about the role of social media in social protests and movements more generally. O’Reilly points out that the Occupy Wall Street and now Occupy Everywhere protests have disproved Gladwell’s dismissive critique of the role of social media in social protests. O’Reilly notes that Gladwell was down on social media having a productive role in protests and social movements because of two main reasons.

O’Reilly mostly focuses on the question of structure. Gladwell suggests that 1960s-era civil rights protests and the broader movement had a strong top-down organisation, while internet-based movements by their nature are mostly horizontal with no central organisational structure. Second and relatedly, that social media, like most if not all internet-based social relations are based on ‘weak ties’. There are no strong social ties between participants in a ‘social media revolution’ because online relations are normally impersonal. Drawing on the research of Doug McAdam, Gladwell notes that many of the protesters in the civil rights movement had strong social ties based on actual personal connections to those who suffered civil rights injustices:

What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam compared the Freedom Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed, and discovered that the key difference wasn’t, as might be expected, ideological fervor. “All of the applicants—participants and withdrawals alike—emerge as highly committed, articulate supporters of the goals and values of the summer program,” he concluded. What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement. All the volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts—the people they wanted kept apprised of their activities—and participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi. High-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.

What O’Reilly does not engage with is the question of risk that Gladwell raises. I want to suggest that the dichotomy between high risk protest and low risk participation that Gladwell isolates as typifying most historical social mmovement protests versus most contemporary online social movement participation is actually spot on. What is remarkable about the Occupy Wall Street protests is not that the ‘internets’ have somehow produced an effective mode of protest, but that the risks involved in the esculation of protest from low-risk online participation (‘liking’ a social movement on Facebook, for example) into actual high-risk toe-to-toe in-the-street vaulting-the-barricades mobilisation have now become risks worth taking for the majority of participants.

The protests are symptomatic of a US and broader neoliberal social structure whereby the average middle-class citizen is burdened with far greater risk than of previous generations. In the past, including the civil rights era as described by Gladwell, black populations were already at-risk in the sense of not being able to enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities as their white fellow citizens. The solidarity of white citizens was a leap of faith and a salutatory call to fighting against structural injustice. The ‘New Deal’ era of corporations and government assuming most of the social risks assumed by everyone living in a capitalist society have now largely been rolled back. The average US citizen accepts are greater degree of risk relative to the elite (the ’1%’) in fundamental or even ‘universal’ areas of social life, including health care and employment security. It means that US society has been transformed to such a degree that the everyday risks experienced as an average citizen are now so large that after weighing up the risks of protests against the structural risks they assume because of the social structure, the protesters have decided to accept the risks of protests as the lesser risk.

The ‘social ties’ argument comes into it when those who do not share the same burden of structural risk (white youths in the civil rights movement era, or ‘successfully’ employed, health care-equipped and owner-occupier housed professionals and workers in the contemporary era) join with those who are at-risk in the name of justice and solidarity. This leap of faith was described by Immanuel Kant as ‘enthusiasm’. He ‘shared’ the enthusiasm of those participants in the French Revolution. The Revolution was a ‘sign of history’ and participants were mobilised by ‘strenuous’ affects enjoined with an idea (of the ‘French Republic’) that did not exist yet. It was a leap of faith and a leap of collective imagination. The ideals of the Republic, which are also shared to a large extent with the US, had to be created through force of will and determination. Participants in the revolution were organised in relation to this collective challenge. I would therefore argue against sociologists looking for necessary social links between protest participants and instead point to a willingness to mobilise to engage with and hopefully overcome shared (or ‘universal’) challenges as a key characteristic of social movement enthusiasm.

To conclude by way of a fantastic tangent: I don’t imagination that the protests will end until the government and those that benefit from the current unjust, unequal distribution of risk correct their ways to make it more equitable. I am not sure that will happen, however, until those living in a globalised West realise that their middle-class lifestyles are gradually being off-shored as their jobs are being out-sourced and just as they want a more equitable distribution of risk, those in developing countries are desperate for a more equitable distribution of opportunity. The workers in developing nations are being used as a weapon to leverage subservience from workers in developed countries. To correct this could take generations.

In Bruno Latour’s now relatively famous paper “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” he launches into a scathing critique of most of the methodology that defines cultural studies:

When naive believers are clinging forcefully to their objects, claiming that they are made to do things because of their gods, their poetry, their cherished objects, you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naive believers are thus inflated by some belief in their own importance, in their own projective capacity, you strike them by a second uppercut and humiliate them again, this time by showing that, whatever they think, their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don’t see, but that you, yes you, the never sleeping critic, alone can see. Isn’t this fabulous? Isn’t it really worth going to graduate school to study critique?
[...]
One thing is clear, not one of us readers would like to see our own most cherished objects treated in this way.

Now some contemporary thinkers embrace this line and turn their attention to ‘objects’ so as to resuscitate the dignity of objecthood. Objects can no longer be defined as a function of relation with subjects, they say. Perhaps they are concerned about their own existence as relatively powerless, but functioning objects in various social systems? By discovering the dignity of objects they will also discover dignity for themselves?

I turned in a different direction for the argument in my dissertation, which having completed now four years ago is practically historical in relation to my current thinking. As I was dealing with enthusiast cultures that organized around cars I did not want to fall into the trap of a neo-Freudian account of enthusiast practice that reproduced the fetishistic dimensions of enthusiast engagement. This was an intellectual decision, as it would have been too easy to follow this ‘common sense’ neo-Freudian line of scholarship.

Instead I turned to investigating enthusiasm itself. What is it about ‘enthusiasm’ that mobilizes enthusiast bodies into action? I still don’t know. I focused more on the event-based structure of enthusiasm, that which produced a processual cadence essentialized by Latour above as ‘cherishing’. I thought about enthusiasm as an event, a virtual structure of relations differentially repeated with any number of different objects and subjects. The motor for this event was not ‘in’ the objects or the subjects, but the process of becoming-together between the contingencies of challenges that mobilized enthusiasts into action as enthusiast practice and affective contours that constitute the enthusiast habitus and encourage communication across them as they are activated in positive and negative ways. ‘Positive’ and ‘negative’ in the sense of scholarship on affect where positive affections increase one’s capacity to act, while negative affections diminish one’s capacity to act. Enthusiasm is a positive affection.

Enthusiasts would dismantle, modify and repair the ‘black box’ of the automobile. They would produce an experience-based practical knowledge — ‘know-how’ — deployed to overcome challenges and establish a reputation in subcultural and masculine economies of respect. The contingencies that characterized the challenges of enthusiast practice could also be regarded as ‘problems’ for non-enthusiasts. A challenge is not an object; it is a virtual and processual structure characterized by the limit of understanding of the enthusiast, but one that is open to the future. A challenge is not yet a problem as the translation of the singular coordinates of a challenge into that of a problem means that the processual structure of the challenge has been conditioned into possibilities for solution. A challenge becomes a problem in discourse and in a backformed comprehension of the possibilization of the contingency into a field of solutions. (Massumi describes something similar, but not the same, with sport and play in Parables of the Virtual.) This is why ‘know-how’ is acquired by doing and maybe showing, but definitely not by talking or teaching in any conventional sense (unless ‘talking’ or ‘teaching’ are constituent elements of a specific challenge). Deleuze described a somewhat archaic version of this process when he argued that the Stoic sage “identifies” with the quasi-cause:

The Stoic sage “identifies” with the quasi-cause, sets up shop at the surface, on the straight line which traverses it, or at the aleatory [contingent] point which traces of travels this line. The sage is like the archer. However, this connection with the archer should not be understood as a moral metaphor of intention, as Plutarch suggests, by saying that the Stoic sage is supposed to do everything, for the sake of attaining the end. One rather acts in order to have done all that which depending on one in order to attain the end. Such a rationalization implies a late interpretation, one which is hostile to Stoicism. The relation to the archer is closer to Zen: the bowman must reach the point where the aim is also not the aim, that is to say, the bowman himself; where the arrow flies over its straight line while creating its own target; where the surface of the target is also the line and the point, the bowman, the shooting of the arrow, and what is shot at. This is the oriental Stoic will as proairesis. The sage waits for the event, that is to say, understands the pure event in its eternal truth, independently of its spatio-temporal actualization, as something eternally yet-to-come and always already passed according to the line of the Aion. But, as the same time, the sage also wills the embodiment and the actualization of the pure incorporeal event in a state of affairs and in his or her own body and flesh. (146)

In a sense (pun intended), Deleuze’s description of the Zen-like actualization of the archer and his attendant technologies of archery is when he is at his most Foucauldian. Foucault’s ‘discourse events’ are the spatio-temporal actualization of a pure event that defines the limits of intelligibility and authority as it is distributed into what is sayable and what is visible for a given body of knowledge. Foucault made this discovery in the archive, where the processual dimension was already backformed into discourse. Michel de Certeau repeats this while discussing what he calls ‘know-how’ in the Practice of Everyday Life for non-discursive situations. The on-going process of actualization that produces a distribution of subjects and objects and normative subject-object relations is the ‘grid’ that Deleuze discusses in the Fold as always already intervening in chaos. While this is all very interesting, I am sure, it seems to have even less relevance for contemporary thought than does a rigorous if futile investigation into the dignity of objects.

Kant’s discussion of enthusiasm is interesting at this point and perhaps more so is Lyotard’s discussion of Kantian enthusiasm. I don’t mean the version of Kant’s enthusiasm that is most commonly discussed with regards to Kant’s positive comments about the enthusiasm of spectators for the French revolution as proof of the moral judgment of the revolution as ‘good’. I mean in the context of Lyotard’s interpretation of a practical rationality that relies on enthusiasm as its impetus for ‘striving’. Enthusiasm signals a failure of ideas, it triggers an inflammation in the powers of imagination to overcome this failure. The concept of enthusiasm I developed many years ago extracts the virtual coordinates of this process as the processual differential repetition of the enthusiast body as it continually encounters challenges.

Of course, the Enlightenment project in part was defined by the work of Kant and others to rescue ‘rationality’ from all kinds of mystical and religious enthusiasms. The contradiction is that we need enthusiasm so as to achieve great things. Hence the problem, recast slightly, of the critique of critique. It was meant to be self-evident once the limits of rationality and conditions of possibility had been sufficiently laid out; the ‘naive’ believers (as Latour calls them) would simply come to their Enlightened sense. Instead critique itself poses a challenge that is not simply overcome with enthusiasm, the challenge posed by critique serves as another opportunity to differentially repeat enthusiasm itself. Witness political discourse, no minds change, only banal discriminations performatively reproduce themselves.

I don’t agree with Latour’s solution: “a multifarious inquiry launched with the tools of anthropology, philosophy, metaphysics, history, sociology to detect how many participants are gathered in a thing to make it exist and to maintain its existence. Objects are simply a gathering that has failed — a fact that has not been assembled according to due process.” Should we treat all enthusiasts of a given reality, of a given distribution of possibilities, as if they need to resuscitate the dignity of ‘cherished’ objects? No, they are working to actualize a particular world, an entire distribution of subject-object relations. Evangelicals name the Apocalypse as quasi-cause. Harnessing enthusiasm does not involve critique, it involves assembling challenges to mobilize (enthusiast) bodies into action. Increasing their capacity to act, rather than diminishing their capacity to act with ‘solutions’ to their banal everyday problems.

I started writing this post thinking about why Latour’s argument for turning to matters of concern is relevant for journalism, but it became something else. Apologies!