Antoine
Hennion (MINES Paristech)
Bodies and Things. From ANT to Attachment/Detachment
Attachment does not belong to the vocabulary of action, it cannot be registered in terms of causes, intentions or determinations. It is more like a liability: an obligation from the past that is brought to bear on the present. Except that no one can do the equivalent accounting. Attachments are incommensurable. They are at once indeterminate, constraining and yet strictly linked to situations, deployed in the interlacing where every bond does something, but where none is sufficient on its own. This implies a challenge to the notion of causality to the benefit of a much less tidy set of interactions: fumbling, scraping up against, mutual coaching. Instead of clear distinctions between dependent things and determining ones, we pass to the continuity of a less trenchant but infinitely more productive form of “faire faire”, disseminated in networks.
The essential, then, is not to liberate oneself but to sort the good attachments from the bad, by leaning not on grand overarching principals but on the immanent justice in things. But how can we decide upon the quality of attachment? How do we detach from an attachment, if some are harmful or less good than others? Sportsmen, drug addicts, music lovers only know one manner of proceeding: an obligatory pragmatism. Unable to judge their own action but from the effects produced, they are forced to depart from the present state of bodies and things, operate by trial and error to facilitate displacement and to permit not a liberation, but partial substitutions. They live not a series of mastered choices flowing out of a world of stable objects, but a trajectory made up of withdrawals and retractions of the self, crafting little by little, experience after experience, bodies that are different. Drawing from such cases, my contribution will try and clarify what could be an ‘attached’ morality, a morality of examining trials, in which action and the criteria for action are found within one another from within the fibre of existing ties, risking the production of a discrepancy and attempting an uncertain progression.
