The key difference is around strategy. Lennard's line in what I quoted is that by participating in the Occupy actions people have changed the way they interact with one another and how they feel, and that this is a path to changing social relations more broadly. (Is this a misinterpretation?) My question was how this is supposed to happen - by accretion, simply by more and more people joining the protests? The opposing line is that changing social relations more broadly is not primarily about internal relations among the protesters, or their individual feelings, but about communicating with a broad range of people where they are at and engaging strategically with political structures.
>
> but I don't think you've accurately characterized what she's saying:
> she's talking about physically, materially enacting a politics. (is
> this what Eric B means by biopolitics? I never understand that
> language...)
We have different definitions of 'material' - I don't think it is a synonym for 'physical'. And 'physically enacting a politics' seems like a category error. Sure, there are physical aspects to politics, but you can't understand social relations simply in terms of direct physical relations - doing physical things in the physical space of Zuccotti Park matters only through its mediation over various networks, interpretations and responses.
> Regardless, Natasha's is a thoroughly materialist vision of social
> change as political practice. Ideas change in the process of putting
> your ass on the line trying to change the society you live in. The
> idealism problem rests with the rest of the folks in the room,
> unfortunately.
See, I just don't think this version of 'materialism' is useful - the idea that there is some social domain that can be abstracted from ideas, which is prior to ideas, and which determines ideas. Ideas are material; there is no social interaction that is not thoroughly shot through with thought. The materialism-idealism distinction is not about physical vs. mental. Materialism is a rejection of the idealist view that reality is structured like an Idea, that history can be understood as the changing of a Zeitgeist. It's not about denying that ideas are important or have causal power - just that there is no Idea singular. Ideas have reality both inside peoples heads and even as social structures irreducible to what's in people's heads (discourses). It makes perfect sense to take them into account in your political strategy and, yes, to try and transform them.
The idea that the world will change through the subjective transformation of activists is more idealist than the view that it will take practical engagement with all kinds of discourses that are really out there in the world.
Mike