Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 12:04:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Bryan N. Alexander" <bnalexan-AT-umich.edu>
Subject: autovalorization


This term - autovalorization - is becoming increasingly useful among some 
of us.  
	
 	We have been discussing it in terms of a self-giving of value 
(clearly in a Nietzschean sense), as well as a rhizomatics (Deleuzian - not 
imposed from above, nor the product of a positional lattice of power), 
and a localism (hard to imagine autoval. extending beyond, say, a city or 
small region for any length of time.
	It became a practical notion during a brief instruction-staff 
strike here last April, when, on our own, we created a temporary zone 
defined by our notions of meaning and value.  Our teaching appeared 
clearly as our product, not the extenson of a University's will, and a 
product of specific *labor*.

	We've been having a hard time tracking down good sources, so our 
ideas are largely from a few cites, or out of our heads.  Negri mentions 
this very briefly in the few texts we have.  Newell's intro to THE POLITICS OF
SUBVERSION describes autoval.: "Like the Spinozian conatus, autoval. increases
the power of the struggle and widens the separation of work from capital.  It 
is the concept which allows the unificatio of various kinds of behavior 
under one category: the refusal to work, the refusal of orders, the 
reappropriation of time and use-values..." (32)
	Negri touches on this himself, I think, when discussing how "the more 
the process - on the capitalist side - proceeds from the real to the ideal, the
 more - on the side of the society of the workers and of productive cooperation
 - the 
machine of a constitution of the mechanism proceeds from the ideal to the 
real, and from the lack of determination to the maximum of 
singularization (or to put it in simple terms, *from resistance to 
appropriation, from reappropriation to self-organization*).  In short 
this is a journey through the various figures of 
*self-valorization*."(137-8)  
This clearly has enormous significance, and danger:  "The maximum of ideal 
insistence is the state of resistance, whereas the maximum of real 
determination consists in the singularization of the processes of 
cooperation and in 
placing them at the service of an effective utopia, entirely subjugated 
by the singulairites - the communist disutopia [why not dystopia?]." (138)
	We see another, more purely (or oppositionally) negative version 
of this in MARX BEYOND MARX.  "Capital appears as a force of expansion, 
as production and reproduction, and always as command.  *Valorization is 
a continuous and totalitarian process*, it knows neither limit nor 
repose.  Labor is so dominated in the process of valorization that its 
autonomy seems reduced in all cases to an extreme limit, to the reduction 
of nonexistence... In the process of valorization, capital conquers a 
totalitarian subjectivity of command." (76) (On  77 we see this is 
reproduction, on 117 as key strategy)

	We plan to read SAVAGE ANOM. this month for more on 
autovalorization.  Does anyone have any comments, suggestions, ideas for 
other areas/sources?  We're novices, and this concept seems infinitely 
suggestive and powerful.  Thanks.



Bryan Alexander					Department of English
email: bnalexan-AT-umich.edu			University of Michigan
phone: (313) 764-0418				Ann Arbor, MI  USA    48103
fax: (313) 763-3128				http://www.umich.edu/~bnalexan



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