Date: Fri, 18 Sep 1998 06:16:40 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: AUT: psychobabble, misrepresentations, & mythology  


Harry wrote:

> > "In his attempt to critique Marcuse and the Frankfurt school, Negri's
> > American protege, Harry Cleaver, asserts a military analogy, certainly in
> > a context in which it is normal to stifle independent thought. Remarkably,
> > he draws on the movie Patton to develop a critique of the Frankfurt
> > school: 
> >   If Patton had read that book of his declared opponent [Rommel] the way
> >   Critical Theorists read bourgeois authors, he would still have been   
> >   sitting in his quarters writting "critiques" of this point or that when
> >   Rommel  rolled over him with his army. 
> >   Cleaver's reliance on the military analogy is a projection of his
> > masculine identity onto the "working class" and a perversion of the
> > revolutionary project into a simple question of brute force" 
> > Pg 232 
 
> Thano: What can I say but that I burst out laughing at the above remarks,
> first at the notion that I am Toni's "protege" and then at his
> dismissive non-response to the use of Patton. If this is a
> sample of the quality of his work, it doesn't sound like its worth the
> trouble.

If it makes you feel any better, I *did* laugh when I read the above. What
psychobabble! On a more serious note, though, I believe it is symptomatic
of the style of discourse --  distorting the perspectives of the ones who
one is engaged in political arguments with -- that has become so
commonplace for (most) all those on the Left. In addition to other
objections that could be made, it is a waste of (everyone's) time. Isn't
there too little time to be discussing and acting on the real issues for
us to continually waste our time responding to misrepresentations?

> As I said in a previous posting, Negri's focus on work is largely based on
> his understanding that being capital's basic means of domination many
> other forms of domination are articulated through it. HOWEVER, it is also
> true that in COMMUNISTS LIKE US and then in THE LABOR OF DIONYSUS Toni
> has so focused on work/labor as the nexus through which working class
> subjectivity moves toward communism as to begin to sound a lot like
> traditional productivist orthodox Marxism. The "struggle against work"
> which figured so prominantly in Italian New Left theory and politics seems
> to have been replaced, at least to some degree, by something very much
> like the old notion of the appropriation/transformation of work. I
> remember at a conference he organized in Paris in 1992 he asked me at one
> point "what's your problem with work?" So little am I Toni's protege that
> I published in the Italian journal Vis a Vis a critique of this drift in
> his writing --a journal (now defunct) that I understand he was quite
> displeased with. 

Another popular myth concerning autonomists (of which I am not one) is
that they represent some unified, monolithic perspective. Ha! Perhaps some
on the Left find it hard to conceive of a "school of thought" (a clearly
inadequate term to grasp the nature of autonomists' writings and actions)
which does not have a hegemonic perspective and authority (e.g. a Lenin,
Trotsky, Stalin, Mao who can be quoted to resolve a debate). 

Jerry



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