Date: Fri, 18 Sep 1998 23:55:35 +1000
Subject: Re: AUT: re: grundrisse etc discussion


Harry M. Cleaver wrote:
 
 
> Angela: no Angela 1) I did not accuse anyone of having any particular
> motivation and if you don't have those, why imagine that I did? 2) What I
> have done was to think outloud about various apparent motivations I have
> seen, or have thought I have seen, in various interventions on various
> lists. Including this one. There have been people who have come, blasted
> virtually every aspect of the ideas of the founders of this list,
> sometimes in rather ugly ways, and then departed, leaving a bad taste in
> the mouth.  I had absolutely no problem with my discussion with Haines,
> nor, I believe, did he. Similarly, I have no problem with my current
> discussion with Rakesh who is quite polite and well spoken. 


harry, harry harry... no i did not feel interpellated, which is why it
was posed as a question for clarification rather that as a leap into
defensiveness.

it seemed to me at times that when i (too) mused out loud about my
misgivings with either particular people's positions (ie., negri) or
with what i see as the drift of autonomist positions (which is evident
in the way i HAVE seen them received by some people who have read some
of this stuff here) or theoretical assumptions (ie., subjectivism) that
you read this too often as a criticism of your own stuff, or are too
ready to dismiss it on the grounds that you beleive it has already been
dealt with (or transcended?). maybe i was wrong.  maybe i wasn't. i
thought and still do, that the reception of a certain position, the ways
in which it takes on a life, is a responsibilty of those who write from
that position, not in an absolute sense, but in the limited sense of
clarifying where there have been ambiguities.  an author's intention is
not always an unmediated thing i know, and you might insist that you can
only be held responsible for what you say, but i think the times when,
for example, negri shifts into rhetorical overdrive are those moments
that both make for fun reading and which require
clarification/qualification if not criticism. and, precisely because
they are such fun reading, or really perhaps it is that they make fun
reading because of this, they are at times the passages which are the
least helpful in developing an understanding.

an example of an ambiguity which, read in circumstances perhaps
different to its writing, raises certain difficulties?   

in michael ryan's epilogue of MBM, he summarises: "reformist
organisations...have blocked the continuity of the organisation with the
class.  the new organisation must live the life of the class in an
adequate way. hence, although it is necessary to move from class
composition to organisation, the reverse must also be true"

i agree with the dialectic invoked here.  yet, does this perhaps entail
a certain empiricism, whereby the requirement that the organisation be
'adequate' to the class begs the question of how to confront 'reformist'
working class politics?  is this then what forces negri to describe the
formation of new class subject(s), after the defeats of the 1980s, in
order to retroactively lay claim to such empirical adequacy?  i do not
wish to abandon the insistence on the dialectical relation between class
composition and organisation, but this tended here to slide easily into
an empiricism which, since claims to empirical fidelity so often tend to
be the mask for a kind of idealism, became at times fanciful.  i really
do not have answers, only questions.  i can act AS IF i think i have
answers, and i can act in full knowledge that my answers are prone to
changing because they are shot through with doubts, but i find myself
unable to be so sure of things as you seem to be harry.

however much some of us would wish for these things to be transended
(ie., those endless series of dichotomies: subject, object, positivism,
rationalism, determinism, relativism, etc ad nauseum), i strongly
beleive that these ways of seeing the world are still embedded in many
of the ways we speak of the world and act in it and bring ourselves to
various impasses of both thinking and action.  (eg., padova item that
was posted recently expresses a dissatisfaction with the injunction to
optimism for a time when matters seem to many quite pessimistic) these
dichtomies are still a struggle that has not been overcome - we cannot
distance ourselves fom them however much we might be frustrated at them
or have a critique of them. and, i think it does damage to those
elements of, say negri's work, which i like, ie., a political analyisis
of the 'economic categories'.  this also entails a politicisation of
philosophical categories, which is not then an abstract squabble, but a
real stake in the struggle to transform our world.  

negri in his more cartesian moments? if not entirely, then surely the
issue of consciousness, or the group as conscious subject, is here
depicted as decisive: "reality is transformed continually and draws into
its movement the antagonism of COLLECTIVE FORCES that KNOWINGLY exercise
power" (MBM, p56) 



> So, don't take offense and let's get on with it. OK?
> 
> Harry


ditto harry and by all means. let's, 
angela.


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