Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1998 16:41:21 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Re: AUT: re: grundrisse etc discussion


My apologies for the delay in sending this out. It got lost in my
"postponed mail" file and I just found it. Harry


On Fri, 18 Sep 1998, angela mitropoulos wrote:

> 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?).

Angela: I haven't particularly felt critiqued by recent conversations, but
I have sometimes felt that your interpretatons/critiques, of Toni let's
say, have involved a process of hypothesizing what was mean through a
process of looking at a statement through a different context than the one
in which the statement was generated. A kind of "in such and such
circumstances this could be taken as meaning...." Sometimes I think such
exercizes are warranted but often involve such an extraction from context
as to make accurate interpretation impossible.

>  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.  

Angela: I happen to be very much in agreement with this and have found any
number of (especially) European intellectuals to be unconcerned at the
difficulties others have in understanding what they have written. Toni is
one who is guilty of writing in a style, even in Italian, which many find
impenetrable. He has been reproached about this many times and has, I
think, actually become MORE readable over time despite his dismissal of
the charges. In the Red Notes Collection on the Working Class and Crisis
there is an interview with Toni about this issue which is quite
off-putting frankly.

> 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.

Angela: I know what you mean; the same problem exists in reading/decoding
Marx. The fundamentalists who take every word literally and do no discount
for rhetorical "overdrive" as you put it have produced absolutely horrible
interpretations of his work. Unfortunately, to be able to cut through the
rhetoric you need real familiarity with enough of an author's work to have
your interpretations informed by many separate readings and a sense of the
development of the ideas. A lot of work.
> 
> an example of an ambiguity which, read in circumstances perhaps
> different to its writing, raises certain difficulties?   

Angela: "read in circumstances perhaps different to its writing" was what
I was talking about before. One thing about this kind of work, it seems to
me, is that we are always involved in at least two kinds of operations:
figuring out the meaning of arguments IN the circumstances in which they
were composed and then also trying to see if they are useful in other
circumstances. It's what we do with Marx and everyone else.

> 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"

Angela: One warning about Michael's postscript, he tends to attribute all
kinds of ideas to Negri that did not originate with him but elsewhere in
the movement of which Negri was a part. His sketch of Negri's work is very
useful, especially the parts that cover untranslated works, but for anyone
familiar with the literature and history, it's somewhat one-sided; too
many other significant figures slide silently into the shadows. Steve
needs to publish his dissertation because it provides an excellent and
balanced study of lots of important figures of the time.

> 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? 

Angela: I don't think so. This argument was laid out in some detail by
Sergio Bologna in a piece called "Class Composition and the Theory of the
Party in the German Workers Council MOvement" which took on the tendency
of orthodox Marxists to adopt a singular "best" form of organization,
especially the Leninist Party or the Social Democratic Party. The essay is
not apriori but examines how different class compositions "threw up"
different forms of organization more or less "adequate" to the complex of
forces in which they were crafted. (I hate the word "adequate" because it
seems to say a lot and really says very little; same for "inadequate".)
Bologna argued that the differences between these two party forms (which
he also juxtaposed to the Wobblies) had more in common than usually
recognized and were, neither one of them "adequate" to a Fordist class
composition, e.g., post-war Italy. So the historical analysis was being
used precisely to critique the Socialist and Communist Parties with their
"reformist" politics/policies. 

> 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?  

Angela: I don't understand why you put your question in this manner. I
think Toni's work, and that of autonomists more generally over the last 30
years, has sought to come to grips first, with the way the class
composition of the post war period came to be able to rupture the
Keynesian state or planner-state followed second by an assessment of the
severity of the capitalist counterattack and third by an attempt to
understand the changing character of the class composition in this period
of attack and counterattack, of success and defeat on various terrains and
in various dimensions.

I understand neither the question about him being "forced" (when it is
his explicit research project to understand the evolution of working
class subjectivity) nor the question about his "retroactively lay[ing] 
claim to such empirical adequacy" which sounds rather pejorative to say
the least. In the period that Negri was in exile in Paris this research
was at the very center of his work, both personal and in collaboration
with others involved in Futur Anterieur.

> 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, 

Angela: WHERE do you see "this" "sliding into empiricism"? In what texts?
And do you consider Franco's discourse on this kind of research
"empiricist"? Also note that within autonomia, as I wrote earlier, the
"dialectic" you mention above, between class composition and organization,
came to be seen as a problem, as involving a closure which cut off all
possibility of finding organizational forms able to rupture capital
once and for all.

> since claims to empirical fidelity so often tend to
> be the mask for a kind of idealism, became at times fanciful.  

Angela: This is one of those kind of statements in which you bring in some
undesirable action from some other arena as a "possible" problem but
without showing or arguing that such a sin applies in the particular case
under consideration. It comes across like a kind of "guilt through
rhetorical association".

> 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.
> 

Angela: I think our rhetorics are more different than our attitudes toward
what we think we know and what we are not sure about. Added to this is
that we've fallen into a kind of repartee in which you are "on the attack"
--even if only by raising questions-- and I have been trying to answer the
questions or question their applicability vis a vis the people and ideas
under consideration. The ways of speaking that we have adopted are not
surprising given these two different roles.

> 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.  
> 
Angela: I certainly agree that these things are part of the work we have
to do, just as it has been a part of the work others have been doing for a
long time. Disentangling one's self/politics/theory from the dead weight
of the past while preserving what is worth preserving is no easy thing.

> 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) 
> 

Angela: The passage you quote above appears within the context of a
discussion of theoretical method, more particularly Toni's fourth
criterion of the "displacement" of the research. The "knowing" "exercise
of power" includes the reformulation of theory and research within the
antagonistic recomposition of history. The issue of consciousness is
raised within this (hardly Cartesian) discourse on method with reference
to "displacement" and "decisive" only with reference to this. Clearly Toni
--as a Marxist-- has an obvious interest in the "consciousness" dimenision
of struggle; but that interest is quite different from the old notion that
the presence or non presence of "class consciousness" is the final
determinant of the class struggle. Toni has also demonstrated, as have
othes, interest in the "consciousness" of capital as expressed by its
theoreticians and policy makers, e.g., Schumpeter, Keynes, etc., but
hardly treats that "consciousness" as THE "decisive" factor in the
dynamics of the struggle.

<snip>

Harry
............................................................................
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173  USA
Phone Numbers: (hm)  (512) 478-8427
               (off) (512) 475-8535   Fax:(512) 471-3510
E-mail: hmcleave-AT-eco.utexas.edu
Cleaver homepage: 
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html
Chiapas95 homepage:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html
Accion Zapatista homepage:
http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
............................................................................




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