From: "Rowan Wilson" <wilson_rowan-AT-hotmail.com> Subject: RE: AUT: An interesting critique of Negri Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2001 17:28:13 -0000 Hi Chris and all More rambling gibberish from me, i'm afraid (this answer was composed prior to seeing john's piece - apologies for delay, server's been down). Your comments are spot on as usual, and i'll try and deal with them as best i can. DIALECTICS I'm really not qualified to answer for Negri on the subject of dialectics (and certainly i need to read more on it). I was just giving what I understand to be his take on it. I know he's written more on Hegel (particularly some untranslated stuff from the sixties) but I can't say whether his version is a fair representation or not. So with my comments on dialectics it will often be from a rather crude understanding, apologies. ONTOLOGY & METAPHYSICS In Marx's theses on Feuerbach that you quote Marx is keen to make the distinction between idealism and sensuous human activity, practice. In one sense this is all that Negri's ontology is - practice. So although I said that I sometimes see Negri's ontology as a sleight of hand, this quote highlights to me that it can bear scrutiny. To put it another way, does Marx really escape metaphysics with his formulation? As you said 'we have no essence outside of our practical-critical, thoroughly social, practice'. This definition surely carries a metaphysical claim with it and it is inside here that is where I think Negri (and perhaps Foucault and Spinoza) would argue a useful ontology lurks, but not an essence in the debilitating reified sense of a rational core but in an open sense of being as practice. So Negri's ontology is the capacity of creation, of activity, of labour. It is this notion of being - as practice, labour, power that we don't need to negate but develop. This is not to say that history has as its subject 'man' (as Althusser critiqued), whether as individual or as a group of individuals, but that history is moved by collective human activity - and it is by developing this potential that revolutions are created. Remember, no claims are made for being other than it is dynamic, multiple and creative - this is all that is guiding us. This is not to be negated but its reified form is. WHERE DOES CAPITAL COME FROM? This is a tricky one with Negri and I have no firm answer on this. I think the answer might be here: He seems to talk of capital in two different ways: firstly it is limit, the horizon of being, the edge of our human capacities. Secondly it is subject, a force that attacks the subject of labour. As best as I can understand this capital is labour made abstract, reified. But, drawing on Marx, Negri seems to suggest that this abstraction becomes a subject, a subject that develops a logic of its own, a subject that then tries to dominate its producer. However, once it becomes this subject it is separate from being, from dynamic labour. Part of capital's confused strategy is its attempt to separate itself from labour - labour is felt as a limit on its capacities, even though it requires labour to feed off. While it is impossible for capital to separate from labour it seeks to dominate labour by trying to absorb it into capital. The subject of labour experiences this as an attack on itself and is always struggling to finally separate itself from the abstraction, from its reified form - which it can only do by destroying it. So yes - capital does come from labour, but as soon as it reifies it ceases to be labour, but capital. UNHISTORICAL Does Negri's ontology succumb to being unhistorical? This version of ontology does not necessarily suggest that whatever we understand communism might be now (whatever 'positive' content we give this term) could have been created 500 years ago. The fact is that there were oppressive forces at work then and struggles were played out then that have lead us to the current situation. But certainly he wouldn't take the line (as I wouldn't) that we have to go through certain stages of history before we get to the golden age. That's not what you mean is it? But I see your point about the relationship between labour and capital. How is labour to be affected by capital if it seems to be the harbour of all 'good things' (as I rather inadequately expressed it) - if ultimately there is a fundamental distinction between labour and capital? (see above for my tentative discussion of the separation) Well, I guess that capital bends and pushes the multiple forces of labour to its own ends, reducing labour's intensity, but ultimately capital doesn't alter the fundamental tendency of labour to produce, to be different and to be dynamic. But the explosive force of labour resists, and negates the capital relation. Maybe we can then talk of a second level of theory when we talk about the different forms that labour takes (in terms of social worker, etc) throughout history - this form is a result of the conflict between labour and capital. And as each of us are the territory of this struggle then we are certainly embroiled within it. But does negative dialectics successfully answer such huge questions as where does oppression and its reverse ultimately comes from? 'In the beginning was the scream', John Holloway has written - screaming 'no' at ... what? A metaphysical oppression? - Or is the scream of life the metaphysical beginning? Also, you say that capital comes from our subjectivity alienated - does this not suggest an initial moment when the subject was whole, unalienated, and that this then progresses through history to return to being whole again? so where does the alienating power come from? Can any theory really successfully account for the origin of oppression and resistance? COMMUNISM To your fourth comment, i agree that capital assimilates anything but its own destruction - but I suppose Negri would argue against the idea that there is necessarily a moment of destruction. That is, the rupturing of the capital-labour relation is a process - Negri talks of communism as the transition. Agreed also that numerous strands of the class struggle tradition have raised the idea of new forms of prole politics appearing at different moments of struggle. However, there was a tendency to reify such political forms. For instance, if I remember rightly from reading the SI's stuff, one gets the impression that the workers' council is IT: the final form of proletarian politics, the final realisation of communism. And isn't this discussion of political forms of communism a mooting of positivity? A 'yes'?. How can the negation be constructive - where is its affirmation? And if you don't suggest a positive direction how do you know you'll end up somwehere worth going (although, a plan of some form is obviously no guarantee)? But I think Negri's formulation puts the issue of communist politics centre stage without reifying the form. Agreed, there is still that millennial edge in that he argues that only now, now that we produce the means for our social cooperation can we operate without the mediation of the party (something I have problems with). But at least the sense of politics as an ongoing development, the accruing of power, keeps in sight what we are after which is not just not-capital but a world where we define what we want and what we are. Here is the problem with dialectics - as we define ourselves purely by negation, by what we are not, we maintain the 'not' within ourselves. I also think that Negri doesn't make enough of the tool that he has created, in terms of concretely looking at struggles and seeing how they develop their notions of justice (these discussions always seem to be in the footnotes). Yes, the community must be not-capital but can it be more than just not-capital? Depending on how you define capitalism this still gives a wide scope for what community can be. Community must be for something. If we define our community as just not-capital then are we not perhaps still defining ourselves as just one side of the capital-labour relation. I didn't say that the Zapatistas have surpassed capital. Yes, it's all around them, yes it still controls a large part of their lives - but they have still produced some interesting experiments in democracy. Certainly this democracy must be developed and its more unsatisfactory elements must be negated. (The impression I got from Empire was not that Negri was saying that struggles no longer have an interconnection. Rather, I thought he was saying that they appeared not to be interconnected and that this appearance must be denied, that their actual interconnectedness must be re-affirmed by those struggling developing some kind of common language whereby they can understand each others struggles as each others own.) Comment 7: It's not necessarily about being moralistic when we worry over the importance of different struggles. Its about the problematic relationship, as I said, of strategy to autonomy, the problem of the authoritarian party with the right program over the freedom of the different sectors of the class. But coupled with this is the problem of these different struggles defining themselves through their difference to each other and not acknowledging their connections, not acknowledging and defining their community (and Negri has some caustic words about the extremes of identity politics). Sorry, but this is even more rambling, and it's getting late again. As per usual i'm frustrated by my lack of knowledge and expressive capabilities, and this piece is full of that lack; apologies. Cheers Rowan _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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