From: ".: s0metim3s :." <s0metim3s-AT-optusnet.com.au>
Subject: AUT: RE: The "Multitude" and Rights
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 15:23:07 +1000


Lowe, Harald, all,

You know, it's not so much that I've been confused
about what N&H are arguing for, so much as I'd
rather they weren't and waiting for someone to
actually convince me that perhaps they weren't.
So, maybe I should be more clear about what I see
as the stakes here.

I don't know where N&H talk about the end in the
most recent cycle of struggles; but it seems
obvious to me and not surprising for anyone to
argue that the cycle has passed.  The question,
however, is what this actually means and how one
responds to it.  I've always thought it meant the
passing of the most visible peaks of resistance --
and, here, I'm firmly with Bologna rather than
N&H. (N&H have never, imo, grasped this
consistently -- a critique of the forms of
representation of fordism isn't the same thing as
a critique of representation, of the relationship
between, as Bologna puts it the elites and the
movement, or as I'd put it,
activists-intellectuals and movements.)

In other words: it's not that resistance has ended
per se, but that, in the failure of those
struggles to actually challenge either emerging
forms of exploitation (which include, among other
things, the ways in which particular forms of
immaterial labour make 'us' into the managers of
'our own' exploitation -- yes immanence but what
kind?) or the forms of representation and
mediation that flow from this, what we are
confronted with now is a combination of
restoration and innovation.  The Leftisation of
the 'new social subjects' began the day after
Seattle, to put it bluntly, and can be seen in the
articulation of demands for recognition.

I think, far from actually generating any kind of
antagonism to Empire, N&H argue for 'our'
habituation to it.  What they argue for is an
innovation in the forms of representation of
abstract labour: global citizenship, income for
all, etc. Ie: the forms of representation
appropriate to immaterial labour, the multitude,
etc.

I think their motif of 'exclusion - inclusion' is
all wrong. (Marx, Foucault, Agamben manage not to
adopt a liberal critique of capitalism for its
'exclusions' -- so, why do N&H?)

Marxism has often oscillated between wierd
versions of either a reactionary critique of
capitalism (in its more communitarian, identity
forms) and a cheering on of its progressive,
destructive aspects (the RCP, wierdo maoist cults,
Stalin, Lenin). (And both assume the perspective
and fantasy of control, imo.)  In doing a version
of the latter -- albeit creatively wrapped up in a
Spinozian gloss about immanence and absolute
democracy, and urged on by the usual leftoid panic
merchandising about 'barbarism or Empire' -- N&H
reverse the insights of an analysis of class
composition which place movement before its
instituted or visible expression.

Global juridical structures are already emerging
because of the inadequacy of the nation-state to,
among other things, controlling population
movements. No one needs N&H to argue for this for
it to happen. It is happening. Ie: I don't think
it would be wrong to argue that there is a
tendency toward a global state (um, global
citizenship).  But in cheering it on, in taking
capital to task for not validating Empire as it
were, puts them 'on the other side.'

Angela
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