Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 02:14:09 +0100
From: Nate Holdren <nateholdren-AT-gmail.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: the "multitude" and rights


hey all-

I don't think the collectiveness of production point is so much about
production now, though Negri does say somewhere in Negri on Negri that
"people are much more communist now" because we're even more engaged
in communication networks and products of prior
cooperation/communication. Andy, and I'm not being flippant, isn't a
basic point of ... umm, all this stuff ... that things which are held
up as unity and identity (the state, the people, the body, etc) are
actually multiple and non-identical, depending on where one draws the
lines? Can you give an example of an act of utterly individual
production?

And just to echo MJ, why 'non-work' for housework etc? Do you just
mean 'non-waged work'? (If so, may I respectfully recommend a
terminology shift? ) If you mean some distinction other than lack of
wage, what is it?

best wishes,
Nate

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 10:29:35 -0400, Lowe Laclau <lowelaclau-AT-hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Andrew,
> 
> 
> >For instance, they take "production" to be first of all equivalent with systematised labour and thus with capitalism, and secondly to be inherently and by definition collective.  Production is absolutely central to their whole project, so these assumptions (the first implicit, the second explicit) are very significant.
> 
> 
> The collective definition of productive labor is something that goes back to Marx. It corresponds to the type of labor that is produced becomes hegemonic with the rise of industrialism. Perhaps you are confusing the labor of Modernity, --the labor that Modernity comes to define as productive labor-- with some abstract notions of work in general.
> 
> >Secondly, their critique of Deleuze and Guattari is based on a false claim that their view of positive transformative forces is firstly undefined and secondly tends towards mysticism.  This is based solely on Guattari's final book, Chaosmosis.  As an assessment of D&G's entire edifice it's totally untrue.  Their theory of desire is quite precise.  This is important because H&N take on large swathes of D&G's analysis, and Foucault's also, but replace "desire" with "production".  Hence the problems.
> 
> 
> I agree with you that there assessment of D&G or of Guattari in general in Empire is quite idiotic. Even some of their incorporations of their concepts is borderline innapropriate (I'm thinking of both the smooth/striated space distinction they use to describe Empire and an ambiguous section of Time For Revolution where Negri talks about what he's gathered from Mille Plateaus).
> 
> >Keep in mind:
> 
> >1) that you have to be productive to qualify as a citizen, and this is the basis for their claim for global citizenship.
> 
> >2) that the future "common" world is to be based on production which is inherently common.
> 
> >
> 
> >Of course, production is supposed to be broader than just work, but it seems to be identified MAINLY with work (which has colonised all of social life, e.g. as affective labour), and secondarily with non-work activities which are nevertheless productive FOR THE SYSTEM (e.g. housework).  So basically, their political analysis is a kind of productivism/Stakhanovism, a cult of work which represses desiring-production beneath social-production.
> 
> 
> Umm... not so sure. I see what you're saying but insofar as they are not in favor of capitalism's appropriation of social production (in general), and that which would keep desiring-production permanently subordinate to social-production, I'm not sure one could say that. Its hard actually to align Negri's thought with theres on many issues. I have to think about it a little, but I think Negri's comments with respect to the distinction he'd like to make between Desire and Love, gave me the impression that he understood the basis of that theory. Conceptually though I'm not sure where his concepts like "strength", "cooperation", "alma venus" and all that stuff relate. What I DO remember is that Love is to be in some sense Desire become cooperative, or Desire become militant. Perhaps I'm screwing up his concepts though.
> 
> >The reason for the commonality of production is never made clear.  H&N never discuss why creative activities, which otherwise have the centripetal tendencies ascribed to them by D&G and Foucault, end up coming together in commonality in D&G's approach.  I suspect, therefore, that some "hegemonic" agent would have to play a repressive role in order to unify the resistances into counter-Empire.  And since production is to remain common, this would turn into a new State.
> 
> 
> Well H&N you are right never make clear the commonality issue. But this is thoroughly covered I think in Marxist studies and in empirical analyses of hegemonic production relations for the past hundred fifty years. They should perhaps retrace their steps (though I have the feeling Negri doesn't like to do this). I'm not sure how to think about this "hegemonic agent" of resistance. It doesn't seem to me that such would be necessary at all. In fact I think they've taken many pains to distance themselves from such interpretations. Certainly they'd agree that all temporal definitions of labor have an hegemonic element, like the industrial working class in the previous epoch over agricultural and manufacturing and peasants. Today they see that as the service industry workers or the information workers (perhaps services is not quite specific enough) or for Bifo that'd be the cognitariat. But I don't see any of this necessitating a state. I think that the opposite is in fact the cas
>  e.
> 
> 
> >But what worries me most is H&N's failure to escape the moral accountancy of bourgeois thought and its socialist tailers - the assumption that the right to an income (to consume, to exist) should be dependent on one's engaging in productive activity, as defined by the social totality.  This is something their very affirmation of "global citizenship" takes as its ethical premise.  Moral accountancy is the nodal-point of the capitalist-statist repression of desiring-production beneath social production, and, however far H&N stretch the boundaries of social production, this gesture of repression remains unchallenged and, indeed, foundational to their own conception.
> 
> 
> I think you have to look more closely at their arguments about productive activity. A lot of controversy surrounds Negri's work in this area, but it is not just Negri, plenty of people are dealing with these issue of defining productivity in an age where immaterial work is hegemonic. The argument for a guaranteed income is not meant to be a tool for exclusion at all. The opposite is true.
> 
> Lowe
> 
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