Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 10:28:20 -0600
From: Nate Holdren <nateholdren-AT-gmail.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Negri and Charleton Heston?


hey again Lowe-

> The problem as Negri would like to present it to you is not whether or
> not he's right, but rather holding each singularity responsible for
> the eternal (the eternality of the present... or of kairos, or the
> Event).

Sorry, but I really don't know what this means. Can you unpack it for
me please, preferably in terms of what it means politically?

I'd like to say that what I have found very exciting in reading Negri
was basically a set of theoretical moves, not unique to Negri. These
moves consist in the following-

1. emphasizing subjective power (like how Deleuze says resistance is
ontologically prior to power, but even more like how Tronti and others
have argued that class struggle actually historically creates new
changes, 'from below). I like this because it's a corrective to
determinist and objectivist marxisms, which I used to be trapped in.
It's also a way to reject all that while remaining marxist (a
distinction of baby and bathwater, if you will), something I spent a
long time not understanding. For me, marxism became relevant to
'political work' again, and in a new way, when I started reading this
stuff.

2.re-interpreting marxist categories to basically include nearly
everyone - domestic labor, service work, student work, children's work
within the family, etc. This relates to the first thing - it's been a
way for me to still make use of marxian categories while rejecting
certain aspects of the politics of much marxism (again, babies and
bathwater).

On this last, though, it's not clear to me where this rethinking
occurs. In some autonomist work, the re-interpretation is in our
categories, it's read back into how we understand history (so, the
productivity of domestic labor requires a new understanding of the
history of class struggle). In Negri, though, it sometimes sounds like
the change is not in our categories, but in the world: domestic labor
becomes productive at a certain point, production becomes biopolitical
at a certain point, the working class develops the possibility of
being multitude (ie, of organizing ourselves in nonhierarchical [and
still effective] ways) at a certain point in time. This is the source
of our earlier disagreements on Negri and Lenin - I get the impression
that Negri and Hardt are arguing, implicitly, that Leninism is over,
exhausted. This requires no re-thinking of the history of Leninism,
attention to alternatives exluded or exterminated by Lenin and co,
etc.

Now, to try to graft this non sequitur missive back into the thread of
our current conversation:
I think this last point - is the change a shift in our interpretive
categories (an epistemological shift, an innovation in our
political-theoretical tools),  or a world-historical shift (a change
in the production process, such that now things which weren't
productive before are now productive, that folks without [potential]
political subejctivity now have [potential] political subjectivty) -
is directly relevant to how we understand HN on multitude. If the
change is world-historical then the picture is different - the world
today is in rough shape but there's a new possibility for human social
being, a new absolute democracy in need of organization to bring it
about.
This means multitude is a change in class composition, and there are
new organizational possibilities today.

If the change is epistemological (perhaps an epistemological shift
brought about by changes in the world - given that caring is a part of
waged labor now it becomes harder to maintain that caring work is
'unproductive' and so it's easier to see that unwaged caring work is
also productive), if the change is epistemological then what we have
is a possibility that has continually been present, and multitude is
not a change in class composition, and the term offers less resources
for understanding the composition of class today, and less resources
for understanding organizational possibilities adequate to today.

In this latter case, the term is at best a critical term that helps
clear away various debris that impedes our thinking about politics,
affirms the general open-ness of possibilities (ie, the term can work
against premature ideas and approaches which prematurely foreclose
political/subjective possibilities), so that thinking about
organization can begin. This is by no means unimportant, of course,
but I think these are important distinctions.

I hope this makes sense. Thanks for provoking me to think hard about
all this stuff, I feel clearer on it than before, at least in my head
(though some of my simple enthusiasm for Negri is now more
complicated...)

take care,
Nate
 


On Thu, 2 Dec 2004 15:31:27 +0100, Lowe Laclau <lowe.laclau-AT-gmail.com> wrote:
> The problem as Negri would like to present it to you is not whether or
> not he's right, but rather holding each singularity responsible for
> the eternal (the eternality of the present... or of kairos, or the
> Event).
> 
> 
> 
> 
>     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>


     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---