Date: Sat, 4 Dec 2004 23:44:13 +0100
From: Lowe Laclau <lowe.laclau-AT-gmail.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: more on the multitude - reproductive labor, social factory, etc


Hey Nate, 

Sorry I wrote out a reply to your last post but my computer froze for
some reason and i lost it. My perspective on this issue is that the
theory/epistemology generally follows Events of whatever sort of the
real world. These can be theoretical events, discoveries,
rediscoveries (which I would argue can never be dissociated from the
real world concerns of thos engaging in them) or socio-political,
cultural, aesthetic events and transformations happening in the world,
on the streets and in the workplace.

None of these concepts that H&N take up are the result of solely
theoretical events. All of these theoretical events must take into
account the flows, dynamics, and objects that they attempt to provide
signs for. The focus on reproductive and domestic labor is not at all
solely an epistemological event. Theory is forced to accept these
previously excluded categories because capital itself comes to
incorporate them (they are all large parts of the growing service
sector). But its the same type of matter-opening-theory type of event
that happened in International Relations studies. The State has never
been a sole homogeneous rational actor defining global politics...
never... but it has taken a real transformation in the powers of the
state and in the powers of non-state actors for IR theory to accept
that fact. So one can never completely separate one aspect from the
other. Theory is only there to serve some interest (on the
knowledge/knower side) of actions in the real world (acting
independently of the known). They might help this or that person do
this or that thing in the real world, but it is by no means a key to
the real world itself. Its merely a tool of convenience. If economics
ignores reproductive labor for so long, its because it could, no? When
did popular theorists and economists finally talk about 'social
capital' when it was necessary for them (even though they still talk
about it in their own special exclusive way), its not as if it didn't
exist before or that Marx never formalized an understanding of it.
they could however ignore it, because it didn't serve their immediate
interests.

> In Hardt and Negri and others' talk about the multitude, real
> subsumption, etc, and in earlier talk about the social(ized) worker,
> the social factory, there's stuff about the productivity for capital
> of domestic and reproductive labor, traditionally feminine labor.
> 
> My question is this: is the theoretical move here an epistemological
> or ontological one? That is, is the argument that political ideas have
> changed, or that the rest of the world has changed? More clearly: is
> the point that lefty theory/politics discovered that
> domestic/reproductive labor and so on was productive (and so the
> concept of labor had been too narrow to account for laboring
> activity)? Or is is that domestic/reproductive labor became productive
> (and so the newly expanded labor activity requires an expansion of the
> concept of labor)?

> And does anyone have any views either way on this? I'm more keen on
> the point being one of epistemology, of theory, that the concept of
> labor had been too narrowly defined. This touches on the meaning of
> multitude as well, since this view also means that the condition of
> reproductive-labor being productive-labor is not a new facet of class
> composition today, though reproductive labor being waged labor -
> nursing, caring work, etc - may be. (I don't know the history well
> enough to say).
> 
> best,
> Nate
> 
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> 


-- 
"I am God most of the time... when I don't have a headache..." - Felix Guattari


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