File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0201, message 65


Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2002 23:41:54 +0000
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.com>
Subject: Re: Toni Negri on Globaisation




  Eric/All

No I didn't translate this - (you are right I could have) I downloaded 
it from www.slash-autonomedia.org <http://www.slash-autonomedia.org> (an 
excellent site) - the header text didn't get sent through the mail 
system, and I didn't look at the text until I received this...

What I found especially interesting is the way the specificity of the 
events we are living through - the globalising events in NYC and 
Afghanistan , the attempts to establish an 'autonomous democratic state' 
for the citizens of Afghanistan, which can function within the 
globalised world does seem to work within Negri's analysis. Of course it 
is important to place the 'autonomous democratic state' within the 
context of the postmodern global economy rather than to theorise it as 
part of some USA led colonial event... What I especially enjoy is the 
fact that we seem to have available the theory and the tools to 
understand the contemporary events...

The precise issue of the 'refusal of work' which as part of the 
political weapons available was always so important to 20th C struggles 
even into the late 1970s, interestingly it is going through a slight 
resurgence at the moment, in the forms of the strike, rejection of 
consumerism and so on. However there is a stronger radical theme in the 
recognition that old paradigms of resistence are no longer suitable in 
the changes being made in the post-modern world. A related aspect of 
Lyotard's work which we have touched on and yet not addressed directly 
is that the most radical moments in Lyotard are those in the libidinal 
philosophy texts where Lyotard is dealing with the intensities flowing 
through matter and transforming structures... Still, odd though it may 
seem, I tend towards recongnising that the Libidinal period(s) are a 
better response to the 'threat of nihalism' than the Differend and the 
Kantian turn twards the sublime, however both approaches resulted for 
Lyotard in a passive politics - however I think that this is no longer 
true, for the marrying of the 'event' to the 'libidinal economy' 
connects directly to the political forms that Negri is touching on in 
the pieces we have been discussing. From Paris, Seattle, Genoa (a 
shorthand which fails to include the conferences and actions in the '3rd 
world ' whose names I forgot...) and onwards the echos are there of an 
anti-foundational perspective that he represents. But its a radicalism 
that, in my bemused and materialist way, I believe can only be liberated 
by the reintroduction of those creative moments represented by the 
return that Negri and Hardt represent.

The left needs its 'myths' and 'utopias', just as the right in the 70s 
and 80s had the utopian myth of neo-liberal economics and then 
globalisation. The absence of such ideas simply aids those who always 
have a utopian vision..l. What is being engaged in with the suggestion 
that the act of exodus, leaving, of migration and the support of such 
activity is the construction of a figure to denote a new figure of 
resistence.

The politics that you state is missing from the USA, which increasingly 
seems so tragic to me (every time I travel to the USA I am struck by the 
loss and the waste... at home in europe things are simply different 
strung out as we are on different socio-economic imperatives...), 
however it is worth remembering that change and evolution never comes 
from the centre, it always comes from the peripheary, just as it is the 
weak who evolve and not the strong. We humans are not descended from the 
ubermensch but from the weak and sickly apes who were forced out of the 
jungle, onto the savannah by the fat and the strong. I recognise that 
this is a denial of the phantasy of the 'survival of the fittest' but I 
believe it is important to accept the implicit challenge laid down by 
Lyotard, Negri and co and recognise that change in a globalised society 
cannot be expected to come from the centre but as a resistence to it...

'....it seems to me that what was taking place was a fulgurant junction, 
a flash of lightning between theory and practice - the most immediate 
practice and the theory perhaps the most elaborated that we have known 
in the last forty years...' (Lyotard 1970 On Theory) Lyotard is 
referring to the events of 1968 - the words would work just as well as a 
description of the anti-globalisation protests throughout the world and 
empire.

(Personally the reason I have gone quiet on the metaphysical side, and 
incidentally not responded to Shawn's mail, is because I'm working my 
way through Adorno's 'Problems of Moral Philosophy' and am trying to get 
closer to the Kantian position before the inevitable reappearence of 
ethics and perhaps moral law appears again on the list...)

Today a step was taken towards the rejection of the 'british state' 
being able to export migrants/refugees back towards those places which 
may persecute and torture them... Let us hope that this will ultimately 
result in something enshrined in european law - just as criminals may 
not be exported to countries with the death penalty...

regards
steve
(oh back in the USA next week for two weeks...)

of
Mary Murphy&Salstrand wrote:

>steve,
>
>Thanks! 
>
>you translated this?  You know Italian?  Do you know French as well?
>
>I found these comments very interesting as a kind of short update on
>Empire. Perhaps the following statement was the most provocative for me:
>"The refusal of work was imaginable in a Fordist society, but today it
>becomes increasingly less thinkable. There is the refusal of command
>over work, but that is quite another thing. When we talk about exodus,
>we are trying successfully to construct new forms of life."
>
>I like the sound of this and certainly agree with it in the abstract
>(even if it modifies some of my thoughts on the refusal of work!) but
>still I wonder. How is this going to be accomplished in the concrete?
>
>Right now in America there is a recession going on and many people have
>been laid off.  If they were previously temps or low wage workers, many
>of them do not even qualify to receive unemployment compensat
>ion.  Even
>if they do, this pay averages less than a third of their regular income.
>Welfare as well has become severely restricted.  Rent continues to
>remain extremely high in most American cities. Insurance (assuming one
>qualified for it beforehand!) becomes a huge cost for the unemployed.
>Under COBRA laws, one can be charged 102% the cost of this insurance.
>This can literally cost thousands of dollars per year for family
>coverage.
>
>Yet, there doesn't seem to be a collective outcry that is making inroads
>politically and the current congress is doing absolutely nothing to pass
>legislation that might help the unemployed cope better with these
>problems.
>
>The so-called knowledge workers tend to be more individualistic and
>self-reliant. They tend to fend for themselves rather to engage in any
>kind of political action.  They don't want an exodus. Most of them
>simply would like to incorporate themselves. ME.com
>
>So, my questi
>on is how does the exodus emerge?  How do we know this
>isn't going to be simply another myth like the general strike or the
>single workers union?
>
>I don't ask this cynically. I just don't see how it will occur in the
>near future and what form it could possibly take. Are H&N proposing the
>development of counter-institutions? Hoe would these exist side-by-side
>with captitalism without being crushed.  
>
>I am quite willing to forgo the metaphysical discussion about whether we
>give more weight to American or global hegemony right now. I also
>recognise the obvious limitations of Baudrillard as a political
>theorist.  
>
>However, I just don't see any great exodus here in America right now. If
>anything, people are knocking on the door and want to get into the
>enclave. The great fear is that they will be left out in the cold.  
>
>How does the multitude become a force to be reckoned with and not simply
>a Brownian motion of diver
>se singularities to be picked off one by one.
>
>eric
>
>



HTML VERSION:

Eric/All

No I didn't translate this - (you are right I could have) I downloaded it from www.slash-autonomedia.org (an excellent site) - the header text didn't get sent through the mail system, and I didn't look at the text until I received this...

What I found especially interesting is the way the specificity of the events we are living through - the globalising events in NYC and Afghanistan , the attempts to establish an 'autonomous democratic state' for the citizens of Afghanistan, which can function within the globalised world does seem to work within Negri's analysis. Of course it is important to place the 'autonomous democratic state' within the context of the postmodern global economy rather than to theorise it as part of some USA led colonial event... What I especially enjoy is the fact that we seem to have available the theory and the tools to understand the contemporary events...

The precise issue of the 'refusal of work' which as part of the political weapons available was always so important to 20th C struggles even into the late 1970s, interestingly it is going through a slight resurgence at the moment, in the forms of the strike, rejection of consumerism and so on. However there is a stronger radical theme in the recognition that old paradigms of resistence are no longer suitable in the changes being made in the post-modern world. A related aspect of Lyotard's work which we have touched on and yet not addressed directly is that the most radical moments in Lyotard are those in the libidinal philosophy texts where Lyotard is dealing with the intensities flowing through matter and transforming structures... Still, odd though it may seem, I tend towards recongnising that the Libidinal period(s) are a better response to the 'threat of nihalism' than  the Differend and the Kantian turn twards the sublime, however both approaches resulted for Lyotard in a passive politics -  however I think that this is no longer true, for the marrying of the 'event' to the 'libidinal economy' connects directly to the political forms that Negri is touching on in the pieces we have been discussing. From Paris, Seattle, Genoa (a shorthand which fails to include the conferences and actions in the '3rd world ' whose names I forgot...) and onwards the  echos are there of an anti-foundational perspective that he represents. But its a radicalism that, in my bemused and materialist way, I believe can only be liberated by the reintroduction of those creative moments represented by the return that Negri and Hardt represent.

The left needs its 'myths' and 'utopias', just as the right in the 70s and 80s had the utopian myth of neo-liberal economics and then globalisation. The absence of such ideas simply aids those who always have a utopian vision..l. What is being engaged in with the suggestion that the act of exodus, leaving, of migration and the support of such activity is the construction of a figure to denote a new figure of resistence.

The politics that you state is missing from the USA, which increasingly seems so tragic to me (every time I travel to the USA I am struck by the loss and the waste... at home in europe things are simply different strung out as we are on different socio-economic imperatives...), however it is worth remembering that change and evolution never comes from the centre, it always comes from the peripheary, just as it is the weak who evolve and not the strong. We humans are not descended from the ubermensch but from the weak and sickly apes who were forced out of the jungle, onto the savannah by the fat and the strong. I recognise that this is a denial of the phantasy  of the 'survival of the fittest' but I believe it is important to accept the implicit challenge laid down by Lyotard, Negri and co and recognise that change in a globalised society cannot be expected to come from the centre but as a resistence to it...

'....it seems to me that what was taking place was a fulgurant junction, a flash of lightning between theory and practice - the most immediate practice and the theory perhaps the most elaborated that we have known in the last forty years...' (Lyotard 1970 On Theory) Lyotard is referring to the events of 1968 - the words would work just as well as a description of the anti-globalisation protests throughout the world and empire.

(Personally the reason I have gone quiet on the metaphysical side, and incidentally not responded to Shawn's mail,  is because I'm working my way through Adorno's 'Problems of Moral Philosophy' and am trying to get closer to the Kantian position before the inevitable reappearence of ethics and perhaps moral law appears again on the list...)

Today a step was taken towards the rejection of the 'british state' being able to export migrants/refugees back towards those places which may persecute and torture them... Let us hope that this will ultimately result in something enshrined in european law - just as criminals may not be exported to countries with the death penalty...

regards
steve
(oh back in the USA next week for two weeks...)

of
Mary Murphy&Salstrand wrote:
steve,

Thanks!

you translated this? You know Italian? Do you know French as well?

I found these comments very interesting as a kind of short update on
Empire. Perhaps the following statement was the most provocative for me:
"The refusal of work was imaginable in a Fordist society, but today it
becomes increasingly less thinkable. There is the refusal of command
over work, but that is quite another thing. When we talk about exodus,
we are trying successfully to construct new forms of life."

I like the sound of this and certainly agree with it in the abstract
(even if it modifies some of my thoughts on the refusal of work!) but
still I wonder. How is this going to be accomplished in the concrete?

Right now in America there is a recession going on and many people have
been laid off. If they were previously temps or low wage workers, many
of them do not even qualify to receive unemployment compensat ion. Even
if they do, this pay averages less than a third of their regular income.
Welfare as well has become severely restricted. Rent continues to
remain extremely high in most American cities. Insurance (assuming one
qualified for it beforehand!) becomes a huge cost for the unemployed.
Under COBRA laws, one can be charged 102% the cost of this insurance.
This can literally cost thousands of dollars per year for family
coverage.

Yet, there doesn't seem to be a collective outcry that is making inroads
politically and the current congress is doing absolutely nothing to pass
legislation that might help the unemployed cope better with these
problems.

The so-called knowledge workers tend to be more individualistic and
self-reliant. They tend to fend for themselves rather to engage in any
kind of political action. They don't want an exodus. Most of them
simply would like to incorporate themselves. ME.com

So, my quest i on is how does the exodus emerge? How do we know this
isn't going to be simply another myth like the general strike or the
single workers union?

I don't ask this cynically. I just don't see how it will occur in the
near future and what form it could possibly take. Are H&N proposing the
development of counter-institutions? Hoe would these exist side-by-side
with captitalism without being crushed.

I am quite willing to forgo the metaphysical discussion about whether we
give more weight to American or global hegemony right now. I also
recognise the obvious limitations of Baudrillard as a political
theorist.

However, I just don't see any great exodus here in America right now. If
anything, people are knocking on the door and want to get into the
enclave. The great fear is that they will be left out in the cold.

How does the multitude become a force to be reckoned with and not simply
a Brownian motion of div er se singularities to be picked off one by one.

eric





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