notes on negri’s marx beyond marx – lesson two

Lesson 2: Money and Value 

In Notebooks 1 and 2 (skipping Notebook M for the moment), Marx delves into a discussion of money and value. This is significant for a few reasons, most notably because he does not include the commodity as a mediating category between money and value. Money is value, value is money; money represents the form of social relations: “Value is the same shit as money” (23). For Negri, this approach to value/money foregrounds antagonism in a way not achieved in Capital:

“There is so much class hatred contained in this way of approaching the material! Money has the advantage of presenting me immediately the lurid face of the social relation of value; it shows me value right away as exchange, commanded and organized for exploitation. I do not need to plunge into Hegelianism in order to discover the double face of the commodity, of value: money has only one face, that of the boss.” (23)

This vision of the law of value recognizes the absence of a mystification, perhaps making the discussion in Capital of the fetish somewhat irrelevant, at least for understanding antagonism. Negri notes that there is no logical step from analyses of commodities to value then to surplus value, it is merely a literary fiction. Money is the exclusive functioning of the law of value, and therefore (contra Proudhon and Darimon) money is only an equivalent if the equivalence is a social inequality. Ultimately, Negri asserts that, based on Marx’s analysis of money/value,

“Communism is not the realization of the interchangeability of value, the being in force of money as a real measure. Communism is the negation of all measure, the affirmation of the most exasperated plurality – creativity.” (33)

Money is a tautology for power that extends everywhere, and therefore the critique of money is akin to the critique of power. In critiquing money, Marx gets to the heart of the social inequality of labor, and posits that within communism value and money would not “be the same shit.” A world without measure of value, pure creativity.

**All references refer to the 1991 Autonomedia edition**

notes on negri’s marx beyond marx – lesson one

Lesson 1: The Grundrisse, an Open Work

In the first section, Negri lays out the context for turning towards Marx’s Grundrisse, in particular its place in marxism. First and foremost, Negri argues for reading the Grundrisse on its own terms, rather than as merely a draft on the way to becoming a “mature” work, i.e. Das Kapital.

 ***** 

Unlike Capital, Negri argues for the significance of Grundrisse as a political text, focused on:

1. the role of crisis as the immanent condition of antagonism (2)

2. the production of revolutionary subjectivity (8)

3. the importance of class composition as the subjectivity of the struggle (9)

Grundrisse is the text that most forcefully places the theory of surplus value at the “dynamic center, [the] dynamic synthesis of Marx’s thought, the point where the objective analysis of capital and the subjective analysis of class behavior, where class hatred permeates his science” (9).

 *****

Negri argues that the Grundrisse rescues marxism from exhaustion surrounding the theory of value and brings antagonism to the fore (17).

“We find ourselves in a phase where the revolutionary movement is seeking new foundations, and in a way that will not be that of a minority. We have nothing to do with orthodoxy. And we would be delighted to be able to ignore Marx himself. A break has been made, there is no denying it. The theory of value is worn to threads, as far as our struggles are concerned. Now the discovery of the Grundrisse restores Marx to us.” (17)

This may seem commonplace to us now, but in the 1960s and 1970s, marxism was dominated by a form of dialectical materialism originating in Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao that, while containing some internal differences and contradictions, was more concerned with consolidating the party and its power, justifying centralized command economy, and elevating an orthodoxy of the purge. Negri’s turn to the Grundrisse, along with many of the other originators of autonomia and operaismo (i.e. Tronti, Bologna, Bifo, and many others), signaled a turn to thinking about the autonomy of the working classes not only to define their struggle, but to define the composition of class itself.

 *****

Negri presents 6 theses on the Grundrisse in this chapter (10-11):

1. “From the form of money to the form of value… the analysis of money is precisely what allows us to analyze the form of value.” (10)

2. “The definition of work… work appears as immediately abstract labor… Work is abstract insofar as it is only immediately perceptible at the level of the social relations of production. Thus we can only define work on the basis of the relations of exchange and of the capitalist structure of production. We can find no concept of work in Marx that is not that of waged work, of work that is socially necessary to the reproduction of capital, thus no concept of any work to restore, to liberate, to sublimate, only a concept and a reality to suppress.”  (10)

3. “Marxism has nothing in common with a socialist economy, be it utopian or already realized.” (11)

4. “The ‘system,’ a dynamic and open system, is completely dominated by the question of the relation between the crisis and the emergence of revolutionary subjectivity. This relationship is so fundamental that Marxism could well be entitled the science of the crisis and of subversion. To want to consider the crisis as a sickness to treat and to cure is not only to betray the revolutionary movement, it is also to fall into a banter that has nothing in common with Marxian categories.” (11)

5. The definition of communism in the Grundrisse is very radical, especially in the articulation of communism and class composition: “Class composition-power, class composition-transition, the articulation of these relations are based on the materiality of the behaviors, the needs, and the structure of valorization.” (11)

6. The definition of the working class is addressed, unlike in Marx’s other works: “It is a question of following the text, of retracing the links which conceptually unite the critical definition of the wage and the revolutionary definitions of communism and communist subjectivity. It is a question of at least perceiving the outline of the book foreseen by Marx on the wage and grasping the main articulations.” (11)

These theses, understood as a structuring commentary on the Grundrisse, provide a fertile ground of theory upon which a new marxism has been built, a far more open and non-hierarchical marxism.

**All page references refer to the 1991 Autonomedia edition.**

biopolitics post-foucault exam reading list

Background Reading:

Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Slavoj Zizek, Mapping Ideology (New York: Verso, 1995).

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Timothy C. Campbell, “Interview with Roberto Esposito,” diacritics 36(2), 2006: 49-56.

Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

Michel Foucault, trans. Robert Hurley, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990).

———,trans. David Macey, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976 (New York: Picador, 2003).

———, trans. Graham Burchell, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-1978 (New York: Picador, 2007).

———, trans. Graham Burchell, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France,1978-1979 (New York: Picador, 2008).

Karl Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes, Capital vol. 1 (New York: Penguin Books, 1990).

———, Grundrisse (New York: Penguin Books, 1993).

Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (eds.), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004).

Agamben:

Giorgio Agamben, trans. Michael Hardt, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

———, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

———, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

———, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

———, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2002).

———, trans. Kevin Attell, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

———, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

———, trans. Luca di Santo, The Signature of All Things: On Method (New York: Zone Books, 2009).

———, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Nudities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (eds.), Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).

Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).

Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

Autonomous Marxism:

Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.), Debating Empire (New York: Verso, 2003).

Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (AntiThesis).

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysius (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

———, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

———, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (NYC: Penguin Books, 2004).

———, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009).

Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (eds.), Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007).

Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl, Marxism Beyond Marxism (New York: Routledge, 1995).

Antonio Negri, trans. Maurizia Boscagli, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

———, trans. Timothy S. Murphy and Arianna Bove, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy (New York: Verso, 2005).

———, trans. James Newell, Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005).

Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean, Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (New York: Routledge, 2004).

Jason Read, The Micropolitics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).

Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004).

Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (eds.), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002).

reading notes on critical pedagogy – mclaren’s the future of the past

Peter McLaren, “The Future of the Past: Reflections on the Present State of Empire and Pedagogy,” in Peter McLaren and Joe L. Kincheloe, Critical Pedaogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 289-314.

Summary

McLaren organizes this chapter around a series of reflections:

1) “A reflection on education under attack” (291)

Here he lays out in very brief terms the kinds of educational policies and attitudes of the early 2000s as exemplified by Jeb Bush in Florida. McLaren discusses a 2006 law in Florida that effectively outlawed “revisionist history” and mandated teaching a respect for the flag and an understanding of free enterprise. He ends the reflection by pointing out that given the United States’ tendency to forget (wilfully?) the histories of the “great” presidents (Reagan, Ford, etc), that laws such as the one in Florida are not even really necessary to ensure that the “proper” history is taught in US schools.

2) “Reflections on multicultural education” (292)

McLaren opens this reflection with a statement I generally agree with: “The field of multiculturalism has, regrettably, overemphasized contingency and the reversibility of cultural practices at the level of the individual at the expense of challenging the structural determinations and productive forces of capital, its laws of motion, and its value form of labor…” It’s after this, where he mobilizes an attack on poststructuralist thinking, that we diverge. As is quite typical of McLaren’s work, he attempts to castigate cultural studies (at least certain strands of it) and post-Marxist theorists as having “exercised a ‘solidarity of defeat’ in so far as they have limited their work to bad-faith reforms that have sidestepped the struggle against capital and pursued analysis compatible with the demands of neoliberal capitalism” (292-293). However, he closes with an important observation about class. He argues that the “race, class, and gender” triptych is often reduced to a kind of mere culturalism; it is important to remember that class, under global capitalism especially, is a universal experience based in an ‘objective’ relationship of individual or group to capital. The primacy of class analysis in critical pedagogy, then, shouldn’t be read as economic or class determinism, but instead as a universalizing problematic that operates in and through other “-isms” such as racism, sexism, and so on.

3) “The birth pangs of a new social movement” (294)

The new social movement is, I think, the rise of immigrant activists/activism around anti-immigration legislation. Important here is McLaren’s admission that we may need to fight racism before class struggle is possible. However, he maintains the primacy of class as the precondition for racial or sexual division.

4) “Reflections on educating inside the beast” (297)

5) “Reflections on our providential history” (298)

“What we are may see [sic] in so-called progressive, critical classrooms throughout the United States is not a pedagogy steeled in opposition to oppression, but rather an ersatz critical pedagogy, a domesticated approach to Freirean teaching that stresses the centrality of engage student experiences and histories… Those pedagogies that affirm (through dominant narratives and discourses that unproblematically valorize democracy and freedom) student experiences but fail to question how these experiences are produced conjecturally in the formation of subjectivity and agency, accept a priori the sovereignty of the market over the body politic; and this, in turn, helps to resecure a pliant submission to the capitalist law of value. And they are often the soft-focus pedagogies of the give-advantage-to-the-already-advantaged, self-empowerment variety. These dominant pedagogies systematically negate rather than make meaningful alternative understandings of the relationship between identity-formation and social relations of production. They are not only reflective but also productive and reproductive of antagonistic social relations, dependent hierarchies of power, and privilege and hegemonic strategies of containing dissent and opposition.” (298-299)

6) “Reflections on a pedagogy for life: Paulo Freire in urgent times” (299)

In offering a reading of Freire’s work, McLaren charges that the field of teacher education has domesticated Freire by “transforming the political revolutionary with Marxist ideas into a friendly sage who advocates a love of dialogue, separating this notion from that of a dialogue of love.” (303)

7) “Reflections on a revolutionary socialist pedagogy” (306)

8) “Reflections on critical pedagogy for a better society” (309)

“Labor power, as the capacity or potential to labor, doesn’t have to serve its current master – capital. It serves the master only when it engages in the act of laboring for a wage. Because individuals can refuse to labor in the interests of capital accumulation, labor power can therefore serve another cause – the cause of socialism. Critical pedagogy can be used as a means of finding ways of transcending the contradictory aspects of labor-power creation and creating different spaces where a dereification, decommodification, and decolonization of subjectivity can occur. Critical pedagogy is an agonistic arena where the development of a discerning political subjectivity can be fashioned (recognizing that there will always be socially and self-imposed constraints).” (309)

9) “Reflections on bad faith rebels” (311)

In this final reflection, McLaren notes how unproductive, and even destructive, it is for academics, activists, and critical pedagogues to engage in grandstanding, “announc[ing] their radical credentials to the world, marking their territory with stale ink from an acerbic pen.” He emphasizes that critical pedagogy, and theory in general, is material work that cannot be divorced from the realm of action, thereby rendering moot charges of the necessity of making critical pedagogy more practicable. Critical pedagogy is not about making us feel free, it is meant to be a material intervention, a praxis that changes social relations as it thinks its way into the space of pedagogy.

*****

Most of the material is adapted from articles previously published, but the article serves as a good overview of McLaren’s writing. In particular, it demonstrates quite well the rhetoric he typically mobilizes, outlines the topics he often discusses (i.e. conservative politics, multiculturalism, and Freire, to name a few). There are some statements contained within that I certainly agree with; however, it is becoming apparent to me that I disagree with McLaren’s construction of epistemological and ontological positions, not least the way “liberation” is mobilized in both positions.

Useful Quotes

“Revolutionary classrooms are prefigurative of socialism in the sense that they are connected to social relations that we want to create as revolutionary socialists. The organization of classrooms generally tries to mirror what students and teachers would collectively like to see in the world outside of schools – respect for everyone’s ideas, tolerance of differences, a commitment to creativity and social and educational justice, the importance of working collectively, a willingness and desire to work hard for the betterment of humanity, and a commitment to antiracist, antisexist, and antihomophobic practices.” (310)

[Yes, but the school as an instrument of the State, whether a capitalist or socialist State, would always prefigure a foundational inequality and violence. You would still have an epistemically and ontologically limited education blinded by the parameters of State violence.]

“Revolutionary critical pedagogy operates from an understanding that the basis of education is political, and that spaces need to be created where students can imagine a different world outside of capitalism’s law of value (i.e., social form of labor), where alternatives to capitalism and capitalist institutions can be discussed and debated, and where dialogue can occur about why so many revolutions in past history turned into their opposite. It looks to create a world where a new mode of distribution can prevail, not based on socially necessary labor time, but on actual labor time; where alienated human relations are subsumed by authentically transparent ones; where freely associated individuals can successfully work towards a permanent revolution; where the division between mental and manual labor can be abolished; where patriarchal relations and other privileging hierarchies of oppression and exploitation can be ended; where, to paraphrase Marx, we can truly exercise the principle ‘from each according to his or her ability and to each according to his or her need.’ It looks to create a world where we can traverse the terrain of universal rights unburdened by necessity, moving sensuously and fluidly within that ontological space where subjectivity is exercised as a form of capacity building and creative self-activity within and as a part of the social totality: a space where labor is no longer exploited and becomes a striving that will benefit all human beings, where labor refuses to be instrumentalized and commodified and ceases to be a compulsory activity, and where the full development of human capacity is encouraged (Hudis, 2005). It also builds upon forms of self-organization that are part of the history of liberation struggles worldwide, such as the 1871 Paris Commune, Cuba’s Consejos Populares formed in 1989, those that developed during the civil rights, feminist, and worker movements, and those organizations of today that emphasize participatory democracy.” (310-311)

 

more theses on biopolitics

As I continue to refine and develop working theses on biopolitics, I will continue to post them here.

*****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****

~It is important to remember that the concept of biopolitics has a prehistory (see Aristotle, Arendt, Esposito). Foucault is a threshold figure who articulated the concept from its prehistory into the “biopolitical moment” of the present. Having popularized the term and shifted the discourse of contemporary politics, Foucault deserves much credit for acknowledging a largely ignored problem in political theory after the Enlightenment.

~ Biopolitics is not properly “political,” as biopolitics represents a struggle over biological life itself. Biopolitics is the threshold concept that can go in one of two directions (at the least): 1) the thanatopolitics of Nazism, or 2) the productive biopolitics of genetic engineering (see N. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself). In either direction, the ‘worldliness’ of human life is reduced to either: 1) the least possible threat to the social body, or 2) the ‘fullness’ of life as measured by a) the lifespan, b) reduced disease, c) lowered heart rate/blood pressure/etc., or d) other biometrics. This is supported empirically by looking to the Western democracies, where arguments of ‘worldliness’ are reduced to the “clash of civilizations” played out for the very life of the social body. There is no meaning here, just life.

~ If biopolitics is meaningful in capitalist society, it is because life = labor, and more specifically, life = labor power (see Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude). Biopolitics has no inherent value, as such, but historically situated takes on a limited meaning in the realm of the production of (extreme) surplus value. What Marx saw in the machine (see Marx, Grundrisse), biopolitics under capitalism produces human machines capable of repairing themselves, taking on a life of work with no work/life distinction, and a gratefulness of the machine to its master for ‘improving the life’ of the machinic worker.

~ Biopower, as described by Hardt and Negri, is the transforming of extreme surplus labor into a socially productive value: excess = biopower = multitude. But this transformation seems necessarily limited, specifically due to the disappearance of politics (see Arendt). Articulated in a sphere of rights, constitutionalism, and constituent power, biopolitics as ‘world-production’ does not open onto a new politics; it merely repartitions the “right to life” and the “right to rights” and their attendant institutions (i.e. collective bargaining, ‘Arab democracy,’ etc.).

~ Unlike Arendt or Foucault, Agamben sees biopolitics as the paradoxical core of what we think of as politics today. Arendt seems nostalgic for an ideal Greek past; Foucault genealogically demonstrates how a concern for life entered into discourses of government(ality). Agamben, though, sees biopolitics as the ontological foundation of modernity, with roots going back to Greek and Roman thought. Refining Arendt, he argues that the ban is a relation of inclusion through formal exclusion, which creates an absent ground upon which modernity is constructed. What is new is not biopolitics, for Agamben, but the mass production of homo sacer, which renders visible the ontological paradox of modernity.

~ Given the historical connection between politics and violence, it seems necessary to move to a paradigm of non-violence. The shift to biopolitics, then, makes sense, because it operates within a bounded territory as the protection and production of life, rather than the protection and production of politics. However, we know this to be untenable, since biopolitics’ internal violence is the ban, and the necessity of division (of inclusion and exclusion) within the hegemony of the nation-state form opens up the internal violence into our everyday lives. By affirming biopolitical governance, we are consumed with the violence (which we do not see as such) of the friend/enemy, insider/outsider distinction. The ban, the paradigmatic violence of modernity, is masked by a series of naturalizations: natural citizenship, allegiance to the nation-state, the sanctity of borders, sovereignty…

 

10 theses on flanerie

1. The flâneur is a phenomenon of exteriority.

2. A theory of surfaces, or topography, produces exteriority.

3. Exteriority induces movement, idleness, detachment – i.e. flânerie.

4. Flânerie has been normalized due to changes in the mass industrial city.

4a. Mass industrialism has given way to mass precarity.

4b. Flânerie is a commentary on and critique of the division of labor.

5. As significant as ‘the general intellect’ is to post-Fordism is flânerie to ‘the general intellect.’

6. Difference, multiplicity :: repetition, sameness – the dialectic of the flâneur

7. The flâneur operates at the threshold of capitalism and communism.

8. The figure of the flâneur is prophetic/messianic, containing within it a theory of time, as well as movement.

9. A political project based on flânerie must include withdrawal and a rigorous critique of everything in existence.

10. The highest form of flâneur is perhaps that of the flâneur who does not move.

agamben’s infancy and history

Giorgio Agamben, trans. Liz Heron, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (New York: Verso, 1993).

In Agamben’s third book, Infancy and History (IH), a few themes that seem to be important to his work as a whole begin to stand out. First, his insistence on the existence of a crisis that must be addressed. Second, his idiosyncratic readings of major philosophers that tend to go against the grain of most established scholarship (to my knowledge). Third, his identification through use as primarily an Aristotelian and a Benjaminian. And finally, the centrality of the concept of messianism and messianic time to much of his work. Many of these themes are interrelated, so I will not deal with them as completely stand-alone issues in a rote fashion, but they are themes that seem to pop up in Agamben’s older and more contemporary work and begin to sketch a portrait of a philosophical project.

In what is, by now, becoming characteristic of Agamben’s work, he begins IH with an assertion that forces us to confront something that we normally take for granted. Previously it was aesthetics (The Man Without Content) or the scission between philosophy and poetry (Stanzas). Unlike his previous works, however, he is not calling for an end to experience; on the contrary, he is saying that experience is something we are no longer having and we must put a stop to that. This seems an absurd statement (as de la Durantaye points out[1]), for surely we experience things all the time. Yesterday I experienced being sick, the day before that I experienced frustration while reading. A few months ago I experienced joy when I found out I could, in fact, change departments. It also seems reasonable to say that I can (and do) experience physical pain, emotional trauma, and so on. Not to mention that I experience the sky being blue, Rome’s beauty, and the absolutely singular experience of my niece’s smile. So what on earth does Agamben mean?

For Agamben, the very experiences of everyday life are being “expropriated”:

“For modern man’s average day contains virtually nothing that can still be translated into experience. Neither reading the newspaper, with its abundance of news that is irretrievably remote from his life, nor sitting for minutes on end at the wheel of his car in a traffic jam. Neither the journey through the nether world of the subway, nor the demonstration that suddenly blocks the street. Neither the cloud of tear gas slowly dispersing between the buildings of the city centre, nor the rapid blasts of gunfire from who knows where; nor queuing up at a business counter, nor visiting the Land of Cockayne at the supermarket, nor those eternal moments of dumb promiscuity among strangers in lifts and buses. Modern man makes his way home in the evening wearied by a jumble of events, but however entertaining or tedious, unusual or commonplace, harrowing or pleasurable they are, none of them will have become experience.”[2]

Such statements must, I think, conjure images of Marx’s alienated labor and the Situationists’ alienated… everything, and should be read within and against those contexts. However, at this point in his writing career, he makes little or no reference to this aspect of Marx or the Situationists (Debord, especially, makes appearances later).

To make sense of this, at this time, Agamben turns to Walter Benjamin to parse out a definition of experience. Leland de la Durantaye’s explication was essential to my understanding of this point, as he further articulates what Agamben meant (indeed, he is more clear than Agamben here).[3] He notes that Agamben uses an Italian word, esperienze, which seems close to its English equivalent, experience. However, “[a]s Agamben makes clear, the term he employs is borrowed from Benjamin,” and in German there are two words for experience, Erlebnis and Erfahrung:

“Erlebnis is an experience in the sense of ‘to have an experience,’ something literally ‘lived through,’ reflected in the word’s etymology (its root is leben, “to live”).

When Benjamin speaks of a “change in experience” or a “poverty of experience,” he employs the term Erfahrung because it is Erfahrung that changes you, Erfahrung that affects you in a durable fashion, that you learn from and lean on, and that is handed down to you by tradition. (A clear illustration of this is found in the fact that in German one can know something not by Erlebnis but only by Erfahrung).”[4]

So experience is not merely something we live through, but that which changes us. Again, this is why I think much of this work needs to be read alongside notions of alienation and why Agamben turns to the Situationists in later works.

All of this talk of experience is, to some extent, a prelude to introducing the concept of infancy, which is the primary appearance of a topic that will continue to preoccupy Agamben for years: potentiality. Agamben introduces the term in his discussion of language:

“The transcendental subject is nothing other than the ‘enunciator’, and modern thought has been built on this undeclared assumption of the subject of language as the foundation of experience and knowledge…For if the subject is merely the enunciator, contrary to what Husserl believed, we shall never attain in the subject the original status of experience: ‘pure, and thereby still mute experience’. On the contrary, the constitution of the subject in and through language is precisely the expropriation of this ‘wordless’ experience; from the outset, it is always ‘speech.’ A primary experience, far from being subjective, could only then be what in human beings comes before the subject – that is, before language: a ‘wordless’ experience in the literal sense of the term, a human infancy [in-fancy], whose boundary would be marked by language…A theory of experience could in this sense only be a theory of in-fancy, and its central question would have to be formulated thus: is there such a thing as human in-fancy? How can in-fancy be humanly possible? And if it is possible, where is it sited?”[5]

For Agamben, this concept of infancy, in-fancy, seems to be the pure experience of things without the mediation of language. This state of in-fancy is a state of being before language, and for Agamben, a site of intense potentiality.[6] This lays the groundwork for much of his discussion of language, identity, and community in The Coming Community.

The notion of a pre-linguistic (or language-free) potential being raises, later, the question of time. A misconception of much of Agamben’s work is its reliance on messianism as being somehow overly metaphysical or overly reliant on the revolutionary moment. But what Agamen means by messianic time is not eschatological, but instead, time in its very “now-ness.” He notes, “The original task of a genuine revolution…is never merely to ‘change the world’, but also – and above all – to ‘change time’.”[7] Focusing on a reading of Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, Agamben develops the notion of messianic time as a time of the Now, an immdediacy. De la Durantaye summarizes it well:

“His [Agamben’s] idea is not of apocalypse but of immediacy; it is not waiting for the Messiah to come, it is acting as though He were already here. It is for this reason that Agamben will say not only…that the central idea in Benjamin’s Theses is “messianic time,” but also that “the paradigm for understanding the present is messianic time” (UL, 18).”[8]

I will not dwell long here, but it is important to note that this sense of immediacy, of urgency in its Now-ness, characterizes a great deal of Agamben’s writing and feeds into the feeling of his constant reaction to crises.

Agamben is now becoming clearer as engaging in a philosophical project that transcends each individual work. The elaborations of in-fancy and messianic time, and the development of a degree of alienation, are becoming central themes in his work. Eventually, he brings them together in The Coming Community, but for now they appear as thoughts on the page, yet to be developed. They are similar to the incomplete works he posits in the introduction (to pull my favorite quote from this book):

“Every written work can be regarded as the prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or the moulds for other absent works, represent only sketches or death masks.”[9]

---

[1] Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). He notes, “Yet the reader might ask whether his concern is justified, whether the idea of a ‘destruction of experience’ is to be taken seriously. For all the ravages that might be visited upon an individual or a culture, experience, it would seem, is precisely what cannot be destroyed.” (82)

[2] Agamben, IH, 13-14.

[3] de la Durantaye, 85.

[4] de la Durantaye, 85.

[5] Agamben, IH, 47 (italics in the original; bold is my emphasis).

[6] de la Durantaye (92) notes that Agamben later drops infancy/in-fancy altogether to focus on the term potentiality.

[7] Agamben, IH, 91.

[8] de la Durantaye, 103.

[9] Agamben, IH, 3.

Roundtable on Marx’s Capital CFP

Roundtable on Marx’s Capital

Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, February 24-27, 2011

Our second Roundtable will explore Volume One of Marx’s Capital (1867). We chose this text because the resurgence in references to and mentions of Marx – provoked especially by the financial crisis, but presaged by the best-seller status of Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Marx’s surprising victory in the BBC’s “greatest philosopher” poll – has only served to highlight the fact that there have not been any new interpretive or theoretical approaches to this book since Althusser’s in the 1960s.

The question that faces us is this: Does the return of Marx mean that we have been thrust into the past, such that long “obsolete” approaches have a newfound currency, or does in mean, on the contrary, that Marx has something new to say to us, and that new approaches to his text are called for?

The guiding hypothesis of this Roundtable is that if new readings of Capital are called for, then it is new readers who will produce them.

Therefore, we are calling for applications from scholars interested in approaching Marx’s magnum opus with fresh eyes, willing to open it to the first page and read it through to the end without knowing what they might find. Applicants need not be experts in Marx or in Marxism. Applicants must, however, specialize in some area of social or political philosophy. Applicants must also be interested in teaching and learning from their fellows, and in nurturing wide-ranging and diverse inquiries into the history of political thought.

If selected for participation, applicants will deliver a written, roundtable-style presentation on a specific part or theme of the text. Your approach to the text might be driven by historical or contemporary concerns, and it might issue from an interest in a theme or a figure (be it Aristotle or Foucault). Whatever your approach, however, your presentation must centrally investigate some aspect of the text of Capital. Spaces are very limited.

Applicants should send the following materials as email attachments (.doc/.rtf/.pdf) to papers@sspp.us by September 15, 2010:

1. Curriculum Vitae
2. One page statement of interest in the Roundtable. (Please include a discussion of the topics you would be willing to explore in a roundtable presentation. Please also discuss the projected significance of participation for your research and/or teaching.)

Ben Fowkes’ translation of Capital (Viking/Penguin, 1976) is the official translation for the Roundtable, and should be used for page citations. However, applicants are strongly encouraged to review either the German text of Capital (the 2nd edition of 1873 is the basis for most widely available texts) or the French translation (J. Roy, 1872-5), which was the last edition Marx himself oversaw to publication; both of these are widely available on-line.

All applicants will be notified of the outcome of the selection process via email on or before October 15, 2010. Participants will be asked to send a draft or outline of their presentation to papers@sspp.us by January 15, 2011 so that we can finalize the program.

In order to participate in the Roundtable (but not to apply or to be selected), you must be a member of the Society in good standing. You can become a member of the Society by following the membership link at: http://www.sspp.us/

Crazy Life

Life has been pretty crazy the past few weeks. I’ve presented 3 papers at two conferences and I’ve been managing to keep up with my school work pretty well too. Hence, no posts for a while…

I’m going to eventually get some of my 3 papers up on here, but for now, just some good news. A few weeks ago I was invited to give a paper as part of a panel at the 2010 AERA Annual Conference in Denver, CO. I had to submit an abstract and then the panel had to be approved by the big-wigs at AERA. I found out today that it was accepted, so I’ll be giving my first invited paper in late April or early May as part of a panel called, “Unusual Spaces: Exploring unconventional sites for the study of teaching and learning.”

AERA changed its process for reviewing and accepting proposals this year – I’m also serving as Co-chair and Co-program Chair for the Foucault and Education Special Interest Group, so I’m familiar with the updated process – and it was much harder to get accepted than in the past. Last year (2009) there were about 1400 paper sessions; this year (2010) there will only be about 1000, a really big cut. AERA is trying to improve the “quality” of the presentations, which is all part of their effort to become more narrowly scientific, which is all due to pressure from government and policy makers and uninformed members of the public to be of more use to setting “good policy.” Clearly I don’t like this development. So, it’s nice to get accepted, do some radical work, scare some people (no joke, I was told I was scary at the most recent conference I went to), and subvert the agenda a bit.

Here’s the abstract for the paper I’ll be giving:

The Pedagogies of Markets: Rethinking the Educational Role of Capital

Under the contemporary conditions of capitalism, education is a key component that articulates with other forces to create specific conditions for life to exist, particularly as productive life. The thought that man’s purpose may be to not work is perhaps unthinkable in the context of cell phones, laptop computers, wireless internet, and 24-hour connectivity to work.

Following Judith Butler, I will explore the epistemological and ontological questions of “framing” markets. As she notes, “the frames through which we apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of others as lost or injured (lose-able or injurable) are politically saturated” (2009, 1). However, Butler is quick to remind us that this epistemological question is deeply entwined with an ontological one because we have to accompany the question what do we know with what is it that we know?

At issue is the way markets operate in (at least) a triple-layered fashion. At a local farmer’s market, people encounter the physicality of the market itself. Walking through the stalls and talking with vendors, they then encounter a market based on meeting human needs organized largely around use-value exchange. But they also encounter a market that is global, exploitative of labor-power, highly volatile, and normalized through the exchange of money for goods, the sale of non-local products, and the presence of security guarantors such as the police. The experience of the layered market is not an abnormal one in American lives, and must surely have educative impact.

But such an analysis has largely been done before, by Giroux, McLaren, Apple, and others. However, these thinkers tend to homogenize capitalism as something to be resisted, which is, to me, an uncontroversial impulse. Where they tend to fall short, though, is that “the market” is often perceived to be the site of injustice instead of a site that can be re-appropriated as anti-capitalist. Using the works of Hardt and Negri (2001; 2005; 2009), DeLanda (1997; 2006), and Marx (1990), I will discuss the educative epistemological and ontological frames of markets and provide the beginnings of a way to think markets otherwise and perhaps give rise to new educational possibilities.

Works Cited:

Butler, J. (2009). Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?. New York: Verso, 2009.

DeLanda, M. (1999). A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 1997.

DeLanda, M. (2006). A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. New York: Continuum, 2006.

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2001). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009.

Marx, K. (1990). Capital, Volume I. New York: Penguin, 1990.