interview with Domenico Losurdo on liberalism and marxism

Ross Wolfe: How would you characterize the antinomy of emancipation and de-emancipation in liberal ideology? From where did this logic ultimately stem?

Domenico Losurdo: I believe that this dialectic between emancipation and de-emancipation is the key to understanding the history of liberalism. The class struggle Marx speaks about is a confrontation between these forces. What I stress is that sometimes emancipation and de-emancipation are strongly connected to one another. Of course we can see in the history of liberalism an aspect of emancipation. For instance, Locke polemicizes against the absolute power of the king. He asserts the necessity of defending the liberty of citizens against the absolute power of the monarchy. But on the other hand, Locke is a great champion of slavery. And in this case, he acts as a representative of de-emancipation. In my book, I develop a comparison between Locke on the one hand and Bodin on the other. Bodin was a defender of the absolute monarchy, but was at the same time a critic of slavery and colonialism.

RW: The counter-example of Bodin is interesting. He appealed to the Church and the monarchy, the First and Second Estates, in his defense of the fundamental humanity of the slave against the “arbitrary power of life and death” that Locke asserted the property-owner, the slave-master, could exercise over the slave.

DL: Yes, in Locke we see the contrary. While criticizing the absolute monarchy, Locke is a representative of emancipation, but while celebrating or legitimizing slavery, Locke is of course a representative of de-emancipation. In leading the struggle against the control of the absolute monarchy, Locke affirmed the total power of property-owners over their property, including slaves. In this case we can see very well the entanglement between emancipation and de-emancipation. The property-owner became freer, but this greater freedom meant a worsening of the conditions of slavery in general.

from Platypus.

cfp – materialism and world politics conference

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)

 

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.

a grammar of the multitude

As I prepare for my candidacy exams in Spring 2011, I’ll be posting reading summaries here. All block quotes appear in red and refer to the edition listed at the top of the post.

*****

Paolo Virno, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, Andrea Casson, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004). [Includes an introduction by Sylvere Lotringer, referenced below as "Lotringer"]

Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life lays out his vision of post-Fordism, culminating in the radical statement that “Post-Fordism is the communism of capital” (110).

He begins with an elaboration of the multitude, based on Spinoza:

For Spinoza, the multitudo indicates a plurality which persists as such in the public scene, in collective action, in the handling of communal affairs, without converging into a One, without evaporating within a centripetal form of motion. Multitude is the form of social and political existence for the many, seen as being many: a permanent form, not an episodic of interstitial form. (21)

The Spinozist multitude is juxtaposed against the “people” of Hobbes. For Hobbes, the state of nature was a multitudinous state, and the development of the social contract moved people from existing as many, the multitude, to existing as One, the people. Virno notes,

The concept of people, according to Hobbes, is strictly correlated to the existence of the State; furthermore, it is a reverberation, a reflection of the State: if there is a State, then there are people. (22)

Essentially, the State is endowed with a single will, that of the people’s. Much like Hardt and Negri’s notion of the multitude, Virno agrees that the multitude

shuns political unity, resists authority, does not enter into lasting agreements, never attains the status of juridical person because it never transfers its own natural rights to the sovereign. (23)

Where Virno begins to deviate from Hardt and Negri, though, is through his articulation of the multitude and post-Fordism with Marx’s notion of the “general intellect” as articulated in the “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse.

Virno departs from Marx, in that he claims Marx equated the general intellect with fixed capital. Virno insists that instead, “the general intellect presents itself as living labor” (106).

In the Post-Fordist environment, a decisive role is played by the infinite variety of concepts and logical schemes which cannot ever be set within fixed capital, being inseparable from the reiteration of a plurality of living subjects. The general intellect includes, thus, formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mindsets, and ‘linguistic games.’ In contemporary labor processes, there are thoughts and discourses which function as productive ‘machines,’ without having to adopt the form of a mechanical body or of an electronic valve. (106)

The shift in the paradigm of labor is essentially one from labor-time to productive-time. Even a brief example will make this clear: any contemporary individual with a cell phone understands that there has been a complete collapse between the time spent at work (formerly labor-time) and the time in which a person is now expected to be productive. When individuals employed even in the non-profit sector (in other words, individuals engaged in work with no connection to international stock markets, or other demands that a person be available beyond the “normal” work day) receive phone calls at home in order to troubleshoot the next ‘crisis,’ and the norm is to take laptops and cell phones into the home, it becomes clear that the distinction between ‘work’ and ‘life’ has utterly collapsed. This crisis – the crisis of the division of human experience into the labor sphere (poiesis), the sphere of political action (praxis), and the sphere of the intellect (the life of the mind) – is precisely the background of the multitude.

Virno extends this crisis into a critique of Foucault’s notion of biopower, and the contemporary studies of biopower. This is an oblique critique of Hardt and Negri, and needs to be understood as such. Virno notes,

The concept of “bio-politics” has recently become fashionable: it is often, and enthusiastically, invoked in every kind of context. We should avoid this automatic and unreflective use of the term. Let us ask ourselves, then, how and why life breaks through to the center of the public scene, how and why the State regulates and governs it. // In my opinion, to comprehend the rational core of the term ‘bio-politics,’ we should begin with a different concept, a much more complicated concept from a philosophical standpoint: that of labor-power. (81)

Biopolitics, for Virno, is necessarily linked to labor-power, or, the potential to produce. Under a Fordist economy, there is still separation between biopower and labor power, in that there are goods produced and exchanged in such a way as to maintain a division between the polis and the oikos. Under post-Fordism, where the good to be produced is immaterial, we can only operate on the level of life. One sells and buys an individual’s potential to produce as the primary commodity. It is for this reason that Virno writes:

Here is the crucial point: where something exists only as possibility is sold, this something is not separable from the living person of the seller. The living body of the worker is the substratum of that labor-power which, in itself, has no independent existence. ‘Life,’ pure and simple bios, acquires a specific importance in as much as it is the tabernacle of dynamis, of mere potential. (82)

why is life, as such, managed and controlled? The answer is absolutely clear: because it acts as the substratum of a mere faculty, labor-power, which has taken on the consistency of a commodity. (83)

Virno concludes A Grammar with “ten theses on the multitude and post-Fordist capitalism” (95-111). These theses reiterate and extend the primary observations and arguments of the book, and culminate in his tenth thesis: “Post-Fordism is the ‘communism of capital’” (110). In concerning himself with the multitude as the primary figure of post-Fordism, Virno argues that post-Fordism is capitalism’s attempt to articulate many of the demands of communism without any of the emancipatory components, therefore preserving exploitation and alienation. He summarizes by saying,

This [the communism of capital] means that the capitalistic initiative orchestrates for its own benefit precisely those material and cultural conditions which would guarantee a calm version of realism for the potential communist. (110)

This taps into the revolutionary creative potential of the multitude, foreseen by Marx and Spinoza (among others) as the condition for communism and democracy respectively, but for capitalist and anti-democratic ends: the extension of exploitation in the immaterial scene as ‘common sense,’ in other words, a new capitalist hegemony.

In a rather significant way, what Virno does in A Grammar of the Multitude is return the multitude to a position from which to engage in class warfare. But this class warfare is no longer tied to the proletariat (Thesis 9, 109); instead, it hearkens back to the autonomist politics of 1970s Italy, which fought to include the unemployed and underemployed in the struggle against capital. By broadening the revolutionary class, as does Hardt and Negri, but maintaining a more faithful Marxist core, Virno (according to Lotringer in his introduction) imagines the multitude as a class looking for a struggle, rather than a struggle looking for a class (16).  Lotringer insists that Virno avoids “turning exile, or the multitude for that matter, let alone communism, into another splendid myth” (9). What Virno accomplishes is articulating the multitude as “a force defined less by what it actually produces than by its virtuality, its potential to produce and produce itself” (Lotringer, 12).

 

fear/anguish: the psyche of mobility

Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude is turning out to be pretty fantastic. Here’s some thoughts on “Day One: Forms of Dread and Refuge.”

Fear and anguish, through Kant and Heidegger, are articulated as a dialectic that has implications for distinguishing “the people” from the “multitude.” As Virno notes, Heidegger asserts that fear “refers to a very specific fact,” while anguish “has not clear cause which sparks it off” (32). He goes on to say, anguish is “provoked purely and simply by our being exposed to the world, by the uncertainty and indecision with which our relation to this world manifests itself” (32). Virno then pushes this dialectic onto the opposing conceptions of “people” and “multitude,” in that the concept of “people” is “closely bound to the clear separation between a habitual ‘inside’ and an unknown and hostile ‘outside’” (32-33). However, the concept of “multitude” “hinges upon the ending of such a separation” (33).

Interestingly, he claims that the fear/anguish dialectic is groundless, for three reasons:

1. “one cannot speak reasonably of substantial communities”
2. “Today, all forms of life have the experience of ‘not feeling at home’”
3. the traditional model of stimulus (dread) – response (seeking refuge) is wrong; “Above all, we protect ourselves; then, when we are intent on protecting ourselves, we focus on identifying the dangers with which we may have to concern ourselves” (34).

This inversion of the stimulus-response model of dread/seeking refuge forces us to look upon enclosure practices and discourses of interiority/exteriority in a different way. Practices of confinement and exclusion, for example refugee detention camps and physical barriers such as walls, are an attempt at turning the multitude into a people. They are practices and technologies of differentiation, separation, and hierarchization in the face of a multitude, a “plurality which persists as such in the public scene, in collective action, in the handling of communal affairs, without converging into a One, without evaporating within a centripetal form of motion. Multitude is the form of social and political existence for the many, seen as being many: a permanent form, not an episodic or interstitial form” (21).

Confinement and exclusion produce a paradox: to reduce the multitude into distinct and coherent communities of peoples which are then reunited into a One, a “people.”

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/