An amazing looking conference coming up.

I'm currently at a college reunion, so I am missing what is going on in the internet (please save the best for me). Regardless, I wanted to share this conference coming up that I had intended to go to, but no longer can.

Commonalities: Theorizing the Common in Contemporary Italian Thought

a diacritics conference : 9/24 – 9/25/10 Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Speakers:

• Franco (“Bifo”) Berardi
• Remo Bodei, “Goodbye to Community: Exile and Separation”
• Cesare Casarino, “Universalisms of the Common”
• Ida Dominijanni, “Wounds of the Common”
• Roberto Esposito, “Community and Violence”
• Michael Hardt, “Pasolini Discovers Love Outside”
• Antonio Negri (via video conference)

Amazing.

Hardt and Negri and love in Commonwealth

Jodi Dean has an interesting post up on Hardt and Negri's Commonwealth, which most of you know I read and reviewed for Radical Philosophy Review (thanks again, Peter). In her post, Dean makes some arguments/gut reactions about using love, joy, etc as political theoretical categories. I don't necessary share those, but it provides a decent place for me to begin some public thoughts on their categories of love.

One of the things you'll notice in Commonwealth is a bizarrely Heidegger-esque language about true forms of love from false forms of love. While the word authentic itself isn't thrown around, it certainly feels like what Adorno once called the jargon of authenticity. I don't want to get too much into all of this now (I know their response would probably be they aren't be Heideggerians, but Spinozians, maybe I'll try to spell this out in more detail later). But I think there is a large and useful literature base on the political question of love, particularly in the literature base of radical women of color. What is odd is that this base, some of which has been cited in previous discussions of love, is missing from Commonwealth's discussion of love.

However, the most interesting criticism of Hardt and Negri's notion of love comes from Ranciere's interview "People or Multitude". In it Ranciere argues that political subjectivity comes not from love, but from apparatuses of litigation against specific torts. Negation serves an important process of producing radical political subjectivities.

Anyway, I haven't really said much. Hopefully I will get to a more fully formed post later.

Copyright as performative contradiction

So, one of the weird things I didn't talk about with Hardt & Negri's Commonwealth is that the book is, of course, copyrighted. Hundreds of pages, many of which deal explicitly with the need to move beyond property relations, especially in forms of affective and cognitive labor. That these forms of 'biopolitical labor' belong to the common, and by releasing that we only enrich each other and that labor by allowing it to stay in the common.

Now, I understand that publishing companies have a lot more to do with copyrighting than authors' wishes. But unless there is a back story I am unaware of (and if there is, please let me know) I sorta think that authors at the stature of Hardt and Negri could freely choose to publish with a smaller company without copyright or some sort of creative commons copyright without hurting their careers.

This clearly isn't the only case of copyright as performative contradiction, but it is one of most egregious I have seen.

hypermodernity, postmodernity, and altermodernity = German, American, and French = wtf?

At one point H&N write, "We could say, in a playful kind of nationalist shorthand, that Germans are primarily responsible for the concept of hypermodernity, U.S. intellectuals for postmodernity, and the French for altermodernity-- although our preference for the position of altermodernity is not due to any sort of Francophilia" (p. 113).

Let's quickly gloss over the obvious dialectical relationship of these three terms (indeed, the dialectical relationship that is the key to altermodernity) despite H&N's protestations, and just get into how this sentence above is completely incoherent.

Now, hypermodernity here refers to theorists who feel that modernity is an unfinished project. And I can get to how they call it playfully German, considering the theorists they mostly identify with this position are Habermas and Beck.

Postmodernity they mean simply a rejection of modernity. Now, I don't understand how this is mostly a term of U.S. intellectuals. I can make some arguments for them, but they don't indicate anything useful in the text. Indeed, in a footnote they write: "The weak versions of postmodernism, from Jean-Francois Lyotard and Richard Rorty to Jean Baudrillard and Gianni Vattimo, offer this kind of aestheticized reaction to the crisis, at times veering into theology" (p. 403 n. 74). In that list we have two Frenchmen, one Italian, and one U.S. intellectual. Now, this might not be worth mentioning would it not be for the absurdity of referring to altermodernity as French.

For the several pages proceeding this schematic distinction between the three reactions of failed modernity, they had been discussing concrete political assemblages they would associate with altermodernity, and host of theorists to explain altermodernity. Almost to a person we are talking about Latin American and Caribbean theorists and struggles. How does this suddenly become a French thing? The only French theorist they have specifically named with altermodernity up to that point is Foucault. On the pages before and afterward they warn against the dangers of Eurocentrism, and then we have this completely bizarre and unwarranted moment of Eurocentrism.

Immanence and from below

I'm working on this review of Hardt and Negri's Commonwealth, and in such a review you end up way more material than can go into a review. So probably for the rest of this week, and some of next week you will see several random posts on stuff that isn't going into the review.

So, random observation: I'm really annoyed by the authors claims on one hand to working within the framework of immanence, and then on the other hand, they constantly talk about stuff "from below." Clearly this isn't a big deal, but those concepts terminology, at the minimum, has some tension. Now I understand, one set has to do with a lack of metaphysics of hierarchy in ontology, and the from below refers to the hierarchy of material and social conditions. Still, annoying.

Negri, more on vitalism and humanism

Peter Gratton follows up my last post with this:

I think it’s a false choice, no? One can’t be both? I also think that though Negri is saying he’s not a vitalist that doesn’t end the point. I think Critical Animal is right, but let’s not pretend that Negri is the most consistent thinker on this and doesn’t often have confusing discussions on this point.

I think he's absolutely right that vitalist vs. humanist is a false choice. Sorry if I came across that way. And I am in now way trying to get onto anyone who has read Negri as a vitalist (including myself. I am sure if you searched through my various internet writing places you can come across some places where I described Negri as a materialist vitalist). Though I think, and I can in no way back this feeling up so thank god this is blogging, that the fault is not with Negri on this on. I would guess he has been pretty consistent on this issue, and our confusion rests with having read this position as being slightly closer to Deleuze's than it is in reality. But this has a pretty important implications for Negri's political ontology. The fact that I seem to create an obviously false contrast between vitalism and humanism is because I think the contrast is true for Negri. Vitalism destroys the power of humanism, for him. Not only does vitalism destroy the power of humanism, it opens the door for biopower (again, in his use of the term). A desire for a biopolitical humanism in a biopolitical enlightenment is absolutely essential for Negri's work, and there is no room for vitalism.

Now, I really can't prove it without combing through my Negri books (and right now my tendency would be to work a little backwards, starting with The Porcelain Workshop and In Praise of the Common and only later getting to A Savage Anomaly), which right now I am not inclined to do, but if there is real interest or a lot of discussion, who knows what will happen. So, if anyone wants to weigh in, feel free.

Negri, Humanism, Monstrosity

Jason Read has a review of Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics. (h/t Philosophy in a Time of Error). In it, Read argues:

Finally, Casarino's example of language as this relation between the virtual and actual, an example that is repeated numerous times throughout the discussions with Negri, underscores that as a philosophical problem the common focuses as much on the fundamental aspects of human subjectivity, on a philosophical anthropology, as it does on an ontology.

The turn towards philosophical anthropology, towards an examination of humanity through its fundamental activities and relations, differentiates Negri's work from the work of thinkers of a previous generation such as Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Louis Althusser. For Deleuze, and other "anti-humanist" thinkers, any discussion of human nature, of some commonality, was an effect of power or an ideological ruse. Negri's and Casarino's work has more in common (no pun intended) with the work of Giorgio Agamben, Etienne Balibar, and Paolo Virno, who have returned to the maligned field of philosophical anthropology, to a consideration of what makes us human, not as a generic essence, but as the interplay between abstract potential and singular differences. This is not to say that these conceptions are the same. In the interviews, and in the essay on the political monster, Negri distinguishes his understanding of humanity from Agamben's understanding of bare, or naked, life. For Agamben, bare life, the reduction of humanity to pure survival, is at the basis of the modern state. Such an understanding of humanity disavows the common, specifically the way in which the common as presupposition constitutes a kind of historicity. As Negri writes,

There is no naked life in ontology, much as there is no social structure without rules, or word without meaning. The universal is concrete. What precedes us in time, in history, always already presents itself as an ontological condition, and, as far as man is concerned, as (consistent, qualified, irreversible) anthropological figure (208).

This is, as I have argued before, absolutely correct. Negri is no vitalist, no matter how many times you read that people say he is a materialist vitalist in the same lineage as Deleuze. For Negri, it is not life that gives us the power to be, but rather the very being of humanity that gives us the unique power to be. This is, and always been, the flavor of humanism that always exists in Negri. Though a biopolitical (in the sense Negri uses that term) humanism, to be sure.

This collection, however, contains a particularly interesting essay that both goes the farthest at contesting the boundaries of the human while at the same time ultimately reterroritoralizing on the figure of the human. This is the essay "The Political Monster." I remember a little over a year ago, back when I first trying to blog, Shaviro had a series of posts up on the question of monstrosity that Hardt and Negri praise as the monstrous flesh of the multitude. Shaviro had argued at the time that such a moves ignores that for Marx, the monstrous was capitalism. At the time I argued that the monstrous was something I wanted to be on the side of. Anyway, in this essay Negri not only extends the analysis about why he is on the side of monsters, but also specifically deals with this change from capitalism as monster to multitude as monster.

Miéville, Negri, Agamben: A brief note

As many people have pointed out, one of the ways by which we can understand the differences of Negri and Agamben is based upon their different understandings of potentiality. Negri is based upon his reading of Spinoza, and Agamben is based upon his reading of Aristotle. I don't have enough time to go into these readings, and the consquential distinctions in their philosophical projects. I just wanted to give a brief note on a way to conceptualize these distinctions in the first two bas-lag novels by China Mieville.

In Perdido Street Station, a significant plot device is dedicated to the development of a crisis engine, something that would us to tap into crisis energy. Crisis energy is perpetual motion. Crisis energy takes the decisive moment that something changes, and uses that feed into more and more power for that change. Crisis energy is a part of being, by the very nature of being you are already in crisis, just waiting to tap into it to do anything. This seems close to the understanding of potentia by Negri. Power that comes from living being that allows one to constantly change, morph, become something else entirely. We don't know what crisis can do.

In The Scar, a different type of power is sought after, the power of the possible. The power of the possible sword, or the possible letter. The explaination of the possible is given with the possible sword. Uther Doul carries with him a strang piece of technology, called a possible sword. When turned on, it doesn't just hit the target he actually hits, it hits all possible targets to a certain degree. The more possible, the more they are hit. The power of the sword isn't to become something else (a la crises) but to be or not to be whatever it possibly could be.

Now, maybe crisis energy and the possible sword are bad examples. However, the way Mieville describes the tension between the two is a great description of the tension between the two politics of Negri and Agamben.

From The Scar:

[H]is conviction that underlying the facticity of the world, in all its seeming fastnass, was an instability, a crisis pushing things to change from the tensions within them.
[...]
In the possibility mining that Uther Doul had just described Bellis saw a radical undermining of crisis theory. Crisis, Issac had once told her, was manifest in the tendency of the real to become what it was not. If what was and what was not were allowed to coexist, the very tension -- the crisis at the center of existence -- must dissipate. Where was that crisis energy in the real becoming what it was not, if what it was not was right there alongside what it was? (p. 396).

Negri and vitalism

So, most people read Negri as being a vitalist even though he explicitly and frequently rejects vitalism. Now, I assume this because of the vitalism that is in Deleuze. But this is one of those issues where people end up reading everyone into the poststructuralist goo. Someone says something similar to someone else, and suddenly they are saying the same thing.

Regardless, that Negri is not a vitalist, that he rejects the bergsonism in Deleuze, is a key and critical difference. Not just between Negri and Deleuze, but oddly also between Negri and Agamben. Negri does believe in an ontology of becoming, which clearly places him alongside Deleuze. And their shared interest in Spinoza and a Marxism that focuses on the production of subjectivity means this shouldn't surprise you. What changes however is that for Deleuze this ontology of becoming is rooted in a vitalism, with the force of life that comes from outside and exceeds everything. This life is certainly not contained within just the human, necessary. Though certainly life, as Deleuze (with and without Guattari) understands it includes things like metal, and various other things that would not traditionally be considered life. For Negri, the ontology of production has nothing to do with the nature of life, but rather with the particular nature of humanity. To be human, for Negri, is rooted with our unique capacity for production, for living labor power. This is not vitalism, as people keep calling it, but humanism. And a not surprising humanism from a man whose early philosophical projects were undertaken in examining many of the great enlightenment era humanists (Descartes, Machiavelli, and a certain conception of Spinoza). And that this is a thinker who desires a new enlightenment, a biopolitical enlightenment. Now, I have no doubt that Negri would disagree with my characterization of this as humanism. Most likely because the production of subjectivity that is uniquely human for Negri can overcome itself (with all the Nietzschean and Foucauldian overtones this is suppose to evoke).

This humanism is also stands as stark contrast to Agamben. Negri believes it is when vitalistic concerns are introduced, when we come to care about zoe instead of just bios, that we see introduced the concerns of the thantopolitical. This comes to heart of Negri's criticisms of Agamben's figure of the homo sacer becoming a political figure. He is terrified that we will rally around naked life as something to be protected, which for him continues to justify being able to see humans as being separable from their bios.

I guess I don't need to say I find this humanism even more problematic than I find Deleuze's generalized vitalism. In particular, I doubt I need to tell you that what Negri misses in this obsession with bios is the problem that I refer to, following the movie Blade Runner, as more human than the human. It may be true that we can produce something different from the human, but if we are bound up with humanism then all seek to make is to perfect the human. And that drive, of course, is what drives regimes to make people into naked life. Not by having the concept of naked life, but by having a concept that can we need to perfect the human.

Which is sad, because I really Negri.

In praise of Antonio Negri: A joke

I recently picked up a copy of the book length interview of Negri, entitled Goodbye, Mr. Socialism. I've not very far into it, so if anyone has any comments about it feel free to share them. But I wanted to share a little joke on the back cover.

The back cover has at the top a section entitled, "In Praise of Antonio Negri" with two quotations underneath it. The first is from the New Statesman, "One of the most significant figures of current political thought." Fine, nothing remarkable there. The next, however is from Slovaj Zizek, "A guru of the post-modern left." What is truly remarkable is I'm sure that is neither meant as praise by Zizek, nor taken as praise by Negri.

Seriously, that is more humorous than the back cover of Anti-Oedipus with the quotation from the New Republic about how D&G are advancing a metaphor.

A question about Negri's Porcelain Workshop

Does anyone know why Negri's Porcelain Workshop has a special shipping fee from Amazon?

Like, is it especially big or irregularly shaped or somehow different from every book ever?

And I'm sure most of you don't care, but I'm traveling, hence the sudden cut off of blog posts.

monstrosity

Over at Shaviro's blog he has a very interesting post on the notion of the monstrous flesh in the work of Hardt and Negri. You should go read it http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=639

I wanted to post here the comment I made over there:

Interesting post. A few issues I have.

(1) The Task of Philosophy:
I think that whatever problems there are in Empire and Multitude (and sure, there are many), these books are not just works trying to describe a political situation, they are also trying to produce a political ontology. As Deleuze and Guattari put it in What Is Philosophy? “We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist” (p. 108). Empire and Multitude is about calling forth this new people, this multitude. I think we have to judge the exuberance of these two books partially upon a criteria of a “becoming-political of philosophy” (as Alliez puts it in The Signature of the World).

(2) On subsumption:

Few people have done more to advance the knowledge of transitions from formal subsumption to real subsumption than Negri. Indeed, one can see in the works of both Negri and Hardt a thorough look at capitalism’s move to a cognitive and affective capitalism. We can see the increasing disciplinarization and normalization of capitalism. Read Negri’s The Politics of Subversion for merely my favorite work on this issue. Also, a good read (if you haven’t already) is Jason Read’s The Micro-politics of Capital, which synthesizes the work of Negri and other autonomists and french political theory. The switch from formal subsumption to real subsumption and the rise of immaterial labor is clearly at stake in both Empire and Multitude, why then does your post imply that somehow it isn’t acknowledged? Your post implies that they somehow think that the categories of immaterial labor and real subsumption are somehow less oppressive. I don’t think they ever imply that (though maybe, in the general sense, that they imply that Empire is less oppressive than the days of nationalism). What they do argue in those texts (and perhaps more forcefully in other works) is that the stage of real subsumption is a stage of contestability. Similar to Foucault, if capitalism now inhabits every moment of our life, then every moment of life is a possibility to fight capitalism. The antagonism against real subsumption becomes the constitutive reality of the multitude.

(3) Monstrosity:
It is the question of constitutive possibilities that seems to be real break you make with Negri and Hardt. Does capitalism contain creative, constitutive powers itself? Does it have poesies and potentia? The argument of Negri is unambiguous on this point, capitalism does not and cannot. (It is here that Agamben makes his criticism against Negri). If capitalism does not have its own constitutive powers, than it proceeds based upon control and normalization (and those words should be not be heard too far outside of their Deleuzian and Foucauldian registers). Perhaps then we should also hear the word monstrosity in its Foucauldian register. Foucault devoted an extensive amount of time to the idea of monstrosity, particular in his lectures on The Abnormal. In there we find that “the monster is essentially a mixture” (p. 63). But it is not enough for the monster to be a mixture. “There is monstrosity only when the confusion comes up against, overturns, or disturbs civil, canon, or religious law” (ibid). If capitalism is only parasitic, if it only has potestas and not potentia, if it has only constituted and not constitutive power, if it only can own the means of production but cannot produce itself; then it needs normalization and control. Capitalism may break taboos (may indeed depend on it), but only to create a new normal. Monstrous bodies are still bodies that need to be controlled or killed in our society. When Hardt and Negri align the multitude with a monstrous flesh, this is actually a very important moment. First of all, it sets up the antagonism between the multitude and those societies of control (deleuze)/societies of normalization (Foucault). Second of all, it contends that the common of the multitude will not be one of normalization. Communism is not and cannot be soviet socialism, it cannot be another way of normalizing, rather, the common of the multitude must be the monstrous. The singularity of the monstrous body, the creativity and productivity of the multitude against the normalizing control of capitalism.

That post makes me sound like I am in the tank for hardt and negri, which surely isn’t the case. It also didn’t express enough that I liked your post.