What in the hell …

This is the text I’m using as the basis for a talk I’m giving later this week on Negri etc. It’s about as polished as I have time to make it right now, which is to say, it’s a rough draft including my own notes to self. I lost the footnote numbers and don’t have time to put them in again right now. If/when I clean this up I’ll repost the cleaner version here. Comments welcome.

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Reading Hardt and Negri’s recent work like reading Volume 1 of Capital. This is not a complement. Both bodies of work contain their own internal narratives and dramatic presentations, arguments at a logical level about definitions and concepts,and historical arguments which tell stories about things changing in time, beginning, ending, becoming possible, and ceasing to be possible. The texts pass between these different registers without always indicating when they’re doing so. This makes it difficult when one disagrees or is troubled by a part of the text, as well as making it unclear how – or if – the parts of the text hang together or if one may accept some but not other parts of the text. Generally speaking, I like much of Hardt and Negri’s theoretical work when it is, or is read as, an interrogation and revision of Marxian categories of thought. I find some of their historical narratives unsatisfying, however. I suspect that my objections on the level of historical narratives have an impact at the conceptual level, but I am frankly not clear on what these might be.

Hardt and Negri see a number of changes happening in the recent present. They characterize these changes in multiple ways: as the passage from formal to real subsumption, from fordism to postfordism, and as the immaterialization of labor or achievement of hegemony by immaterial labor. I plan to address the narratives that Hardt and Negri deploy specifically around the labor process and reproductive labor, the concept or subject of multitude, and the connection between these intersecting narratives. I will return later to more general questions of historical narratives in Hardt and Negri’s work.

Under postfordism the distinctions between worktime and nonworktime break down. All of lifetime becomes implicated in production. Production is said to become biopolitical, such that struggles occur on and over biological and social life itself. Postfordism is also characterized by a transition to immaterial labor, variably defined as work that produces and/or manipulates signs and symbols, data, information, knowledges, affects and biological life. Teachers, graphic designers, computer programmers, translators, retail clerks, prostitutes, nurses, nannies, and housewives are all examples of immaterial laborers. This labor occurs in and out of recognized workplaces, in remunerated and unremunerated modes. This set of ideas and narratives shares much with the concept of the social factory developed within the operaismo tradition of Marxism, among which Negri was a major thinker.

The social factory is a conceptual optic that makes visible that the techniques and practices of power deployed within the factory also impact life outside the factory, and vice versa. In other words, the walls of the factory are a semi-permeable membrane across which passages take place and across which lines of force operate. The basic point of the concept is that value production and resistance to value production do not occur only in determinate and recognized workplaces and in activity by waged workers. The concept of the social factory has a polemical force, against the factoryist political and organizational model that centers on workplaces and waged work. The concept is valuable to this extent. At the same time, the social factory can itself be considered as not only a concept but a historical narrative, which makes an important difference. Consider the following arguments:

On the one hand, one could argue that the factory, the shopfloor, is social from the beginning. Every factory is a social factory. That is, the workplace and society outside the workplace are contiguous such that relationships of command and of subversion cut across the inside and outside of the factory. To my mind, this is always true of capitalism ever since its genesis.

On the other hand, one can deploy a narrative in which the inside and the outside of the factory become contiguous over a period of time. In this case, there are social factories, and unsocial factories, and a historical process in which unsocial factories become social factories. This is what Hardt and Negri seem to argue about the transformation of labor time and lifetime under postfordism. For Hardt and Negri, in the transition to postfordism and immaterial labor, the relationships of worktime and nonworktime, waged worktime and unwaged worktime, change dramatically: all of lifetime becomes work, such that one is always on the job, though only sometimes working and only sometimes paid. As part of this process what are traditionally known as women’s work, and other ostensibly off the clock activity activity, now become value productive under postfordism. Capitalist command now comes to reach across the inside and outside of the factory.

The sticking point is the word ‘now’ in these preceding sentences. The ‘now’ implies that these were not the case before. The ‘now’ operates a partitioning between the present and the past, and those laboring in and struggling in each. To say unwaged activity such as reproduction becomes value productive now means that it was not so before. Therefore women were not exploited by capitalism, women’s labor was not exploited labor, women’s struggles were not communist struggles. One could say the same for peasants, students, the unemployed, etc.

By contrast, let’s briefly consider the work of a trio of Italian feminist and Marxist writers: Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Leopoldina Fortunati, and Silvia Federici. In addition to sharing contiguous political and theoretical histories with Negri, these three thinkers also share the view that so-called “women’s work”, unwaged reproductive labor, is productive of value. Reproductive labor is therefore enmeshed in circuits of command and subversion that cut across both designated workplaces and spaces that are taken to be spaces of nonwork in more conventional Marxist accounts . Dalla Costa, Fortunati, and Federici differ from Hardt and Negri’s addendum of ‘now’ to the productivity of reproductive labor. For these three, reproductive labor has always been productive as the labor of producing the commodity labor power since the beginning of capitalism, in all areas in which capitalism existed.
Federici’s book Caliban and the Witch details some of the impacts of the originary processes of capitalism, ‘so-called primitive accumulation’. Producing the vogelfrei workers who can live only by the sale of their labor power as a commodity required a tremendous operation of force over a long period of time, as detailed in volume one of Capital. The production of labor power as a commodity also required the recomposition of the labor of producing the bodies that bring the commodity labor power to the market. Federici details the effects that the violently accomplished recomposition of reproductive labor had upon women’s lives, as well as exploring the specific changes wrought in the mode of performing reproductive labor and the relationships between reproductive labor and other labor. In Federici’s analysis these spheres, like sites of waged labor, are subject to capitalist command and are sites of potential communist struggle. In other words, the passage of reproductive labor into being value productive which Hardt and Negri see as occurring in the passage to postfordism as a result of the cycles of struggles of the late 60s and mid-70s, occurs for Federici in the passage to the capitalist mode production via the originary processes of primitive accumulation.

To be clear, no one believes that nothing has changed since primitive accumulation, or since the 1970s. Things have of course changed. The difference is that between saying that at some point in the history of capitalism reproductive labor becomes a moment of value production, as opposed to saying that reproductive labor is unwaged labor that is always already a moment of value production from the beginning of capitalism, because capitalism requires - and engages in conflict over - the reproduction of the bodies which bear the commodity labor power.

There are of course important differences between fordism and postfordism. These differences, however, do not include one in which reproductive labor was unproductive under fordism and is now productive under postfordism. Rather, postfordism and fordism are different modalities of the distribution of waged and unwaged labor, productive and reproductive labor. These modalities exist within the temporally and spatially distributed aggregate processes of value production, and are changes in the relations and flows of forces within these aggregate processes, ie, within the social field in which these labors occur. Unwaged reproductive labor in both fordism and postfordism is a part of value production.

To be fair, Hardt and Negri do of course see a continuity between fordism and postfordism, a continuity of struggles and so forth. Still, for Hardt and Negri postfordism is a new type of capitalism within which unwaged reproductive labor is newly productive of value, rather than a different arrangement of the relations between waged and unwaged value productive labor. Another way to put this is that for the perspective I find in the work of Dalla Costa, Fortunati, and Federici, the present is genuinely different from prior eras, but its difference is the same difference that every historical moment under capitalism has from every other historical moment. Every historical moment is unlike every other moment and must be thought in its specificity. Hardt and Negri, on the other hand, imply that the different between our special historical moment is a difference that is different from the difference between any two historical moments. There is something extra-different or different in a special way about the present, beyond it’s being our moment.

Hardt and Negri see the passages I have been addressing with regard to productive labor as intimately bound up with what they see as the new political possibilities and requisite projects that inhere within the present. These possibilities and projects cluster around the term multitude. For reasons of brevity I will here define multitude as a capacity for the autonomous collective production and management of our own biological and social lives. Put differently, multitude means something like “production by freely associated labor” which is also “the real movement that abolishes the present order.” That is to say, the terms means something like “communism” or “communisms” or “communist subjectivities”. Hardt and Negri see multitude as both a possibility and a transition which is materially underway in the present social order.

Just as I am uneasy with the idea that reproductive labor once was not productive under capitalism but becomes productive at some point within the history of capitalism, I am also uneasy that Hardt and Negri say that only now does multitude become possible to instantiate, that communism becomes possible for the first time only in our era. My unease can be expressed by looking at a line from Marx. Marx writes in the Grundrisse that there exist within capitalism certain relationships which are mines, with which the whole edifice of capitalist society can be blown apart. Marx says that if these relationships did not exist, then communists would be quixotic. The narratives about the becoming-productive of reproductive labor and about the becoming possible of communism mean that earlier feminists and communists were trying to make inert social relationships explode, to set fire to stones. This would implicitly consign our forbears in communist struggle to being quixotic, a result I find problematic.

This is not a matter which occurs only in Hardt and Negri’s work, nor only in academic theoretical debates. There are voices today in Spanish-speaking sectors of the growing European and global movements around precarious labor, voices which call for a new organizational project that would takes as its point of departure a rethinking of syndicalism based on a conception of postfordism. For example, Franco Ingrassia has called for what he terms “biopolitical sindicalism”, a syndicalism based on what he takes to be the new traits of postfordism.

I agree with Ingrassia’s proposals as an organizational concept. This proposal, however, looks relatively similar to what the Industrial Workers of the World have been practicing, when they’ve been at their best, for one hundred years. For Ingrassia this organizationl form is an idea which becomes effective now, while the IWW sees it as something practicable since at least 1905. Ingrassia’s perspective also entails less of a critique of aspects of the histories of the workers movement than does the IWW perspective, which sees prior – and in some cases, still hegemonic – organizational forms as having been always problematic, not least for the failure to “build the new society within the shell of the old.” Hardt and Negri’s work and Ingrassia’s short piece bear a common type pf historical narrative which threatens to valorize prior labor aristocracies, prior hierarchies within the proletariat, and other aspects of the history of workers’ movements, aspects which have always been problematic at best, and which at worst served to prevent or to crush attempts at actualizing other organizational forms.

Instead of this position, I prefer Walter Benjamin’s formulation that every historical moment was and is a door through which it might be or might have been possible to pass into a better material world (cite page number). Paolo Virno displays something of a Benjaminian sensibility in his work, which uses a different concept and historical narrative of multitude as having been instantiated historically before. Virno believes we can see an example of this narrated in Marx’s descriptions of the US frontier in Capital volume 1 (cite, it’s in an interview on generation-online). There are problematic aspects of the example Virno chooses – the treatment of the indigenous people and the use of some class sectors against others – but what I am most concerned with here is the different historical understanding Virno has. For Virno the instantiated multitude is not ‘not-yet’, but rather ‘not right now’, though it has been instantiated before.

On a similar note there is a polemical piece written by the Italian novelist collective Wu Ming called “We The Multitudes Of Europe Rising Up Against The Empire.” The piece, written on the occasion of the Genoa protests in which the police killed Carlo Giuliani, draws continuous red line from 1381 to today, in a fashion analogous to the Zapatista declaration “We are the product of five hundred years of struggle”. One could also look at Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker excellent history of the transatlantic maritime economy of the 18th century, The Many Headed Hydra, as an argument about multitude: the heads of the multitude are an instantiated multitude, while the body of the hydra out which other heads rise up is the always-already or virtual multitude. In this version of the narrative and concept, multitude is occasionally instantiated in specific modalities which have their own histories and specificity at different points in time. We might call this the ‘once and future multitude’ This is a different sort of argument than arguing that multitude becomes possible for the first time now.

I would also like to note that for Hardt and Negri immaterial labor or the becoming hegemonic of immaterial labor is what creates the project which Hardt and Negri see as needed, possible, and perhaps already underway in the present: the project of producing the multitude as actually instantiated. Immaterial labor and postfordism are linked to this project, as I noted above. One of the aspects of immaterial labor with which Hardt and Negri most closely identify the political potentials of the present is its production of affect, its production of biological and social life. There are important changes that should be noted within the spheres of reproductive and affective labor. Different aspects are waged today. Waged versions of this labor have a different importance and prevalence within certain economies – and perhaps the global economy – than previously. Some unwaged forms of this labor are also performed differently than previously.

Despite these differences there are also important contiguities bearing on the traits of the affective labor that Hardt and Negri emphasize with regard to the project and possibility of multitude. Affective labor, immaterial labor in its affective mode, is productive of affect, of emotions, experiences, relationships, the body, sociality, social relations. It is labor involving, as Virno puts it, virtuousity: it is work that is performative, which intervenes on and modulates relationships, and the performance of which is its own end. Given these traits, the paradigmatic case of labor of this type is labor which is characteristically unwaged now and throughout history: the labors involved in motherhood and fatherhood, and cohabitating with a partner. Parenting and partnering existed before capitalism, obviously. Under capitalism these activies are unwaged and which capitalism seeks to make productive, as activity which produces future labor power (biologically and in terms of training and education) and which maintains current labor power through caring activity – thus restoring the body that bears the commodity labor power, and rendering labor power saleable once again.

I see no way in which parenting and partnering – which do of course change in their historical instantiations – could not be modes of affective, immaterial labor. If this is so, given that Hardt and Negri root the possibilities they see and valorize in the present within this type of labor, then it is not at all clear how it could be the case that multitude is only now possible. This also suggests that struggles within the arena of reproduction are now and have always been potentially communist or multitudinary struggles. This then would mean that struggles including the women’s movements of the 1970s, the struggles narrated by Federici over the retention of working class and women’s knowledges and control over bodies and reproduction in the processes of the witch-hunts, the Levellers and Diggers, the Movement of the Free Spirit, and a great many other possible examples, all figure as forbears for the communism and multitude of the present, and having their own specific communist potentialities which must be thought in their specificity.

If multitude is possible today within immaterial labor in its affective mode, and if one admits that reproductive labor is labor and is affective, then multitude as a possibility must have always existed in some fashion within these sectors of labor. That is, the political possibilities which Hardt and Negri call not-yet multitude must have been always-already possible to instantiate. This perspective in turn suggests a project of historical research into the moments when and reasons why multitude may have instantiated itself and the moments when it did not, as well as projects of developing and seeking out moments or modalities of multitude – or, as I prefer, moments of the production of communist social relations – in order to understand them, learn from them, circulate them, and defend them.

Jacques Ranciere lays out a useful schema for understanding historical narratives. The most basic hierarchy we can draw is that between good and evil. Posed simply and obviously, good is better than bad. The most simple logical or temporal relationship we can draw between them is that of before and after. Ranciere uses these four quadrants to draw out two types of historical narrative: progression and retrogression. The latter type occurs regularly on the right: “things were better before and now they’re not, we’ve lost touch with foundational values, calamity is impending,” etc. This also characterizes parts of Marxism which end up apolitical and despairing, such as the post-Situationist perspective which brought people around Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed to eco-primitivism and brought the British King Mob group to calls for the murder of artists.

The former type of narrative, progressivism, consists in saying things are better now, better than they ever were, things are looking up and so forth. There are moments of this in Hardt and Negri’s work: “people are more communist today than before, we’re on the cusp of something, we’re closer to revolution”. This optimistic perspective is valuable as a corrective for the exhausted Marxist dead-ends which some of us have found ourselves in at times – I think this is one of the reasons for the great enthusiasm which Empire evoked among so many of us around the antiglobalization movement when that book first came out – but ultimately progressivism is also a problematic historical narrative.

Another Marx quote provides a way to address this matter. Marx says that ‘one form of waged labor may correct the abuses of another, but waged labor is itself an abuse.’ We certainly can distinguish between better and worse forms of waged labor, better and worse forms of capitalism. But the communist project is not aimed at a better capitalism. It aims at the end of capitalism, the end of waged labor. It’s not at all clear what the relationship is between historical narratives of epochs being better, of being closer to something good – or for that matter, worse – and the ultimate project of escape from capitalism and, or by, the construction of communist forms of social relationships. Better capitalism or worse capitalism, the project of its abolition remains, and it is not clear that evaluations of better or worse help us determine our tactics.

For Hardt and Negri, the present is unlike every other historical moment, but this is a different difference: the difference between postfordism and every other moment in the history of capitalism is different from the way that, say, fordism differs from an earlier era of production. There is a messianic tonality to this special differentness of the present, which holds hat we are today closer to something, we are particularly important today. This idea of the present’s being qualitatively closer to a new possibility comes at the cost of denying that our moment is a moment like every other. Our moment, like every other historical moment is a narrow door through which it might be or have been possible to pass into a better material world, but the only thing particularly special about our moment otherwise is that it is ours. Our responsibilities to our moment are akin to the responsibilities of all communists to their moments.

All of the preceding leaves two basic questions, one for Hardt and Negri and one for myself. The basic question I have for Hardt and Negri is what their ‘now for the first time’ adds that is useful. What does the novelty matter, what is added to the argument by saying “never before, but now is the time”? There is a rhetorical force, a sort of marshalling the troops aspect, but other than that what is at stake in the novelty of our moment’s political possibilities? What difference does brand-newness make for the construction and exercise of the forms of counterpower that are possible and present in the present? If the perspective is right that sees multitude as not a new possibility but rather an old one, then stressing the newness of multitude occludes an accurate thought and action in the present in its specificity by focusing our attention on phenomena which are not new or specific to the present.

The question I am left with for myself is what is at stake in any of this, what is to be gained from one position versus the other? I’m not at all clear on this. To paraphrase Ranciere again, the issue is less a matter of proving this view or the other to be the case, and more a matter of seeing what we can accomplish if we believe it. I can see nothing that is gained by asserting the newness of reproductive labor’s productivity, or the newness of the possibility of multitude. At a minimum, what is lost is a continuity with prior struggles in the form a sort of retroactive emotional solidarity, grieving for and recognizing the tragedy of histories extinguished in the history of capitalism, a history written in letters of blood and fire.

The Federici/Dalla Costa/Fortunati perspective, as well as Virno’s different account of multitude as being occasionally instantiated historically, opens up a project of historiography: a project of reading and writing the histories of struggles which are in a relationship of relative contiguity with the present, rather than one of break. These histories are sources of knowledge about where the present came from but also are accounts of people dealing with problems quite a bit like ours: the problems of trying to escape from capitalism into and via communism. This opens up a task for materialist historians, to recount the history of the long preparation of the present suffering in a fashion which makes us more aware of and wanting to use our own power. Of course, resistance to capitalism must always address the specific modalities in which capitalism is instantiated historically – as well as spatially – if our resistances are to be effective and to have any chance at coming to become forms of counterpower. For instance, we can no longer engage in coin-clipping, which as Marx notes in the Contribution To The Critique Of Political Economy was an enormous problem for capital when money was still being physically made out of precious metals. On the other hand, we can file share today, which is like coin-clipping in that it produces additional wealth while leaving the original object qua bearer of exchange value intact and undamaged.

One thing that may be at stake in the matter of these historical narratives has to do with the valuations that occur within or as a result of the narratives, and the impact those valuations may have on questions of political activity. Hardt and Negri see a new possibility in the present which is beginning to concretize itself, a phenomenon which they valorize. If this possibility is rooted in new aspects of the present then it follows that those sectors which are most new, in which the new phenomena are most instantiated, are – and should be – leading the charge, so to speak. That is, if multitude lies within immaterial labor or hegemonic immaterial labor, then the sectors where labor is most immaterialized, or wherein immaterial labor has most become hegemonic, ought to be the sectors wherein multitude is most possible or most instantiated. In other words, the historical narratives in Hardt and Negri’s work, in which the present is full of uniquely different possibilities, risks a vanguardist or sectorial specific deployment of their thought, which would blunt the force of their work run counter to their contributions to the production of communism.

A different understanding of history would have to avoid these risks, though it would of course open up others. I can not say in advance what the effects of this other history would be, as it is only just becoming a research interest of mine. My hunch, however, is that it would start from both Negri and Benjamin’s insights as to the importance of history and theory in what Ranciere calls political subjectivization, or, in less inflated terms, class hatred. [Cite Benjamin on histories that feed hatred and increase our opinion of our own power, Negri on capital v1 being salutary among other reasons for the hate it inculcates.]

Works cited

[Finish inserting citations, then compile list of works referred to here]

Notes:
Ranciere, The Distribution of the Sensible, p12.
Ranciere, The Distribution of the Sensible, p65.
On the social factory, see Steve Wright, Storming Heaven. [Cite]
For one example of an attempted political and organizational project involving something like the concept of the social factory, see the activity of the extra-parliamentary group Lotta Continua, whose programmatic slogan “Take Over The City!” was predicated upon seeing productive activity as occurring within and without the factory. [cite]
Multitude is a complex term, itself subject to multiple possible elaborations and deployment, as well as much work that is currently in process. As such, it is difficult to summarize the term at all, let alone in a fashion that would do justice to all of the different versions of the concept. I have tried to compare the different uses of the concept of the term multitude deployed by Negri, Agamben, and Virno in another paper presented at the conference of the American Comparative Literature Association in March of 2005. The sense of multitude I am using here as a thumbnail sketch of the term is one which I have explored in another paper, though I am increasingly unsatisfied with that paper’s use of the historical narratives which this present paper is partially an attempt to work out. This paper, entitled “The Ontological Communism of the Multitude”, appears in the online journal The Anomalist ( HYPERLINK “http://www.theanomalist.com” www.theanomalist.com), versions of which were given at the Society for European Philosophy conference in August, 2004, and the Radical Philosophy Association conference in November, 2004.
I stress the ‘possible to instantiate’ here in attempt to recognize that Hardt and Negri distinguish between a virtual multitude – that is, the always-already multitude which serves primarily as a category for critiquing operations that seek to produce social bodies as unified and heterogeneous – and an actual multitude – the not yet multitude, as Hardt and Negri call it, multitude as an instantiated form of social being and organization. Hard and Negri believe this instantiation has never occurred, which their descriptor ‘not yet’ underscores.
See “11 precarias idea para un sindicalismo biopolitico” HYPERLINK “http://revistacontrapoder.net/article.php3?id_article=70″ http://revistacontrapoder.net/article.php3?id_article=70. Ingrassia’s piece is only one example. We can look also to discussions around the Malaga Social Forum, the work of the Chainworkers, the Precarias a la Deriva and TrabajoZero for a similar position to that of Ingrassia and Hardt and Negri. [Cite the Malaga social forum, the precari-opoly actions around the European Social Forum in London, and the Precarias/TrabajoZero pieces]
Most recently under the name “minority unionism” and now “solidarity unionism”, as distinct from the “business unionism” of the AFL-CIO unions. See for example the series of columns entitled “The Minority Report” by 2004-2005 IWW General Secretary Treasurer Alexis Buss, available online at http://www.iww.org/en/organize/strategy/solidarity.html.
This line is quoted from the preamble to the constitution of the IWW, which is available online quoted in the article “The ABC’s of Revolutionary Unionism”, online at HYPERLINK “http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/abc.shtml” http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/abc.shtml. The critique of organizational forms does not meant to say that these problematic organizational forms might not have lost some of their efficacy. That the business unionism of the AFL-CIO is in crisis is attested to by the federations recent highly publicized split. Nevertheless, the lost efficacy of this organizational form is less due to immaterialization in the labor process – the service industry with its plenitude of affective and immaterial labors has seen some of the biggest union growth – than to the breakdown of a tacit class deal implied within the labor statutes and enforcement processes which largely under-girded the business union organizational model.
See http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/giap/Giap_multitudes.html
See the “First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle”, http://www.ezln.org/documentos/1994/199312xx.en.htm
(Cite)
Interesting and sadly underutilized work on these changes within reproductive and affective labor has been produced by the Precarias a la Deriva in Madrid. The Precarias are a group of women workers actively organizing and theorizing within and against their own conditions within the present processes of precarization of labor, changes in affective and reproductive labor, as well as longstanding processes sadly common to the conditions of many women’s lives and labors under patriarchal and capitalist social forms. The works of the Precarias is provocative and valuable in many ways, though they seem to hold more than I would prefer to a historical narrative closer that which I am criticizing here. In particular with regard to the topic at hand, see “Four hypotheses over the sex-attention-care continuum”, available in Spanish at HYPERLINK “http://www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias/4hipoteses.htm” http://www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias/4hipoteses.htm. I have several unpublished draft English translations of texts by the Precarias as well, which I would be happy to share with anyone interested.
(Cite, this comes up in the Grammar as well as in the articles in the Virno/Hardt collection.)
Several friends and I have attempted to politically develop the idea of temporal specificities – the specificity of historical moments which connect to various possible presents and futures – in a pamphlet written and distributed in the context of activity against the G8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland. This attempt still bears traces of the historical narratives of which I am currently trying to work through and out of, and does of course leave as many questions unanswered as it addresses. Interested parties may consult “Event Horizon”, by the Free Association, online at (http://www.nadir.org.uk/Event%20Horizon.html), and forthcoming in the webjournal Ephemera.
Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster¸ p117
Antonio Negri, Negri On Negri, p27
Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. [Find page reference]
[Cite the passage in the end of v1 of Capital, I believe its in the ‘bloody legislation’ section of the chapter on so-called primitive accumulation.]
Virno also deploys a narrative of passage to postfordism which much be interrogated and I in no way mean to uncritically valorize his work. Like Hardt and Negri’s work, I believe there is much of possible importance in Virno’s work but it must be refashioned in our appropriations of it – in the way that all use values are transformed in their use by others.
[Cite, Benjamin, Arcades Project, Convolute N, find the specific paragraph/aphorism]
This point is not my own but rather that John Levin. I am grateful for his theoretical insights and wealth of detailed knowledge on both coin clipping and file-sharing and other free/open-source software, as well as the parallels between these different historical phenomena of mass criminality.
[Cite – Negri, among the many good reasons to read volume one of capital, one of the best is the class hatred it inculcates – Benjamin, unlike the social democrats we must embrace histories which retain the class hatred which is one of the working class’s historical strengths.