What follows is very much a work in progress and bears all the inadequacies of its status as such. It is part of a project of self-clarification, and as a result its concepts are only half-formed, more questions than certainties. Even if I were able to perfect the darstellung, the forschung’s incompleteness would still give these remarks a necessarily unfinished character. I must also admit that the incompleteness of the form of presentation is not solely due to its being a presentation of intellectual work that is still in progress. In any case, this unfinished project began as an attempt to get clearer about my own ambivalences with regard to the work of Hardt and Negri, work which has been quite important for my own intellectual development. This project is currently in the middle of opening up onto larger questions about the political uses of history and memory, the philosophy of history, modes of historical narration, and the possibilities for both different modes of ‘doing’ history and for inquiry into the present that would occur solely with the contours of what Benjamin has termed jetz-zeit, the time of now. I am able to focus here only on Hardt and Negri.

Jacques Ranciere writes that all “theoretical discourse is always simultaneously an aesthetic form, a sensible reconfiguration of the facts it is arguing about.” In other words, theory poses simultaneously what Ranciere calls a distribution of the sensible, a “system of self evident facts that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it”, at the same time that theory makes claims about the so distributed field of sensibility. My concerns with Hardt and Negri can be summarized by simply saying that to my mind sometimes they seem a little too old-fashionedly Marxist. By this I mean that they pose a distribution of the sensible which may leave out important facts about prior historical moments - an operation retroactively consigning the residents of prior historical times to a condition of having been a priori incapable of the laudable and important activities that we today are capable of - in order to create an inspiring andurgent image of the present.

Generally, I am very enthusiastic about many of the claims in Hardt and Negri’s work if they read as being true for all of the history of capitalist production, but I dislike these same claims if they are taken as solely traits of the present. I am particularly concerned with the paired narratives they tell in which reproductive labor becomes productive and multitude becomes possible in the recent present. In what follows I will touch upon reproductive labor, on the social and organizational forms that are multitude/communism, on the understanding of history bound up with these historical narratives in Hardt and Negri’s work, and I will attempt to gesture toward a different view of history which I am still encountering for the first time in the work of Benjamin, Ranciere, and Virno, among others.