Several friends have made comments to me, drawing on Deleuze and Negri, about production and about ontology - ontology is production, life is productive, etc. It reminds me of some remark by Marx (happy to chase up the citation if anyone wants) about how society/societies should not be thought of as single entities. I worry that this production stuff deploys some idea like ‘production as such’, into which various types of production get lumped, and flattens very important differences. Namely, differences between value production and other types of production, and the historically changing articulations of the relationships among them all. In other words, antagonism and the incommensurabilty of perspectives between incompatible class positions gets lost. Instead of ‘production’ perhaps ‘productions’ might be better, as that would leave open exploring how different modalities exist in tension with each other, and how different vectors emerge from the balances of forces among different modalities of production.
October 3, 2005