What in the hell …

Answering, of course, requires being able to say what’s old about the past and what is and is not old about the present. In the context of a longer post, Steve Shapiro at Pinocchio Theory kindly responded to my notes on Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control.”

His post is worth reading in full. As a narcissist, I’m going to concentrate on where he’s talking about me (Deleuze is just a transitional object, I’m sure). I appreciate the chance to try and get clearer on some of these issues of periodization and the like.

Steven writes:

“Nate’s point here, I think, is twofold. First, the differences that Deleuze observes between the societies of discipline and control are, at the most, changes in tactics within an overall practice — that of exploitation, or extraction of surplus value, in the process of production — that remains dominant and unchanged. Second, both sorts of tactics (enclosure and modulated control) were at work in the era of capitalist industrialization, in 19th century; and both tactics are still at work today.”

That’s a fair characterization. I’m not sure but I think Deleuze would agree with the former, in the following sense: “Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways, perhaps, but both of us. You see, we think any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capital­ism and the ways it has developed.” (From an interview in the first issue of Futur Anteriur in 1990. For fellow trainspotters, among the material also appearing in that issue was the ‘whatever singularity’ piece in what would become Agamben’s book The Coming Community, and an article on Machiavelli by Althusser. The interview is available online in English and in French. ) That is to say, I think Deleuze would agree that, at a minimum, the rupture he sees between disciplinary and control societies coexists with a continuity of capitalism. The second is really the sticking point. I’ll get back to this.

Steve continues,

“This means that Deleuze’s distinctions are trivial at best, when they aren’t entirely spurious. And Nate therefore rejects Deleuze’s claims for new modes of subjectivity (and implicitly, for a radical redefinition of class consciousness) in postmodern society. And the same would go, presumably, for all the other arguments that proclaim a massive change as the result of the new electronic technologies (computing and communications) of the last thirty years or so.”

I didn’t mean to say the distinctions are trivial, though I may have given that impression. I don’t particularly like Deleuze. I find his writing style tremendously difficult and I get irritated in response, not least because not understanding something makes me feel dumb and I don’t like feeling dumb. None of this is an argument for triviality, though. All that said, I am less than fully convinced about what I understand of the point on control society. I’m not opposed to the positing of new modes of subjectivity, but I’m not convinced of either of the following:

That there’s some objective change such that old modes of subjectivity cease to exist or become outmoded. (The latter would actually look a good deal like a Hegelian narrative of historical overcoming. This is, in my view, Negri’s recent position, with his argument that the dialectic of labor and capital has ended. Anyone interested should see the discussion at Jon’s for more on this.)

That there’s some objective change such that new modes of subjectivity automatically come about.

I’m not sure Deleuze means exactly either of these, but I’m not sure how else to read his remarks on the move from mole to snake as the figure of class struggle. I’ll re-read the piece again soon and double check.

As for “all the other arguments that proclaim a massive change as the result of the new electronic technologies (computing and communications) of the last thirty years or so,” I am suspicious of that kind of thing, yes. I’m not familiar with the literature on it, of course.

The points of contention as I see them are at least two. One is to do with subjectivity. The other is to do with the definition of terms. I’ll start with the second.

Basically, it comes down to what one means by the terms. How massive is a massive change? How much of a rupture is the rupture posited? I see the accounts of a major break between today and some past era operating like this:

There is a relative continuity. That continuity ends, ie, there’s a break. Then there is a new relative continuity.

Expandind a bit:

There is a relative continuity.
- This must be so or the break could not be identified.
That continuity ends, ie, there’s a break.
Then there is a new relative continuity.
- This must be so or the break could not be identified. If there were not a new relative continuity we would still be within the era of the break. (This is part of what Hardt and Negri argue in Empire - we’re in the passage to Empire - and is part of a Virno’s disagreement with them, expressed briefly here, here, and here. Virno’s argument is basically that Hardt and Negri take a moment of break/transition/interruption (the 90s, more or less) to characterize a new era. For Virno only after this moment ends can the new era be defined.)
It’s important that the new relative continuity be new, that is, it must have a different consistency or different direction or some other different quality.
- It must be different consistency/direction/quality because the new relative continuity is not the same as the old relative consistency. If this were not so, the break would not be a break but an interruption (a momentary holding of the breath, preceded and followed by relatively normal breathing).
- It must be new, rather than a return to an old one, or the character of the break is different.

(I hope this doesn’t come across as pedantic or condescending. If it does, my apologies. That’s not my intention. I’m just trying to get my own thoughts clear on this stuff, which is why I’m trying to unpack everything like this.)

Presuming this a relatively acceptable schematic for narratives of historical break, there are at least three possible places to disagree about a proposed account of this type. These are what/whethers: what the first continuity was/whether the first continuity was a continuity at all, what the break was/whether the break was a continuity at all, and what the new continuity is/whether the new continuity is a continuity at all.

There’s also the matter in each case of the relative frame of reference: break in what sense. I think it’s reasonably - but only trivially true - that all breaks and events in human history certainly in the past 2000 years have been non-breaks and non-events relative to the their effects on the moons of Saturn. As far as we know. It’s also fair - but again only trivially true - to say that there’s a radical disjunction between every single second and every other, if one defines ‘radical disjunction’ as a difference of one second.

I’m belaboring the point. The point is that continuity or break is relative to the frame of reference. That being the case, the question becomes (to purloin a line I like very much from Rorty, or maybe it’s Richard Bernstein, I forget who), what is the difference that makes a difference? That is, what’s at stake?

There are at least two things at stake. One is the picture of the present and the efficacy of certain projects in it. The second is the picture of the past and historical research into it. I’m not entirely sure, but I think my dispute is more to do with the future. I’m not sure what Steve/Deleuze mean by or want in/from the radical redefinition of class consciousness in the present. As part of getting clearer on that, I would very much like to know what the contrasting definition is that is held for class consciousness in the past, against which the new definition takes on its character as new and radically so.

I was talking recently about something very vaguely political and used the phrase ‘organized resistance.’ I was asked what I meant by that. My answer, though not as clear then as it is after retrospective editing, was basically that the phrase is redundant. All resistance is organized, by definition. (I got this point from an interview with Sergio Bologna, where he says that “spontaneity does not exist. What we could call “spontaneity” is, in reality, the formation of microsystems of struggle”. Of course, again, spontaneous or not is relative to the frame of reference and frames of reference are judged by their efficacy. To my mind the frame of reference that makes spontaneity and political spontaneism make sense is not effective for any purpose that I like with the sole exception that it may on some occasions provide people with an ability to hope that things will be better when they are having a very hard time otherwise hoping so.) I’m pretty sure what this person was asking me and wondering about what whether I meant forms like the political/vanguard party and the trade union, and perhaps the official nonprofit NGO as distinct from so-called un- or disorganized forms like the affinity group, the infoshop, etc. That is, I think they wanted to know if by ‘organized’ I mean ‘formal’. Not what I meant at all. The opposite actually. It’s my general view that the power of formal organizations is predicated - perhaps not solely, but in an important way - on informal organization(s). Stan Weir talked about this in terms of ‘informal work groups’ (which reminds me, I found some audio files online of interviews w/ him that I want to remember to listen to sometime at a faster internet connection that I have at home.)

This is to say, I suspect that the old definition of class consciousness being rejected (to my mind the term ‘class consciousness’ and the discourses around/using it are generally unimpressive in my encounters with them) wasn’t a very good one in the first place, and that this is what makes the new redefinition more attractive.

This brings me back to the point about subjectivity that I identified earlier as one of two points of contention I can see. I want to get back to this, because it’s an area that I’m very concerned with, am still thinking through, and where my ideas have changed a lot.

First, though, I want to address some other things Steve wrote. I think he and I do disagree, but with some substantial agreement as well.

He writes: “although these two points of view [continuity and rupture, I think] seem incompatible, I think that they both apply, or that they both are necessary. I do think that the social, technological, economic, and ideological changes of the last thirty years are massive, and that they do mark a rupture in the ways that the world is organized, and in the forms of subjectivity that constitute us, that we experience or inhabit.”

I agree that the perspectives can be made compatible. And I agree that there’s a lot of important changes in the last 30 years. On forms of subjectivity, I’ll come back to that.

Steve writes “the figure of the consumer takes center stage alongside (or even instead of) the worker, or better where these two figures are merged” and “Many theorists also speak of circulation as taking over from production as the main sphere of capitalist activity.” He adds “many of these sorts of formulations (…) are often accompanied by a disavowal of the very possibility of Marxist analysis: the claim that this is a totally new situation, in which Marx’s “productivist” categories no longer apply.”

I don’t think Steve holds the last. My point about those kinds of analyses, which Steve is more familiar with than I am, hangs on the ‘no longer apply’. My view is that the ‘productivist’ version of Marxism never applied. So the present is not such that objective conditions have changed in a way which renders the old productivist account obsolete. What’s needed instead of a new account of a new situation is a better account of the old one. This account already exists in partial form, in voices marginalized within marxism and elsewhere in theoretical and political traditions. That’s not to say that a new account of a new situation may not ultimately be needed, but I don’t think we can know that if we’re working a bad account of the old situation. (If anything has changed around the productivist account it’s these two things: the groups with a vested interest in/who made use of the productivist account have lost their relative hegemony within radical movements, and [or, as a result of] these groups’ deal with the bosses of the world has been broken on the bosses’ side. [And rendered less effective by the working class. Both took place over the same period of time, the bosses’ attacks and the workers’ attacks. I’d like to place the causal agency on the working class, but I’m not 100% sure on that anymore.] Said deal was to manage the working class or a section thereof in a way which provided some material gain to the working class or a section thereof, more material gain and social power to the managers, and assured a relative functioning of capital.)

Steve says this, more or less: “traditional Marxist ideas about class consciousness, about organization, and so on, need to be completely rethought, from the beginning.” The question is what ‘from the beginning’ means.

He also says “”the trouble with Hardt and Negri’s notion of the Multitude is not that it abandons traditional proletarian consciousness, but that it is still too close to the old model of proletarian consciousness, and thus fails to take the full measure of the changes that, in other parts of their work, Hardt and Negri delineate quite well.”

I agree completely, except the ‘full measure of the changes’ part. I’m not convinced the changes are as tremendous as all that. I think, at least in Hardt and Negri’s case, the changes look bigger than they are precisely because the changes show the inadequacy of the account held of the time before the big changes. If one has a better account of the time before the big changes, I don’t think the changes look so big. (For instance, if god or a god appeared in my living room while I type this, I could have at least two responses: “I was wrong! God exists after all! I must rethink some the categories by which I’ve been understanding the world!” or “Wow! God suddenly came to exist! I must theorize a ransition from god’s nonexistence to god’s existence!” Hardt and Negri do the latter. I’ve tried to address this before using a metaphor from Plato, which I could stand to revisit.)

On circulation and consumption, the importance of circulation looks a lot less radical in the present if one takes it to have always been important. Steve quotes Lazzarato, “consumption can no longer be reduced to the buying and ‘destruction’ [i.e. “consumption” in a literal sense] of a service or product”.

Again, why “no longer”? I think this account of consumption and circulation never made sense. Circulation was always required, in order to recoup value advanced plus surplus value. If the ship carrying product sinks, or dockworkers/truck drivers/grocery store workers refuse to unload perishable goods for long enough, then the product is lost to capital in the sense that it doesn’t contribute to the continuation of capitalist production. So circulation’s always been really important.

On consumption, Marx wrote in V2 of Capital:

“Productive consumption (…) includes the individual consumption of the labourer, since labour-power is a continuous product, within certain limits, of the labourer’s consumption.” (Capital Volume 2, New York: International Publishers, 1981, p.93.)

And in Volume 1 “if the laborer consumes his (sic) disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.” (Capital v1 p233, Int. Pub. Ed)

So consumption’s also always been really important as well. I’d want to push on this, and on the production/consumption distinction, to include activities of producing, reproducing, and repairing the bodies and minds that go into the sites of waged labor. (That is, I’d want to expand the account to include unwaged and traditionally often feminized labors. Marx isn’t as good on this as he should be, nor is a lot of marxism.)

Steve is absolutely right that “we must not regard the relation of production to circulation as one of inner essence to outward appearance, or base to superstructure – as orthodox Marxist theory has all too often done. For production itself cannot lead to profits, and to the further accumulation of capital, unless the produced commodities are actually sold.” But the Lazzarato account and others seems to me predicated on a view that production historically loses its role as uniquely determining, as essence, it becomes appearance alongside of consumption (or, conversely, consumption becomes essence too). That’s daft.

Now then, back to the subject. Steve writes, “the social, technological, economic, and ideological changes of the last thirty years (…) mark a rupture in the ways that the world is organized, and in the forms of subjectivity that constitute us, that we experience or inhabit.”

My thoughts on this have changed recently. I think it’s tremendously important to emphasize an antagonism of perspectives or epistemological positions. Put simply, does one articulate from Their side or Ours? As I see it, the forms which we are subjected, the things we’re subjected to, do change in important ways. (We might say that the shape of the class-in-itself and the alienation it endures continues to mutate historically.) The way the world is organized for us (against us) does changed and has changed in important ways. It’s also stayed the same in important ways. I don’t think either break or continuity is the primary issue, though, rather it’s the composition of the present. But even in that sense, I don’t think that the way the pesent is already composed for us - the way the world is organized for us, the ways we are already constituted - should be our primary object of inquiry or point of departure. Rather, the ways we (re)compose the present and ourselves should be first (the struggle of the working class).

I think Tronti is dead on when he says that the class in itself should come first, and I’m increasingly drawn to what I’ve read of Ranciere and Badiou on subjectivization and/as declaration. Put differently, I’m not convinced that things have changed all that much from our side of things. I mean this both in our subjective response to what we endure, in terms of class hatred (in the words of a song I like very much, ” From the days when you chained us in your fields to the strike a week ago”), and even more so in terms of the modes of forming and animating organization against Them (see, for instance, a beautiful text by Wu Ming written on the occasion of the Genoa protests where the cops killed Carlo Giuliani). The composition of the present, as that which we want to end, to escape from (the object that the subject wants to break or destroy), that does change and in ways that must be addressed. I’m not convinced in changes along the lines of periodizations like fordism/postfordism or disciplinary/control societies, nor do I think that that should be the first thing addressed. Subject(ivity/ization) first, then object (goal/target).

That said, there are of course tremendous differences in how organizations are built, collective bodies are formed. But the variation isn’t solely, or perhaps even primarily, one of a periodization into eras. There’s tremendous variation across spatial and other distributions. (Night shift vs day shift, etc.) It’s tempting to say that every moment of composition is absolutely singular, but that’d be overstating it. The point is that there’s a lot in common and a lot different. Parsing out precisely how much - in order to periodize in terms of either continuity or break - seems to me to be the wrong response. Rather I think it’s more valuable to produce/identify accounts, circulate them, try to extrapolate from/think with them in situation, and later start the process again.