There’s a long post up at a new blog that’s well worth reading on immaterial labor and all that. Good questions and points, including a solid discussion of Negri on simple and complex labor. In a nutshell I take that argument to go like this: Negri’s claim that today there’s no unit of simple labor with which to measure complexified immaterialized labor implies a highly problematic thesis that there was some quality about prior simple labor, and complex labor as an aggregate thereof, which lent itself to measure. This quality was not provided (imposed) by capital but was inherent in or proper to this form of labor, such that measure was more appropriate and less of an imposition than it is today in the era of labor that is “immeasurable” or “beyond measure.” That argument strikes me as entirely right, and something to develop at greater length. One such avenue would be to address Negri on this via the category in Badiou of the count by or count as one, the imputation of a given unity. Labor power is a multiple counted as a unity by capital and too often this counted-as is taken as not an operation enacted upon a multiple but as a given, a starting point rather than a result.
August 2, 2006
… is the aura of immaterial labor?
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absolutely my friend! (well… friend and comrade)
but at what point does ontology actually enter the field of practice. Badiou is a bit unclear on this point since he completely mingles the two. Perhaps this is a smart move, but it thereby renders the notion of practice somewhat confusing… “so what are we doing again?”
I would say that Badiou does try to engage in this conversation with Negri in the opening chapters of his tome 2 of Being and Event, BUT, it remains something of a mystery as to why Badiou is engaging with Negri on the point of ontology rather than on the question of practice.
Perhaps with the help of Hardt, Negri is able to fall back on the question of political praxis (via love/desire which is their move in recent years), thereby making Badiou look like something of a bourgeois philosophy… such a move isn’t quite fair, of course, but it certainly can be made.
Comment by tzuchien — August 5, 2006 @ 7:34 am
hi Tzuchien,
Re: Badiou’s addressing Negri, is that in Logiques des mondes (sp?) or somewhere else?
I think this - “at what point does ontology actually enter the field of practice” - depends on, among other things, what one means by ontology, whether one means the activity carried out by ontologists or one means that which is studied by ontologists. That is, if one means a discourse or one means being. The former is already a practice or set of practices. It could have a political use, as could any practice I suppose. I’m skeptical of the claim, though. If one means the latter, to my mind practice occurs in an upon being, such that ontology is already present. The field of practice, as you put it, is one instantiation or set of instantiations of being, a subset of being, and the field of political practice is a subset of the field of practice. But, if practice is in being, so to speak, then I’m not sure how much being matters relative to this or that or any practice (except that of ontologists), in terms of the carrying out of that practice. I want to say being qua being is the x alongside every term and so can be ignored during the carrying out of any particular practice. So being can be factored out, like we can factor out ‘x’ in an equation like 16xy - 7x = 9xy + zx, to get 16y - 7 = 9y + z. Like I like to say, I’m a communist whether or not there is a god. While I am an atheist, my being a communist is indifferent to god’s (in)existence. That’s how I see being in the field of practice, something one can be indifferent to.
Take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — August 5, 2006 @ 9:49 pm