This started as a comment on a post at Eric’s but got long enough that I figured it was better to slap it up here.
The most provocative point in this post for me (I’ve not read that Foucault closely - started it but the library made me give it back, haven’t found an affordable copy to buy yet) is this last bit:
“arguments against the locating of epochal transformations, especially phantom ones, are often a plea for recognizing continuity and that changing appearances aside capital remains essentially the same. And all the guarantees and, um, security that come with that.”
Certainly in some cases. But there’s also a certain fearfulness and dread: so much is still the same, after all these times? All these failed attempts? In that sense the same point could be made about the new epoch declaration, just as it could and should be made (and has been made) about the old marxist (Bernsteinian?) claims about the inevitability of revolution: that too is a sort of security and guarantee. We are ever closer, comrades!
Anyway, re: Negri and some other post-operaisti at least some of the time in the 1970s, some of whom were still operaisti and some who were already post-operaisti, the claim to epochal shifts was tied to which sections - which sociological types - of the Italian working class they would orient to and what sort of organization they would build. (And I don’t mean to be a jerk, but I think this sort of admittedly reductive claim about political motivations is just as valid as your point that claims against epochality are motivated by or rewarded with a feeling of security, and I think this claim of mine is more heavily documented.) Maybe this tie between epochal declarations and organizational/political stakes in the present is no longer … um, present in the more recent post-operaist work, but I doubt it. (Negri and other post-op folk have to their credit been very involved in the left in Italy and France for many many years, I respect that a lot even though I don’t always or really, often, like the line they take. This involvement though makes me think there’s still a political stake here, in the short term, organizationally.)
I for one am deeply suspicious of this sort of move. Among other things, it has an implied - and sometimes explicit - notion of adequacy which is to my mind not sufficiently laid out. Specifically, adequacy of organization/political line to the present. So, everything changes and now the vanguard party is no longer adequate, then everything changes again and now the trade union is no long adequate, then everything changes again and reproductive labor is a valid terrain of struggle. I know that’s reductive and uncharitable, but I don’t think I’m really misreading the post-operaisti on this.
It seems to me there’s two serious problems with this. One, it’s not at all clear that for any objective situation there’s only one most or best adequate organizational form (just like there’s multiple routes and modes of travel between Minneapolis and Austin). Two, this serves to get out of critical engagement with the past. I admit I’ve never read Negri’s book about Lenin (I own it in Spanish, will get to it eventually) but I’ve never heard him make a critical remark about the Bolsheviks. Have you? He still namedrops Lenin, and thankfully he’s clear that he doesn’t want to just repeat 1917 today, but I think this is an important issue.
If the Lenin issue doesn’t appeal to you, consider this example: Lotta Continua dissolved in part over an incident I forget when, maybe 1973 or 1974, where men from their group got into a physical confrontation with an all women’s feminist march. Leaving aside moral outrage (which is sufficient for me, but is not the terrain of marxist analysis), if reproductive labor is value productive by this point - as Negri et al say it becomes in the passage to the new epoch - then this was at best a serious error with bad results for the interests of the working class/multitude. If reproductive labor was not then value productive, then the act was wrong (a tactical miss-step and patriarchal bullshit) but the analysis which said that the women’s movement was a distraction may have been more right.
This last kind of thing is a big deal for me, and wherever we set the goal posts we could find a similar situation of ostensibly radical men telling women (or whites telling people of color or …) that the time was not yet ripe for their struggle. The post-operaisti claims to epochal shifts strike me as serving a valuable function in undermining those sorts of “now is not the time yet” claims in the present because the time now is definitely pretty ripe for these cats (this is one of the things I like about that material; incidentally one of the earlier sources for material on the Italian situation was a journal/pamphlet published in Ireland called The Ripening of the Time) and if that’s all that matters then maybe I’m just off base here, but I think it’s an important gap that this material does not help at all in asking previously if other previous moments, “now’s” which are now over, were _also_ the time, as in they had a shot at it. Because lurking in the back of this epochal stuff is a sort of implied “no, then was not the time” kind of moment. Hardt and I got into an argument about this at a conference, friendly but no less an argument, I was trying to push him about the Diggers and other forebears in struggle that I think matter a great deal for us in the present. He finally said “look, then why wasn’t there a revolution in England back then?” with the implication being that it couldn’t be done yet. That’s what most bothers me about all this epoch stuff.
And also, more simply… it feels to me like Negri et al can’t get into a car and go some place without saying “look! we have entered an entirely new land!” Obviously that’s overstated, but … sometimes objective conditions haven’t changed so much as subjectively a project has failed. In that case, the task is figure out what needs to be done differently on the subjective side, and claims to objective epochal changes are useful only to the degree that they’re useful for that subjective (organizational) work. And even if useful they may not be true.
None of this is to say nothing is new. Every moment is unique - no one has ever before sat here right now, and right now, and right now. And there are some genuine novel traits to the present objectively, certainly. But whether objective temporal registers and subjective temporal registers must run in parallel is not established. And the political meaning of those epochs is not pre-determined (for instance, while Virno buys the arguments that we’re in postfordism/real subsumbtion he thinks or at least 4 or 6 years ago though that a global Empire is not coming and if it is we most certainly should not push it forward in order to come out the other side a la Hardt and Negri, he thinks we should oppose it).
To my mind - and from your earlier comment when we discussed the Graeber piece I got the sense that you find this attractive - the post-operaisti perspective is predicated on a break, on rupture, on new epochs. I’m not attracted to this, obviously, but more than that, it seems to me that a theoretical mechanism which can see only break is not a good mechanism for determining when break has and has not occurred. It’s like a math equation which always concludes X=4. If for any T, T=n where T=the present time and n=the condition of novelty then the framework has no way to conclude that T doesn’t equal n. And I think in some cases that conclusion may well be a reasonable one, that some things haven’t changed.
More even handedly:
Clearly there are some changes which it’s reasonable to call epochal, some conditions in which it’s reasonable to announce a new epoch.
But surely you must also agree that there are some change which it’s *not* reasonable to call epochal, and some conditions in which such an announcement is not reasonable. Otherwise the category ‘new epoch’ becomes vacuous. This means there are times when a claim to continuity is the reasonable option. I think the post-operaisti don’t make this latter sort of claim enough. Interestingly enough, a certain strain of operaist thought did do a lot of historical work in order to draw lessons, looking for instance at workers councils in Germany, the IWW in the US, etc. Some of those folks didn’t go along with Negri et al, and some of them also went to prison. I don’t know that their claims to continuity were any more comfort than Negri’s claims post-prison that everything was different. I think that the implication you make about a need for security could equally be applied to people like Negri and Virno. Negri went through horrible stuff in prison, I believe he lost a lung because of it (I think Ari from Generation-Online told me that but I’m not sure, I was very drunk then). A claim to extreme novelty might also be a form of security, a comforting “that experience will not repeat itself” sort of thing.
Okay, I’ll quit ranting at you Eric. Sorry if my tone seems hostile. I do disagree with you strongly on this and I’ll admit I feel a bit defensive as I feel like I’m in the camp of folk you’re dissing on, but mostly - really, honestly - the energy in this post is that I’m excited to be talking about this again, it’s been a while. This bodes well for the operaismo reading group that’s starting up here in Minneapolis this weekend, I hope. (If you’d like details on that I’d be happy to post them up here.)
Hey Nate - I am shatteringly tired right now, so no intelligible comment from me, other than that this is fantastic, and I’ll try to find the thought-space over the next day to put up a point at least at roughtheory. We’ve had discussions in the past about the issue of the past being perceived as, in a sense, unfolding in the only way it ever could have - I’ve always been drawn to Benjamin’s notion that this attitude toward the past - the suggestion that there needs to have been some sort of sufficiency of objective conditions for political action - is actually pernicious to contemporary political action. Any political movement is going to build on the historical materials of its time, and so be a movement of its time - this isn’t the same as the claim (tacit or explicit) that those material predetermine political outcomes… (And apologies if this is a very reductive and crass way into what you’re saying - I’m very tired
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Comment by N. Pepperell — June 27, 2008 @ 6:08 am
Nate–I’d love details about the reading group. And I didn’t detect hostility at all. Disagreement is not the same as hostility. I got a bajillion things to take care of just now, but I’ll respond later on today. For now, as someone who also can’t borrow the Foucault from the library and who is broke, I appreciated this. Not scanned and searchable!
Comment by Eric — June 27, 2008 @ 11:03 am
Hey Nate — I meant to respond last night, but between brutal summer allergies and awful heat — 43 days in a row of 93F+ — life is pretty miserable. Sleep, usually my enemy, is now my friend.
I hadn’t thought of you as being in the camp of people I was criticizing. In the past, and especially and very clearly here, you’ve made your arguments against this stuff and though I’ve generally disagreed with your reading, your objections are always political: your concern is the effect such arguments have or can have on political movements, different sectors of the working class, etc. Particularly, as you focus on, this sort of stifling of political difference that comes from time-is-not-ripe arguments. That’s well diagnosed, and I hadn’t really made that connection before.
For what it’s worth, I’m not interested in identifying breaks. What I like about the Foucault quote I posted is that he specifically disavows such epoch-making moves. He looks at the techniques and says, and later shows, how the “ages” overlap and represent changes in dominant characteristics and tools and etc. For example, only an idiot would argue that in today’s “biopolitical” society “sovereignty” has disappeared.
I think this is the way Graeber reads Foucault. Not just uncharitably but showing more interest in playing gotcha than in using his concepts. Which is to say, contra your reading, not politically. One of Graeber’s main points about immaterial labor is that feminists got there first. That’s fine, but I’d be more interested in inquiring about how they came to work on the same thing, how their theories interact, which ones are more politically useful. As far as I can see, Graeber’s not. He seems to be more interested in figuring out whose is more authentic because it arrived first.
Similarly, and maybe the most irritating thing to me about Graeber’s piece, was that he seemed most interested in showing how the post-operasti think of themselves as prophets. Besides being purely ad hominem, there’s nothing useful there. He’s not dealing with the messianic aspects of their politics (and, at least in the case of Negri, the Leninist vanguardism at work), but their personal messianism. To me, that meant Graeber had an extrapolitical axe to grind. I won’t begrudge him that, I guess, but it’s uninteresting at a minimum.
As I hope I made clear, I don’t think your take on this stuff is like that at all. You always seems interested in the political implications, which is why I agree with most of what you write here. Especially important, I think, is seeing, as NP says it, the things that are “pernicious to contemporary political action.” You see this in the, to use shorthand, Leninist implications of post-operasti thought, which I can see. I also get it from Graeber’s arguments against change and novelty.
Comment by Eric — June 28, 2008 @ 9:04 am
i’m going to take this shit higher level. it’s not about whether there’s a change, but what kind of change. Marxists are obsessed with epochal shifts (along teleological lines) that somehow reorganize prior categories. Different schools draw those lines differently, and there’s a cottage industry of saying “a shift has occured! there’s a new proletariat” or whatever. That kind of change is stoopid.
On the other hand real shifts have occured in the economy, the state, etc. The changes we have seen though aren’t neat. They are partial, complex, and copresent with continuity. This sort of thing doesn’t lend itself to flashy complete breaks of history, so in the ever escalating avant guardism of marxist/academic theory.
Comment by todd — June 30, 2008 @ 8:57 am
Hey y’all, sorry for not replying, been very busy in my offlist life (apartment hunting among other things). Thanks for your thoughts.
Todd, real quick, to my mind the issue is what is the political/subjective/proletarian-communist significance of technical/objective/capitalist transformations. I want to say the significance is underdetermined, but I’m nervous about going too far that way (underdetermination taken too far amounts to basically “no change has occurred”).
gotta run
xox
n8
Comment by Nate — June 30, 2008 @ 10:43 pm