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”).

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n8

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.

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.