When I wrote about “significant differences” I thought I was making a quick reference to what I think is Deleuze’s influence on Negri’s take– the idea is that what will appear as the significant difference is not the difference which will make a difference, the differences which will make a difference are small, imperceptible.

In our ordinary perception of things, we might consider a significant difference to be the visibility of large numbers of people protesting. We might discount much more subtle, uncoordinated, “disorganized” changes, thinking of them as insignificant, ineffective. That these latter appear this way could be part of what would make them effective. At some point, these sorts of changes could become overwhelming.

It seems to me Negri relies on people sharing his own Deleuzian-Foucauldian conceptualization of the nature of power. He assumes the Deluezian-Foucauldian nature of power in his theorization–he doesn’t bother to explain. But the Deleuzian-Foucauldian concepts are not widely appreciated or understood and it isn’t plain how these concepts are working in Negri’s ideas.

I’m not sure about this, but I also think Negri may be thinking of difference-repetition the way Deleuze does, and that might be the reason people are frustrated by him saying there are changes where they see sameness with the past.

This is a complicated thing to discuss,anyway. It really is difficult to even determine on what level the disagreements are arising. We may be disagreeing about what difference is, what significance is, or we could agree on that, but still completely disagree in some other way which I can’t even think of right now.

“how do we know the differences we observe are significant differences?”

That’’s a useful clarification of my point, though there’s also the matter of what exactly that significance is.

I know you think the differences Negri is on about are significant, and I probably agree. I assume you think they have the significance he thinks they have. This is where I disagree pretty strongly - I don’t think they have the significance he thinks they have, either in philosophical or political terms. This is mostly because I think what Negri says about the present applies to the past - I think Negri holds up aspects of capitalist production that he’s recently recognized and claims they’re qualities of recent capitalism. In that Negri is definitely tracking onto important changes but these are mixed in with observations about the present which also apply to the past (such that they’re not changes).

Unfortunately I think this is just a restatement of the disagreement we’re having. I’m a bit stuck on how to proceed here, I’d like this to be a productive disagreement but to be honest I don’t know how (and sorry if I’ve taken a negative tone, the rest of my life has been hectic lately and that has colored some of my communications w/ folk lately). Any ideas? Maybe we could pick a short text from Negri that gets at the heart of this issue?

One thing I will say - I understand that this post is grumpy and isn’t a very well worked out argument. I respect that you want to defend Negri and find his work insightful. Maybe Negri does work for you that he doesn’t do for me (at least not anymore, Negri defined what I read and thought about and how in a major way for probably 4 years - part of the problems with the tone in some of what I write here about Negri is that I’m often disappointed with Negri as I want his work to wow me in the way that it used to). In case you’re interested, I’ve got some more worked out statements of some of this, for instance here:
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/biopolitical-capitalism/

http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2005/10/23/is-up-with-the-insistence-on-the-new/

There’s also a paper by Silvia Federici that I think is quite good on some of the stakes of this stuff, my notes on it are here - http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2008/07/01/is-wrong-with-the-precarity-conversation/

take care,
Nate

I don’t think it is difficult to know when things are different…Twenty years ago, we would not have been able to have this conversation in the way we are having it now, through the internet…Two weeks ago, we’d never had any contact with each other any way at all. Things are different, and we know they are different. In our time, things are changing very, very rapidly.

For Marx, I don’t think he had a difficulty knowing things were different, either. He knew that in times past, there hadn’t been factories, there hadn’t been workers working in factories, etc. Pointing out the differences between Marx’s present and the European past was the least of his problems.

I think what you are asking is: how do we know the differences we observe are significant differences? How do we know these obvious differences are the differences which make a difference? For example, (somewhat arbitrary) how do we know that the changes introduced by communication through being able to communicate through the internet, meeting people through the internet rather than in some other way, is a significant change? We know we wouldn’t have had this conversation through this media 20 years ago, but does that matter?

How would Marx have known that the change in the mode of production from farm to factory was a significant change, (in both cases, people were making a living, feeding themselves and their family, making do, etc. so in many, many ways, the change in mode of production could easily have been characterized as insignificant)?

Significant or insignificant–this is the question of the nature of value, of the value of value. This is THE question. My opinion is that Negri, following Deleuze, does not find insignificant difference to be insignificant.

If you are asking whether Negri thinks he can anticipate the future, (or if Marx thought he could anticipate the future,)my opinion is Negri is guilty of no arrogance. He knows he can’t. I think Marx was remarkably prophetic…As much as one can be prophetic to a species which can react to prophecy and thereby change its course.

Clearly “there’s nothing new” is a bad idea, but that’s not what I said. As I said, the point has a common sense truth to it when put very generally. But when do we know when we need new ideas? And how? Using what ideas? The ones we currently have? If so, then presumably they still work, and if not, then how can we know that we need new ideas? Also, what sorts of newness count such that new ideas are needed? Every succeeding instant in time is new. Clearly we don’t need new ideas every instant. My real point is that I think Negri present no criteria or convincing arguments for saying that the present moment is such that we need tremendously new ideas. I think his recourse to Spinoza, Marx, Machiavelli, and a host of other figures from the philosophical tradition.

Here’s a question for you: _did_ Marx know that (as in, did he _know_ rather than assert or assume) things were different and so on? If so, how, and what things? Obviously these are big and unfair questions, but my points are
1) I bet you don’t know this either, you assume it as a starting point as does Negri. That bothers me some, but most of what bothers me about it is when it’s not admitted to, and when it’s held up as more coherent than it really is. Like I said: “The injunction ‘in a new condition, seek a new method’ is itself a methodological or theoretical (or, meta-methodological/meta-theoretical) point, which is treated as valid in all contexts. Put yet another way, Negri’s point amounts to ‘in a novel circumstance, rethink your assumptions,’ which on the one hand has an obvious rightness but which is on the other hand itself an assumption and thus one which is either false (because this assumption is not to be rethought) or is itself subject to rethinking (and if this is so, then there is much less argument for all the theoretical scaffold-building that Negri engages in).”

2) The whole novelty-or-not thing isn’t very interesting or useful. The point is not new ideas or not. I’m not sure what the point is exactly but I don’t see any positive work that the refrain of novelty does in Negri, and I can see a few negative things it does.

take care,
Nate

If you disagree with this, your beef isn’t merely with Negri, it is with all of modernity. You side with the ancients, who say things such as, “there’s nothing new under the sun,” and “the old ways work just fine, thank you.” I don’t see how you could do anything but reject Marxism or leftist politics wholesale. If what you say in this item # is true, how could Marx himself have known things were different and required a new way of organizing society, of doing things?

BTW, have you seen this? It’s my (current) take on Negri and the multitude. Any thoughts or comments would be most welcome.