I’ve been invited by some people I like very much to give a talk on the theme of the common, a philosophical category (or a family or cloud of categories sharing a name) used by some contemporary Italian writers and folk influenced by them. I’m flattered at the invite and happy to have a chance to get my thoughts clearer on this by writing something up. On the other hand, that category is one that I’ve never found very useful even when I was really enamored of that work, which I’m not any more. So I feel a bit nervous (more than usual) about this as I’ve got find a way to question the utility of the category as used while addressing the work that the category does or could do, in such a way that my questions and criticisms can actually be heard. I’ll be blogging to prepare for this.
As part of said preparation I think all of the following are in order.
1. Review the literature on the category, reminding myself what’s said in stuff I’ve already read and reading what I’ve not read, in order to have support for my claims
2. Get various criticisms out
3. Get any urge to be snarky out of my system
4. Refine based on the above.
*
My basic point I want to make, at least for now -
The category as I understand its use tends to be tied to accounts of the present which rely heavily on a contrast with the past, a contrast in which the account of the past is only partially spelled out and - to the degree that it is spelled out - is inaccurate. I don’t claim to have a better understanding of the present as an alternative, only a claim that this one doesn’t work. My own presumptions, which are not arguments and which I won’t spend any real time one, are that the politics of this category tend to derive from the their context (no surprise) more than they add to their context (more surprising), the politics tend to be tied to something like a movementist perspective which does not address questions of organization and which tend to minimize the utility of previous critical vocabularies and political/organizational practices. The category also tends in my opinion to stay largely within a theoretical or philosophical register.
A few quotes and notes
Review Althusser’s account of what he called his own earlier and mistaken ‘theoreticism,’ here:
http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/ESC76.html
Benjamin, On the Concept of History, thesis 12:
“The subject of historical cognition is the battling, oppressed class itself. In Marx it steps forwards as the final enslaved and avenging class, which carries out the work of emancipation in the name of generations of downtrodden to its conclusion. This consciousness, which for a short time made itself felt in the “Spartacus” [Spartacist splinter group, the forerunner to the German Communist Party], was objectionable to social democracy from the very beginning. In the course of three decades it succeeded in almost completely erasing the name of Blanqui, whose distant thunder [Erzklang] had made the preceding century tremble. It contented itself with assigning the working-class the role of the savior of future generations. It thereby severed the sinews of its greatest power. Through this schooling the class forgot its hate as much as its spirit of sacrifice. For both nourish themselves on the picture of enslaved forebears, not on the ideal of the emancipated heirs.”
Tronti on the future:
“Of all that exists today, nothing is for the future. To place the model of a future society before the analysis of present society constitutes a vicious bourgeois ideology (…) No worker that struggles against the boss asks: ‘and later?’ The struggle against the boss is all. The organization of the struggle is all. All of that, however, is already a world.” (note here: http://leggiamotronti.blogsome.com/2005/11/22/notes-on-the-rest-of-the-introduction/)
“the future, from the working class point of view, does not exist; only a block on the present, the impossibility for the present to continue functioning under its present organisation, and thus an instance of its possible reorganisation under an opposite notion of power. An autonomous working class political power is the only weapon that can block the functioning of capital’s economic mechanisms. In this sole sense the workers’ State of tomorrow is the party of today.
This brings us back to the concept, which we attributed to Marx, of communism as the party, which instead of constructing a model of the future society, supplies a practical means for the destruction of the present society.” (Strategy of the Refusal, here: http://www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/tronti_refusal.html)
Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory”
“one thing that is evident in some of the best Marxist cultural analysis is that it is very much more at home in what one might call epochal questions than in what one has to call historical questions. That is to say, it is usually very much better at distinguishing the large features of different epochs of society, as between feudal and bourgeois, or what might be, than at distinguishing between different phases of bourgeois society, and different moments within the phases: that true historical process which demands a much greater precision and delicacy of analysis than the always striking epochal analysis which is concerned with main lineaments and features.” (8.)
Hey Nate, I’m reading a good book on the common right now - Casarino and Negri’s _In Praise of the Common_ (2008). Check out Cesare’s preface for the most sophisticated explication of the common that I’ve read thus far. It might fall directly into your critique of being too abstracted from practices of political organizations, but I think you might benefit from engaging with it (especially since Cesare seems to have a quite nuance understanding of time - e.g., see the last essay in this book, “Time matters: Marx, Negri, Agamben, and the corporeal” - also, see some parts of the sections “Sound the Present” for some more on the common). I’d love to talk with you about this stuff because I’m trying to figure out whether and how the concept of the common could be useful for my own political-theoretical work (especially in comparison with the concept of commons (in contrast with “enclosures), which is easier for me to wrap my mind around so far). Possibly we could meet up to talk about this soon in order to help you prepare for your presentation (if you haven’t given it already). Let me know…
Comment by Eli M. — April 19, 2009 @ 12:21 am
hi Eli,
Thanks for your comment. I do plan on reading that book. I got it right when it came out and put it aside in frustration after skimming the first 10-15 pages. I really like Cesare and he’s really smart and well read but I found it to presume most of the things that I think are open questions - or downright wrong - in the work of Negri et al.
The final straw was a footnote where he implied that Negri’s periodization in terms of real subsumption of society is Marx’s periodization. It’s not, at least as I read the relevant texts, and I’ve yet to see any evidence otherwise. Marx’s version of real subsumption is more bounded both spatially/economically - to specific firms and industries - and temporally. Departure from Marx is fine, but the gesture of hanging the claims involved in ‘real subsumption of society’ on Marx without adequate textual engagement really, really put me off, not least because I think both the idea of real subsumption of society and the interpretation of Marx as suggesting such a thing are at best very questionable. I just got the book off the shelf again, the note in question is note 23, p250. The sentence that I found (find!) so annoying is the third one.
With all of that in mind, I am really skeptical of the utility of the concept of the common as used by Cesare and others. This is partly because I just don’t think philosophical inquiry at such a high level is the right sort of tool for the questions I’ve got (not finegrained or empirical enough), partly because the philosophical reflections of this sort are compatible with (perhaps even serve to deflect criticism from) propositions that I think are wrong, and partly because in general I don’t think we need any particular philosophical framework. The third point is not to say that there’s no utility to philosophical reflection as such, rather I mean to make a metaphilosophical point: for any given use which a given philosophical perspective is good for, it is likely that another philosophical perspective could also be used. This has no real force except to say that claims or implications about philosophical exclusivity make me very suspicious. Specifically with regard to marxism and what I think are the most interesting and relevant bits of Marx, I think the types of arguments implied in the philosophical work I’ve seen on the common are not an interesting avenue - I think we can have functioning and interesting marxisms which are compatible with each other whether we’re deleuzian spinozists or adornian hegelians or something else. While I’ve not seen this claim made directly, there’s a strong implication in the work of Negri at al that the philosophical/metaphilosophical framework they use is exclusive, hence the uninteresting asides about dialectics. The irony there is that culturally speaking, as a body of people with habits of speech and thought abstracted from the content of that thought, they have a great deal of bad habits in common with hegelian marxists, including the exclusivity of their framework. All of this is especially ironic when the frameworks are so vague and subject to such variable interpretations.
Sorry, I’m ranting.
Anyhow - yes, I’d love to discuss this with you. I’ll be reading up on it this summer. I don’t do the talk until the fall, but I need to work on it slowly over time in order to be able to stand reading this stuff. (Which make me hard to stand, so I won’t be offended if you decide you don’t want to discuss it!)
I’d particularly like to hear your thoughts on commons/enclosure in relation to to/as distinct from all this stuff on the common. I like the former better, as it’s a bit more historical. I particularly like how Peter Linebaugh talks about this sometimes, he suggested we should talk about commoning instead commons, as commoning refers to a diversity of practice and relationships. To my mind there’s a great many of those, as with the range of things that fall under Marx’s categories of use and use value.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — April 19, 2009 @ 12:51 am