I’ve agreed to do a talk about recent Italian theory that uses the term ‘the common,’ tied to the theme ‘the future of the common.’ I’m not sure what to say, still percolating. Here are some working titles, which get at a bit of the difficulty I’m having:
Commonsunism: A Neologism Appropriate to the Muddle It Names
The Future of the Common is in the Dustbin of History
How I Started Worrying and Learned to Hate the Common
Left-Wing Commonism: A Geriatric Disorder
“I’m not saying we have to use the table of contents for volume one of Capital to circumscribe our theory or our practice, but if we did, hypothetically speaking, what part would you pick and where would you place all this Common(s) stuff? (I’d put it in the intro, or the preparatory material.)”
Against Theoreticist Liquidationist Deviation!
The Bigger the Russian Doll, the Emptier It Is: Remarks on the Recurrent Mistaking of General Determinations for Particular Historical Conditions, Objective for Subjective, Philosophy for Analysis, and Analysis for Politics
If We’re Going To Drink Old Wine Anyway Let’s At Least Admit It And Discuss Which One And Why We Choose It
Common, Commons, Communism
The last is probably the most serious as a real title though the others probably speak more accurately to my disposition.
I’d start with a discussion of William Shatner’s cover of “Common People” by Pul and how that serves as an analysis of the failure of alleged immanent communism of immaterial labor… or something like that…
Comment by Stevphen — August 7, 2009 @ 11:09 pm
Oh, please use “How I Started Worrying and Learned to Hate the Common” … before Zizek does!
Comment by John — August 11, 2009 @ 9:37 am
I agree, I like the Strangelove one. Howzabout:
Making Sense of the Common
Common All Ye Faithful
The Italians Get Us Common and Goin’
Screwings Royal and Common
Comment by Carl — August 11, 2009 @ 11:04 am
I assembled the following as a set of readings that could go with the talk. The texts all fit with some of the points I want to make… The Marx passage is tied to my argument that Negri et al are, at most, articulating general matters true of much longer periods than they think, and they mistake these general matters for claims articulating
the specificity of the present.
The other materials mostly center around issues of historical narrative and periodization. I want to foreground the fact that giving meaning to chunks of time is an activity - we don’t find meaningful chunks of time in the world, people make them so. I also want to offer
a different sensibility than that of Negri et al, one with a much, much longer scope. I don’t care if folk agree or not, I just want to present the view for consideration in the hope that this will make the first point easier to grasp concretely, that historical narratives are narratives. The Tronti, Benjamin, and Wu Ming excerpts offer a theoretical take on this. The song and the agitational material by Wu Ming offer examples of people in movements self-consciously practicing historical narration for effect.
There’s little here yet about concrete struggles, in relation to my other claim, that the common/s as category is overly general and applies to collective action as such.
*
http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”, thesis 12; addenda A and B
XII
We need history, but not the way a spoiled
loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it.
Nietzsche, Of the Use and Abuse of History
Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. This conviction, which had a brief resurgence in the Spartacist group,* has always been objectionable to Social Democrats. Within three decades they managed virtually to erase the name of Blanqui, though it had been the rallying sound that had reverberated through the preceding century. Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.
(…)
A.
Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, though events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.
B.
The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance–namely, in just the same way. We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.
*
Mario Tronti, “The Strategy of the Refusal,” (excerpt from Operai e capitale)
“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)
*
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/appx1.htm
Marx, unpublished introduction to the Contribution of the Critique of Political Economy
(This text appears in the Grundrisse.)
“[W]hen we speak of production, we always have in mind production at a definite stage of social development, production by individuals in a society. It might therefore seem that, in order to speak of production at all, we must either trace the various phases in the historical process of development, or else declare from the very beginning that we are examining one particular historical period, as for instance modern bourgeois production, which is indeed our real subject-matter. All periods of production, however, have certain features in common: they have certain common categories. Production in general is an abstraction, but a sensible abstraction in so far as it actually emphasises and defines the common aspects and thus avoids repetition. Yet this general concept, or the common aspect which has been brought to light by comparison, is itself a multifarious compound comprising divergent categories. Some elements are found in all epochs, others are common to a few epochs. The most modern period and the most ancient period will have (certain) categories in common. Production without them is inconceivable. But although the most highly developed languages have laws and categories in common with the most primitive languages, it is precisely their divergence from these general and common features which constitutes their development. It is necessary to distinguish those definitions which apply to production in general, in order not to over look the essential differences existing despite the unity that follows from the very fact that the subject, mankind, and the object, nature, are the same.”
*
http://washingtonoldtimemusic.com/WHFAUA03.htm
We Have Fed You All A Thousand Years
We have fed you all for a thousand years
And you hail us still unfed,
Though there’s never a dollar of all your wealth
But marks the workers’ dead.
We have yielded our best to give you rest
And you lie on crimson wool.
Then if blood be the price of all your wealth,
Good God! We have paid it in full!
There is never a mine blown skyward now
But we’re buried alive for you.
There’s never a wreck drifts shoreward now
But we are its ghastly crew.
Go reckon our dead by the forges red
And the factories where we spin.
If blood be the price of your cursed wealth,
Good God! We have paid it in!
We have fed you all a thousand years-
For that was our doom, you know,
From the days when you chained us in your fields
To the strike a week ago.
You have taken our lives, and our babies and wives,
And we’re told it’s your legal share,
But if blood be the price of your lawful wealth,
Good God! We bought it fair!
“Written by ‘an unknown Proletarian.’ Music by Von Liebich. First listed printing, Industrial Union
Bulletin, April 18, 1908.”
*
http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/giap/Giap_multitudes.html
Wu Ming, “From the Multitudes of Europe Rising Up Against the Empire
and Marching on Genoa (19-20 July 2001)”
We are new, and yet we are the same as always.
We are ancient to the future, an army of disobedience. For centuries we have marched, armed with stories as weapons, “dignity” emblazoned across our ensigns.
In the name of dignity we fight those who play the lords and masters of people and meadows, forests and waters. Those who rule arbitrarily, impose the order of the Empire and impoverish the communities.
We are the peasants of the Jacquerie. Our villages were plundered by the mercenaries of the Hundred Years War and the nobles made us starve. In the Year of Our Lord 1358 we took up arms, destroyed their castles and took the ill-gotten back. Some of us were captured and decapitated, blood flowed from our noses, but we were on the march and we would not stop again.
We are the ciompi of Florence, the workers of factories and the minor arts. In the Year of Our Lord 1378 a carder led us to rebellion. We took over the city council and reformed the statute of arts and professions. The lords escaped to the countryside and organized the siege of the town. After two years they defeated us and restored the oligarchy, but nothing could stop the contagious spirit of our example.
We are the peasants of England who battled against the nobles to get rid of tolls and excises. In the Year of Our Lord 1381 we heard the preaching of John Ball: “When Adam dalf and Eve span / Who was then a gentilman?”. We set off from Essex and Kent with pruning hooks and pitchforks. We occupied London and set buildings on fire. We sacked the palace of the Arch-bishop and opened the doors of jails. By the King’s appointment many of us went to the gallows, but things had been changed forever.
We are the Hussites. We are the Taborites. We are the Bohemian labourers and craftsmen who rebelled against the Pope, the King and the Emperor after Ian Hus was burnt at the stake. In the Year of Our Lord 1419 we assaulted the town hall of Prague and threw the burgomaster and the councillors out the window. King Wenceslaus died of a heartache. The powerful of Europe waged war on us, and so we called the Czech people to arms. We drove back all invasions, counterattacked and entered Austria, Hungary, Brandenburg, Saxony, Franconia and the Palatine. The heart of a continent was in our hands. We abolished servitude and the tithes. We were defeated after thirty years of war and crusades.
We are the thirty-four thousand men that answered the call of Hans the Piper. In the Year of Our Lord 1476 the Madonna of Niklashausen appeared to Hans and said:
“There shall be neither kings nor princes, neither papacy nor priesthood, neither taxes nor tithes. Meadows, forests and waters shall belong to all people. Every one shall be a brother to each other, possessing no more than his neighbour”.
We arrived on the day of St. Margaret, a candle in one hand and a spear in the other. The Holy Virgin would tell us what to do. The knights of the Bishop captured Hans, then they attacked and defeated us. Hans burned at the stake, but the words of the Virgin did not.
We are the String Shoe, the labourers and peasants of Alsace. In the Year of Our Lord 1493 we conspired to kill the usurers and cancel all debts, confiscate the treasuries of the monasteries, reduce the priests’ incomes, abolish oral confession and establish local courts elected by the communities. On Easter Sunday we attacked the stronghold of Schlettstadt. We were defeated. Many of us were arrested and put on the rack, to be quartered or decapitated. Many were crippled by having their hands and fingers chopped off, and were driven out of the country. Yet those who kept marching spread the String Shoe throughout Germany. After years of repression and re-organization, the String Shoe rose up in Freiburg in the Year of Our Lord 1513. The March
went on, and the String Shoe has never stopped.
We are Poor Konrad, the peasants of Suabia that rebelled against the taxes on wine, meat and bread, in the Year of Our Lord 1514. We were five thousand and threatened to conquer Schorndorf, in the valley of Rems. Duke Ulrich promised he would abolish the new taxes and examine the peasants’ complaints. He was only seeking to keep us quiet and gain time. The revolt spread all over Suabia. Our delegates were admitted to the diet in Stuttgart. It was decided to depose and punish three of the hated councillors of the Duke, to add to the Duke a council of four knights, four burghers and four peasants, and to confiscate the monasteries and the endowments in favour of the State treasury. Ulrich convened another diet in Tuebingen, and his neighbours helped him gather troops. It was not easy to take the valley of Rems by force: Ulrich besieged and starved Poor Konrad on the mountain of Koppel, then he plundered the villages. Sixteen hundred peasants were captured, sixteen of them decapitated, and the rest received heavy fines. And yet Poor Konrad still revolts.
We are the peasants of Hungary that rallyed for the crusade against the Turk, and decided to wage war on the nobles instead, in the Year of Our Lord 1514. Sixty thousand armed men, at the orders of commander Dozsa, spread the insurrection all across the country. The army of the nobles surrounded us at Czanad, where a “Republic of Equals” had been founded. They captured us after a two months’ siege. Dozsa was roasted on a red-hot throne, his lieutenants were forced to eat his flesh. Thousands of peasants were impaled or hanged. The massacre and the impious Eucharist led the March astray, but could not stop it.
We are the army of peasants and miners that followed Thomas Muentzer. In the Year of the Lord 1524 we shouted: “All things are common!” and declared war upon the world order. Our Twelve Articles shook the powerful of Europe. We conquered towns and won the hearts of the people. The Lansquenets exterminated us in Thuringia, Muentzer was torn to pieces by the headsmen, and yet nobody could deny it: all that belonged to the earth, to the earth would return.
We are the “Diggers”: a community of unemployed labourers and landless peasants. In the Year of Our Lord 1649 we gathered in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, occupied the common land and started to dig it up. We wanted to live together and share the fruits of the earth. The lords of the manor aroused the populace, we were seized and locked up by an angry mob. Countrymen and soldiers assailed us and trampled our crops. When we cut the woods on the common, the landlords sued for damages and trespass. We moved to Cobham Manor, built four houses and started a crop of winter grain. Troops attacked us, destroyed the houses and again trampled the fields. We persisted. Other diggers started crops in Kent and Northamptonshire. A mob drove them out. The law defeated us and we set out again.
We are the serfs, miners, fugitives and deserters that joined Pugachev’s Cossacks to overthrow the autocracy of Russia and abolish servitude. In the Year of Our Lord 1774 we conquered strongholds, confiscated riches and moved to Moscow. Pugachev was captured, but the seed was going to bear fruit.
We are the army of General Ludd. Our fathers were cleared off their lands and we became weavers. Then came that weaving machine. In the Year of Our Lord 1811 we ran across the countryside of England, stormed factories, destroyed machines and laughed in the face of constables. The government sent thousands of soldiers and armed civilians. A disgraceful law established that machines were more important than human beings, and those who destroyed machines had to be hanged. Lord Byron warned:
“Is there not blood enough upon your penal code, that more must be poured forth to ascend to Heaven, and testify against you? How will you carry the bill into effect? Can you commit a whole country to their own prisons? Will you erect a gibbet in every field and hang up men like scarecrows? Or will you proceed (as you must to bring this measure into effect) by decimation? . . . Are these the remedies for a starving and desperate populace?”
The rebellion broke out, but we were tired and underfed. Those who escaped the slip-knot were deported to Australia. And yet General Ludd still rides at the edge of the fields, in the dead of night, rallying his troops.
We are the workers of Cambridgeshire under the orders of Captain Swing. In the Year of Our Lord 1830 we rose up against despotic laws. We set barns on fire, destroyed machines, threatened landlords, assaulted police stations and executed narks. We were sent to the gallows, but the call of Captain Swing would gather a bigger army. Their advance would raise a dust that soiled all coppers’ coats and judges’ gowns. The assault on the sky would last 150 years.
We are the weavers of Silesia who rebelled in the year 1844.
We are the fabric printers that set fire to Bohemia in the same year.
We are the proletarian insurgents of the Year of Grace 1848.
We are the spectres that tormented popes, tzars, bosses and footmen.
We are the populace of Paris in the Year of Grace 1871.
We have gone through the century of revenge and madness, and we keep on marching.
They say that they are new, they christen themselves by acronyms: G8, IMF, WB, WTO, NAFTA, FTAA… They cannot fool us, they are the same as those who have come before them: the écorcheurs that plundered our villages, the oligarchs that re-conquered Florence, the court of Emperor Sigismund that beguiled Ian Hus, the diet of Tuebingen that obeyed Ulrich and refused to admit Poor Konrad, the princes that sent the lansquenets to Frankenhausen, the impious that roasted Dozsa, the landlords that tormented the Diggers, the autocrats that defeated Pugachev, the government whom Byron cursed, the old world that stopped our assaults and destroyed all stairways to heaven.
Nowadays they have a new empire, they impose new servitudes on the whole globe, they still play the lords and masters of the land and the sea.
Once again, we the multitudes rise up against them.
Genoa.
Italian peninsula.
19, 20 and 21 of July
in a Year that no longer belongs to any Lord.
*
http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/wumingblog/?p=264
Wu Ming, excerpts from “Spectres of Muntzer at Sunrise,” introduction to Verso’s forthcoming republication of Thomas Müntzer’s Sermon to the Princes.
“It is impossible to disclaim the responsibility the Wu Ming collective had, at least in Italy. We were among the most zealous in urging people to go to Genoa, and helped to pull the movement into the ambush. After the bloodbath, it took quite a while - and a lot of reflection on our part - to understand our own (specific) errors in the context of the (general) errors made by the movement.
Clearly, something went wrong with the practice of “mythopoesis” or “myth-making from the bottom up”, which was - and still is - at the core of our philosophy.
By “myth” we never meant a false story, i.e. the most banal and superficial use of the term. We always used the word for a narrative with a great symbolic value, a narrative whose meaning is understood and shared in the community (e.g. a social movement) whose members tell it one another. We’ve always been interested in stories that create bonds between human beings. Communities keep sharing such stories and, as they share them, they (hopefully) keep them alive and inspiring, ongoing narration makes them evolve, because what happens in the present changes the way we recollect the past. As a result, those tales are modified according to the context and acquire new symbolic/metaphorical meanings. Myths provide us with examples to follow or reject, give us a sense of continuity or discontinuity with the past, and allow us to imagine a future. We couldn’t live without them, it’s the way our mind works, our brain is “wired” to think through narratives, metaphors and allegories [3].
At a certain point, a metaphor may suffer sclerosis and become less and less useful, until it’s void of all meaning, a disgusting cliché, an obstacle to the growth of inspiring stories. When this happens, people have to veer off, looking for other words and images.
Revolutionary and progressive movements have always found their own metaphors and narrated their myths. Most of the times these myths survived their being useful and became alienating. Rigor mortis set in, language became wooden, metaphors ended up enslaving the people instead of setting them free […]
No-one can erase mythological thought from human communication, because it’s embedded in the circuitry of our brains. As a matter of fact, every iconoclasm eventually generates a new iconophilia, against which new iconoclasts will rage. The cycle will be endless if we don’t understand the way these narratives work.
The trouble with myths is not their intrinsic falsehood, truth… or truthiness. The trouble with myths is that they sclerotise easily if we take them for granted. The flow of tales must be kept fresh and lively, we have to tell stories by ever changing means, angles and points of view, give our tales constant exercise so they don’t harden and darken and clog our brains.
This, of course, is an extremely hard task, for several reasons.
First of all, it’s too easy to underestimate the dangers of working with myths. One always runs the risk of playing Dr. Frankenstein or, even worse, Henry Ford. We can’t create a myth at will, as though on an assembly line, or evoke it artificially in some closed laboratory. To be more exact: we could, but it would have unpleasant consequences.
Expanding some observations by Karoly Kerenyi, Italian mythologist Furio Jesi drew a sharp distinction between a “genuine” approach to myths (although he later criticized Kerenyi’s use of the adjective) and a forced evocation of myths for a specific (usually political) purpose. Think of Mussolini describing the 1937 invasion of Abyssinia as “the reappearance of the Empire on the fateful hills of Rome”. Kerenyi and Jesi called the latter strategy “technification of myths”.
Technified myth is always addressed to those Kerenyi called “the sleeping ones”, i.e. people whose critical attitude is dormant, because the powerful images conveyed by the technifiers have overwhelmed their consciousness and invaded their subconscious. For example, we may “fall asleep” during the incredibly beautiful first half-hour of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938).
On the contrary, a “genuine” approach to myths requires staying awake and willing to listen. We have to ask questions and listen to what myths have to say, we have to study myths, go looking for them in their territories, with humbleness and respect, without trying to capture them and forcibly bring them to our world and our present. It is a pilgrimage, not a safari.
Technified myth is always “false consciousness”, even when we think we’re using it to a good purpose. In an essay entitled Literature and Myth, Jesi asked himself: ‘Is it possible to induce the people to behave in a certain way - thanks to the power exerted by suitable evocations of myths - and then induce them to criticize the mythical motives of their behaviour?’. He answered himself: ‘It seems practically impossible’.
In the heyday of the global movement (from Autumn 1999 to Summer 2001), we tried to operate in the space between the adverb (”practically”) and the adjective (”impossible”). We tried to use the adverb to break open the adjective. We deemed Jesi’s answer too pessimistic. We thought that “opening the laboratory” and showing the people how we processed “mythologemes” - i.e. the basic conceptual units, the metaphoric “kernels” of mythological narratives - was enough to provide the people with the tools of criticism. “Correct distance” from a myth was our chimera: not too close lest we might fall into a stupor, not so far that we no longer feel its power. It was a difficult balance to keep, and in fact we didn’t keep it.
Because the problem is also: who is the artificer of mythopoesis, the evocator, the obstetrician? It should be up to a whole movement or community or social class to handle myths and keep them on the move. No particular group can appoint itself to that office. At the end of the day, we ended up being “officials” assigned to manipulate metaphors and evoke myths. Our role became a quasi-specialised one. An agit-prop cell. A combo of spin doctors. Sure, From the Multitudes of Europe… could make your nerves sing, it made you feel like going to Genoa right away, but that was not enough. We never looked for ways to “criticize the mythical motives of our behaviour”. “Practically” never cracked “impossible”.
At present, there is no alternative but continuing the work: we have to continue the exploration, prick up our ears and approach myths in a way that’s not instrumental. We have to understand the nature of myths without wishing to reduce their complexity and test their aerodynamic properties in the wind tunnel of politics.”
*
Excerpt from my paper “A Biopolitical Stage Of Capitalism?”, I think this was published in Critical Sense journal, but I’m not totally sure if the journal continued to exist after accepting this.
“What is at stake for Hardt and Negri in a declaration of a new epoch? I suspect that this is not simply a mistake on their part, but rather a rhetorical and political attempt to have some external effect. In the words of Carl Schmitt:
“All political concepts, images, and terms have a polemical meaning. They are focused on a specific conflict and are bound to a concrete situation; the result is a friend-enemy grouping, and they turn into empty and ghostlike abstractions when this situation disappears. Words such as state, republic, society, class, as well as sovereignty, constitutional state, absolutism, dictatorship, economic planning, neutral or total state, and so on, as incomprehensible if one does not know exactly who is affected, combated, refuted, or negated by such a term.”[55]
That is to say, the categories of political thought are themselves political and potentially constitutive.
Along these lines, it must be noted that the term, multitude, the name that Hardt and Negri give their political project, had a currency in Italian social movements prior to the publication of Empire, as did the concept, exodus, which they hold up as the practice of the multitude.[56] Hardt and Negri’s use of these concepts comes out of their familiarity with these movements, and I suspect are an attempt to intervene in those circles in order to impact the formation of collectivities and alliances of collectivities against capital and the state. In this light it is interesting to note not only Hardt and Negri’s use of Schmitt, but the similarity in their respective readings of Marx.[57] Schmitt writes:
“[T]he antithesis formulated by Karl Marx: bourgeoisie and proletariat … concentrates all antagonisms … into one single and final battle … by integrating the many bourgeois parties on earth into a single order, on the one hand, and likewise the proletariat on the other. By so doing a mighty friend-enemy grouping is forged.”[58]
Hardt and Negri write:
“[A] theory of class not only reflects the existing lines of class struggle, it also proposes potential future lines. The task of a theory of class in this respect is to identify the existing conditions for potential struggle and express them as a political proposition. Class is really a constituent deployment, a project. This is clearly how one should read Marx’s claim about the tendency toward a binary model of class structures in a capitalist society. … This claim is really part of a political proposal for the unification of the struggles of labor in the proletariat as a class. This political project is what most fundamentally divides Marx’s binary class conception from the liberal models of class pluralism.”[59]
Hardt and Negri continue, noting that today “the old distinction between economic and political struggles becomes merely an obstacle to understanding class relations.” In light of the above quote, one must read ‘understanding’ as, essentially, synonymous with “shaping.” They continue: “Class is a biopolitical concept that is at once economic and political. When we say biopolitical, furthermore, this also means that our understanding of labor cannot be limited to waged labor but must refer to human productive capacities in all their generality.”[60]
This is a worthy sentiment, but there is no need for the limitation of its application solely to the present, unless there is some function to be played by this limitation. I suspect that the historical break that Hardt and Negri posit may be part of a Schmittian attempt to construct a political community through positing ours as a historically and politically ripe moment. Whether this is the maneuver they have in mind, I am not convinced, as the preceding arguments make clear. Every moment is ripe for its participants, and whatever the constitutive power Hardt and Negri’s declaration of a new epoch may have, it comes at the cost of writing out of history a number of important forebearers in struggle.
This declaration may also be motivated by a desire to think through the present and toward the future without engaging critically with the wreckage and nightmare of much of the history of Marxism. I can think of no other motivation Hardt and Negri might have. I am not sympathetic with either. Hardt and Negri are right that “[w]hat is necessary is an audacious act of political imagination to break with the past,” but this has been the political task of everyone alive at any moment ever in time since the inception of exploitative and hierarchical social relations.[61] Hardt and Negri’s positing of this rupture as a need that is unique to the present demonstrates an inadequate account of the uses and abuses of history for life in the present.
Notes
(…)
[55] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 30-31.
[56] See the previously mentioned pieces by Virno, wherein he provides a different theoretical account of and political valence to the term multitude. See also the 1997 piece “Un mundo … muchos mundos,” circulated by the Ya Basta network for a discussion of multitude and exodus within Italian movement circles (“Un mundo … muchos mundos: globalización, éxodos y multitudes-Repensar la acción política antagonista por una nueva carta de derechos,” http://www.sindominio.net/laboratorio/documentos/varios/yabasta.htm (accessed 12/19/05). See also Steve Wright, “Confronting the crisis of ‘fordism’: Italian debates around social transition,” http://libcom.org/library/confronting-crisis-fordism-steve-wright (accessed December 19, 2005) for a fuller treatment of debates, dating from 1990 onward, around the category of exodus and the political practices connected with it within the Italian left.
[57] Interestingly enough, in another context Etienne Balibar commented to Negri in regard to the latter’s support for the EU constitution: “You have become completely Schmittian,” because Negri felt that the EU constitution offered a chance to impact the formation of another global power that could stand against the US. Quoted in Arianna Bove, “Notes on public discussion between Etienne Balibar and Antonio Negri on the constitution of Europe. Rome, June 2004,” http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpbalibar3.htm (accessed 12/16/05).
[58] Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 74.
[59] Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 104-5.
[60] Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 104-5.
[61] Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 308.”
Comment by Nate — August 21, 2009 @ 12:04 am