What in the hell …

It’s a bit weird. As far as I can tell, it’s something that arose in anti-fascist circles in Germany using a sort of post-Frankfurt school marxist theory to arrive at a position that supports the state of Israel, is at least partially in favor of US miltiary interventions, and believes there’s a special German-ness that is a threat to Jews such that Germany is the main target to be stopped. Perhaps this all makes more sense in Germany. To me it looks really odd.

It’s been the subject of discussion on the aut-op-sy email list recently, one of the better discussions there in a while. (Interested folk, it’s archived here.) For an intro, see this piece from Mute. There was also discussion of it at interactivist about a year and a half ago, here and here. That discussion lists Postone’s “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism” as a key text for the anti-deutsch.

Rethinking Communism is the theme of one of the plenaries at the Rethinking Marxism conference this year. Details here. Aspiring ultraleftist malcontent that I am, it strikes me that several of the practical examples included, most of them actually, are of a rather … administrative or bureaucratic tenor.

I’ve been racing the clock to finish this Sewell book before it’s due back to the library (curse you, unknown recaller!) but I may break down and buy it. One of Sewell’s goals is to show that the persistence of corporate idioms among the working class after the French revolution does not indicate a backwardness on the part of the class, no kind of vestigial holdover. Rather, the idiom on the workers’ differs on the part of the workers than on the part others, and it is re-articulated by the workers in new contexts. (more…)

I’ve barely even started jobhunting and I’m already in a sour mood. I got an email just now, though, that brightened it. Issue number eleven of the Commoner web journal has just rolled out, co-edited by yours truly. I’m a big fan of the journal and was nervous about the prospect of co-editing, felt like getting on stage with a beloved local band. All that pressure. Ends up I’m quite pleased with how the issue turned out. Those interested, click here.

I don’t know Althusser’s work. I was uninterested in it for a long time - categories like ideology and structure don’t interest me very much. My impression was that his work was largely about the successful continued accomplishment of the reproduction of capital, which doesn’t strike me as of much use to articulating the breakdowns thereof. I’ve become more interested, while those concerns remain, in large part via exposure to folks I respect very much who have made use of Althusser (Angela and David are high on that list, as is Jason Read). (more…)

Antonio Negri seeks in his recent work to found a political project, the construction of the insurgency of the multitude, on supposed changes in the present stage of capitalist development. Negri argues that there is a tendency for all of the life-time of all of humanity to be productive in the Marxian sense, and thus a tendency toward all of humanity being united against the same opponent. Negri seeks to forge a friend/enemy distinction based a narrative of progressive stages of the unfolding of capitalism. The effort to forge such a distinction in the present is a strong continuity throughout Negri’s career as a militant and theorist. The term for the present stage, the tactics advocated, and the name of the class figure may change, but the effort at intervention and construction is the same.
It is interesting to note that alongside Negri’s drive to enact a Schmittian constitution of a collectivity, there is also a strong similarity in how Schmitt and Negri read Marx. Schmitt writes:

“the 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.”
Similarly, 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 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.”
The difference, of course, is that Schmitt is not a Marxist. Rather, for Schmitt, Marx is an example of a political tendency that can today be described as Schmittian. Hardt and Negri, however, are Marxists in a fashion wherein they approve of and seek to replicate this tendency in Marx. They are, then, at the same time in at least some sense Schmittian.
In any case, 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’. The periodization in terms of historical break that Hardt and Negri posit is part of an attempt to construct a political community through positing the present as a historically and politically ripe moment. Furthermore, specific groups within the present, immaterial laborers, sit at points of particular ripeness of time. They are the temporal leading edge in the passage from present into future.
Historical periodization is a recurrent theme matter in Negri’s work, as in much of Marxism. The assertion of a historical break is a political operation posed in the ostensibly nonpolitical register of a narrative about a shift in the mode of production. This periodization can be made sense by addressing Schmitt’s discussion of the political nature of the delimitation of what is and is not political.
The determination of status as political or nonpolitical - regardless of the outcome of the determination - can be political. As Carl Schmitt writes in the preface to the second edition of Political Theology One, “any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons are advanced.” (PT p2) Schmitt expands on this point in his The Concept of the Political,

“Above all the polemical determines the use of the word political regardless of whether the adversary is designated as nonpolitical (in the sense of harmless), or vice versa if one wants to disqualify or denounce him as political in order to portray him in order to portray oneself as nonpolitical (in the sense of purely scientific, purely moral, purely juristic, purely aesthetic, purely economic, or on the basis of similar purities) and thereby superior.”(CotP p31-32)
Designation as nonpolitical is what Schmitt calls a depoliticalization, a decision which renders nonpolitical, or rather, ostensibly nonpolitical for political purposes. Depoliticalization is one of Schmitt’s charges against liberalism. Such rendering can itself be a powerful political activity. As Schmitt writes: “designating the adversary as political and oneself as nonpolitical (i.e., scientific, just, objective, neutral, etc) is in actuality a typical and unusually intensive way of pursuing politics” (CotP p21, note 2). Schmitt does not offer a corresponding term for designation as political. This designation can be called a politicalization, deriving the term from Schmitt’s term ‘depoliticalization.’
Reading Schmitt on the politics of the designation of status as political or nonpolitical might lead one to inquire about the status of Schmitt’s own work, whether political or nonpolitical. Doing so, however, risks missing the important point of Schmitt’s with regard to the politics of (de)politicalizations. The terms depoliticalization and politicalization are nominalizations, verbs rendered into a noun form. The nomimalized verbs implied within the terms depoliticalization and politicalization are depoliticalize and politicalize: to render nonpolitical and to render political. To depoliticalize and to politicalize are actions, decisions. Prior to the decision on any concept as either political or nonpolitical, the concept is a sort of (non)political Schrodinger’s cat, an indeterminate that is neither political nor nonpolitical until a decision occurs which renders a status as political or nonpolitical.
Schmitt’s formulation suggests dealing with actions rather than with conditions and being. Being and conditions - status as political or nonpolitical - are dealt with in relation to and as the effect of actions. Schmitt here is akin to Marx, for whom objectivity is subject, living labor, rendered as objective, as in the account of fixed capital as an accumulation of dead or objectified variable capital. The political and the nonpolitical are the rendered-political and the rendered-nonpolitical. This rendering is what is most interesting and important. Even more so, rendering or decision as such are addressed with the aim of helping understand and act within the field of renderings or decisions specific to any particular situation.
Decision need not necessarily be deliberate, hence this paper’s use of decision and rendering interchangeably. Depoliticalization as a category of analysis helps make clear how ostensibly nonpolitical factors can serve to determine and impact a political field or maneuver. This can occur without deliberate intent. Put differently, politicalizations and depoliticalizations are observer dependent phenomena, not subject a priori to agreement across different perspectives. One could, for example, imagine an exchange between someone championing the feminist slogan “the personal is political” and someone defending as nonpolitical a certain familial arrangement, wherein the two would be unable to reach agreement over the (non)political status of the object of their discussion. This disagreement would be precisely a political one, and as the contest between equal rights, the deciding factor would be some form of force. The relationship between these two positions would be precisely polemical, to use Schmitt’s term.
Marxism as a tradition of political thought and other activity has seen many polemical depoliticalizations and politicalizations. Mapping the history of these polemics and and their roots in and effects upon Marxism is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is one of the primary issues this paper hopes to be of use to. Depoliticalizations of a certain type within Marxism, such as appeal to objective forces, historical progress, and objective science, have their roots in the political project that Marx assembled in his reconfiguration of the politicalizations and depoliticalizations within English political economy, French socialism, and German philosophy. The depoliticalizations operated by Negri via historical periodization are thus part of a long and storied tradition within Marxism.
Negri writes in “Twenty Theses on Marx” that in the present “new technical conditions of proletarian independence are determined within the material passages of [capitalist] development”, opening up the “possibility of a rupture in the restructuration [of class relations] which is not recuperable and which is independent of the maturation of class consciousness.” For Negri, proletarian independence is conditioned technically, which is to say, nonpolitically. This implies a nonpolitical condition for the politics of working class movements. It is also instructive to note that Negri speaks of proletarian independence as technically determined, rather than as determining. There is an important sense in which Negri’s proletarian independence is precisely not independence, in the sense of self-determination, but rather a determination by objective forces. This same sensibility is evidenced in Negri’s copious remarks on the political possibilities opened up and closed off by the hegemony of immaterial labor in the technical aspects of production. The depoliticalized sense of the technical here differs from the account of technology in the work of an early thinker in similar circles as Negri, Raniero Panzieri, for whom ostensibly nonpolitical technology was precisely political and politically determined, as opposed to finding the political to be technically nonpolitically determined.
Along similar lines, Negri says in an interview with Anne Dufourmantelle that today “people have become more communist than before (…) levels of community and sharing exist everywhere: even writing an article on a computer means relying on a common knowledge.” This is the general sense of Negri’s claims about the hegemony of immaterial labor within the technical processes of production, communism as a generalized world condition is closer today than ever before. The present is already the transition to communism.
Communism for Negri here is technically determined. This puts Hardt and Negri’s project, quoted earlier, of the unification of the working class in a new light. The working class as a subject productive of communism is, the account goes, preceded by a technical unity. This technical unity is held as a variant on the Marxist class-in-itself, a nonpolitical precondition for the formation of a collective political subject, the class-for-itself. Hardt and Negri take their subject, the multitude, to have been impossible prior to the present with its technically produced unity of the working class.
The class-in-itself is analogous to the figure of the people, a collective entity which exists with interests in common. The people is, for Schmitt, the condition of possibility for the political as it is precisely in the relation of the people to an enemy that threatens the people’s way of life that the political appears. The claims in Negri’s work about a present moment wherein a technical unity obtains such that a political subject can emerge amount to a depoliticalized theological picture, wherein a people, defined by what is taken for a non- or pre-political collectivity, comes into being such that a political grouping can now be forged from it. This is the millenarian moment in Negri’s work, an apocalypticism evident throughout his career wherein the last days – termed real subsumption – have always just begun and the new kingdom – communism – is always about to be ushered in. The drive behind this sentiment, the desire to constitute an acting collectivity, is laudable, but it must be noted that the constitutive operation here relies on a type of depoliticalization in service of a politics. It is tempting to speculate that this is the case for Marxist reference of a political content to nonhuman or structural objective forces, which is to say, to all objectivity that is taken for non-objectified. There is certainly a lingering theological quality to much of Marxism and to Marx’s work, bound up with a political depoliticalizing impulse.
Jacob Taubes writes:

“Apocalyptic science implies a passive posture toward historical events. All capacity for action is enfeebled. Universal history is predetermined, and all efforts to resist that inevitable destiny are pointless. The passive voice is an essential element of apocalyptic style.. In apocalyptic works, no one ‘acts’; things rather “come to pass.” (…) The apocalyptic style, which one also finds in Karl Marx, founds itself in the lack of confidence characteristic of humanity. The long age of wretchedness and ill-fortune, of recurring delusions, the devastating power of evil, the immense colossus of the diabolical on earth, together occasion the loss of hope, expressed in the apocalypse, in any future prosperity and wellbeing which would depend on the good will and consent of humanity. In this sense, one can speak of at least an implied determinism within the conceptual structure of the Marxist apocalypse. Marx also saw superior forces at work in history, over which the individual had no control, and, using the mythological terminology of his era, and named them “productive forces.”" [quoted In Tronti, p152. I am grateful to AV Worden for assistance with the translation of this quote.]

What Taubes identifies as an apocalyptic strain in Marx, continued in Negri and in much of the rest of Marxism, is a depoliticalization, one which, in keeping with Schmitt’s analysis, can serve as a tremendously powerful act of politics. It’s not surprising in this sense that certain Marxisms and millenarian religious groups - or perhaps it would be better to say ‘certain Marxisms and other millenarian religious groups’ - have made use of an ostensibly nonpolitical foundation, the science of historical materialism or the revealed holy word, as constitutive of their political project.
Taubes identifies “productive forces” as a remainder of theology or mythology in Marx and Marxism. The term also functions as a depoliticalization in many uses. This is not unique within Marxism. Other related terms subject to frequent theological and depoliticalized uses in Marxism include the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and various events that are taken to be inevitable: crisis, false consciousness, communism. The terms and their deployment vary with the liturgy under question, but they retain a frequent function as depoliticalizations with storied political uses.
None of this, of course, occurs in a vacuum. Schmitt has noted that the political can emerge from any other sphere, at any location at all. In a similar vein, Jacques Ranciere writes that all “theoretical discourse is always simultaneously an aesthetic form, a sensible reconfiguration of the facts it is arguing about.” The term reconfiguration is noteworthy. All theory begins within what Ranciere calls a distribution of the sensible, a “system of self evident facts that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.” That is to say, renderings and decisions are made in relation to other past, as well as present, renderings and decisions. These acts do of course change the distribution of the sensible that they are within, which is the entire point of the activity and of the term reconfiguration. The point in all this is not to get outside of all distributions of the sensible, but to know what particular distribution or distributions one takes part in or constitutes, its effects, and how to act within and upon it to produce a new distribution - or defend a prior one - favorable toward one’s collective goals.
The depoliticalizations of Negri and Schmitt and Marx are forms of producing distributions of the sensible for political ends. There aims, at least in the cases of Negri and Marx, are laudable, but their means less so. They effectively re-enact a version of the noble lie Plato wrote of, in which a distribution of the political and ostensibly nonpolitical is produced, a distribution which is political - and as such is the result of a decision - in the sense of constituting a collectivity capable of having enemies.

[note: add in a short discussion of Negri on guaranteed income vs the political use of the wage in earlier Italian contexts - for Negri the basis is the productivity of activity for capital (hence a pomo replay of the old slogan “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”) as opposed to on the basis of the political power to force that upon the bosses. Contra all this, an anti-totalizing politics, or an invidualizing antipolitics - antiplatonism in the sense of not legislating who is and is not capable: this ascription of capabilities is precisely, in practice, the building of measures to police who can and can not act. It’s the positing of places that people are told to stay in. One key piece to this antipolitics would be the construction of collectivities that declare themselves collectivities on the basis of their own declaration. This usurps the power to determine a collectivity, a power which sovereignty seeks to monopolize. It must also aim to undermine the sovereign as having the monopoly on force and the decision of who is friend and enemy - which in a sense undermines the sovereign qua sovereign. This would in a sense be the enactment of Hallward’s description of the politics of prescription, by turning all politics into a politics of prescription (and the undermining of any other possible form of politics). Virno on Marx as individualization theorist, Benjamin on the right to use force. Instead of periodization, dialectical images in Benjamin, Ranciere’s histories, Chakrabarty’s notes on and attempts at a different type of history]

He’s ambiguous at best, these days. I’d love it if someone who really knew Lenin and the Leninist tradition(s) - preferably someone critical but I’d settle for a smart vanguardist - could interview him and ask. (more…)

(This was what I did for the Long Sunday Schmittpartisymposium, it appeared here. In keeping with the spirit of this blog being a notebook, the text was useful for me to write - pointing out some loose threads in need of tying, pointing out some not loose threads to pull at - and, as a notebook should be, is of dubious use for others.)

In 1972 Mario Tronti presented a paper dealing with Carl Schmitt at the University of Turin. Whether beginning or example, this presentation is of a conceptual turn in which “Schmittian elements became part of a thoroughgoing ‘Marxist critique of Marxism’ which sought (…) to put a practical theory of power squarely at the centre of revolutionary theorizing.” (Muller, _A Dangerous Mind_, 179.) The Marxisti Schmittiani exemplify the problematic relationship of “Karl und Carl” which Tronti later characterizes, albeit not critically enough, as foundational to political theory.

There are several aspects in Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan resonant with the sensibility of operaismo and subsequent developments which take Tronti’s early work as a touchstone. One such similarity is the relationship posited between resistance and constituted power wherein the former forces the latter to attempt to render resistance productive of innovation in the forms of power-over. In response to the partisan’s irregularity, there are produced “new concepts of warfare (…) along with a new doctrine of war and politics” (3), such as that embodied in the Prussian Landsturm edict of 1813. A similar point can be seen in the chapter on the working day in volume one of Capital, concepts and law are produced in response to working class struggle. Technology as well. “The partisan too participates in the development - in the progress - of modern technology and its science.” (54.) Again there is a Marxian parallel: “It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working-class.” (Capital v1, ch15.)

Both legal and technological responses to - or innovations developed by - the partisan are deployed in Napoleon’s army. The Napoleonic force, “partisanship on a large scale” (3), is analogous to the re-inscription of examples of and techniques for rupture within value production. For one example of this sensibility applied to recent developments, although not unproblematically, see the first of Paolo Virno’s “Ten Theses on the Multitude and Post-Fordist Capitalism,” in his Grammar of the Multitude. (The sense in which constituted power has little autonomous productive capacity, only reacting, should of course not be hypostatized into an ontological principle. Doing so repeats the worst of vulgar cultural studies, wherein everything expresses resistance, the mirror image of a vulgar Situationist and Frankfurt School perspective capable only of ever seeing further encroaching domination in all phenomena. The point, rather, is methodological. Developments are addressed in attempt in understand the active role of resistance in their constitution, and to see them as political maneuvers in a war of position.)

The Napoleonic army, or any army for that matter, embodies an important point by its having both technical and legal components. That is, within the sphere of political theory both law and technology should be seen as political, as opposed to the inverse - politics reduced to technical or legal. This is not to say that technology is always political. Saying so would fly in the face of one of the most important insights in Schmitt’s Political Theology, that setting the boundaries of what is and is not political can itself be a powerful political maneuver. Rather, the political is not technologically determined, and technology is only politically interesting insofar as it functions politically, that is, insofar at it is both politically determined and made use of politically in attempt to determine some outcome in some conflict.

Karl und Carl passed on a trait, recessive in neither parent, which makes the problem of the partisan for Schmitt still a pressing issue for the inheriting Marxisti Schmittiani. This trait is a predilection for a type of unity. For Schmitt, a political entity its an aggregation of individuals capable of sacrificing one of its members, specifically in the order to kill and thus to risk being killed by someone declared enemy and declared so based upon a threat to “our” way of life, someone who differs from us in nature, “existentially something different and alien” (Concept of the Political 27). As Peter Hallward writes, Schmitt’s emphasis on real combat with a real enemy “presumes and reinforces the social homogeneity of the combatants.” (”The Politics of Prescription,” 774.) Marx displays a similar view when he writes in the 1844 Manuscripts: “The more [workers] wish to earn, the more must they sacrifice their time and carry out slave-labour, completely losing all their freedom, in the service of greed. Thereby they shorten their lives. This shortening of their life-span is a favourable circumstance for the working class as a whole, for as a result of it an ever-fresh supply of labour becomes necessary. This class has always to sacrifice a part of itself in order not to be wholly destroyed.” For the operaisti and their continuers, the focus on unity, on social synthesis, is visible in the continual search for - the simultaneous and obfuscated attempt to produce - a hegemonic subject capable of uniting the class in order to seize the machinery of the state.

In all three there is a certain depoliticalization operating. A prior given unity is posited - the people, the class in itself, the technical and political composition of the class - which undergoes a fiery baptism such that it becomes capable of acting together. This prior unity, the precondition for the political entity, is placed outside the bounds of the political, such that it can not be decided upon, in an operation that at the same time serves to produce unity as the goal, again in a way that can not be decided upon or contested. That is to say, politics is circumscribed within the state and nation, or a sphere which is state-like/nation-like.

The partisan problematizes this sphere. Hallward writes that Schmitt’s understanding of the political “is not prescriptive enough,” because in Hallward’s understanding of politics as prescriptive, “[p]olitics divides, but not between friends and enemies (via the mediation of the state). Politics divides the adherents of a prescription against its opponents.” (774.) Adherent, of course, is the term which Schmitt uses for the partisan: parteiganger, someone who adheres to a party. Schmitt does not want to allow a possibility for the production of divisions and unities not rigidly managed by a single central power. Schmitt’s preference for the telluric (ie, nationalist and defensive) partisan helps ease the breakdown of the monopoly of the political by the state or state-like entity: the telluric partisan has as its goal a stable nation and state.

Schmitt fears the revolutionary partisan, the figure of absolute enmity who would challenge the possibility of containment by the state, the monopolized power to enforce homogeneity - to produce an entity called or like the people - by selecting people inside and out to be eliminated. Ironically, probably due to a shared blindspot, Lenin is not the figure of absolute enmity which Schmitt poses him to be. Furthered the homogeneity of the class in itself conceptually and even more so via the practical brutality of war communism (for instance), Lenin produced not an uncontained enmity but a reconfigured containment. Tronti reflects this in his characterization of revolution as the act of the workers’ state existing already within capitalist society, and in his call for the circulation of a “proud and menacing” photograph of the worker (an attempt via aesthetic means to produce a unified class subject and which demonstrates the need for inquiry into the modes of subjectification bound up with the theoretical and political positions in contest here).

Schmitt’s primary fear is the practice and what he sees as the trend of the “shattering of social structures.” It is this political component, more than the technical challenge of policing partisan war and its possibilities, that makes the partisan such a troubling figure. “Commonality exists as res publica, a public sphere, and it is called into question when a non-public space forms within it, one that actively disavows this publicness.” (51.) The partisan indicates a political potential not appropriated or exhausted by the state, one which works toward the dissolution of the monopoly which constitutes Schmitt’s political entity as such. The partisan is evidence of a power to act and produce in common, to produce social relations which are not of the people but rather introduce a disunity that challenges the workings of the people as an entity. This is what Schmitt is most opposed to and fearful of, to such a degree that his work can barely recognize it: the existence of a power to dissolve the res publica and sovereignty. (Schmitt comes close in his polemic against Scelle’s methodological individualism in the paper translated as War/Nonwar.) It also should be noted that this power is what makes the partisan an important figure, not the reverse.

It is worth comparing whether and how what Schmitt takes as opposed to his own views actually replicates or shares an affinity with Schmitt’s project. In this sense, then, in the use of Schmitt as solvent for the Marxist critique of Marx the method is not to valorize from a left wing perspective what Schmitt dislikes from the right. Any positive elements in common between the Schmittian perspective and the Marxist are to be rejected, or at least vigorously criticized. Instead of Marxisti Schmittiani, then, one wants a rigorously anti-Schmittian Marxism, and not merely “anti-” at the level of moral denunciation (the “anti” in many “anti-war” and “anti-capitalist” circles). An emergent quality here is a dissolutionary power, the self-positing centrifugal force that threatens to overcome the centripetal force constitutive of the unities produced by and productive of the figure of the people, the class for itself, the universalized vanguard class fraction. This power is not monopolizable, at least not exhaustively, legitimately, and sustainably so. Walter Benjamin referred to this power as “the right to use force,” which is partisan against the political as delimited to the level of unitary entities, and serves as part of the theoretical armature in process of producing Marxism, perhaps by the cultivation of its recessive traits against its Schmittian moments, “as a rigorous individualism: thus, as a theory of individuation.” (Virno, 80.) That said, the point is insufficient at the level of theoretical assertion. It must be verified by its practical assertion in declarations of selfpositing power, and by research into the forms and modes of subjectification accomplished via this type of assertion across history and across the planet.