Re: AUT: An interesting critique of Negri

["Rowan Wilson" <wilson_rowan@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Dear John and all

Attached to this is a response to John's post. However, I am suffering from
acute technology problems - it was typed in wordperfect on an old pc at home
and is now being sent from a Mac - consequently it seems to be illegible -
does anyone know how i can convert it properly?
Cheers
Rowan


>From: John Holloway <Johnpholloway@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Reply-To: aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>To: "INTERNET:aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
><aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: Re: AUT: An interesting critique of Negri
>Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 11:06:43 -0500
>
>Peter,
>
>         I should explain. The comment on Negri arose because the group
>that
>publish Situaciones in Argentina sent me an interview that they had done
>with Negri and asked me if I'd write a short comment on it. They intend to
>publish the interview with various commentaries. I sent a copy of my
>comment to Chris, without bothering to translate the Spanish quotations
>from the interview, and he posted it to the list. So it hasn't been
>published anywhere yet (it will be in Spanish in Argentina, if you have any
>ideas for an English publication, I'd welcome them). I append a version
>with the quotations translated into English.
>
>         Any comments would be extremely welcome. I've been struggling with
>Negri and find it very difficult. We have a discussion group here in Puebla
>and we've been reading through The Savage Anomaly, but I find it extremely
>difficult to understand the implications of the turn to Spinoza. This
>comment is my attempt to deal with it.
>
>         John
>
>
>Comment on the Interview with Toni Negri
>For a Negative, Dialectical, Anti-Ontological Approach
>
>
>John Holloway
>
>
>1.      Toni Negri's work is enormously attractive, not only for its own
>merits, but because it responds to a desperate need. We are all looking for
>a way forward. The old state-centred model of revolution has failed,
>reformism becomes more and more corrupt, yet revolutionary change is more
>urgent than ever. Negri (and autonomist theory in general) refuses to give
>up: that is its attraction.
>
>         The problem is that Negri leads us in the wrong theoretical
>direction.
>
>
>2.      Negri tries to develop revolutionary power (potentia) as a
>positive, non-dialectical, ontological concept. He insists on this point in
>the interview. What does this mean?
>
>         Potentia is the movement of the constitutive power of the
>multitude. The multitude gathers in force over time, constantly pushing
>potestas (the attempt to contain and exercise power over the multitude) on
>to new terrains.
>
>In modern capitalism the unfolding power (potentia) of the multitude is
>manifested in the changing compositions of the working class (skilled
>worker, mass worker, social worker  immaterial worker). The latest
>development of the multitude (as social worker/ immaterial worker) has now
>pushed Potestas on to the terrain of Empire.
>
>The task of theory is to uncover the constitutive power of the multitude.
>Herein lies the importance of such theorists as Machiavelli, Spinoza and
>Harrington.
>
>The positive character of the approach has its core in the notion of
>autonomy. Autonomy is understood as something currently existing. The
>multitude is a positive, autonomous, constitutive force driving forward.
>Power (potestas) is the never entirely successful attempt to contain this
>positive force.
>
>
>3.      One aspect of Negri's positive concept of potentia is his rejection
>of the dialectical approach. In the interview he characterises the
>dialectic as a 'theodicy' and as a 'pre-conceived and pre-constituted
>conception of a historical teleology, a concept of historical necessity
>which is external to the collective practice of the masses'.
>
>He criticises the Frankfurt School theory for leading to a sense of
>impotence and criticises their 'incapacity to be Marxists. That is to say,
>for not conceiving that there exists the positivity of action, of
>struggles, of the proletarian movements that construct history, which are
>at the basis, continual genesis of production and construction'.
>
>
>4.      The central problem with Negri's positive approach is his concept
>of the autonomy of the subject.
>
>         He conceives of the multitude as an autonomous subject, whose
>positive movement is the driving force of history.
>
>         The concept of the revolutionary subject as a pure, autonomous
>subject continues the Leninist tradition in a different form. For Lenin,
>the pure subject was the Party; for Negri it is no longer the party, but
>the multitude (personified above all by the militant, with Saint Francis of
>Assisi as the model of the contemporary militant (Empire, p. 413)). The
>link between revolution and the purity of the subject is deeply rooted in
>left-wing traditions and is at the base of the authoritarian, puritanical,
>self-righteous unreality of much of left practice.
>
>         The notion of the multitude as a positive, autonomous subject
>means
>that the relation between potentia and potestas is understood as an
>external relation: the positive multitude is confronted by another
>autonomous subject: Power (potestas). The struggle then is a struggle
>between two Titans: multitude and empire. The force of both sides is
>magnified, the contradictions of both sides unexplored.
>
>5.      Against this, we must develop the concept of anti-power negatively,
>dialectically, anti-ontologically.
>
>         Negri's description of dialectics is a crude caricature that has
>little to do with the dialectical approach developed by Marx, Lukcs, Bloch
>and Adorno, among others.
>
>         Dialectics is important simply because it attempts to understand
>society in terms of the movement of negativity. Our starting point is
>negative, the scream of refusal to accept the horrors of the world as it
>exists. In this world, our doing (power-to, potentia) is the sole
>constitutive power, but this power (potentia) exists negatively, in the
>mode of being denied. Power-over (potestas) is nothing other than the
>metamorphosis of power-to which denies its own content (capital is nothing
>other than the metmorphosis of doing which denies its own basis in doing).
>We cannot possibly understand potentia (power-to) directly, as an innocent,
>positive force, but only as the struggle against its own negation.
>
>         The struggle of power-to against its own negation is obviously
>penetrated by that negation: the struggle against power-over is inevitably
>contradictory and the subject of that struggle is equally contradictory. In
>a rotten society, we are all rotten: that is precisely why we are
>struggling for a different society. To struggle against a rotten society is
>to struggle against ourselves. There is no innocent subject here, no room
>for puritanism or authoritarianism.
>
>         The relation between Power-over and power-to is an internal
>relation, a relation of mutual inter-penetration. If capital (power-over)
>penetrates us, it is equally true that we penetrate capital. Capital, being
>the metamorphosis of doing that denies its own basis in doing, is
>absolutely dependent upon the doing which it denies. Capital depends on
>labour, that is, upon the transformation of doing into labour and its
>effective exploitation. This absolute dependence of capital upon us is lost
>if the relation is understood as a positive, non-dialectical one. The terms
>'capital' and 'labour' express this relation of dependence, which is
>absolutely lost in the terms 'empire' and 'multitude'.
>
>         The transformation of power-to into power-over is the negation of
>our doing, in other words the transformation of doing into being. Our
>struggle, therefore is for the liberation of doing from being and, as such,
>profoundly anti-ontological.
>
>
>6.      To treat the subject as a positive subject is attractive but a
>fiction. In a world that dehumanises us, the only way in which we can exist
>as humans is negatively, by struggling against our dehumanisation.
>
>We live in a fog of fetishism and the only way that we can see through that
>fog is by criticising. To adopt a positive-realist position, as Negri does,
>is rather like a person lost in a fog saying that he can see clearly. This
>is invigorating for those who hear him, but it is a fiction. It is a
>fiction that easily leads on to other fictions, to the construction of a
>whole fictional world. Realism (the claim that we can know reality
>directly) is always irrational in the 'enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy
>world' (Capital III, p. 830) in which we live.
>
>
>7.      When we negate, we always remain with our boots stuck in the mud of
>that which we are negating. Going beyond is always an extended theoretical
>struggle to free our boots.
>
>Negri's work begins as a criticism of communist orthodoxy and he continues
>to carry with him many of the assumptions of that orthodoxy (on dialectics,
>on materialism, on realism, for example).
>
>The corollary of this argument is that we pay homage to that which we
>criticise. It is in this sense that this comment should be understood.
>
>
>
>
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