Re: AUT: Negri, Hegel, etc

["Nate Holdren" <nateholdren@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Chris-

Let me ramble at you. I haven't participated on the Hegel etc thread cuz I
haven't read tons of Hegel, and found a fair portion of what I have read
very very opaque. (Ditto for Spinoza.) I have read some Marx and some Negri
though (who considering their intellectual forbears are relatively readable,
but only relatively!)

you said

"My disagreement with Negri, Althusser and Spinozism is grounded in a
distrust of their politics, not a failure to understand their theory.  I
take Negri very seriously."

This is good to know, as frankly it has not been always or even often clear
to me from some of your earlier posts.

contuing, you say:

"Negri, at the end of Empire, returns in his own way to the semi-Leninist
praising of 'the militant'.  His treatment of the Multitude is in fact the
opposite of Marx's treatment of the proletariat.  Negri's Multitude is in
fact quite dumb, in both senses of the word.  Only the militant gives voice
and consciousness.  In the face of the much-deserved death of the Party as
Subject, Negri's return to this type of logic is embarassing.  Very
appealing maybe to the new generation of young activists and intellectuals
who do not see the working class as active, but only see the activist as
active.  Not appealing to me because it is bogus.  Negri (not to mention
Althusser) has abandoned in many respects the idea that liberation is the
active self-liberation of the working class.  His paradigmatic approach is
not new nor novel, but a functionalism which is not about a critique of
capital or, as Marx was concerned with in Capital, a critique of capital's
ideological self-representation in political economy.  Spinozism (and the
Althussers of this world are quite a bit worse than Negri) does not at all
impress me with the conclusions it has drawn politically and I find it
radically at odds with working class self-liberation. As a result, I feel
that an adequate critique of Negri cannot be made from only the political
perspective, but has to be grounded in Negri's reappropriation of Spinoza
and aspects of earlier Spinozist Marxisms eg Althusser."

Sorry for the long quote, but a few things - some of us have read (perhaps
wrongly but barring textual support on either side we'll have to bracket
that for now) Negri and Hardt on the multitude as precisely being an attempt
to work out the self liberation of the global working class in conceptual
form. Granted, the multitude is a hazy theoretical term, something HN are
fairly open about if I recall _Empire_ and various interviews correctly. I
think those two are currently holed up somewhere working out a new work
dealing w/ clarifying that concept.
You're also (w)right that the relationship between multitude and militant is
a muddy one.
I think I share your suspicion that there are vanguardist aspects to some of
the arguments in Empire.
I'm very troubled by the emphasis on immaterial labor as it's hard for me to
tell if HN argue that the importance of immaterial labor - a poor word
choice in my opinin - entails that the struggle of immaterial laborers is
the center of class struggle. I think one can read the text either way, and
some of us have read it either way.

Your point about the inability of the multitude to speak hits on a central
issue for me in reading Negri. As I understand it, HN in Empire are trying
to figure out or lay the groundwork for figuring out how the global working
class (multitude) can become a political subject while retaining differences
inside it. In other discussions on this the issue of language and political
communication has come up again and again. As the multitude is considered
unrepresentable in conventional politics, taking the multitude seriously for
politics means either a non-representational politics or a new form of
representation which doesn't leave out the multitude in any aspect, and
probably new forms of political communication in either case. In one
instance someone (I think Steve Wright but I'm not sure) suggested that
perhaps the metaphor of political practice as language is a bad one, as
language may prove inherently representational and thus not a productive
metaphor for thinking out non- or anti-representational politics. I realize
all this is hasty and very schematic.

Have you seen the Rethinking Marxism double issue dedicated to Empire? It's
pretty good. My favorite piece is Dyer-Witheford's, where he takes up some
issues related to HN's argument about the centrality of immaterial labor.
Also notable (in my opinion primarily for its wrong-headedness) is Zizek's
response where he calls for a return to the Party and to Lenin (in the
Kierkgaardian sense, which leaves me wondering why not just read Kierkegaard
then). The response by Hardt and Negri is good as well, much clearer on a
number of points though still with a big ambiguity in ways I can't specify
beyond that they set off my anti-vanguardist spider sense.

What I take from all of this in my trying to make sense of Negri is not that
Negri is radically at odds w/ working class self-liberation (how you read
him I think) but rather that there's a tension in Negri's work, elements of
which are very relevant to working class self-liberation and other elements
of which I think we should be wary of. (Rather like the theoretical and
organizational practice of the Johnson-Forest Tendency as far as I
understand it.)
To be very honest though, while you may be right that the lamentable
elements of Negri's work derive from his Spinozist heritage, I have my
doubts that recourse to the philosophical groundings of his thought and
arguments over Spinoza and Hegel will resolve these issues. At least not
until the political 'charges' against him are articulated with complete
clarity, something I am as of yet unable to accomplish.

Also I think it is important to recognize that misguided thought it may
finally prove (something we may disagree on) the turn toward Spinoza was an
attempt to move forward not back (at least I think so in Negri's case. I
don't really know enough to fully support this claim, particular in regard
to Althusser who I both know less about and am less amenable towards.) At
times in your emails it sounds as if you think Negri and co are utterly
devoid of worthwhile content.

best,
Nate



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