Re: AUT: Negri, Hegel, etc

["cwright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Nate,

Thanks for the reply.  Sorry for my rambling response.

> 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.

On the first point, I don't think that Negri and Hardt have any intent to
carve out a politics which is not about self-liberation.  However, I think
that they end up undermining that intent and fail in their attempt in
serious ways.  I point to the relation between the militant and the
multitude because it seems the most obvious to me, but that is far from the
only problem with Empire.

I think that it is related to their philosophical commitments as well, such
as their waffling on immanence and transcendance (which Negri and Hardt
reserve for footnote 4 to p. 327) and essentialism.  IMO, on p. 327, in the
first full paragraph, their statement is loaded with essentialist notions of
what is in accord with the 'essence of capital' ("in principle") versus what
is 'extraneous' and 'historical.'  That section of theory on sovereignty
relates immediately to their notions about the increasingly free flow of
labor across borders, which I doubt anyone involved with immigrant labor
struggles could take too seriously.  It is places like that where I see a
connection between the politics and the philosophy.  I'll also promote John
Holloway's article in HistoMat again, btw, alongside a sympathetic
Althusserian-ish review of Empire in the same issue which is worth a close
read.

However, there seems to be a larger thread about subjectivity running
through Empire.  In the discussion of the Social Factory (pp. 195-6),
subjectivity is treated as an absurdum, purely socially constructed in a way
very reminiscent of classical structuralism, which also has a strong
relationship to Spinoza.  Subjectivity is artificial and socially
constructed, but by what or who?  This leads to Negri's tendency to treat
Empire and the Multitude as dueling, independent Subjects.  The Multitude
itself is split into the dumb manual laborer and the Militant, who is the
consciousness-giving mental laborer.  This reproduction seems too close to
the separation of mental and manual labor which lies at the very heart of
any meaningful notion of class division, but it is contained in a context of
a dualism between Empire and Multitude (where the Militant is certainly
conceived as a part of the Multitude in some fashion, though also somehow
outside of it, hence the recourse to Saintly apparitions and a Militant who
can speak while the Multitude cannot.)

This is all too reminiscent of exactly what Negri and Hardt claim to oppose,
but laid out in a far more sophisticated fashion than Leninism, which also
desired communism, but had a politics rather closer to capitalist
development in practice.  That doesn't seem to me to be an advance by any
stretch, so when it gathers the adoring eye of a new generation of
activists, I find myself quite hostile to it as much, much more dangerous
(but also generative) than the clunky old Leninisms and social democracies.
If Empire is also appealing because Negri and Hardt have a lot to say that
is genuinely insightful as well.  I have read many books which have given me
tremendous new insights, but largely in spite of the theoretical outlook,
and I count Empire among them.

On representation, this is one of the things I like about Negri and Hardt.
I am also against a politics of representation.  Self-activity can only be
opposed to representation, which assumes activity on someone else's behalf.
Also, the idea that language is representational has a lot of problems and
much lingusitics would call that a pretty pre-modern conception of language.
There are other problems with the comparison with language, however, which
are worth exploring (I started reading Negri with a friend as a side project
of reading lingusitic theory together to grapple better with structuralism,
which is all over linguistics.)

> 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.

Haven't seen it, but I am trying to get a copy.  A friend of mine is
ordering it for us.  I look forward to it, since Rethinking Marxism was long
the premier Althusser-influenced theoretical journal.

> 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.)

On what you say below, see above.  The tension is overburdened by, IMO, a
theoretical retrogression, which I would not claim about the Johnson-Forest
Tendency, which was breaking new ground.  Negri and Hardt are moving
backwards theoretically in some ways from earlier autonomia, or maybe just
working up its weaknesses to their fullest extent theoretically.  Which way
are we being taken: forward or backward?  Two radically different
trajectories.

> 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.

I agree and never thought that the philosophical issues would resolve the
political issues.  I just don't think that the political issues will be made
full sense of without the 'philosophical' question being treated as part and
parcel.  Negri returned to Spinoza for political reasons, not simply for
'good theory.'  In that sense, I think that Negri's 'lamentable elements'
partially precede, partially develop in tandem with and partially are
amplified by his Spinozism, rather than any simply one-to-one or 'chicken
and egg' relation.  It may be no accident that Negri was considered the most
Leninist of autonomia's theorists.  There is a link, nonetheless, of which I
think they are fully cognizant and which both have tried to work out fully
and that is to be welcomed, since a lot of autonomia seems not to have taken
those issues up in depth prior to the retreat following 1976, at least not
as deeply Negri and Hardt and (through Futeur Anterior, especially) some
others have been trying to do since.  And judging from recent discussions, I
am not alone on seeing this link between politics and theory, though from a
different end of the spectrum.

> 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.

I don't think that there is a single answer on this.  I don't think that
this does apply to Althusser.  I think that Simon Clark's critique of
Althusser goes far enough to show that it involved first a battle within the
French CP, which was in part motivated by a desire to turn against the faux
'workerism' of the PCF line in the 1940's and 1950's and the desire to have
a theoretical line which accorded more importance to the intellectuals in
the party.  The result was not something positive politically in 1968 on
Althusser's part, something which many people seem intent to overlook, but
which put Althusser on the other side of the class line in practice.  In a
different way, Sarte's atrocious stand on Hungary in 1956 is a precursor to
this.

Negri is in a very different position and breaks with the CP politically,
but, again IMO, only partially theoretically.  His move to Spinoza also
seems to me to be part of a general retreat, not an advance, in a period
where the pressure to defend the possibility for working class revolution
resulted in an attempt to establish it upon a positive basis of the 'being'
of the class, rather than on its negating activity.  That is my basic and
extremely brief take on it, but I think that Negri's disillusion with the
mass workers' movement is present in his writings from 1976 or so to 1983,
especially his praising of armed struggle in that period.

At the same time, politics not grounded in Spinoza, but in Hegel, also
attempted a different return to revolutionary traditions, in the case of the
SI, Raya Dunayevskaya, and CLR James' colleagues, among others trends
without organizational affiliations, with rather better practical outcomes
in most cases.  Nor was the turn towards a more libertarian politics free
from 'Hegelian' influences in the 1920's, with Lukacs and Korsch.  But
politics being what it is, other traditions arose without the kind of
thoroughgoing 'philosophical' reappraisal at the time, such as autonomia,
Socialisme ou Barbarie, etc, or rather delayed until the retreat which began
in the mid to late 1970's.  When that happened in the form of Negri, it was
on a theoretical basis which had been laid by a trend which had become the
leading edge of bourgeois social theory and philosophy, such as Nietzsche,
Heidegger, Levi-Strauss, Saussere and the emerging post-structuralism of
Foucault, the ex-SoB theorist Lyotard, et al.  So not only do I not think
that Negri was moving forward, but that his also simply isn't the only, or
the most engaging, libertarian Marxism out there.

In the end, I am not trying to condemn Negri for turning to Spinoza as such,
but I am trying to understand the connection between his Spinozism and his
failure to articulate a theory which is as revolutionary as his empirical
field of vision.

However, to be blunt, I do feel that Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze and the
rest in general represent the vanguard, if you will, of 20th century
bourgeois ideology in Left form.  That does not mean that everything they
had to say was valueless (far from it), but that their underlying theory is
a very poor basis for the kind of ruthless critique of everything existing
that is at the basis of communist theory.

Cheers,
Chris




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