Re: AUT: RE: antiwar movement

[chris wright <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 17:07, Peter van Heusden wrote:
> From:           	"Nate Holdren" <nateholdren@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> To:             	aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:        	Re: AUT: RE: antiwar movement
> Date sent:      	Fri, 26 Mar 2004 14:49:49 -0500
> Send reply to:  	aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> > Hi Peter-
> > Sorry for the rough and schematic character of this (as usual) hasty post,
> > I'm pressed for time (as usual). Well put and I like the references to the
> > Colectivo Situaciones and Precarias a la Deriva. What's the problem,
> > though, with communicability? Sure, there are no communicative guarantees
> > - conversational misfire can always happen - but isn't incommunicability
> > just another unpleasant cousin in the same family as transcendence? It's
> > like talk about absolute difference from certain anti-hegelian camps, one
> > moves away from some of the sillier excesses of the tradition but still
> > retains an absolute, a foundationalism (or a despair over the lack of
> > achieving a viable foundation). The reason I'm drawn to the Spinozist
> > approaches to Marxism is precisely because in the idea of immanence (which
> > I don't pretend to really understand) it seems to me there's an
> > affirmation that the hacienda can always be built, in theory speaking,
> > that is, that relationships are always constructed and at least
> > potentially constructible. One may fail in a project, communication may
> > not occur or may break down, but that doesn't mean it was impossible, that
> > failure was guaranteed from the outset.
>
> Hi Nate
>
> Nice to have some meat to chew into (metaphorically, of course - I'm a
> vegetarian!). I think your last sentence gives me a place to start - you
> talk about a "a project", and people have often in the past talked about
> the "Left project". I think the problem I've got here, and the point I
> was trying to make, is that this implies communicability, that there is
> this singular project, or set of related projects, which are bound
> together by language. In this sense, language  becomes the transcendent,
> and the terrain inhabited by a set of (generally miserable) Left
> intellectuals.

So why are these projects bound together by language, per se?  Not that
I am defending or rejecting the notion of projects.  Why language
instead of reason or some other such?

> I'm not arguing for incommicability as some kind of virtue, but rather
> the opposite - I'm arguing against the notion that somehow there will
> ever be a time when we can all understand each other. I can't recall the
> section of Empire relevant to this - mind supplying page numbers (the
> first time I read Empire, it was on my Palm Pilot as a text dump, so I
> don't have a good sense of the layout of the book). Like the Marcos says,
> we're all embroiled in a war whose object is the redistribution of the
> Earth, and at the same time, behind the mask is a host of differences -
> gay in San Francisco, peasant in Chiapas, etc. And do / can these need to
> "understand" each other? All the time?

Doesn't this again risk reifying these differences?  What if these
fixities of identity are themselves products much like commodities, of a
certain form of social activity?  What is we produce them and yet they
control us and if this were possible to overcome, why should we posit
incommunicability as central or inescapable?  I may be wrong, this idea
of incommunicability may be a category of capital for Deleuze, but it
seems, rather like some of Lacan's stuff, to be part of 'the human
condition.'

>
> > You say:
> > "strengthen of every singularity, the valorisation of each exodus, is a
> > better bet than to deny the particularity of each situation, and then
> > subsequently subsume of agency within some overall "revolutionary
> > strategy"" and I agree completely. But what does this have to do with
> > incommunicability?
>
> Um, in different language... listen to your situation, but don't imagine
> that you can speak that situation again. Create and discard languages as
> rapidly as you create and discard organisations. Is it now clear why I
> think rhizomatic power and the incommunicability (or shall I call it not-
> necessarily-communicability, ala. a Hollowayism) of struggle are related?

Still working on this one.  Why shouldn't we be able to speak that
situation again?  Why should I think in terms of 'speaking a
situation'?  What is the basis for this linguistification of practice?
And when you say discard languages, you clearly do not mean so-called
national languages, but the chain of symbols and signifiers and
referents, I think.  But is language such a play thing, so wholly
subjective and disconnected from social practice?  It seems to imply
that language is a solipsistic cleverness, much like organizations.  In
such a situation, aren't the relations with other people treated as as
ephemeral as changing one's style?  Language and organization seem here
reduced to style or a politics of choice.  I suspect this seems unfair,
but I am not trying to be unkind.

> As I mentioned before: in my old Trot sect, there was an insistence on
> relating everything in a "clear language" which ordered all struggles in
> a particular hierarchy of importance and priority. If you insist on an
> ultimate common language, aren't you heading down the sterile path that
> my old Trot buddies ended up in? Its enough to translate when
> necessary...

I wonder if Harald would dig in on this 'clear language' thing again.
The interesting thing is that, for Peter, 'clear language' is understood
as language which tries to hierarchize struggles and to steal their
particularity (in opposition to Deleuze and Foucault, but also in
opposition to dialectic's particularization, as discussed in some detail
in State and Capital: A Marxist Debate, by Holloway and Picciotto.)

But do we not in some sense 'rank' struggles?  Is a struggle for a woman
to get equal treatment in the police force (a basic sort of thing that
IMO all communists oppose the imposition of sexual discrimination, even
for a cop, since it is never merely about this or that job) really equal
with a struggle against and instance of police brutality?  Is a strike
placed on the same plane as a struggle for black workers to get equal
access to management positions?  Even more so, would a strike to keep
black workers from getting equal access be equal to a strike to get that
equal access?  I choose unpleasant or 'untimely' examples for a reason.

At the same time, does our making an appraisal or a ranking have
anything to do with telling other people what to do?  We make an
argument and choose our activity.  What other people do is not for us to
enforce, but it is a political debate and discussion, a taking of sides.

Doesn't your idea risk being a little 'to each their own'?

Is the option 'annihilate the particularity of struggles by denying
their equality' or 'deny all hierarchy by recognizing their pure
difference and therefore their lack of inner connection' the only way to
pose the problem?  Is this latter not the argument of
incommunicability?  And in the former, is not this ontological equality
the equality of all commodities before money, before the abstract
equality of the individual under capital, the citizen to the state?

I hope this is not seeming testy.  I am not unsympathetic to the way the
Trots (as a former one) do their reductionist dance.  It is hideous and
universalizing in the same way as capital.  But this seems to me the
flipside, at least potentially and I may be wrong here, of that view.

Anyway, I hope this is not jumbled.  This is really all stream of
consciousness.  I started responding to you clear and evocative
discussion and this is where it has led me.  Thank you again, Peter.
Very provoking.

Cheers,
Chris



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