Re: AUT: Backward workers, was: Negri and Charleton Heston?

[Thiago Oppermann <difference_3ngine@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 30/11/2004 5:44 PM, "Lowe Laclau" <lowe.laclau@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> But it is specifically the fact that the multitude is
> not defined in terms of individuals (which correspond to identities, a
> public that represents them etc) but as singularities that the
> characterization of shared values is wrong.


I think you have a great deal of faith in words.  But let's concede that
there is a substantive difference between this notion of singularity and the
individual. What is to stop identity politics to be constituted in terms of
singularities? I mean, surely - it is inconceivable you haven't come across
this - you know that the identity politics literature is utterly obsessed
with radical difference. These people didn't invent the idea of the
differentially structured identity, that which was not based on a
preexisting reproduction of a prototype individual - but they did pretty
much import into English. Sheesh, I don't think you can go five pages into
Judith Butler without reading that fifteen times over. So I am really not
very impressed by this retort. Identity politics has been nothing except a
relentless assault on the Individual; I think it would be foolish to deny
this hasn't been, via Hardt, a major contributor to the poitical theory you
find in Multitude.

Then you say:

> Of course values can be
> shared amongst cooperating singularities but it is in no means
> presupposed.

...which as I would read it, seems to negate the progress away from the
Individual you made in the first half of your posting.
>
> Well... I wasn't denying that walmartization has a tremendous effect
> on the world. I was objecting to calling it the cutting edge of
> capitalism. It simply isn't.

This is just not really a very interesting question. From one perspective
Ford was the most advanced form of capitalism, but from another, the German
worker's council movemet was the most advanced form of political
organization of the working class, that is to say, of capitalism. From one
perspective, Wal Mart is just a ruthless retailer, from another, it is the
largest corporation in the world and its effect on the composition of the
working class is astonishing and decisive.

The interesting question is: what is the effect of this recomposition? And I
think that it is a very, very important effect.  Precarization is not
something that is happening in the far reaches of the technological or
financia frontier (though I am not for one minute denying how important
these are), but somethinng more along the lines of a Blochian 'internal
colonization', a 'conquest of the hinterland', a rearticulation of those
moms and pops with their guns and crucifixes praying away their precarity.
Wal Mart, God's own supermarket, is a far more apt symbol and effective
insturment of this, one has to say, new compact of production, than the
Zapatistas or ACT UP.

Thiago



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