Re: AUT: Negri and Charleton Heston?

[Lowe Laclau <lowe.laclau@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Look, all I want you to explain to me is why some workers are part of the
> multitude while others aren't, and why it is that this division happens to
> coincide with the difference between the republican, christian masses on the
> one hand and your funky polyphormic swirl of struggles on the other.

The multitude does not include and exclude different populations.
These words are insufficient. It is something that comes into
existence as a result of the changes in the nature of production
(meaning it has real qualitative presuppositions dealing with the
hegemony of a type of productive activity: namely one that frees the
intellectual and cooperative functions of a person) and in the
creation of the common (i.e. in the deterritorialization from forms of
sovereignty over the existence of singularities in and of themselves).
Excluding and including are not proper characterizations because they
fail to give note that the multitude is created (as common) by us. The
existence of "backwards" population is never in isolation. They too
presuppose an effective or ineffective engagement by populations that
are different in kind from them.

> Hardt mentioned in a recent interview that he thought that left politics was
> too often based on feeling bad. He was impressed by the Zapatistas, who had
> a politics stemming from joy. Oddly enough, he also thought this was present
> in the slogans of ACT UP, which I am supposing reveals he has a very
> sinister sense of humour. Surely, though, you can see what he is getting at.

Ah. OK. "Sinister" sense of humor I don't know. He's merely
reiterating both a Foucaultian slogan and the Spinozist insight that
revolutionary sentiment that is incapable of laughing is also the
first to break under the weight of its own struggle. I'm not sure what
this has to do with identity politics though...

> You shouldn't project your negative perceptions of identity politics, I
> think - but that is only to easy,  as I said, it needs to be rescued from
> its devotees. Identity poltics isn't something you 'fall back on' - its a
> reality, you can fail to appreciate it, or you can deal with it.

My point wasn't that identity politics was "bad". Rather that
characterizing it as some kind of backbone to the self-development of
the multitude is not appropriate. Singularization doesn't presuppose
any "kinds" of identity (which I would say still presupposes too much
attempt at representation --and thus recuperation-- of the the
multitudes "poverty" (using this term in the sense Negri defines it).
In other words these ever potential differences that emerge as demands
from the multitude (based upon its poverity of existence) and which
makes it beyond measure (representation) as well excludes the
multitude from "falling back on" any *particular* identity politics.
The construction of this body would be too fluid and too heterogeneous
for that. That is *not* at all to say that any particular indentity
political struggle is rendered unnecessary or not of concern to the
multitude. To the contrary. Each is to an extent. What needs to be
objected to is however the idea that the multitude's self-construction
somehow stops there. It doesn't.



Lowe

--
"I am God most of the time... when I don't have a headache..." - Felix Guattari


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