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

[Lowe Laclau <lowe.laclau@xxxxxxxxx>]

> I think you have a great deal of faith in words.

Faith, no. A reliance upon, yes. We all do.

>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.

I don't know for sure (I don't really read any of these theorists of
identity politics, although I had to familiarize myself with them when
I was still a student, in undergraduate... and thus my conception of
them may now be inadequate). My suspicion however is that most if not
all of the pomo characterization of "radical difference" allow
themselves to be recuperated in forms of sovereignty as if some
expanded more inclusive sovereignty were something to rejoice about.
This reformism which IMO(observations) flies the banner of "identity
politics" and uses this term "identity" in general as if it expresses
the *soul* of ones possible difference and gives far too much credence
to ones consciousness to represent itself as difference is opposed to
the concept of the singularity which knows no formal means for a
sovereignty to recuperate it. The singularity is defined
'in-the-instant' so to speak, and is relational (viz. the substance,
the how and the what of cooperation).

> 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.

Not sure what you mean.


> 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.

Well precarization isn't made possible by Wal Mart. Its made possible
by transformations in the decisions of financial capital (monetary
relations).

And these examples of the Zapatistas and ACT UP (I presume) I don't
think were meant to serve as models for colonization of
reactionaristic global populations. Rather a models of types of
resistance and types of functioning of resistance in cooperation.

Lowe

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


     --- from list aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---