-----Original Message----- From: Erik Empson [mailto:erik at eempson.freeserve.co.uk] Sent: 26 January 2001 16:04 To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: RE: Progressive Empire? NEGRI & POST_STRUCTURALISM
Brad Mayer wrote
""The problem I tend to have with works such as "Empire" are typically methodological in nature. With "Empire" itself, it is 1) the basically post-structuralist discursive mode and 2) the concessions to "Postiality", unacceptable to me, since I reject it as science or as a proposed historical periodization. We do live in a new era, though I date it from Reagan/Thatcher rather than, as H&N do, from the 60s-early 70s, which were actually the last big wave of the preceding series of revolutions. Those last revolutions failed (a la 1848) and the change in our reality was effected by the followers of the "Bolshevik" Thatcher. Hence the periodization.
Post-structuralism came into being, I believe, as a very efficient tool for abstraction, and there is no denying it is. It is quite powerful at abstracting from the minimum set of "data points" (for lack of a better word), weaving between these to develop a system of abstractions. But it is pretty obvious that synthesis (should that be the object) requires test of the abstract concept against different "data points", in the process squeezing out a lot of the ambiguity inherent in abstraction, as well as launching the animation of the whole system, bringing it to life.
It should be obvious to any half wit that this movement between abstract and concrete thought is unavoidable for a system with any hope in hell of launching a practice. But Althusserian poststructuralism, at least - Foucault was actually a superior practitioner of this art, although he had the luxury of not encompassing with his scope the sort of prickly political matter claimed by Althusser or, for that matter, H & N - was notorious in its deliberate refusal of this dirty task, the High Priest himself once enplaning this in terms that essentially boiled down to, "it's not my job", to put it crudely.""
Hello list- I want to say this:
Though sharing something of the intellectualist concern with “reading” the text inaugurated by Althusser and Balibar, Negri does in his 1978 lectures offer quite a different emphasis to Althusser’s interpretation of Marx and thus also an alternative to structuralism.
“Marx beyond Marx” interrogates the Grundrisse and prefers this to Das Kapital because supposedly the Grundrisse is steeped far deeper into the dialectic between capital and labour and the subjectivity of the working class. Herein class agency is internal to the relations of capital and humans – and the subjective demands of class affect capital and alter its development – people are not simply empty bearers of structural relations. This emphasis is similar in kind to Harry Cleaver.
In respect to method, Marx beyond Marx, sees the type of Hegelian categorical presentation of Das Kapital as unfortunate, and the architechtronics as limiting of subjectivity. In this sense though Negri is attacking the totality as a representative schema, he is not doing so in a post-structuralist way (Derrida: the part is greater than the whole) because of his belief in agency and the concreteness of the subject. Herein the subject is not an Ideological construct as found in Foucault, Judith Butler et al – but a concrete, real life political force.
However in a more recent article on Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, Negri approves of post-structuralism as a de-mystifying phenomenology – but argues that it must be deepened and the critique politicised around exploitation. Here I think Negri is remaining true to the emphasis of his 1978 work, though now he wants to use post-structuralism to support a Marxian agenda, in a way not dissimilar to Michael Ryan (Marxism and deconstruction). For Negri we need to deconstruct and politicise the practices of exploitation. But he is not true to post-structuralism, in that he does not seem to note, the fundamental sense in which the latter’s raison d’etre is formed out of an attack on class and subjectivity which is simultaneously designed to undermine both proletarian and Bourgeois subjects.Though Negri seems to think this opens up the question of ontology he is a little dismayed at why deconstructionism has such an ambivalent and poor relation to practice (this can be found in Sprinker’s edited symposium on Derrida’s spectres of Marx).
So I would say that the ‘methodological’ problems Brad Mayer has with Negri can not be summed up as post-structuralist, simply because I think Negri wants to align himself with an existing philosophical project, that he does not fully identify with but should be seen better as a kind of compromise – we would have to ask whether Negri’s chosen intellectual milieu is not partly induced with an attempt to get respectable – which is fair enough I think if you are still imprisoned by the Italian Bourgeois state – an issue no one so far has seen relevant enough to mention.
That a ‘terrorist’ can get a book like Empire into the public domain is quite surprising. But we cant accuse it of postiality (we haven’t heard this term yet in Britain is it in wide currency in the USA?) when in one way or another we are all stuck on what, when, where and why Leftists have to engage in a different type of project today. What is typically complicated about the idea of post-modern etc, is the incapacity to forge any agreement on whether the phenomena is largely political or economic – or what balance exists between them. Even in someone like Jameson who strongly identifies the this here now with the product of a form of multinational, business commodity capitalism – there is a recognition of the strongly political, cultural and generational types of determination that have produced this malaise. That in Empire Negri retains the framework of some kind of critical political economy that can identify trends outside of the conventional and ideological framework of “globalisation” is encouraging. What is not so clear is what presuppositions Negri might have to concede in relation to his earlier insistence on seeing movements of capital and politics as in internal relations to class subjectivity. We would have to look very closely at what he identifies as the other-side and the alternatives to empire – and whether he does not reproduce something like the structuralist/ post-structuralist problem wherein power is so ubiquitous that we can even conceive of resistance. Because this seems to be where post-structuralism leads politically – something like the impasse of parodic play, between being named as a subject – Butler’s subjectiviation – and the real active progressive process Negri was so keen on in the 70s, of negating this coercion.
While there are comments in Empire about post-humanist age etc that are clearly post-structuralist, these are countered by the general point of the exercise to argue that power is increasingly singular; totalising and unitary – which is clearly different to the post-structuralist emphasis on differentiation of power.
To his credit I think Negri in Empire does continue to try and conceive of power always alongside resistances to it, thus retaining the spirit of his earlier stuff. Whether these are defensible is another matter;
“New quality of social movements: 1. each struggle though firmly rooted in local conditions, attacks the imperial constitution in its generality. 2. all struggle destroy traditional distinction between economic and political. They are biopolitical struggles, struggles over the form of life. “
Negri is too aware that these struggles are incommunible (counter Habermas) and forced to use out-dated antediluvian modalities like Democracy and Citizenship, and racial conflicts.
All in all Negri is worth engaging with as a friend not a foe,
Sorry this was so long,
Erik Empson