Jajuna

No time right now for a lengthy commentary, but I just wanted to flag a book I have been reading by Jason Read titled “The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and The Pre-History of the Present”. In it, Read performs a close reading of Marx’s texts in order to construct an immanent reading of ontology and the function of subjectivity both within Marx’s thought and within the capitalist mode of production in general. In this effort, Read uses the thought of Althusser, Deleuze, Foucault, and Negri in order to supplement Marx and to draw out the complex relations between political economy and the production of desires, affects, and forms of consciousness. By juxtaposing Althusser’s notion of immanent causality (in short, capitalism requires and/or pre-supposes the construction of a particular kind of subject) against the autonomist tradition which suggests that capital itself and developments within the mode of production are always already pre-figured through antagonisms immanent to subjectivity, Read is able to offer a number of trenchant and nuanced re-readings of Marx’s methodological dynamics and conceptual frames. While I haven’t yet completed the book, I am finding it incredibly rich and suggestive as it attempts to blow apart many ossified and reductive interpretations of Marx’s work while re-constructing key Marxian categories in light of contemporary sociological and theoretical developments.

There are some interesting parallels in this section of Commonwealth to points raised by Zizek in his recent book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce particularly concerning the Haitian revolution. I don’t have the Zizek book in front of me at the moment but if memory serves, he also observes that the Haitian revolution revealed the centrality of resistance in the formation of European modernity. For Zizek, the Haitian uprising marks all the ambivalences and paradoxes of modernity, both its legacy of domination and hierarchy as well as it’s liberatory tradition. The Haitian revolutionaries rooted their project within the emancipatory register of the enlightenment and the French revolution and through their revolt embodied the principles of freedom and equality more purely than the French themselves who sought to deny the Haitian slaves their humanity. Zizek claims that the lesson here is that postcolonial resistance to global capitalism should continue to take a critical de-colonizing stance toward the specters of domination handed down from modernity, while recognizing that this stance is firmly within the modern tradition of human emancipation. According to Zizek, the truly revolutionary event, as demonstrated by the Haitian revolution, is not only to appropriate the democratic tradition in political struggle but to radically realign and alter that tradition in the process.

In some ways this is what the concept of altermodernity is getting at in Commonwealth. For Hardt and Nergi it is not enough to recognize the contradiction within the power relation between modernity and antimodernity. It is not enough to resist. The goal, rather, is to generate new relations and social democratic forms (parallel and intersectional class based, gender, ethnic/indigenous struggles) that cut diagonally across the modern-antimodern threshold. Ultimately, in their chapter on altermodernity and throughout Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri offer a far more dynamic analysis than Zizek, who, whenever confronted with a tight spot often just simply reverts to some sort of grand negative reversal. This brings up a crucial point for me in terms of the broader importance of Commonwealth and the Empire series in general. As Zizek has stated on numerous occasions, himself borrowing from Fredrick Jameson, it is far easier today to imagine the end of human life do to environmental holocaust than even basic transformation of the global capitalist system. This is usually offered within the context of a more general lamentation about how the neoliberal moment exerts tremendous downward pressure on our ability to imagine collective paradigms of social transformation. The precise aim of Commonwealth is to offer a creative design for a new ontology of democratic possibility (a performance of imaginative possibility). This does not mean, of course, that Hardt and Negri should not be subject to critique. In fact as we will see in further posts, critiques of their project were incredibly productive in the formation of this project. It is, however, necessary to consider the dynamic in which critique is offered.

Recently, I have found myself defending Deleuze against people that I think fundamentally misunderstand the nature or point of his project. In my view, Hardt and Negri’s project embodies Deleuze’s insistence that the value of criticism lies in its ability to transform and affect. In each of his books on Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and Spinoza, Deleuze offers plenty of criticism, particularly of Kant, however, these projects are all undertaken in the spirit of pushing the philosophical systems of these thinkers into new territory and in the process simultaneously transforming their projects into something new and dynamic (isn’t this Zizek’s point regarding the Haitian revolution?). Everywhere one peers within Commonwealth, one can locate the stamp of this Deleuzian legacy from their treatment of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, to their deployment of the concepts of love, poverty, and altermodernity. The emphasis is not only to unravel faulty assumptions and open up blockages, but to pave the way for new possibilities for thought and being. My comments here are not in any way to suggest that these concepts along with Hardt and Nergi’s theoretical treatment of the multitude are not without their limitations. It is essential that these limitations be made visible and struggled over. However, if we are to adopt Hardt and Negri’s ethico-political co-ordinates, this process would orient itself toward making these limitations useful in the sense of expanding and sharpening our analytical, ethical, and political attunements. Such an approach seems to me to point toward a way out of the de-politicizing neoliberal deadlock. However, this is precisely what Zizek and others have disingenuously failed to do in their efforts to expel Deleuze from contemporary social and political thought (check out this brilliant analysis by Steven Shaviro of Peter Hallward’s recent assassination attempt)

With all this being said, what are the limitations and possibilities of altermodernity as a conceptual figure of revolutionary praxis? In a sense, it is not possible to fully answer this question from this chapter alone. Many of the points raised in Part 2 are developed in much more theoretical detail in later chapters, and not before running the ideas through their critique of political economy in Part 3. Here, as a preliminary matter, I would like to address three interrelated critiques. First, critics allege that Hardt and Negri inadvertently reproduce a kind of Marxian developmentalist teleology through their claim that global capitalism produces both the “objective” and “subjective” conditions of its own demise. Submerged within this critique is a second one that refers to Hardt and Negri’s apparent messianic tendencies, connected to their supposed “faith” in the affirmative power of the multitude to govern itself in horizontal co-operative networks. Third, there is also a great deal of contempt for the notion of affirmation itself as a critical basis of praxis. Doesn’t such emphasis on creativity and affirmation reproduce neoliberal desiring subjects of capital? How can we effectively combat capital without directly negating it? And on and on….Hardt and Negri directly address the first criticism in Part 2 by engaging historical determinism as a misguided vestige of Marxism’s relationship to modernity (which does not in any way negate validity of Marxism as analysis or basis for political struggle!). In relation, they obliquely address both the first and second criticisms by insisting that the move into altermodernity does not share any determined relationship to the present, however, in those moments where it has emerged (Bolivia, Chiapas, etc) it has already embodied many of the characteristics of the multitude that they describe: horizontal organizational forms and intersectional alliances coupled with various dynamics of social production (i.e. new strategies of collective action, imagination, and political creation). Rather than emerging as historical necessity or existing simply as a utopian revolutionary fantasy, these movements embody concrete manifestations of the multitude as it engages in transforming the political relations in which it is immersed and in the process transforms itself through the generation of new forms of social life. As for the last point, Hardt and Negri take great pains to insist (particularly through their mobilization of singularity and multiplicity which we will take up later in further posts) that political articulations contain potential for furthering either reactionary or liberatory aims. The point of altermodernity is to recognize that the existence of the former need not negate the possibility of the latter as it strives to inaugurate potentials for as yet unimagined ways of thinking and acting with others.

What I would like to say in closing out these scattered remarks is that I am interested in continuing to think about criticism in a way that is generative, that opens up rather than closes down productive possibilities for thinking through new intellectual and ethico-political connections. In further posts this will have to mean bringing our notes of Commonwealth into more of a direct conversation with our own interests and projects.

Paul has posted his summary of Part 2 of Commonwealth at Critical Stew:

Part 2: Modernity (and the Landscapes of Altermodernity)

2.1 Antimodernity as Resistance

Power and Resistance Within Modernity

In this section Hardt and Negri problematise the traditional dialectic opposition of modernity/antimodernity. This opposition, they argue, is what gives rise to problematic notions of modernity as an “unfinished project,” inherently good, and simply in need of further advance. They counter the traditional view of modernity as a process of a benign, universalised enlightened European sensibility that civilises an oppositional savage external world, by proposing that modernity itself is dualistic, characterised by the immanent coupling of domination and resistance. The forces of antimodernity, they argue, cannot be seen as being outside modernity but rather internal to it. This means that modernity, for Hardt and Negri, should be seen first and foremost as a power relation. In order to facilitate this ontological shift they first draw on contemporary characterisations of coloniality as a series of “encounters.” Encounters, as opposed to conquests, acknowledge the mutual mixtures and transformations experienced by the coloniser and colonised. Examples given include the adaptation by colonialists to pre-existing spatial layouts of Aztec city states and the influence of Iroquois Federalism on the political history of the United States. The language of encounter misses the violence of coloniality and thus Hardt and Negri continue with a psychoanalytic metaphor: European modernity is “psychotic” because it forecloses the possibility of alternative existences and the influence of the subjugated on the dominant. This is evident in attempts to erase alternate or antimodern histories, which are seen as a threat from the outside, as opposed to being constitutive of modernity itself. Finally, though centre/periphery models come closest to Hardt and Negri’s proposed duality, they run the risk of homogenising both the coloniser and colonised. “The West” is seen as the only “pole of domination,” without internal struggles and resistances, while “the rest” is seen as uniformly subordinate, without it’s own axes of domination. When modernity is understood as a power relation then seeing modernity as an unfinished project is much less benign than is suggested by Habermas and other theorists of social democracy. “More modernity,” Hardt and Negri argue, “is not an answer to our problems.” (71)

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I just finished reading Loic Wacquant’s new book Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. The book accompanies two other recent books by Wacquant (professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley) that explore similar themes: Urban Outcasts and Prisons of Poverty. Punishing the Poor is a detailed sociological analysis of the material and symbolic mechanisms and historical coordinates intertwining the simultaneous retreat of social welfarism and the advancement of new modes of social inequality, the precaritization of labor, and mass incarceration. While these trends have been shared in varying degrees across Western democratic states, Wacquant roots much of his analysis in the “penalization of poverty” in the United States, making the claim that U.S. post-welfare logics have provided the dominant frames guiding contemporary realignments of European governance and social policy restructuring.

There isn’t much here not already widely accepted by social scientists. Wacquant’s primary argument, echoing his mentor Pierre Bourdieu, is that “the downsizing of the social welfare sector of the state and concurrent upsizing of its penal arm are functionally linked, forming, as it were, two sides of the same coin of state restructuring in the nether regions of urban space in the age of ascending neoliberalism” (43). In other words, as the conjoined narratives and structural practices of deregulation and moral responsibility have produced new forms of social insecurity, cultural approbation, and punitive “workfarist” policies for low-income and racialized populations—i.e. those populations left most precarious in the hyper-mobile and flexible circuits of the global economy—the state has expanded its control, surveillance, and punishment functions. Wacquant thus describes the neoliberal state as a “centaur state, guided by a liberal head mounted on an authoritarian body, that applies the doctrine of “laissez-faire” upstream, when it comes to social inequalities and the mechanisms that generate them (the free play of capital, deregulation of labor law and deregulation of employment, retraction or removal of collective protections), but it turns out to be brutally paternalistic and punitive downstream, when it comes to coping with their consequences on a daily level” (43).

A central point in Wacquant’s analysis is that the rise in the penal arm of the neoliberal state serves a variety of key political functions in the government of social insecurity:

The renewed utility of the penal apparatus in the post-Keynesian era of insecure employment is threefold: (1) it works to bend the fractions of the working class recalcitrant to the discipline of the new fragmented service wage-labor by increasing the cost of strategies of exit into the informal economy of the street; (2) it neutralizes and warehouses its most disruptive elements, or those rendered wholly superfluous by the recomposition of the demand for labor; and (3) it reaffirms the authority of the state in daily life within the restrictive domain henceforth assigned to it. The canonization of “the right to security,” correlative to the dereliction of the “right to employment” in its old form (that is, full-time and with full benefits, for an indefinite period, and for a living wage enabling one to reproduce oneself socially and to project oneself into the future), and the increased interest in, and resources granted to the enforcement of order as just the right time to shore up the deficit of legitimacy suffered by political-decision makers, owing to the very fact that they have abjured the established missions of the state of the social and economic front” (7).

Like his other books, Punishing the Poor assembles an incredibly rich and rigorous collection of data to back up its major claims. Armed with a mountain of statistical evidence and acute attention to historical detail, the book pulls no punches as it surveys the intersection of social insecurity and punishment within the neoliberal state across the vectors of political economy and culture. For those interested in the politics of poverty and the law under neoliberalism the book is definitely worth checking out. In particular, Wacquant is very adept at approaching these issues from a variety of different theoretical standpoints while distilling his prose into clever, punchy, and insightful polemical figures. What I see as the fundamental weakness of Wacquant’s work is that it doesn’t delve deeply into questions of agency, resistance, and/or democratic alternatives to the neoliberal juggernaut. Perhaps no other contemporary sociologist has more advanced our understanding of the relations between the post-industrial prison and inner-city poverty, spatial stigmatization, and enclosure. However, Wacquant doesn’t give us much to work with in terms of thinking beyond these relations. Admittedly, in Urban Outcasts he does do an excellent job of dispelling the myths of the contemporary ghetto as a site of total dysfunction, highlighting how such narratives serve to reproduce in both popular and scholarly discourses racist stereotypes while missing the objective conditions of the highly complex social systems and norms that structure daily life in the most dispossessed and disenfranchised spaces of the urban. In my view, however, this doesn’t go far enough in thinking about alternative democratic movements.

While I think Wacquant could do more on this front, he nonetheless does conclude with a brief section on “how to escape the law and order state”. “To avoid getting locked into a penal escalation without end or exit, it is indispensable to renconnect the debate on crime with the paramount social question of the new century, which it now screens from view: the advent of desocialized wage labor, vector of social insecurity, and of increasing material, familial, educational, health, and even mental precariousness. For one can no longer order one’s perception of the social world and conceive of the future when the present is obstructed and turns into a struggle for day to day survival” (281). Wacquant proceeds to offer a series of brief suggestions for re-thinking the economic and cultural valences of insecurity and crime. Unfortunately, these recommendations including “defending the left arm of the state” (a valid and important task to be sure!) are not offered with nearly the depth or theoretical precision as the critique, and can be seen as offering not much more than social democratic reformism as opposed to a more forward looking project of fundamental transformation.