Lacerate the Fabric

Mario Tronti is most well-known for his series of seminal essays collected in Operai e Capitale (1966), which argued for a Copernican revolution in Marxism:

[w]e too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class. (from Lenin in England 1964).

What is slightly mysterious is that although these early essays are available in translation and online (and a new translation of the entire work is due from mayfly books), there is a comparative lack of discussion of Tronti's later career. This is partly remedied by the tantalising article by Matteo Mandarini 'Not Fear but Hope in the Apocalypse'.

Crucial is the "turn" in the work of Tronti and others associated with the journal Contropiano (Alberto Asor Rosa and Massimo Cacciari). This involved an insistence on the "autonomy of the political" and a return to the PCI. Overturning his earlier insistence on a direct antagonism between labour-power and capital (maintained by Negri, who split from the group), Tronti now insisted on the political as mediation - "political mediation that the party expresses at the institutional level." (Cacciari) To simplify, we might say "organised autonomy" saw the possibility of leadership developing outside the PCI through the new forms of worker radicalism, and would later, in some instances, dissolve itself into the movement. On the other hand Tronti and his comrades regarded the PCI as necessary mediator, and saw more signs of fading of working-class power.

This was the call to organise class power politically rather than economistically (and we might add this economism has been a problem haunting Negrian analyses). Tronti's take in 1978 indicates the difficulties:

There are two conditions for the centrality of the working class to function politically. The first necessity is that factory workers are surrounded by a large penumbra of social consensus, the second that their effect on the political and their relationship to institutions remains stable over a long period. It must be made evident and perceptible, with practical actions, that this state must be simultaneously defended and changed. What must be defended are the formal guarantees, the constitutional mechanisms of equilibrium and the significance of the political agreement between the democratic parties. What has to be changed is the significance of power, the functioning of the decision-making mechanisms, the guidance of the economy, and the control, consumption and application of social wealth.

This "politics in the institutions" obviously risked substituting the party for the class - "the autonomy of the political" leading back to the realism of politics.

Drawing on the indications in Matteo's article I want to suggest that the continuing functioning of the thesis of the "autonomy of the political" in Tronti's work, especially as an acerbic critique of democracy, has a functionality that this quasi-reformism would seem to vitiate. Despite his dropping of the direct antagonism of labour-power and capital it appear that Tronti still maintains the negative vocation of his early theses against their positivisation in Negri.

Taking a similar theoretical path to Cacciari (although more Heidegger / Schmitt than Benjaminian) Tronti remains linked to the concept of "minoritarian agency" and working-class partisanship, rather than Cacciari's own "mystical" turn. Here then is a rare example of a negative thought still committed to a conception of political agency and not conceding to the mystical or to the various "new positivities" of the affirmationist consensus. Tronti maintains the necessity for a ruptural "Nothing" and the right to rebel.

Many Mays

To read some analyses, you would think that 1968 took place in the heads of a few Parisian intellectuals. We must therefore remember that it is the product of a long chain of world events, and of a series of currents on international thought, that already linked the emergence of new forms of struggle to the production of a new subjectivity, if only in the critique of centralism and its qualitative claims concerning the ‘quality of life’. On the level of world events we can briefly quote the experiment with self-management in Yugoslavia, the Czech Spring and its subsequent repression, the Vietnam War, the Algerian War and the question of networks, but we can also point to the signs of a ‘new class’ (the new working class), the emergence of farmers’ or students’ unions, the so-called institutional psychiatric and educational centres, and so on. On the level of currents of thought we must no doubt go back to Lukács, whose History and Class Consciousness was already raising questions to do with a new subjectivity; then the Frankfurt school, Italian Marxism and the first signs of ‘autonomy’ (Tronti); the reflection that revolved around Sartre on the question of the new working class (Gorz); the groups such as ‘Socialism or Barbarism’, ‘Situationism’, ‘the Communist Way’ (especially Félix Guattari and the ‘micropolitics of desire’). Certain currents and events have continued to make their influence felt.

Deleuze, Foucault (1988: 150 n.45)

My (late) contribution to the May 68 "celebrations": the monstrous coupling Lukács-Deleuze.

Make it New

Oliver Feltham's Alain Badiou: Live Theory (2008) offers an elegant and ingenious solution to introducing Badiou: tracing the way in which his work thinks change. He traces this through three sequences: the Althusserian, the Maoist, and set-theoretical. Why I found the book particularly engaging was that it foregrounds the question of the historical in Badiou's work. It does so through a rather strange bestiary, in part (I'm guessing) derived from Bataille's "The Old Mole and the prefix 'Sur'". We have the eagle: the figure of decisionism and abrupt rupture. Feltham's elegant (and Derridian) solution to the problem of whether Badiou is decisionist or not is instead to argue that this one stratum or moment in his texts. We have the old mole: the figure of patient tracking and analysis of situations (and the figure favoured by Feltham). Finally, we have the "owl" (Minervan obviously): the figure of the long-distance vision of change.

It is this final figure that interested me, partly because I have tended to associate Badiou more with conjunctural rather than long-term perspectives and partly because it intersects with my own project on longue durée Marxism. The owl seems to play a strange role in the text; on the one hand it can lead to a "right Badiousianism", in which interventions and truth procedures pass on one to another, leading to new situations but seemingly without much sense of progress. This is something like the accusation of the "randomisation of history" Perry Anderson levelled at post-structuralism (yes, he will appear in every post...). On the other hand this perspective of the owl is one from which "the occurence of events is assured; they may not happen everywhere and all the time, but events have occurred and will occur." (105) In a sense then the "owl" guarantees change. So, we have a play of three moments and this, interestingly, seems to correlate (in a way) with Braudel's division of time into structure [owl], conjuncture [mole] and event [eagle].*

There is far more to Feltham's book than this, including some fascinating remarks on the evental site and a re-writing of Badiou's de-throning of philosophy in terms of overlapping incompletions. There is also a highly amusing, if rather short, interview with Badiou himself. This is one of the debits, along with a lack of full discussion of LM** (perhaps due to reasons of space), some problems in the bibliography and rather odd indexing. These problems should not discourage you from buying or otherwise "obtaining" the book. After Peter Hallward I had thought another introduction to Badiou would be pointless; Oliver disproves this.

*This division could also be linked to Immanuel Wallerstein's recent paper on the future, in which he suggests political strategies for operating at these different temporal "levels" (a paper I will discuss in a future post).

** advertised as the "sequel" to Being and Event - prompting Alberto to joke perhaps they will advertise Theory of the Subject as the prequel...

Mao-Beckett: pseudo-couple

‘Fight, fail, fight again, fail again, fight again … till there is victory; that is the logic of the people.’
Mao

Creative Work

"For far too long the accent was placed on creativity. People are only creative to the extent they avoid tasks and supervision. Work is a supervised task - its model: political and technical work - is attended by dirt and detritus, intrudes destructively into matter, is abrasive to what is already achieved, critical toward its conditions, and is in all this opposite to that of the dilettante luxuriating in creation."
Walter Benjamin, 'Karl Kraus'
(p.289)

Benjamin's comment offers a powerful articulation against the "beautiful soul" form of the creative ideology, in which the creator is somehow immune from assessment or measurement while all the time really engaged with the new discourse of creative production (otherwise known as "Having your cake and eating it").

Of course we could argue that that Benjamin's Brechtian "productivism", which runs against his image as a dilettante artist of fragments (the "W G Sebald effect" as Owen has remarked), risks recuperation in the new discourse of the "creative industries". Here "creativity" - qua the perpetual parade of false novelties required by capitalism - is placed under supervision through the usual mechanisms, not only of the market but also of various funding bodies and academic metrics. Here then "technical work" is equated with work for the market and supervision with conformity to funding requirements.

I would argue, however, that it this discourse of "productivity" or "value creation" in the arts that is what makes operative the "luxuriation in creation"; in the fashion identified by Žižek the ideology of creativity operates by allowing a cynical distance towards production, which is what then preserves that creative industry. As a "free" artist I engage in my process of creation at some supposed distance from work and the market, all the while with an eye on that market. After all, in the end, what is left to judge the worth of creation except money? That is how the doxa has it.

In this situation Badiou's point becomes all the more true: "It is better to do nothing than to work formally toward making visible what the West declares to exist."

In a sense Benjamin's over-identification with technical work disrupts the minimal distance of the creative ideology - it suggests a guide to disrupting the existent regime of visibilities. It does so, precisely, by articulating an effect of negativity (being "attended by dirt and detritus, intrud[ing] destructively into matter, [and] abrasive to what is already achieved"). This is what overturns the relentlessly positivities of creativity, whether encoded in the figure of the artist dilettante or the reconvened under the sign of measures and financial reward. This is truly the labour of the negative against the ideology of creativity.

Blame the epigones

It's always the epigones isn't it? Those annoying intellectual pygmies who take the thought of the master too seriously and try to extend and develop it. Obviously, not being masters they always get it wrong and even if they should by some miracle get it right they are merely unoriginal. There is something that I find highly distasteful and deeply suspicious about such lines of argument - I think that I've only once used the word and then it was to state that various thinkers were extending an existent line of thought in the original thinker.

A number of more critical points could be made about such arguments. First, it's often a useful way of disavowing the attack, or picking on the weak (pick on someone your own size). What's also interesting is the refusal to 'name names' - again I'm not calling for gratuitous insult but what always used to annoy me about assaults on "postmodernism" was that it was always "postmodernists say this", who? where? and analyse why they are wrong. Second, we could take Žižek's Hegelian point that such "realisations" are part of the original theory. Stop searching for supposed deviations and treat Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus as part of the unfolding of Bourdieu's theory. Third, how would we make sense of Badiou's concept of fidelity without the epigone? Of course the epigone is taken as meaning 'lesser' or 'minor' follower, but why should we regard it as necessarily something to be treated as negative? Of course we could perform a Deleuzian re-reading of the minor as one place to start, and we could also interrogate the implicit concepts of originality and novelty at work here (as well as mastery).

That said, obviously we do need ways to distinguish good work from bad. I'm not for some levelling, but rather a sense of refinement and probity in these kinds of accusations / arguments. Trying to think of positive epigones its interesting that my immediate thoughts are of psychoanalysis and marxism - those two strange discursive fields in which to return to the original texts ‘constitutes an effective and necessary task of transforming the discursive practice itself’ (Foucault). Still, in psychoanalysis Ferenczi, Winnicott, Lacan, or in Marxism, Benjamin, Lukacs, Bordiga (to choose my personal favourites from long lists) suggest 'epigone' could be a category to be re-valued (as Dave Beech and John Roberts have done with the 'philistine'.

Note

Having been an epigone (of Derrida should you be wondering) and never being someone who will reach the dizzy heights of 'master' then I would say this.

Insulting the Audience

What happened to the lost art of (Marxist) insult? The past master of this art was of course Guy Debord. This is a classic:

One of us remembers him at the College de France in 1966, sitting in on Hyppolite's course on Hegel's Logic, and having to endure a final session at which the master invited two young Turks to give papers. "Trois etapes de la degenerescence de la culture bourgeoise francaise," [three stages of the degeneration of French bourgeois culture] said Debord as the last speaker sat down. "Premierement, l'erudition classique"[at first, classical erudition]-he had in mind Hyppolite himself, who had spoken briefly at the start of things-"quand meme base sur une certaine connaissance generale. Ensuite le petit con stalinien, avec ses mots de passe, 'Travail,' 'Force' et 'Terreur.' Et enfin-derniere bassesse-le semiologue." [even if based on a certain general knowledge. Then comes the little Stalinist cunt, with his words from the past, 'Work,' 'Strength,' and 'Terror.' And finally - the last degradation - the semiologist].

In the same article TJ Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith do their best to revive the art, and I particularly like this comment on Eric Hobsbawm (and anyone else who has read his insufferably pompous autobiography might sympathise):

Eric Hobsbawm's "history of the short twentieth century"-his "report," as one wag put it, "to a Central Committee that just isn't there any more." The very idea of pressing too hard on Hobsbawm's omissions and excuses as a historian was denounced a priori by NLR as "anti-Communist." One law for young-Hegelians, it seems, and another for unrepentant Stalinists. To have been over-optimistic about the revolutionary potential of the Watts proletariat is one thing; to have spent one's life inventing reasons for forced collectivization, show trials, the Great Terror, the suppression of the East German and Hungarian uprisings, and so on ad nauseam, quite another. The former is the ranting of primitive rebels, the latter the hard analytic choices of Marxist history.

In fact in reply to one of their barbs Peter Woollen objected their essays "bile and flashes of sectarianism", "their incessant jabs and slurs", and, in true school-teacher style pronounced "I can see no place for the old S.I. habit of ad hominem personal invective, which T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith still seem to value. I cannot believe it encourages better understanding of anything. In truth, I am really surprised they wish to keep it alive." Refusing the usual propition Clark/Nicholson-Smith replied "If such counterattacks are ad hominem, that is because it is people who misrepresent and keep silent - not just "signs and meanings.""

What prompts my concern and interest in the loss of this art - or its marginalisation - is that I regard it as implying an effect of political disorientation. The inability to pin a thinker down politically in such a fashion seems to imply loss of confidence in such positions (or the usual fear of being "reductive"). This concern has been spurred by my own work on Latour and Savonarola's comment; as well as completing a review essay of which it has been simultaneously suggested that I could have been harsher and that I was becoming an "old curmudgeon" (becoming?).

Of course, we could say with Peter Wollen this is an art well lost; being both (potentially) childish and presupposing a ridiculous level of political confidence. Personally, to add to the irony, I have a mortal fear of being insulting (although, perhaps because of that, I am often inadvertantly insulting). What's lost, however, is the capacity to identify and critique with great rapidity and so to avoid the way in which textual complexity can be deployed against political or theoretical judgement. In the case of Latour, from his published positions, he's pretty obviously right-wing in a fairly repellent (to me) manner. This doesn't obviously invalidate everything he says / does, but the fact this politics doesn't seem much discussed or pointed out seems to me an indication of lack of confidence from the "left".

In fact, the more one examines the political positions taken by thinkers in theory (my field) the more disquieting it often becomes - especially because of a common running together of political and theoretical radicalism often leads to the occlusion of awkward questions of what people did politically. Of course we are all familiar with the endlessly debated "grand" cases - but here if any rapid insulting or positioning gets done it is usually from the liberal centre (or what I would regard as the liberal right...). The exception that proves the "rule" (until my speculative contention is blown out of the water) is Žižek - who is constantly subject to such labelling (in fact it would be amusing to compile a full list of such ad hominem insults and the range of political and other quirks they embody - I'm guessing it would cover a wide range). Žižek himself doesn't engage in the practice and seems bemused and irritated about how he attracts such criticisms - although he is certainly an excellent critic and not inclined to mercy. This is true of In Defence of Lost Causes (2008), although complicated by his statement about frienship at the beginning that invites the reader to sift which vicious criticisms are truly personal and which comradely. An odd moment which I don't know if anyone out there has attempted or can guage.

The exception on the side of engaging in such political positioning is Perry Anderson. While light on actual insult his work exemplifies a mode I much admire - the "slow blade" (cf. Dune), in which a devastating critique is dressed in the guise of positive or neutral report. In terms of actual political insult I hear that Ian Birchall is such a practitioner, and certainly he writes a very stylish review - as in this monumental effort on French trotskyism.

In fact, to call for the return of the insult as an art is precisely to avoid the use of it to end thinking - a true insult (political or otherwise) makes us think and, at the same time, exposes thought to ridicule. No doubt this carries risks but sometimes the endless care and respect of the usual forms exhausts itself and functions conservatively (as an intellectual practico-inert). The (relative) absence of the art, to recurr to an over-used term, does seem to me "symptomatic" and (two for the price of one) "problematic" as well.

References

T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith, "Why Art Can't Kill the Situationist International", October, Vol. 79, Guy Debord and the Internationale Situationniste (Winter, 1997), pp. 15-31 available here as well

Peter Wollen, T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith, "Letters and Responses", October, Vol. 80, (Spring, 1997), pp. 149-151.