Cattivo Maestro

"the weak philosophies of the margin, difference, and nakedness appear as the mystifying figures and the unhappy consciousness of imperial hegemony."
Hardt & Negri in Negri, Reflections on Empire, p.94

What might be quite a rare moment: Hardt and Negri appearing to channel Lukács circa The Destruction of Reason (1952). Brutal as their characterisation of "weak thought" might be, it appears to have increasing truth - although how that truth is taken is up-for-grabs (is Agamben's "bare life" uncannily predictive of imperial hegemony, or simply a counsel of despair in the face of it?). The difficulty is, as Steve Shaviro points out here is that this accusation can be returned to its sender - in what sense does "strong difference", or "nakedness" re-interpreted as poverty qua potenza, really not provide another "mystifying figure" of the supposed powers of resistance?

Perry Anderson has indicated the dangers of consolation, in which "[t]he need to have some message of hope induces a propensity to over-estimate the significance of contrary processes, to invest inappropriate agencies with disinterested potentials, to nourish illusions in imaginary forces." (14) While Anderson recognises this as a necessary illusion (could we say it is the Kantian transcendental illusion of the Left?), the difficulty with Negri's work is the sense of a magical transformation of weakness into agency that seems all too consonant with a mystification of the "obscene underside" of imperial hegemony.

We should, I think, recognise in Negri's work his good faith in trying to come to grips with new class composition(s), and the need to identify and retain a sense of revolutionary agency. After all, without this possibility of such agency Marxism would fall into the position indicated (and rejected) by Trotsky: "if the world proletariat should actually prove incapable of fulfilling the mission placed upon it by the course of development, nothing else would remain except only to recognize that the socialist program, based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, ended in Utopia." The difficulty is that, at worst, Negri's work seems to imply the communism is not utopian because it is already realised - what Gregory Elliott acidly called "a mutant Browderism".

It seems to me that some of these difficulties are written in at a very early stage in Negri's work. I've been reading Books for Burning, the compilation of 70s texts (going cheap at Judd Books). These are definitely some of the densest of Negri's texts, and I start to have sympathy with those ex-Brigadists who accused Negri of the invocation of the "magic Grundrisse" and the recollection of Greppi (recorded in Steve Wright's excellent review "Children of a Lesser Marxism?):

I remember once meeting Luciano [Ferrari Bravo] coming out of a lesson, and he asked, "Why do I have to waste my time explaining Toni’s books?" He was a wreck after two hours of interpreting the thoughts of the great master. Basically this was ideology, rather than the critique of ideologies.

The particular difficulty I'm pointing to particularly concerns the quotation of passages of the Grundrisse and then their analysis by Negri, which at the very least often seem "inventive".

That said, the actual theses of the texts are relatively easy to follow, and identified quite clearly. These hold the key to the continuity that concerns me. In Domination and Sabotage (1977) Negri argues that ‘Sabotage is the negative power [potenza] of the positive’ (2005: 258; italics in original) and that there is ‘a positivity that commands the negative and imposes it.’ (2005: 259) Here already, for me, is the first alchemical transformation of negative into positive that dictates the later ontologisation of constitutive power.

This will later slide all too easily into an endorsement of 'things as they are' as really being communist. The line is perhaps easier to take at the high-point of a radicalised movement, although it offers little to explain the rapidity of defeat (of course we can note the extremity of the state repression - conveyed most movingly in Nanni Balestrini's The Unseen - but then what significant movement has not had to face and try to overcome such repression? Negri's own discourse of sharpened fundamental contradiction and rising proletarian power offers little explanatory grasp to the experience of defeat). In the current context it appears too much as wishful thinking, precisely resulting from an all-too-rapid positivisation of the negative.

Vergeistigung

Reputedly Massimo Cacciari once suggested that workers would be better off taking Nietzsche’s The Will to Power as their bible rather than Capital. What might seem an outlandish provocation (although not as extreme as his attempt to get rid of pigeon feeders in Saint Mark’s square when he was Mayor of Venice) makes more sense when read through the grid of the evolution of negative thought in Italy.

First, we can take Tronti’s Nietzschean re-writing of Marxism in terms of the fundamental antagonism between labour–(will to) power and capital. This asymmetrical relation is one of abundant activity (by the workers) versus reactive re-coding by capital. In this way Capital is re-written in terms of On the Genealogy of Morals, with capitalism functioning as slave morality, and the worker’s gaining the position of aristocracy.

Second, this reactive morality of capital is then read through Negri’s work on Keynesianism and the crisis of the planner-state. Whereas previously crisis had functioned as a crisis of capitalism, what Keynesianism develops is the deployment of crisis for capitalism – the “negative” use of Keynesian policies to re-active a capitalist dialectic that leads to a positive re-composition of capital. We need “to arrive at the essentiality of crisis as such” (Cacciari 13), in which the negative “represents not merely a movement of crisis in the growth of capitalism but the very crisis serving a function within this growth.” (Cacciari 13)

Third, we have the Weberian insistence on rationalisation, in which the “iron cage” figures the demystification of capitalism as negative power of command. Rather than requiring re-enchantment, Weber’s quasi-Nietzschean strategy, we are required to take the truly Nietzschean path of radical disenchantment.

Linking these three moments together Cacciari insists on ‘the contradiction-functionality of the negative’ (38) as both tragic demystification – ourselves face to face with capital – and capitalist re-coding of crisis. This double function of the negative is condensed by Cacciari (and Tafuri) in the figure of the Metropolis, which, as Gail Day wisely suggests functions something like Debord’s category of the Spectacle.

“The Metropolis is the general form assumed by the process of the rationalization of social relations.” (Cacciari 4) The Metropolis is the triumph of rationalization in a demystified form – in which the bourgeoisie, to quote Marx and Engels, “has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation” – is functionally equivalent to Nietzsche’s completed nihilism. Day comments that this produces a strategy of completed nihilism, with Cacciari evincing a "willingness to let the force of the commodity rip into commodification itself (as if unleashing some auto-erotic, self-consuming energy)" (26).

This strategy produces an alteration in subjectivity, as Simmel describes we have the birth of the blasé type, which “arises wherever this negative is completely internalized, wherever the subject feels deep within himself the gravity of his task of “demystification,” his task of acquiring a tragic awareness of the given.” (Cacciari 9)

The result is the insistence on “the indissoluble connection between negative thought and the capitalistic socialization process at a specific point in history.” (Cacciari 10) Negative thought perceives and isolates the historically specific from of capitalist domination; it thereby breaks from nostalgia and utopia. It effects a devaluation, identifying the tragic, valueless character of the Metropolis.

We might say, again following Day, that the concept of the Metropolis permits the isolation of the petrification of experience, to then result in its explosion (28). To do so requires the full pursuit of the negative, the push towards completed nihilism that accepts capitalist negativity as marking a leap, a rupture, with no return to a previous state. We must accept the “tragedy of the given” without recourse to any utopianism or historical back-tracking (in this Cacciari remains faithful to Marx’s critique of feudal and utopian socialism).

The risks of such an argument are evident in its application by Manfredo Tafuri to the function of the avant-garde. The avant-gardes succeed each other “according to the typical law of industrial production” (Tafuri 86). The dialectic of the avant-garde is predictive of the dialectic of capital; the crisis induced by the avant-garde maps the absorption of crisis “as an inevitable condition of existence.” (Tafuri 86)

This passage can be traced in the transition from Munch’s Scream – in which the trace of a reaction to alienation remains – to the completed nihilism of El Lissitzky’s Story of Two Squares: “from the anguished discovery of the nullification of values, to the use of a language of pure signs, perceptible by a mass that had completely absorbed the universe without quality of the money economy.” (Tafuri 89)

In this way the demystifying negative rationalization of the avant-garde becomes functionally equivalent to the negative rationalization of capitalism. The familiar argument concerning recuperation is given another twist, so that the avant-garde prefigures capital in its own operations.

“Dada’s ferocious decomposition of the linguistic material and its opposition to prefiguration: what were these, after all, if not the sublimation of automatism and commercialization of “values” now spread through all levels of existence by the advance of capitalism? De Stijl and the Bauhaus introduced the ideology of the plan into a design method that was always closely related to the city as a productive structure. Dada, by means of the absurd, demonstrated – without naming it – the necessity of a plan.” (Tafuri 93; see Day 29)

Form v. Chaos; anarchy v. planning; the dialectic of the avant-garde is the dialectic of capital laid bare. The new synthesis becomes connected back to the production process, and the residue of utopia eliminated.

For Tafuri and Cacciari the “solution” “involve[s] actively embracing the given situation.” (Day 30) To work with “the negative … inherent in the system” (Tafuri qtd. in Day 31). The difficulty comes in splitting between the avant-garde strategies, in which “the destruction of values offered a wholly new type of rationality, which was capable of coming face to face with the negative, in order to make the negative itself the release valve of an unlimited potential for development.” (Tafuri qtd. in Day 31), and a strategy of completed nihilism that would explode rather than reinforce the operative crisis-function of negativity.

This “radical realism” (Day 32) risks becoming complicit with the crisis-dynamics of capitalism: in the style of a negative accelerationism. The worse the better, radicalise capital to negate it through negativity. The difficulty comes when this “stalled dialectic” becomes stalled in capitalism, leading to fundamental working in-sync with capital. This kind of problem is registered in Tafuri’s call for “empty architecture” – radically disenchanted manipulation of “pure signs” and the endorsement of silence (Day 32).

Of course, during the 1970s the position of Cacciari and Tafuri was still operating within the argument of the force of the worker’s struggles driving capitalism to new strategies. Therefore, despite their use of the canonical figures of Western Marxism this cannot be correlated with a “cunning of (capitalist) reason” pessimism of the kind that might be said to characterise certain moments in Adorno. The strategy of completed nihilism is not simply fulfilling capitalism because capitalism itself is “powered” by crisis, i.e. class struggle. In a sense to “fulfill” capitalism is to negate it, as capital itself is “merely” the management of crisis. We could of course say, despite appearances…

The difficulty of this position of radical realism is that which assailed Lukács – “the reconciliation with reality” leading to disastrous political acceptance of the “real as rational” (in Lukács case Stalinism). The shift re-entry into the PCI was part of this realism: the PCI being the “modern katechon”. Cacciari’s later shifting into a more full-blown mysticism (turning Benjamin’s uneasy coordination of Marxism and mysticism into an internal rupture) correlates, as I have argued elsewhere, with those predominantly French theoretical currents that made the move into the “saving power” of the tout Autre.

In fact, one might argue that Lyotard is a close point of comparison: political militancy, radical accelerationism in which capital “is the unbinding of the most insane pulsions” (Lyotard 138), before shifting to radicalised alterity. The key difference is that Cacciari never had any truck with Deleuzo-Guattarian style philosophies of desire.

In a way Cacciari’s path, as much as I am able to reconstruct it, indicates the difficulty of detaching negative thought from collapsing back into the (operant) negativity of capital. In a way his thought re-stages the debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty concerning the PCF: necessary vector for proletarian “negativity” (Sartre) or doomed to re-compose mere “functionaries of the negative” (Merleau-Ponty). In the current context, lacking such referents, this question of the negative versus the “dialectic of the negative” is posed with all the more urgency, but all the more problematically.

References
Cacciari, Massimo (1993) Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture, trans. Stephen Sartarelli, intro. Patrizia Lombardo. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Day, Gail Ann (2005) "Strategies in the metropolitan Merz: Manfredo Tafuri and Italian Workerism", Radical Philosophy 133: 26-38.
Lyotard, Jean-François [1974] (1993) Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Athlone.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels (1848) "The Manifesto of the Communist Party", Marxists Internet Archive.
Tafuri, Manfredo (1976) Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press.

Fidelity (to May 68)

La fidélité à Mai 68 aujourd’hui, cela veut dire la fidélité à la puissance de subversion collective du mouvement anti-autoritaire.

Jacques Rancière

(from an interview with Rancière forthcoming in the special issue of Anarchist Studies 16.2 (2008) on postanarchism edited by Saul Newman - with thanks to Saul)

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.

Destroy what destroys you!

Once, the car was brightly painted, and on the back, in big letters was written: ‘Careful, Dynamite Transporter!’ And there were really bombs in it, and [the police] just looked at it and said, ‘Dynamite Transporter! – Idiot. Just go on.

Charmingly, and keeping within the doxa on the 1960s, Michael ‘Bommi’ Baumann claims he cannot remember if he coined the slogan ‘Destroy what destroys you!’ or not. After repression, the experience of defeat, historical amnesia and retrospective vituperation (including the ‘revelation’ that Baumann was a Stasi informer), Baumman’s 1975 book Wie alles anfing [How it all Began] – Terror or Love? In English (1979) is a rare internal unapologetic autocritique of this cycle of struggle (‘adventurist’, ‘terrorist’, or ‘urban guerilla’, according to political taste).

The book charts Baumann’s political evolution from the refusal of his proletarian position, his time as a counter-cultural dropout in the ‘Roaming Hash Rebels’, and the development towards armed struggle via Tupamaros West Berlin to the Movement of the 2nd June [M2J] (named after the date on which, in 1967, the student Benno Ohnesorg was shot and killed during a demonstration in Berlin against the Shah of Iran).

The antinomian cultural milieu is charted as a strange cocktail of the beats, Maoism, Guevarism, drugs, anarchism, and even Satanism:

People like Proudhon, the old anarchists, often were also Satanists at the same time; Bakunin too. God and the State is actually in some ways a Gnostic piece. It has religious content when he says that once we take the Bible seriously, we can only say at the end, ‘Hail Satan.’ That story fascinated us.

Unfortunately what is absent is any sense of a link to a German musical counterculture, with Baumann’s references entirely American.

The M2J was the most libertarian / anarchist of the armed groups and, Baumann claims, it more proletarian composition produced a contrasting attitude to violence to that of what he regards as the ‘abstract’ and student-based Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF):

We’d lived with violence from the time we were children; it has material roots. On payday, when the old man comes home drunk and beats up the old lady – it’s all that stuff. At school, you get into scrapes, you have to make your way with fists, for you that’s a perfectly normal thing; you have to fight at your workplace, you fight in bars, you have a more healthy relationship to it. For you, violence is a completely spontaneous thing that you can unroll quite easily. There was always this split between the R.A.F. and ourselves, in the source of violence, where it was coming from.

For Baumann M2J’s amateurism was both its weakness and strength, making it vulnerable but also avoiding the professionalization of struggle that created new apprentices’ of revolution.

In fact the link Baumann draws between his refusal of apprentice work on building sites and then the tendency to re-compose 'apprentice structures' in the radical groups is one of the most useful points of criticism concerning this form of struggle. As he notes this drive to performance involved also over-concession to the function of the media and a machismo of struggle: ‘Only rigid continuation, total pressure to achieve, and it keeps going, always gets worse, until at some point, some guy collapses – he just can’t go along with it anymore, he can’t do it.’ (this might also stand as a reflection on Baumann's own 'informing' - along with a number of sections of the book on inflitrators and those who abandoned the armed struggle and/or informed).

Linked to this conception is Baumann’s reflection on the position of M2J, which appears very different from what one might take from their actions:

The June 2nd group had a theoretical base similar to ‘Gauche Prolétarienne’ in France, or ‘Lotta Continua’ in Italy – that is, to give a militant solution to work conflicts in the factories. When the people in the factories are falling over from the bad air, then the owner’s villa must be put on fire, to show the people you can defend yourself if you attack the guy directly.

One of the ‘forgotten’ facts of the 70s cycle of armed struggle is how often it emerged from counter-violence in the workplace, also the case of the Red Brigades, before becoming more spectacular and separated from any proletarian milieu.

To be more precise the nature of this workplace violence has been forgotten; not only the various forms of alienation but also the ‘direct’ violence of the factory police, often coupled to union resistance to any radicalisation (including physical resistance). In the case of GP their strategy was to compose a new autonomous workers’ movement uniting ‘the anti-authoritarian aspirations as they were expressed and continue to be expressed by youth and the new forms of battle in the working class, anti-despotic forms of battle.’ These anti-despotic forms included plant occupations, hostage taking of senior managers, resisting the CRS, and workplace sabotage. This struggle intensified with the call, in 1969, for ‘the non-armed but violent revolt of the partisans’ (referring back to the partisan activity of the French resistance as much as to Maoist strategies) and for militants to ‘lead the resistance, to lead the violent struggle’. Blow for Blow was the line, and the struggle intensified to the point of the killing of GP militant Pierre Overney in 1972 by a Renault plant security policeman Jean-Antoine Tramoni.

Of course GP did not make the escalation into ‘terrorism’ or armed struggle, although the killer of Pierre Overney was himself killed in a commando ‘action’. A former editor of their paper La Cause du Peuple, Jean-Pierre Le Dantec later reflected that the strategies of GP had an unfortunate influence on German and Italian groups in their turn to armed struggle (he also criticised the killing of Tramoni). What seems to be the missing link in Baumann’s account is the collapse of this link to workplace struggles, although a similar dynamic developed with the Red Brigades. We see a locked spiral of escalation, illegalisation, mediatisation, and alienation of struggle. Baumann himself proves the best critique of this departure from any grounding milieu and the strange transformation of the urban guerilla into a figure dressed like a young executive, robbing banks, and developing new technical skills.

What ‘terrorism’ constructed then, in this spiral of complicity pointed out by Debord,[1] was the occlusion of this ‘mass’ dimension of violent struggle. One of the valid points made in Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions (2007) is the widespread nature of acts of violence never reported and never claimed. [2] In the Italian context the concept arose of ‘counter-power in the pocket’ of ‘my comrade the P 38’ (giving an unlikely link to the debates about Spinozan ‘potential’). Here the use of the weapon was posed as self-defence within the context of the demonstration or action. Of course, both forms of action collapsed under militarised repression. Instead of ‘One, Two, Three, Many Vietnams’ it became a matter, as one Italian radical put it, of ‘One, Two, Three, Many New Yorks’: the counter-attack of not only direct repression but also fiscal capitalism (passing now under the name of neo-liberalism) that dislocated the forms of mass agency that supplied some minimal consistency to the violent (if not always armed) struggle.

All the confusions of Baumann’s memoir can perhaps be summed up in this lapidary reflection: ‘Stalin was actually a type like us: he made it, one of the few who made it. But then it got heavy.’

Notes
[1] ‘Quite to the contrary, it is because a large number of Italian workers have escaped being enrolled by the Stalinist trade union police that the "Red Brigade," whose illogical and blind terrorism could only embarrass them, was set in motion, and that the mass media seized the opportunity to recognize in the "brigade" their advanced detachment of troops and their disquieting leaders beyond the shadow of a doubt.’

[2] The major historical problem with the novel, leaving aside various flaws or problems in its formal construction, is the running together of the history of the Angry Brigade with that of the R.A.F.