Seven Red

“Resistance is born of desertion.” – Antifascist Partisan, Venice 1943 (qtd. in Hardt and Negri, Empire)

If one could condense the whole Empire trilogy into a nice little slogan, it would probably be the epigraph here: resistance is born of desertion. There are, of course, many ways to interpret this slogan (openness being both the benefit and the cost of slogans in general), but it is linked to broader concepts of exit, exodus, and escape. To situate it within the broader history of Negri’s thought, it’s impossible to talk about the role of exit and exodus without talking about the labor and social struggles of the 1970′s: exit from the union structure of the CGIL, and from the party politics that seemed completely compromised. It was not about arguing for better working conditions, but the refusal of work as such, or at least as it functioned in its capitalist and state socialist forms. The very notion of the autonomous social movement is defined by these forms of exodus from conventional (political) structures. Hardt and Negri will then, of course, add additional forms of exit that play key roles in the series, most notably global migration. It is also in this context that something like political apathy – supposedly one of the  primary villains today – takes on a much different appearance, as would the efforts to prevent it. If the other side of exit is engagement, then the current fetish (especially in my field) for “engagement” starts to look very much like a political project to cut off exit routes. On this point, the general form of power and what we generally promote in our classrooms are much the same: you can do everything but exit. Maybe hold on to that for later. But you certainly see thinkers from something like an Autonomia school (it’s not one thing) trying to work through this idea of exit. When Virno discusses kairos and metis, it’s almost always in these narratives of escape, like in the classical image of metis, with the mouse that quickly locates a hole and dodges into it just as the predator is bearing down.

So I’m late to the game on Roger Lowenstein’s widely discussed column from last month “Walk Away from your Mortgage!,” but it strikes me as a new narrative of exit that cashes out the exodus line from the Empire series in interesting ways. Needless to say, Lowenstein is not thinking of 70′s social struggles or Empire or anything of the kind. His argument, in some ways, could be read as quite the opposite. It’s slogan might be “Capitalism for everybody!” The problem, Lowenstein suggests, is that millions of underwater homeowners are required to hold some emotional and moral investment in their debt, while banks and big capitalist institutions are expected to act in a purely rational manner:

Businesses — in particular Wall Street banks — make such calculations routinely. Morgan Stanley recently decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. A Morgan Stanley fund purchased the buildings at the height of the boom, and their value has plunged. Nobody has said Morgan Stanley is immoral — perhaps because no one assumed it was moral to begin with. But the average American, as if sprung from some Franklinesque mythology, is supposed to honor his debts, or so says the mortgage industry as well as government officials.

Lowenstein suggests that people should consider their house purely as an investment, and act according to the same rational calculations that Morgan Stanley does. Clearly, there’s a lot to be skeptical about here, but there’s also a lot to commend in this view. Mid-twentieth century critique generally viewed capital as transforming everything into cold rationality, but Lowenstein is in some sense right that this view was always mistaken. It’s not that contemporary capitalism is too rational; rather, it’s never rational enough. Or, to put it another way, it was always rationality for the capitalists, and emotion-laden moralism for everyone else (indeed, this structural feature explains very tidily why social phenomena that would seem “residual” in Raymond Williams’ sense are not residual at all). It was actually second-wave feminist thought that grasped this problem, though the solution was – too often – to privilege the emotional dimension (and, unfortunately, the moralism). Its diagnosis was correct, but its treatment plan was often wrong. (Certainly, feminist thought was correct to say that the very distinctions between emotion and reason, affect and thought, were themselves the problem, so I’m using them here mainly as shorthand that keys into Lowenstein’s argumentative framework, not as ontological givens). In any case, with that treatment plan, you end up with even more painful conditions,  like Rogerian rhetoric, the joke we call “business ethics,” and similar sorts of projects, all of which are essentially unilateral disarmament, or exit in a bad way. (Negri always talks about exiting with a weapon.) Lowenstein’s solution is the reverse of this treatment plan: let’s see what happens if everyone actually does behave like a capitalist. The stunned blabber that greeted Lowenstein’s piece speaks, I think, to the real threat it presents, even if few are likely to act on his prescription.

Just before the meltdown (ahem…), I noted in this post that “the proverbial cat that is out of the bag is precisely the conceptualization of the house as such,” which is to say, that the mortgage crisis could only happen because the constant shifting we had all been expected to do between the house as concrete lived space (i.e., use value) and the house as abstract investment vehicle (i.e., exchange value) had broken down, or stuck on investment. But I also noted that this wasn’t a breakdown that was likely to be reversed. Lowenstein’s piece adds an interesting new wrinkle here: yes, embrace the house as pure exchange value for the purpose of making financial decisions about it. There is no moral or emotional dimension to it. I have no doubt that Lowenstein’s underlying assumptions could be read as odious at some level, but they do seem to take the logic to an interesting limit. He notes, for example, that “if lenders feared an avalanche of strategic defaults, they would have an incentive to renegotiate loan terms.” The maddening intransigence of the banks on this question would seem to collapse if everyone acted like…a bank. That is to say, if everyone starts practicing techniques of exit, exit itself becomes a weapon.

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