Seven Red

I like this, from our friends at Loungerati:

Since reading about the 500 year anniversary of DOM Benedictine contest last year, I have been tinkering with my own recipe that honors the liqueur but also tips the trilby to the iconic Italian macchina, the Fiat Cinquecento (“500″ in Italian). In other words, DOM meets MOD, a drink that you could have in Torino or West London or Brooklyn. May I introduce a delicious new aperitivo!

Head over to Loungerati to get more on this, including the recipe for The Cinquecento. Just as a note, she and I always make fun of the Fiat Cinquecento. We were listening to NPR one day, and it must have been the 50th anniversary  of the iconic car, because they had some guy on with a thick Italian accent who said something like, “You know, many people in Italy were told that they were conceived in a Fiat Cinquecento.” Wink wink. Hahaha, said the otherwise serious NPR journalist lady, the implication being Oh those crazy Italians with the sexy and the passion! Needless to say, she and I cracked up, since this remains the way “Italy” functions in the American imaginary, even on Marketplace. So now, whenever we see a commercial or news report that draws on the same trope (“Italians are soooo passionate”), we immediately break into Italian accents and say “Did you know, non per niente, that I wuza – how you say – conceived with the bang bang in a Fiat Cinquecento, which izza the funny, yes?, because it is such a smallah car!”

Just as a side note, one could easily index the production of the Fiat Cinquecento to the whole of postwar economic development – and corresponding labor struggle – in Italy. It was through the Cinquecento that the Mirafiore Fiat plant expanded into its giant form; it would become one of the primary sites (along with the Pirelli rubber works in Milan) of the labor uprisings of 1968 (at Pirelli, especially), the Hot Autumn of 1969 (with the occupation of Mirafiore), and the culmination of that cycle in 1973-74.  (Production of the Cinquecento shifted away from Mirafiore in the mid-1960′s, in a deal with Pirelli, Fiat, and Bianchi/Autobianchi). We also see in the production of the Cinquecento the problem of the rapid rise in output in the factories (indeed, the 1957, 1960, and 1965 numbers for the Cinquecento show something like an 80 degree curve, upward), which required the mass migration of southern workers to the industrial valleys of the north, produced the mid-level “pink collar” class of technical workers that would become crucial for autonomist arguments against traditional union structures, and pointed up the problems of intensified labor exploitation together with stagnating wages, the very conditions that made the CGIL accomodationism that much more dramatic. Certainly, there were other industries that shifted the composition of the Italian working class during this period (the development of the massive petrochemical plants in Porto Marghera industrial corridor, for instance), but it would be hard not to see the development and popularity of the Fiat Cinquecento (especially during the 1960′s) as contributing directly to the transformation of the Italian labor movement in the 1960′s and 70′s, which of course comes to us today through people like Negri (Potere Operaio’s role in the Mirafiore strikes of 1973 are especially important for understanding this trajectory). I guess it’s more fun to say “My mama said she makuh the bang bang in the Cinquecento!”

So, to the Cinquecento. I’ll ask Loungerati’s cocktail specialist to make me one when we get back east, and I know what I’ll be drinking to.

The hippies won’t come back, you say
Mellow out or you will pay
Mellow out or you will pay!
Dead Kennedys, California Über Alles

Some quick reviews. In my (very little) off-time this summer I managed to pick through a few non-work books, including a little bout of California noir in James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere and, of course, Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. Reading the two more or less together in the space of a week made for both a nice contrast and a nice focus on the genre, though trying to peg Pynchon on genre is always going to be a little wonky. I liked The Big Nowhere, and I always find Ellroy just eminently readable. There’s also something deeply attractive about the counterfactual method that runs throughout Ellroy’s books: pick a hazy actual historical crime and build an utterly corrupt and twisted explanation for it, walking some interesting characters through the process. In The Black Dahlia, obviously, it’s the Elizabeth Short case. In The Big Nowhere, it’s the Sleepy Lagoon case. I’m rarely surprised by such books, but I was surprised by the character of Danny Upshaw, and I think Ellroy handles the character really well.

Pynchon is also focused on a real California crime, though he has no interest in offering alternative theories. Inherent Vice is set in 1970, and what a difference twenty years makes from Ellroy’s Los Angeles. I have to believe that Pynchon and his publisher were playing a bit of a joke by releasing Inherent Vice on August 4 (it’s beach reading!), since the various reviews would inevitably appear in the same newspapers that were commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Manson murders (August 8 and 9), and these events permeate the novel like a sinister background, some creepy crawly hum that plays behind the text only to break through here and there, with Pynchon’s protagonist, surfer-hippie detective Doc Sportello, professing a crush on Leslie Van Houten and teasing his homicide detective rival, Bigfoot Bjornsen, for not having been “up on Cielo Drive” with the rest of them. But this is really par for the course for Pynchon – in Gravity’s Rainbow, in Vineland certainly, in Inherent Vice, and in (I might have to argue another time) Against the Day – always with an eye toward the collapse of the 60’s counterculture, the emergence of a control society, and he manages to do it in an oddly non-nostalgic way. Something flashed and was gone, and while Pynchon’s going to remain faithful to that event (like Dick with Valis), he’s always working through the process of its disappearance, how fear – dread even – inundates an entire culture and becomes its engine. Classic noir, and I think Ellroy is just a master at this, certainly runs on shady networks, but its always a question of struggle, not fear. And if that’s the switch, there’s no better place to go than Los Angeles in 1970, as the fear generated in early August of the previous year became a national spectacle, a lesson in the new form of life.

One gets the sense reading Inherent Vice that Doc Sportello is telling the tale himself, maybe in the present. The narrator slips into Sportello-like verbal tics, like ending sentences with “and so forth,” and you don’t get the long, contemplative sentences that appear in Gravity’s Rainbow or Against the Day – except at the end, the last few paragraphs (which sketch, incidentally, as beautiful a set of images as you see in any Pynchon). The primary narrator in Gravity’s Rainbow never slips into Slothropisms, like using the word “that” before a place name (that Berlin, that London, and – hilariously – that the Hague), but in Inherent Vice you get just that, and so forth. But if fear is the engine, you get laughter and detachment as the counterforce. Inherent Vice is an incredibly funny book, maybe in the way Vineland sought to be funny, or in the way Gravity’s Rainbow (and, for my money, Mason & Dixon) actually was. The big joke that all the reviews note is that the detective is a stoner who forgets pretty much what he’s doing repeatedly throughout the book, but that’s the detachment side. Far more interesting is that the narrator seems to mostly remember the funny parts, even as the fear is pumped out by the gallon.

So, continuing on in our long neglected series on the so-called Italian Ideology, I want to look at Paolo Virno’s discussion of the joke in Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation. Behind Negri, Virno is probably the closest of the old autonomist movement thinkers in terms of his recent publication in English speaking contexts. Several of his early pieces appear, of course, in the Autonomia volume originally published in 1982, but Michael Hardt’s influence in moving contemporary Italian thought into English translation has been massive. Virno co-edited, with Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy, which appeared in 1996, and Virno’s subsequent little volume, A Grammar of the Multitude was at least widely remarked on when it appeared in 2004. Last summer, in addition to Marazzi’s Capital and Language, Semiotext(e) published Multitude: Between…, not to be confused with Hardt and Negri’s Multitude (the third volume of Hardt and Negri’s series, called Commonwealth, is due in October). So, obviously, Virno has been working on this concept of multitude as the form of the political, as well as a set of related concepts also addressed in Negri, like the common and kairos, so he could therefore be said to supplement the more popular work in the Empire line. Indeed, this is precisely how Virno’s work has functioned even among those clearly in tune with the Negri’s arguments (like Ronald Greene, for instance).

I’d suggest, however, that Virno is far more grounded in rhetorical and linguistic theory than Negri, which certainly makes the relative lack of interest in his work among American rhetoricians a little mystifying. The 1990’s-style tendency to hitch American rhetoric’s wagon to the latest European philosopher has been duly squelched of late by the neo-pragmatists, not to mention the monopolistic Burke industry. Stars and stripes forever. That’s probably a good thing, even if the baby often goes out with the eau-de-toilette. But I think Multitude: Between… makes some interesting moves that at least deserve a closer look, that-side-of-the-pond provenance notwithstanding.

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For me, one of the more interesting papers published in The Responsibilities of Rhetoric – the proceedings of the 2008 RSA Conference – is Richard Glejzer and Michael Bernard-Donals’ “Synecdoche as Figure of the Holocaust,” largely because it dovetails with Alan Liu’s recent collection of essays, Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. Both pieces zoom in on and seek to explain the rhetorical work of the detail in contemporary historical writing, so I think I’ll discuss them together here.

Glejzer and Bernard-Donals are really starting, theoretically, with the problem of figuration in historical writing, building off the work of Hayden White, and his four tropes through which historians “structure” history (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony). At issue for Glejzer and Bernard-Donals is, first, which of these figures dominates Holocaust history, and, second, more expansively, what the dominant figure tells us about the historical event and our understanding of it. Specifically, the authors identify a purportedly metonymic method in Holocaust history writing that has dominated the field “since Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews” (really, the classic in the field, even 50 years after its first publication), and through the various memoirs and diaries and witnessings. The metonymic structure of these histories, the authors contend, proceeds by a detailed recitation of the “parts” that – both singly and through accumulation – points back to a whole as explanation or cause (220); you would presumably understand something of the Holocaust as some kind of substantive agent that produces the parts (the particular detail) as patient of that agent. But Glejzer and Bernard-Donals find something very different in Daniel Mendelsohn’s memoir, The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million. While the memoir would seem, on its surface, to be structured according to the same metonymic logic of historical figuration, it actually, Glejzer and Bernard-Donals argue, operates by synecdoche. If metonymy points back to a whole as cause, synecdoche functions rather as a “part-for-part substitution, in which the associative relation implies a whole rather than expresses it as part of the substitutive relation” (220). It points back to the “hole” rather than the “whole” of the historical event, some essential caesura or excess that, because it is the real – escapes the method of detail, and any method of telling, for that matter.

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Whew. That was a week of reading like comps. When I was reading for comps, I tended to measure my progress – at least apart from the giant stacks of notes – on raw pages; if I plowed through 1000-1500 pages in a week, that was good, while 600 was at the low end (i.e., Derrida). Of course, you have to go back and conceptualize all that, but there is only so much time, and there’s so much to get through, so setting yourself page goals always seemed to reduce the despair before the massiveness of it all. So, this week, I plowed through about 1000 pages of Agamben, which I found now remarkably painless, and I did it while teaching the two classes (OK, granted, it was the last week, so the preps were cursory) and going to meetings, and grading and all that. I can see why faculty seems unimpressed when graduate students gripe about their workload, in any case. But this would have been a pretty good week during comps, especially if you throw a few articles into the mix:

Now, I had read some Agamben before, both collections, and a couple of books: Homo Sacer and The Open (both of which I reread this week). In fact, a funny story about The Open. I read it for a reading group in graduate school, and then some months later lent it to the department chair for some reason. Probably more than a year went by, and then it was time for me to leave SC for Chicago. Before I left, the department chair saw me in the hallway and said “Oh, let me return your book.” Huh, I thought. What book? I followed him into his office and he handed me The Open, to which I replied “I think you have me mixed up with somebody else.” I had no memory of ever seeing this book before in my life. Very diplomatically, he pretended to be unsure, but encouraged me to look through it. I opened up the book to see detailed margin notes in my handwriting throughout. “Huh,” I said, “I guess it is mine.” Well, maybe that’s what you get when you’re plowing through a thousand pages a week.

When you don’t completely forget that you’ve read something, the comps style gets you – if it’s not your main area – some fakeable sense of the concepts (sovereign exception, naked or bare life, the remnant, potentiality, space of indistinction between law and life, language and life, human and inhuman, etc.) and a vague sense of the conversations (with Aristotle on potential, with Schmitt on law/politics, with Benjamin on messianic time, with Heidegger on the ontological difference, with Arendt and Foucault – especially with Foucault – on biopower). And that’s about what I got when I read a little of Agamben’s stuff last time. I remember being annoyed at the time by the intro to Homo Sacer in its portrayal of Foucault’s work, which I still think is off the mark, but certainly worth consideration rather than annoyance. I say you, in any case, when I should say me. Maybe some people can integrate the conceptual system across the board when they’re plowing through stuff, but I can’t. I usually just got some slogans, which is sufficient to the task, and probably not completely worthless, either. But this second reading during the last week gave me a more systematic look at the way these concepts play off each other and connect, maybe call it slogan-plus, so I want to take some of that up in the coming weeks. In a sense, this is the continuation of my long-neglected series here on the so-called “Italian ideology,” and I think that Agamben – by not quite being included (the included exclusion? the excluded inclusion?) in the Autonomist tradition – does shed some light on what’s going on with some of the other stuff I’ve discussed (Negri, Virno, Esposito), especially, as I said, when it comes to biopower, and really, the analysis of power more generally. I still have Profanations, the St. Paul book (how Agamben cashes out his early work on kairos from Infancy and History is the real target here), Potentialities, and the latest, What is an Apparatus?, to get through, but I’ll probably be responding here as I go, in the new series … Blogamben (it’s true…we’re so lame).

I was coming home on the train today, re-reading Paul Willis’ classic study and analysis Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. I first read the book somewhat badly as an undergraduate, and then again maybe my second semester in graduate school. In the graduate school version, I remember reading Willis, Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress all together, probably all in the same week. Willis’ significantly gloomier version of things just resonated with me more than the others, probably because his ethnography bore significant resemblance to my own memories of high school, though Willis’ study takes place in early 1970′s industrial England. In any case, I’m re-reading the book for a project I’m working on, and it’s as good and funny and cogent as I remember, and maybe as gloomy. This time I actually bought a used copy.

So I get on the train, and I’m surrounded by a bunch of young CTA workers who are clowning around and generally trying to get through their day. They’re standing around cracking on each other, telling each other in exaggerated voices that they’re “blocking the patrons” with their equipment. They have canvas bags filled with florescent orange flags and various tools.

“Get out the way! Can’t you see that lady’s tryin’ to get off the train!”

“You need to move, young man! Those reserved for senior citizens. Patrons.” They’re punching each other, laughing.

Then two more get on at Southport station, and these guys are the real clowns.

“Hey,” says the guy sitting next to me, playing the boss, to one of the new arrivals, “I know you weren’t posted to Southport, so I don’t know how you gettin’ on there.”

“Oh,” says one of the new guys, “I was over at Wrigley.” They all laugh.

“Oh, OK,” says the Boss. “At Wrigley. Drinkin’, too, prolly.”

“Oh, no sir. I’m a dedicated employee. I would never be off drinking at Wrigley when the CTA needs me. But I shouldn’t uh had that sixth.” They all laugh.

“Mmmm hmmm,” says the Boss.

It goes on like this for some time, until I’m one of the few left on the train with these guys. They’re all loud and carrying on. Then, suddenly, the Boss says, very officially, “Will y’all quiet down? Can’t you see this gentleman here is reading?” That would be me. This gentleman.

“Oh, he’s studyin’ for a test! Stop messin’ him up!”

“You gonna quiz him?”

I look up and smile. Alright. You got me. I get it.

“He fail that quiz he gonna end up workin’ the CTA,” says one of the clowns. “You better let him read.”

They’re all laughing their asses off. I’m smiling. OK, guys. I get it.

Now, stuff that’s ironic. I was reading the following paragraph as all this was going on:

Some of the non-conformist group in the grammar school are, in fact, from working class families. Despite even their origins and anti-school attitude, the lack of a dominant working class ethos within their school culture profoundly separates their experience from ‘the lads.’ It can also lead to artificial attempts to demonstrate solidarity on the street and with street contacts. That the working class cultural forms of school opposition are creative, specific, borne and reproduced by particular individuals and groups from afresh and in particular contexts – though always within a class mode – is shown by the cultural awkwardness and separation of such lads. The lack of the collective school based and generated form of the class culture, even despite a working class background and an inclination to oppositional values, considerably weakens their working class identity (58).

Sometimes, it doesn’t matter if you get it.

Just finished Elisabeth Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times. Youch. The book reads like an extended rant by somebody who’s kept it all bottled up, where “it” is the general intellectual and cultural attitude in France (and more generally) since the 1980′s. Centered primarily on (normalized) psychology, it turns into a long polemic against the nouvelle philosophie, and a corresponding defense of the philosophers who “heroically” demolished the “norm” (Canguilhem, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida). All very interesting, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, but the tone was really the knife-twist. You don’t often see stuff like the following snippet at the conferences or in the journals, but maybe that’s a bad thing. In this localized rant, she’s beating up on James Miller’s (truly asinine where not totally unreadable) book on Foucault:

According to Miller, Foucault’s father so humiliated him by forcing him to watch an amputation that Foucault lost his virility and remained fascinated all his life by the opening up of cadavers and the sight of torture. Likewise the sight of the mattress on which the sequestered woman of Poitiers had lain had given him a taste for enclosed spaces, labyrinths, and incarceration. As for his feelings of jealousy toward the Jewish students exterminated by the Nazis, it lay, according to Miller, at the root of Foucault’s conviction that fascism had to be opposed, not just as a historical phenomenon, but as a power that determines, without our knowing it, our most routine actions. In any case, these three repressed traumatic experiences guided Foucault, on Miller’s showing, down the tortuous pathways of a death cult – the sole explanation of his suicidal passion and his “desire” to contract AIDS.

One is left speechless at the stupidity of this putatively Freudian interpretation of the work and life of Michel Foucault, resting on nothing but extravagant hypotheses and reaching the most banal conclusion possible: Every book originates in the lived experience of its author. (90)

I don’t know about you, but I want to one day be able to say “One is left speechless at the stupidity of this putatively…” Burn.

This week I read three books that were originally published some time ago, and republished recently. All were strong and interesting. As follows:

1) Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time 2: Disorientation – The follow-up to Stiegler’s Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, T&T2 came out in France in 1996, and only became available in translation (through Stanford UP) in November. It is a difficult book – made more difficult because my background in Husserl is not as complete as it should be – but certainly rewarding. In T&T1, Stiegler argues for a coevolution of technology and the human, with more emphasis on the autonomous evolution of technical systems. While this would seem like a familiar argument, Stiegler is really offering a challenge to a Heideggerian version of autonomous technology (which he’s careful not to reduce to a caricature, as is so common) by refusing an easy distinction between an authentic relation to futurity and a merely technical one (i.e., mathesis, creation of a standing reserve, etc.). Because anticipation and technics are mutually constitutive, he can locate something like being-towards-death already in the origin of the technical relationship. T&T2 expands on this notion with further consequences. Since there will likely be more detailed discussions of T&T2 appearing here later, I’ll save some of my comments for then.

2) Antonio Negri’s Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology, and the Bourgeois Project – More Negri reading is always fun, and this book on Descartes really shows the method at work. Originally published in 1970, it was translated fairly recently (2007) as part of Verso’s Radical Thinkers series. If you’ve read The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, you would already have a sense of how Negri goes about his work here, reading the development of Descartes philosophical corpus as a concrete response to the political struggles of his period. Specifically, Negri argues that Descartes is involved in a project to save the political fortunes of an emerging bourgeois class that had recently suffered the near total defeat of Renaissance humanism, and faced the return of authoritarianism both in the sciences (Aristotelianism, Scholasticism, qualitas, argumentum ex verbo, and all the other enemies of the emerging modern sciences) and at the level of the state (monarchy, absolutism, etc.). Negri demonstrates Descartes construction of a “reasonable ideology” which sought to mitigate the “defeat” of humanism (defeat is the key word in the study, and would probably be the biggest word on the map if Political Descartes were subjected to a Wordle-ization), which is really the emerging value of the bourgeois as a class, by founding a relationship between the individual and knowledge/action that would guarantee the bourgeois project as it struggled against both the (monarchical) state  and the nascent power of the proletariat. A couple of points of interest. First, despite the rift with the typical PCI theoretical frame (in Gramscianism), Negri’s argument really relies on specific Gramscian concepts. Specifically, because Descartes entire mature philosophical work responds to the defeat of the humanist revolution, Negri deploys the idea of a form of struggle that was really formulated directly by Gramsci, and that colored the responses of the Italian Communist Party to the post-war period:

Along with Galileo, the malin sweeps away the revolutionary illusion, the humanist hope. Descartes takes note of all this, accepting the setback but refusing to abandon hope. One must live. Once the revolution is over, the war of position begins (155).

Given that Negri almost compulsively emphasizes that he virtually ignored Gramsci, and given that the volume was written through the height of student movement and labor struggles of 1968-1969, this emergence of Gramscianism at the heart of Negri’s thesis is remarkable indeed. Second, the translators introduction notes the recent emergence of Descartes as a touchstone for critical responses (clustering, of course, around Zizek and Badiou). Negri’s postscript for the English edition studiously ignores these developments (though Zizek, for one, wastes no time beating up on Negri any opportunity he can, as in, humorously as always, In Defense of Lost Causes). But it should be said that Negri anticipates the defense of Descartes in some ways (as constructing some irretrievable remainder of subjectivity that cannot be “accessed” by the power of social systems): “only thought unconditionally qualifies my generic existence and posits it in its autonomy prior to any concretization that, historically or materially, may be impressed upon it, and may have to be accepted” (216). If so-called “postmodern” attacks on Descartes are decried as ideology because they strip even this last vestige of resistance to social power, Negri seems to be suggesting here that it was already thus for Descartes, albeit in a context where a sovereign rather than capitalist power stalked the landscape with totalitarian claws. Score one for Negri, nearly 40 years before the argument. All this is to say, finally, Political Descartes may be most interesting to students of rhetoric because it really serves to ground the rhetorical nature of Descartes’ work, and – hopefully – at least asks us to move beyond caricatured versions of the “Cartesian subject” that have circulated for years in a fairly weak rhetorical theoretical discourse, and that nobody in philosophy has taken seriously for quite some time.

3) William M. Tuttle’s Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 – Finally able to look away from the mostly pitiable work on free and open source software and devote at least some time to Chicago history, I breezed through this book last night and this morning, thereby finally getting some non-computer history fix.  (OK, not really true…I read Baatz’s For the Thrill of It: Leopold and Loeb and the Murder that Shocked Chicago when I was traveling back to Giant State University Town recently, but that’s just guilty pleasure true crime schlock). Tuttle’s study initially appeared in 1970, but was republished by Illinois University Press in 1996. The book does a great job of situating the race riots that broke out in July of 1919, first describing the riot itself, then drawing out its causes in labor disputes, housing shortages, political differences, and the development of a militant consciousness among African Americans, mostly deriving from the increasing aggressiveness of white racism, the migration into the northern cities, and the effects of World War I. Indeed, Tuttle’s description of African American armed resistance to marauding white mobs in the Black Belt is really eye-opening. Just a terrific study. Tuttle’s chapter on labor disputes in Chicago leading up to the riots is a classic in source-based argumentation, and utterly persuasive. Now, Tuttle was of course also responding to the wave of riots that gripped urban America in the 1960′s (and it was useful to read next to Negri’s own 1970 offering for this reason), and he develops an interesting comparative thesis. Whereas the race riots of the early 20th century saw direct confrontation between races, the riots of the post World War 2 era were largely symbolic (i.e., attacking the store rather than the lynchmob) or mediated through the state apparatus (i.e., confrontation between minority rioters and police forces as representatives of the majoritarian state, rather than confrontation between opposed racially determined combatants). This is an interesting point that could be further pursued, but certainly seems to be borne out by intuition.

Next up in my Chicago reading? Dominic Pacyga’s Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side 1880-1922. Will report when I get through that one. When I read a book or two of dense philosophy, these history books become almost like mass market paperback pleasure reading, though they are just incredibly fascinating. I’ve realized that I have virtually no mental image and only a faint awareness of the geography of the South Side,  despite the fact that I’ve lived in Chicago now for almost a year and a half. Which is fuckedf up, of course, but probably a testament to the way this town has developed.

I usually hate interview books. The Derrida interview book industry is perhaps the worst offender, but I dislike them in general. I think the last one I really enjoyed was the big version of Foucault Live, which I must have read in the spring of 2000 for the Foucault course I was then taking. Otherwise, I find these interview books just painful and never very interesting in content. But I do have to make an exception for Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri’s In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics, published last month by Minnesota.

As an interview book, I think it’s a winner for three reasons. First, it’s not only interviews. Casarino’s preface – “Surplus Common” – is really an astounding essay in its own right, with really sharp readings of Aristotle and Marx, and about as clear a description/evaluation of the Negrian project as you could ask for. The other two essays are equally interesting, one by Negri on biopolitics and the general intellect, and another by Casarino, a previously published article on Agamben and Negri’s concepts of time and, not surprisingly, kairos (Casarino’s essay from several years ago, “Pornocairology, or the Communist Clinamen of Pornography” should be standard reading in graduate rhetoric surveys, though, of course, it is not.) Second, the book works as an interview book because Casarino is a damned good interviewer; he fights with Negri where he should, he knows the material cold, and he probes incisively to draw out the conceptual system. Negri, for his part, is remarkable as always in his ability to be a nasty bastard and quite generous, noting, at one point, that he and Agamben are best of friends, and vacation together, just before he trashes Agamben’s whole project as proto-capitalist ideology. It’s hilarious. But Negri is also on the ball throughout, and I think there are significant revelations in here, such as a rather detailed account of Negri’s grappling with Gramscianism (Casarino, meanwhile, expresses astonishment, for example, at the success of Laclau and Mouffe’s project among US academics, noting that he experienced it as little more than the kind of “alliance politics pursued by the Italian Communist Party–with largely disastrous results in the end–as (he) was growing up in Italy in the 1970′s” (163), and a fortiori for a version of Stuart Hall, I should think!). Third, Negri has taken such a beating at the hands of various parties and numerous numbskulls over the last few years that it is in some ways refreshing to see him hitting back, as he does often. This was already apparent in The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics, a series of  lectures – primarily meditations on the category of the “decision” – delivered in 2004-2005 and published earlier this year by Semiotext(e), in which you see a fairly angry Negri lashing out and defending his positions fairly closely. The interviews really play up this angle as well.

Apart from these three check marks, In Praise of the Common really works because it takes you through Negri’s positions in a systematic way, no doubt thanks to the formidible learning and graciousness of Casarino. In my fantasy “Rhetoric and Italian Automist Thought” graduate class, this would have to be an early required reading. If the problem of Empire has always been the return of the “enemy” in a system of immanence, In Praise of the Common approaches this question head on, repeating the Spinozan master trope of the two that are One (two modernities, two commons, two democracies, two temporalities, two biopolitics), while seeking to think antagonism (class struggle) and synthesis without dialectics. If that ain’t your bag, fine, but if you want to beat up on Negri for reinserting the “enemy” into immanence, you have to grapple with the arguments he puts forward here. Obviously, Negri’s going to get it from both sides: the hardcore Deleuze peoples are going to reproach him for residual Hegelianism because of his insistence on the category of antagonism, while the liberals and painfully orthodox Marxists will beat him up for abandoning the traditional concept of class, and the organizational capacities it once had (the latter will almost always cloak this critique in a putatively and fairly stupid “empirical” rebuttal, needless to say). For my money, the double beating is why Negri is interesting.

I want to say more about some of the interviews, but I’ll break it up over the next couple of days. I think I’ll also discuss Christian Marazzi’s Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy, which had the unfortunate publishing date of October 2008. I say unfortunate because the book is practically dated as soon as it was published (Marazzi’s first work in translation, it was actually written in and before 2004). Since Marazzi’s book is largely an analysis of the Internet bubble, it looks almost quaint in light of the far more severe crisis of finance capital represented by the recent collapse of the credit markets. At the same time, the analysis holds remarkably well, and provides some interesting theses, even if Marazzi, a trained economist, remains better on the analysis of capital than he does on the analysis of language.

But back to Negri and Casarino. The first interview serves as a needed overview of Negri’s early intellectual development and political activism. I say needed on both counts because some American readers have been rather quick to dismiss both the rigor and political commitments of books like Empire and Multitude; one recent response to these works even suggested that their thesis amounted to calling for oppressed people to “lay back and enjoy it”—really an outrageous ad hominem, but easy enough to publish under the banner of polemics. In Negri’s discussion of his early development, you really get the scope of the scholarship and early accomplishment, even if it doesn’t add all that much to what you would already get in, for example, Steven Wright’s account (Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Italian Autonomist Marxism), or even the detailed introduction and closing essay by the translators of Negri’s classic lectures, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. It’s still moving, however, to hear Negri discuss the revelation that the Italian factory system was to him when he encountered it (especially in light of his later critiques of “revelation” and epiphany as such, especially when thinking through Benjamin’s work). His discussions of his early activism at the Porto Marghera chemical and gas complexes are really crucial for following the trajectory of Negri’s insistence on tying autonomist thought to production or workerism, an insistence that is critiqued (and not without warrant)—by both Wright and, say, George Katsiaficas (in The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life):

…this was also the time when I basically stopped travelling: all my discoveries and explorations were focused on the factories of Porto Marghera. This was my favorite place back then: Porto Marghera had been built at the end of World War I, but it was in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s that the great chemical plants and oil refineries were built there…there were no union organizations in the area; or, rather, union organizations did exist but were mostly external to the factory—and when they were internal they were very corrupt, that is, they had been put together by the boss so as to fulfill the need of pretending there was some form of dialogue and mediation…these are the years—from 1962-1969—when I stopped writing. The factory was my archive—and it was an exceptional one at that. My research consisted of arriving in front of the factory door at 5:00 am and staying there until 8:00 am handing out leaflets, talking, and getting drunk on grappa with the workers, while surrounded by the thick winter fog and the unbearable oil stench. Then I would go to teach at the university in Padua. And then I would return to porto Marghera at %;00 pm to meet again with the workers so as to write the leaflets we would be handing out the next day. There were around sixty thousand factory workers in that area at the time. (51-52).

Given the at times ridiculous charges thrown at Negri quite flippantly by some American academics (especially of the traditional Marxist variety), I think some of this biographical detail is important, especially for students coming into contact with Negri’s work for the first time through books like Empire and Multitude. Whatever one might think of negri’s intellectual work, this is a guy who really walked the walk – something that grad students and academics purporting to be waging a class struggle from their offices might consider before they invent nonsenses. It should not, of course, stand as some kind of authenticity narrative (and I do think Negri is careful to avoid such silly trump cards), but it might at least forestall easy acceptance of these dumb ad hominem arguments, while also providing context for some of the seemingly stranger moves in Negri’s projects (Is there a fetish for “production?” Why insist on the categories of production and surplus? Why insist on antagonism if you’re going to posit immanence?)

Several years ago, Picador kicked off the translation series of Foucault’s lectures at the College de France with what I think is the strongest of the series to date, the remarkable Society Must be Defended. The following releases, Abnormal, Psychiatric Power, and The Hermeneutics of the Subject have been interesting, in the way that all Foucault is interesting, but not particularly groundbreaking or surprising, at least in my reading. Not so the latest installment of the CdF series, The Birth of Biopolitics, delivered January to March, 1979, and just out from Palgrave. A teaser by the same title appears in Rabinow and Rose’s The Essential Foucault, but that’s a 6-page mini-essay.

The Birth of Biopolitics is worth the cost of admission for several reasons. First, it’s Foucault’s most comprehensive analysis of contemporary economics. In his recent Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications since 1984, Jeffrey Nealon argues that the key to understanding (and, of course, using) Foucault’s later works isn’t the supposed return to subjectivity seen by so many commentators. Or rather, the return to the Self and technologies of the self in Foucault’s later works can only be understood (and made to work) within the larger context of Foucault’s “thoroughgoing confrontation with questions of economics, in both the broad and more narrowly defined senses of the word” (Nealon 17). For Nealon, “Foucaultian economics” is tied up in an expanded notion of efficiency: not just efficiency of production in the narrow sense, but efficiencies of concepts and practices. The question would always be, says Nealon, what does it cost? (I’ll have to admit that I’m sort of stealing/modifying my post title from Nealon as well; he cites Ted Nugent’s album Intensities in Ten Cities as a heading in one of his chapters.)

In light of Nealon’s shift toward a Foucaultian economics, The Birth of Biopower provides an extraordinary supplement: a detailed genealogical account of economic neoliberalism and its diffusion into traditionally “non-economic” domains.  This account requires two moves that might seem startling to those familiar with Foucault’s work. First, Foucault addresses distinctly American thought. While he cycles through the usual 18th and 19th century European works, The Birth of Biopolitics closes with an analysis of American neoliberal discourse (of the Chicago School variety) more specifically. Second, it’s the first time I’ve really seen the genealogical method trace a transformation so far into the twentieth century. Indeed, the portions on American thought cover post-war neoliberalism, such as the work of Gary Becker (there’s a name you wouldn’t expect to see in Foucault’s work!) well into the late 1960′s. For those more accustomed to extended analysis of the Physiocrats (though you get that as well), these passages are both jarring and illuminating.

This current focus leads to the book’s most important feature: it is Foucault’s clearest statement on the forms of power he sees arising after the waning of the disciplinary societies. Foucault’s description of the “carceral archipelago” at the end of Discipline and Punish makes the strong claim for the disciplinary society: the generalization of the penal model or form, the “great carceral continuum that diffused penitentiary techniques in to the most innocent disciplines.” Famously, Deleuze heralds the end of disciplinary societies in his short essay “Postscript on Control Societies,” and at more length, though less explicitly in his book on Foucault. What, then, comes after disciplinary power? Those seeking an answer to this question have been hard pressed to nail it down in Foucault’s work itself, which is why Deleuze’s little comparative essay on control has acquired so much currency.

The difference between disciplinary and control societies can be summed up in the role of partition and the function of the subject relative to energy. Disciplinary societies operate through detailed partition, splitting continuums into discrete units which are then analyzed and normalized. Foucault’s famous example of the way authorities handled leprosy relative to plague is a good example. Whereas lepers were merely excluded en masse, the residents of the plague city were sub-divided and transformed into information machines: each is confined to a specific location, and each must account for his or her condition at regular intervals. The prison combined these techniques, integrating the detailed surveillance of individual units within a place of exclusion. The result is a series of discrete institutions, themselves partitioned and divided and specific (the school, the hospital, the prison, the army, the factory), but all operating through the general principles of partition and surveillance. In control societies, the strict partition of these institutions breaks down, as does the practices of partition that organize and produce the discrete units (that is, individuals) within the institutions (the student, the patient, the convict, the soldier, the worker). In such a society, you’d expect to see not the school as closed site, but distance learning, part time education, and continuing education; instead of the hospital, home health care; instead of the prison, techniques of probation and house arrest; instead of the soldier, the reservist; instead of the worker, the temp, the contract worker, the famous “prosumer” of Internet lore (is there any more radical a leak between institutional roles than that which melds the producer and consumer?). As Deleuze puts it, in “disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything—business, training, and military service being coexistent metastable states of single modulation, a sort of universal transmutation” (179).

Second, disciplinary societies viewed the individual as the “font” of energy, so to speak, while in control societies, what Deleuze calls “dividuals” enter into preexisting flows of energy. This is clearly the correlate to the institutional analysis. If you are not “starting all over again” each time in discrete institutions, it is because the flows of energy have already breached the old partitions, producing continuous practices that you adjust and respond to: not partition, but a “single modulation.” He notes that “[d]isciplinary man produced energy in discrete amounts, while control man undulates, moving among a continuous range of different orbits” (180). Think of the ROTC student taking a class while also working on an internship. When she graduates, she’ll be a reservist with a job, but will also be required to take continuing education classes in her field for certifications and promotions. Deleuze most comical aphorism for this state of affairs concerns sports: “Surfing has everywhere taken over from all the old sports” (180). This is a strange statement indeed, and worth a slower reading. What does Deleuze mean when he says that surfing has taken over the other sports? Consider the way baseball works. Nothing happens until an individual acts: everything is still, with only an abstract set of rules to enter into. Moreover, each player has a specific and rule-based role within the field of energy. Shifts of direction and energy only occur when another individual with a clearly defined role acts. Every action begins with the subject: there’s no middle voice in baseball. These are the disciplinary characteristics of the “old sports.” The “level playing field” is precisely the field devoid of its own energy, direction, or momentum. It is “level” precisely so that only the subject can begin  or redirect the action. (Brian Massumi runs his own comedy act on this, trying to rescue soccer by claiming that the ball itself functions as a virtual “quasi-subject” or source of energy: everything arrays itself in various actual formations around the movements of the ball, etc. – a funny if unconvincing argument). Surfing, on the other hand, requires the “player” to enter into an already existing energy system (the tides); it is environmental or ecological: the surfer doesn’t and cannot “begin” the action on a blank energy field, but responds to already existing and variable flows. Skiing operates similarly, as would mountain biking and the “extreme sports” more generally.

The skateboarding documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys is really an excellent example of the transformation from disciplinary to control societies. It demonstrates the continuum between surfing and skateboarding ( a fascinating mutation, really), while at the same time contrasting the lame old style skateboarding that the Dogtown skateboarders displaced, which was itself primarily disciplinary in terms of its rules and conceptualization of energy. I think the rather chance mutations that produced contemporary skate culture would please Foucault, as well: if you didn’t have a drought in Southern California, you wouldn’t have had empty pools that served as the “preexisting energy sources” (gravity) for the development of the sport. It is important to note that skateboarding could then be seen as a control sport. The documentary presents it as “resistance” to the forms of disciplinary society—a rebellious act that “shocked” the 1950’s-style skateboarding judges, etc. This may be so, but Deleuze is adamant that control cannot be “compared” with disciplinary societies in this way. While the Z-Boys appear as rebels in terms of disciplinarity, they are precisely models for forms of power in control societies. (Foucault would argue that they are not even “rebels” in a disciplinary society, since it is precisely the function of disciplinarity to produce its own “outlaws,” and a “lyricism of marginality” (D&P 301)).

The stakes, in other words, are very clear. It’s easy enough to view the activities of the control societies as a new birth of ‘freedom” if your only model is the disciplinary society, but this is a conceptual and historical mistake. Control societies must be considered in their own terms. That doesn’t mean that everything that appears as “freedom” is really oppression, or anything so sophomoric. Rather, it means that everything must be examined anew, not relative to a power that divides, partitions, and organizes, but inside a power that connects, diffuses, and modulates or selects. We might notice, for example, that the “writer” in what composition scholars call “current traditional rhetoric” looks much more like a baseball player than a surfer. The “writer” contributing to an online collaborative project, on the other hand, looks very much like a surfer, if we consider something like Wikipedia to be a continuous flow of energy that one merely hooks into in a responsive manner. One could say the same about “remixing,” and other current fetishes of writing instruction. To draw the analogy, however, we should be careful to consider that the latter might be, like skateboarding, not merely a mode of resistance to disciplinary power (which produces the solitary writer seeking to master rule-based textual forms), but rather a form of power all its own. Ecology is not salvation.

So, if The Birth of Biopolitics provides Foucault’s answer to “what comes after disciplinary societies,” how does that measure up to or compare with Deleuze’s account? We’ll have to get into that next time, but the answer draws its greatest strength from Foucault’s analysis of American neoliberalism. What’s remarkable about The Birth of Biopolitics is Foucault’s explicit contrast, much like what we see in “Postscript on Control Societies,” between disciplinary power and the discourse of neoliberal economics.