Seven Red

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.

Booga Face’s larger project in his analysis of The Pursuit of Happyness has to do with single parenting, and the peculiar location of single parenting in cultural production. BF explains in a comment below:

Or, if one wanted to continue to rip on Habermas, this is the scene of the private sphere and autonomous, pastoral family time which is perhaps the most public moment in the movie. What seems important here in this social economy is the necessity of privation (or deprivation) in order to be a good networker — the logic of the college frat — which is why the single parent is the perfect image of the new “network-from-home” economic order.

And he further notes on his own page that he’s really trying to get at “the ways identity gets linked to performances of independency and stigmatizations of dependency.” The Pursuit of Happyness thus links these themes: labor as a public act; the family as a private act; performance of autonomy (from the social), together with a corresponding (constituent?) devaluation of social ties. The single parent is a particularly good site for these themes because there’s already an assumed loss of autonomy that would have been provided by the dual parent household (i.e., the caretaking that “frees up” action of the other parent). Barring this classical structure of autonomy (the oikos always holds up the action in the polis), the single parent must combine spheres of activity (political, social, economic, familial) more intensely. And, of course, reach out to social support networks in order to simulate the autonomy created in the dual-parent household. From the perspective of autonomy, these two aspects—intensity of multiple activities (creative autonomy) and dependence on social support networks (simulated or outsourced autonomy)—determine the scene of single parenting, so it would seem strange that cultural productions of the single parent tend to celebrate the first while devaluing the second.

It’s a good place to pick up on the discussion of our Italian Ideologists, and particularly their multiple readings of Hannah Arendt, who was, of course, keyed in precisely on the relationship between the household (reproduction), the social and economic (production), and politics (action). Without rehearsing the details or numerous qualifications, Arendt saw authentic politics (freedom and action) exemplified in the Greek polis, and particularly in its supposedly strict division from the scene of production and reproduction (the household, or oikos). The household/economy is the realm of necessity, the needs of the body, biological life. The agora is the realm of freedom from precisely biological necessity. If the household is structured around the preservation of life as it encounters privation, in other words, the agora is constituted through putting oneself at public risk to create a dynamic and differentiated common. The first is concerned with mortality, while the second is concerned with immortality. But “immortality,” for Arendt, cannot mean simply “fame,” in the way the kiddies say that they want to be famous so that their “name will live on long after they’re gone.” Rather, fame, as a supposed species of immortality, is quite rightly subtitled “I wanna live forever,” which is to say, it is actually a species of the concern for mortality. For Arendt, the immortaliy that becomes the object in the authentic polis is not the immortality of the person (through the name or otherwise), but rather of common structures and affects that can be abstracted from the individual, like, say, democracy or Law. It is in only through their departure from the biological needs of individuals that they become “common” in a political sense. And it is through the reintegration of biology and political action that an authentic common space disintegrates.

(Manifesto Note: Needless to say, Seven Red disagrees with all of this, which is why we don’t have one blog for “academic” writing, another for “politics,” and another for babygirl pictures: it’s all of a piece, playa. We dislike the blogosphere’s silly celebration of the amateur, and the professionals‘ equally silly defense of professionalism. We want “Mommy blogs” that also do vicious takedowns of the culture of childhood! We want foreign policy analysis next to descriptions of last night’s Dora the Explorer episode! We spit at internet marketing advice that insists your blog have a “theme” in order to get more hits and links! Fuck hits. We don’t want a public. We want tempos that twist privatization!)

With the emergence of a particular form of individualism through Christian dogma, this division begins to degrade: the preservation of life (and its attendant efficiencies) spread into the political. The Middle Ages see entire societies governed as if they were households: the pater familias model of the monarchical “state.” In the modern era, the function of the pater familias is distributed in vast administrative bureaucracies; as Foucault would say, the exercise of (bio)power gets lighter, more efficient. But the distance from authentic politics is still there, since the function of the administrative apparatus is increasingly the “care” of the population. While this process is most clearly drawn out in The Human Condition, it runs through all of her works, the stakes of which, of course, are the analysis of totalitarianism.

So, to take the most well-known example, Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann is bound up in the distinction between “pure” politics as distinct from life and a political apparatus that administers life (biopolitics could just as easily administer death, flip over into what Esposito and Negri call thanatopolitics, is the point). That Eichmann struck Arendt as a sad little accountant rather than as a sovereign monster—the” banality of evil” thesis—isn’t a biographical point about Eichmann (one suspects that more hair and less horn-rimmed glasses would have pushed up Eichmann’s exceptional evil ratio); rather, it is simply evidence for the degradation of political action once the preservation of life—at one time the domain of oikos alone—infests and infects and invests the political sphere. Indeed, it would seem that exceptionality could not be evil, strictly speaking, in the same way Nietzsche says you cannot reproach the bird of prey for being a bird of prey. Evil is a quality of the bleating lambs; it emerges only when life infects action.

What Booga Face calls the “most public moment” in The Pursuit of Happyness, the networking at the football game, would not be public at all for Arendt, since it is economic activity, idion, idiocy. For Arendt, there is no “political economy,” or rather, it is a contradiction in terms. Similarly, there is no biopolitics; bios cannot qualify (authentic) politics, and vice versa. Our Italian friends find value, problems, and opportunities for strange reversals in this account, but we’ll have to pick that up next time, cuz this body’s shutting down for the night…

I read with interest Booga Face’s analysis of The Pursuit of Happyness, a film I haven’t seen, and actually actively avoided. One of the themes that came up in the analysis was the strange placement of efficiency and innovation, and I want to comment on that a bit here. Specifically, BF demonstrates that TPOH expends considerable ideological effort to locate efficiency and innovation as qualities of the entrepreneur rather than complex social networks (on which any autonomy is built). This is certainly the neoliberal doxa, and it saturates the discourse even where it would seem least likely (such as, for example, in the discourse of micro-finance and the like). But I’m more interested in the transposition of efficiency into a quality of the multitude.

Efficiency has always occupied a strange position in Left theory, which is not surprising given that efficiency was usually encountered, concretely, as intensification of exploitative relationships.  Even where efficiency became the watchword of the hilariously named “really existing socialism” (in the awful, if remarkably effective, five year plans and rapid industrialization schemes), it subsequently became precisely the point of attack for those identifying real socialism with its capitalist twin. When efficiency is grouped under the broader category of instrumental reason, it becomes the hinge that allows a whole range of mid-twentieth century thinkers to identify the two while also drawing both into a more general destiny of practice. When Ellul says technics, for example, he almost always means efficiency rather than any concrete technology; it is a mode of encountering the world shared by both capitalist and “real socialist” forms of production. And Ellul is only the most obvious case. You could run the gamut of thinkers who focused their energies on instrumental reason – you pick ‘em: Arendt, Adorno, Habermas – and see the horror of efficiency played out again and again, not, of course, efficiency in itself (as it operates in Ellul), but efficiency as the primary concern of praxis rather than one form of approach among others. One need not invoke Bataille’s fascination with productive excess and waste or Heidegger’s “creation of a standing reserve” to see how else this discourse plays out.

But I think that Booga Face is quite right that efficiency suddenly takes on a positive value in what I’ll repeat – tongue in cheek – as the Italian Ideology, or at least in Negri. Which is an interesting reversal. On the one hand, from the perspective of Marxist theory, it’s quite clear why the category of efficiency escapes the logic of exploitation within this discourse. In traditional Marxist theory, you find two primary forms of capital: constant capital and variable capital, where constant capital is (and this is a very simplified, blogified version) the “means of production,” such as factories and machines, while variable capital is (simplified again) living labor, or the potential of workers to produce. In a nutshell, barring innovation, you can’t squeeze any more “value” (which is to say, profit) out of constant capital: it actually degrades, of course, as Marx describes in some of his funnier passages. But you can squeeze more out of variable capital, it being, well, variable. Concretely, this is the horror of efficiency from the perspective of the worker: increased quotas, extension of the working day, maximum use of every available second of work time, etc. In terms of experience, this is the process through which capital attacks the body (or better, life) most viciously, as even a cursory reading of Taylor’s “experiments” would show you. It’s also the site around which class struggle organized itself from the industrial revolution onward (work slow downs, sabotage, agitation for the eight-hour day, etc.). If variable capital is the site of exploitation, then  efficiency is nothing but the techniques of extruding ever more value from variable capital. That it also requires a particular subjectivity that forgets the Being of beings (or whatever) is only gravy for critique after that. So, this is an old story, and hardly worth this oversimplified retelling at this point.

But the story is necessary to grasp the reversal proposed by the notion of the General Intellect, a concept that serves as the real engine for Negri, Virno, and others. If production has become primarily “immaterial,” which is to say, cognitive, communicative, and affective, then – and this is the strong claim from Negri, as I take it – living labor is transposed with constant capital, because what is constant is the not a factory or a machine, but the totality of cognitive, communicative, and affective practice. It’s not a mistake, in this sense, that the very concept of the General Intellect is taken from Marx’s “Fragment on Machines.” If, for Marx, the machine (that is, constant capital) was a concretized instance of general social knowledge for industrial production (in other words, any given technology is a materialization of the whole of technoscientific knowledge), the emergence of immaterial labor simply bypasses the “material” of the machine. But when it does so, nobody really owns the (non)machine of the General Intellect any more. In effect, capital, in its development, gives away the means of production - in that “constant capital” is no longer materialized in an “ownable” machine,” but distributed to the entirety of the social field. This is why capital, for Negri, becomes absolutely parasitical when it comes to immaterial labor: it is not simply relatively parasitical anymore (Marx’s vampire), since it doesn’t even provide production with a set of means or organizational techniques.

Of course, this is a fiction to some extent; it’s a fiction that does a better job of explaining the frenetic insistence on intellectual property rights over the last 30 years than any liberal explanation I’ve seen. Even, however, if we grant that what immaterial labor really means is that capital overtakes the whole of social life (i.e., that real subsumption doesn’t structurally empower anybody, or that play becomes work rather than the reverse), Negri is still correct that work in such an arrangement is immeasurable from the perspective of surplus value, or that variable capital becomes an extremely troubled category, since production occupies a different “temporality.” The only time of innovation (or of comforting, caring for, and other affective labor) is the time of kairos, which lacks the quantitative dimension that would allow measure. And if variable capital no longer maintains a body-time consistency that can be worked on by the industrial engineer or the mid-level manager, then you need something else to ground value. How about a ridiculous “retreat” to pump up your subjective enthusiasm for the work process? It’s as reasonable and impotent a response as any other (and maybe as terrible as the Taylorist subdivision of the worker’s body). Better yet, how about an entire discipline devoted to teaching workers the subjective experience of kairos as a means of training for the (new) immaterial work process.  Something else to measure value, see?

For Negri, this something else is the financial markets; he’s also correct that finance is a laughable substitute as a measuring device, as the recent confusion relating to the “sub-prime” or “credit crisis” amply demonstrates. Everytime Citigroup or some other bank writes down another $8 billion in CDO losses, they proclaim again that the financial markets have no idea how to measure value – they literally don’t know the value of the assets they even hold. But the other result is that efficiency, which was constituted concretely by techniques of extruding surplus value from variable capital, fails to hit the same object: the body and life of the worker. Certainly, there are no shortage of contemporary organizational theories that promote messy inefficiency as a management strategy; as Virno notes, the old factories used to say “Quiet! Men Working,” while today the mantra is “Network! Talk! You’re at Work!” (The worries that employees in information sectors waste too much time surfing the Internet and IM’ing always seem decidedly half-hearted). But this just indicates a slackening of efficiency as it is classically understood. What’s more interesting is whether efficiency itself is transformed in this process (in its operation and concept) to lose the character that actuated so much critique in modernity. To get to this, I want to work through why Hannah Arendt’s work becomes so central in the “Italian Ideology.” Maybe tomorrow…

On the contrary, the impression is that the domain of law is gaining terrain both domestically and internationally; the process of normativization is investing increasingly wider spaces. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that juridical language per se reveals itself to be incapable of illuminating the profound logic of such change. When one speaks of “human rights,” for example, rather than referring to established juridical subjects, one refers to individuals defined by nothing other than the simple fact of being alive. Something analogous can be said of the dispositif of sovereignty. Anything but destined to weaken as some had rashly forecast (at least with regard to the world’s greatest power) sovereignty seems to have extended and intensified its range of action – beyond a repertoire that for centuries had characterized its relation to both citizens and state structures. – Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy

On the day that we learn Berlusconi will deploy 2,500 troops from the Italian Army to “supplement” the police and carabinieri in an “anti-crime” effort, I finished another of the spate of fascinating philosophical texts coming out of Italy, Roberto Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Last week, I finished Paolo Virno’s latest, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, which I pre-ordered like a pathetic teenage fan anticipating the new album of my favorite band. Ah well. We all have our things, I guess. Perhaps the best result of Hardt and Negri’s Empire is the renewed interest and subsequent translation of a whole body of Italian thought – thought, to be somewhat melodramatic, forged in the crucible of the 1970′s, the student and worker struggles, the Legge Reale, the Movement of ’77, the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, the crackdown of 1979, and prison, always the shadow of the prison experience.

Much of this emerging work is, of course, responding to H&N; Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude is certainly much darker in its assessments of the “constitutive power of the Multitude,” or at least the version of “love” (or affirmative biopower) that it leaves us with. Not darker in the sense of retreating from such an affirmative power ( a move generally left to the truly gloomy Agamben), but a much more frightening framework for the way the affirmations are turned against themselves, particularly when it comes to labor. In his previous work, particularly the essay “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment” (in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics), Virno usually ends with a decidedly half-hearted notion that the same forms of subjectivity and action he just outlined as particularly brutal can themselves be affirmed otherwise. But it has seemed rather like a theoretical dogma: to suggest otherwise would be nostalgia. But you can see how the real peddlers of nostalgic politics get to slap Multitude around, and establish their resentful purchase. Where nostalgia always has a programmatic response ready to hand (called “yesterday”), the affirmative politics of what’s been called, snarkily enough for Left polemics, “The Italian Ideology” always seems to end on a fuzzy note, especially where Francis of Assisi makes his appearance.

This “love” business always bothered me, not least because the swerve around sovereignty and the state of exception – now returned rapidly in the lawless Bush regime and their torture apparatus, and in the blithe manner in which Berlusconi deploys the military to combat supposed street crime – the swerve, to repeat, always seems rather insufficient. Both Esposito and Virno tackle this problem directly, focusing explicitly on the state of exception, and the relationship between the “norm” and what it seeks to normalize (which is to say, the relationship between what we used to call, in the key of liberalism, politics and nature). I’m waiting for Negri’s The Porcelain Workshop, at which point I think I’ll produce a review essay on the three books. For now, though, I’d say that the Esposito should be required reading, and the Virno I’ll have to think about more (Virno’s prose tends to be so simple that his ideas need to rest a bit before they flower).

Just saw the news that Albert Hofmann died. It’s amazing that Hofmann was 32 when he first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide while working for the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, Sandoz, and 37 when he became the first human being to ingest LSD-25. Hofmann had been working with various ergot derivatives when he accidentally synthesized a substance that would change the course of history in the 20th century. If you haven’t read LSD: My Problem Child, you should. It is a document of primary importance for the understanding of 20th century scientific development – the flip side and hidden twin of the Manhattan Project in more ways than one.

Just as a side note, Henry Luce, founder of Time Inc. and really the father of modern conservatism much more than Buckley, took LSD-25 often with his wife, playwright and congressional representative Claire Booth Luce. He even pushed (so to speak) stories on the “miracle drug” on his editors at Time and Life. He also took psilocybin mushrooms with R. Gordon Wasson, who first brought them to the United States after trips (so to speak) to Huautla region of Mexico in the early 1950′s. Wasson was an amateur mycologist and an investment banker at JP Morgan; like Luce, he was a staunch anti-communist.

But if it so happen, that being met, they passe their time in relating some Stories, and one of them begins to tell one which concernes himselfe; instantly every one of the rest most greedily desires to speak of himself too; if one relate some wonder, the rest will tell you miracles, if they have them, if not, they’l fein them – Thomas Hobbes, De Cive

The Number 1 reason not to talk to strangers in airports.

At dusk, while we were all stretched along the canal bank eating dinner, two Marine gunships came down on us and began strafing us, sending burning tracers up along the canal, and we ran for cover, more surprised than scared. “Way to go, motherfucker, way to pinpoint the fuckin’ enemy,” one of the grunts said, and he set up his M-60 machine gun in case they came back. “I don’t guess we gotta take that shit,” he said. -Michael Herr, Dispatches

While popular history generally locates the shock of the Tet Offensive in Saigon – where the American Embassy compound was breached and where Lt. Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan summarily executed an NLF soldier in front of American news cameras – some of the most vicious fighting was going on to the north, in Hue. There, Marine 1/5 and 2/5, along with the Cavalry and ARVN units, battled PAVN regulars for a major Vietnamese city. The siege of the Citadel of Hue lasted most of the month of February, and was beamed into American living rooms in all its horror.

We get the narrative version of the Battle of Hue in Stanley Kubrik’s Full Metal Jacket. In the Vietnam portion of the film, the action follows the Marines of Hotel Two Five (H Company, Second Battalion Fifth Marine Regiment), and a Stars and Stripes journalist and photographer who have joined them from Da Nang. Michael Herr, who I’ve been quoting in this segment, wrote much of the dialogue for FMJ, and a lot of it comes straight out of Dispatches. Herr also wrote Willard’s voice over in Apocalypse Now: “Never get off the boat. Absolutely goddamn right.”

Kubrik’s film often gets flak from veterans groups because the setting looks nothing like Hue. Indeed it doesn’t. Kubrik filmed it in the same bombed out apartment complexes where he filmed A Clockwork Orange. In England. (In a strange connection, she‘s English cousins actually run the company that provided the palm trees for FMJ. The company provides flora and fauna for English films; they also did all the floral arrangements for Four Weddings and a Funeral.) I actually like Kubrik’s decision, and its devious anti-naturalist wink. It doesn’t matter what Hue really looked like, Kubrik seems to be saying. From the point of view of the American military, the whole war was like World War II redux, so why not make the Hue look like a bombed out European city? Anexact representations are usually more telling – yet more evidence of Kubrik’s genius.

I might have to get back to naturalism some time soon. I love The Wire, but I do find it disturbing that people praise it for being so “realistic.” When did we all turn into Emile Friggin’ Zola again?

In any case , if we want to go from the anexact to whatever shadow of the Real that combat photography allows us to hold on to, Hue is the place. The pictures that came out of the three week battle were virtually uncensored, and raw as can be. The following image – taken by Stars and Stripes photographer John Olson, is perhaps one of the most famous pictures of the war. Depicting wounded Marines being brought back from the battle line down a street dubbed “Rocket Alley,” the image ran as a giant two page spread in Life Magazine in late February, 1968. Click the pictutre for the larger image to get the full effect.

Wounded from C and D Company, First Battalion Fifth Marine Regiment being evacuated from the Citadel, 15 February, 1968.

One more from Herr:

“It was at this point that I began to recognize almost every casualty, remember conversations we’d had days or even hours earlier, and that’s when I left, riding a medevac with a lieutenant who was covered with blood-soaked bandages. He’d been hit in both legs, both arms, the chest and head, his ears and eyes were full of caked blood, and he asked a photographer in the chopper to get a picture of him like this to send to his wife.” -Michael Herr, Dispatches

Saigon in the Emergency

After enough time had passed and memory receded and settled, the name itself became a prayer, coded like all prayer to go past the extremes of petition and gratitude: Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, say again, until the word lost all its old load of pain, pleasure, horror, guilt, nostalgia. Then and there, everyone was just trying to get through it, existential crunch, no atheists in foxholes like you wouldn’t believe. Even bitter refracted faith was better than none at all, like the black Marine I’d heard about during heavy shelling at Con Thien who said “Don’t worry, baby, God’ll think of something.” – Michael Herr, Dispatches

I’ll be posting a few entries over the next month to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Tet Offensive, which began January 30, 1968 with some smaller scale attacks in I and II Corps, with the main offensive kicking off on January 31. Mostly, I’ll just post some passages from Michael Herr’s classic account in Dispatches; there are certainly more historically detailed accounts out there (Don Oberdorfer’s Tet: The Turning Point in the Vietnam War being at the top of the list), and certainly more military-history styled accounts, but for humor, understated pathos, and just knock-you-down good prose, it’s hard to beat Herr. I had students read the long first chapter, Breathing In, for a class I taught called “The Politics of Ingestion.” They loved it. What did it have to do with ingestion? Well, if you’ve read Dispatches, you’d get a sense of it. The unit – on rhetorical style – was called “The War (on Drugs).” So then, this opening passage from the second chapter, called simply Hell Sucks:

During the first few weeks of the Tet Offensive the curfew began early in the afternoon and was strictly enforced. By 2:30 each day Saigon looked like the final reel of On the Beach, a desolate city whose long avenues held nothing but refuse, windblown papers, small distinct piles of human excrement and the dead flowers and spent firecracker casings of the Lunar New Year. Alive, Saigon had been depressing enough, but during the Offensive it became so stark that, in an odd way, it was invigorating. The trees along the main streets looked like they’d been struck by lightning, and it became unusually, uncomfortably cold, one more piece of freak luck in a place where nothing was in its season. With so much filth growing in so many streets and alleys, an epidemic of plague was feared, and if there was ever a place that suggested plague, demanded it, it was Saigon in the Emergency. American civilians, engineers and construction workers who were making it here like they’d never made it at home began forming into large armed bands, carrying .45′s and grease guns and Swedish K’s, and no mob of hysterical vigilantes ever promised more bad news. You’d see them at ten in the morning on the terrace of the Continental waiting for the bar to open, barely able to light there own cigarettes until it did. The crowds on Tu Do Street looked like Ensor processioners, and there was a corruption in the air that had nothing to do with government workers on the take. After seven in the evening, when the curfew included Americans and became total, nothing but White Mice patrols and MP jeeps moved in the streets, except for a few young children who raced up and down over the rubbish, running newspaper kites up into the chilling wind.

Saigon in the Emergency: