Deflection versus Appropriation: a note on argumentative strategy

It really feels like D-W focuses on side stepping criticism rather then assimilating it. Before the implication driven analysis, I just want to note that this doesn’t pass the mirror test, D-W’s accounts often would apply to his own work more then to others. My impact won’t be contradictions bad, but there are some really important insights he could use to make his alternative better. D-W wants to read D&G with out getting into their critique of psychoanalysis and normalization. If the concrete is desirable the schizophrenic patient is not where your going to find it. D-W seems to read D&G through a secondary text written by Negri and Guattari. It feels like there is some shadow side work happening here to distinguish D&G from Guattari alone or Guattari and Negri. This might get to a capitalism critique minus the critique of psychoanalysis. His footnotes didn’t have a full cite for this, as best I can tell it is the book “Communists like us” which doesn’t appear much in the literature, there are some nettime postings about it from the mid 90’s and not much more. If you have a copy I would like to borrow it. This citation is particularly troubling for me as it is the source for D-W’s reading of the US anti-nuclear movement, the reading utilized in CyberMarx seems to be quite clearly at odds with the prevailing reading of these events in the Org Comm literature. As for his attempts to dismiss potentially complementary authors I have two particular implications for this argument.

For the first time in chapter 6 he actually cites Haraway. D-W moves away form haraway because she doesn’t have clear enough divisions between strategy and tactics, meaning that almost everything could be a cyborg so the argument wouldn’t be analytically useful. The point of modernity is that it colonizes many social relations particularly through self valorization, which means that a resistance strategy that permeates the field of social relations has unique potential relative to a strategy that focuses on single instances of resistance. What this means is that he could appropriate and extend her analysis to explain how his multitude could be actualized. Absent some wide reading of inclusion in a moment/identity it is unclear where resistance will come from.

Radical democracy can inform his project to create larger social ends, instead of reading Laclau and Mouffe and dismissing them he should appropriate their theory. Example: a provisional hegemony between garment workers would be a productive collation for Laclau and Mouffe where he could use their work. To develop a more robust theory of social movements which would get him out of problems with examples and other arguments. He could position CyberMarx then to have a resistance strategy with some easier praxis. I often find myself feeling like CyberMarx is Zizek written by someone with a more organized thought process. Zizek often tries to handle radical democracy through ideological critique which is not nearly as trenchant in D-W.

In seeing D-W’s answer to hybrididty the social struggles he isolates would get swamped as well. If Bhabha can be effectively answered by conflating all acts of valorization with defeat then there really are no strategies for refusing the power relations of the status quo. Consider it this way; if any risk of valorization would swamp the Subaltern then only a strategy of pure refusal would constitute a workable strategy. H/N handle this effectively in the excerpt from Empire from last Tuesday defeats a pure withdrawal from global systems. This really should be no surprise as our earlier readings of D-W were finding his accounts of resistance quite thin, he didn’t cite Bhabha but Arif Dirlik who cites Bhabha. This has important implications for how he runs his argument, the window where resistance is effective but not captured by capitalism is really small.

D-W would do well to appropriate challengers rather then to try to dismiss their alternatives.

--dan