Nielsen's social networking site

I guess it was inevitable. Maybe I can go there to chat about homescan as well...

Strategy of Refusal

For those interested in the strategy of refusal, here is a link to Tronti's original essay.

The Lost Freedom to be Grumpy in the post-Fordist economy

I have been struggling with the ever-present “what is he up to and what does he have to say about it?” questions regarding our new friend Virno. I would be interested in hearing how others are answering these twin questions for themselves—I have found the “10 Theses” section at the end of this week’s piece very helpful in my own attempts to come up with some answers to these basic placement questions.
I was formulating a post calling Virno to task for leaving out any discussion of the relationship of worker to work in his characterizations of the post-1977 “post-Fordist environment.” Isn’t one of the problems of capitalism supposed to be the alienating, mind-numbing effects of working in a factory as an unthinking cog in the factory machine? But then I realized that this is a significant part of what he is talking about. For me, Virno’s characterizations of the new requirements of workers in the post-Fordist work world make a lot more sense if I think of the salesperson at a department store rather than someone whose computer usage is being mined by a multi-national for profit (though I think much of what he says applies to this latter category, too.) The salesperson must bring to bear in his or her work behavior very many aspects of his or her socialization. That is, to do the work even passably well (i.e., to at least keep the job), the salesperson must show a high degree of social and communicative skills, not just with customers but especially with co-workers and bosses. Now certainly these skills would have helped the Fordist worker to get along or even, in some cases, to advance and succeed—union organizers, for example, would similarly have to show a high level of social and communicative skills. But what (as I see Virno pointing out) has changed in the current work world is that work has expanded to include these “socialization” skills as a requirement in the production process, i.e., as a requirement of the actual work itself. The alienation of the worker under this scenario is pushed much deeper (repressed more)—the worker loses the “right” or option of coming to work alienated and grumpy but still being able to do the job. Now a cheerful and chipper attitude has become a requirement of the labor process, so the labor process can be seen as having expanded into this once-private realm of thoughts and feelings (at least insofar as these thoughts and feelings play out in terms of one’s behavior at work).
Could a successful college professor be grumpy and uncommunicative—not just on occasion, but as a standard way of being? Probably not, especially if we expand “uncommunicative” here to include not publishing. Would the worker collective in the past have been any more tolerant or protective of a grumpy and uncommunicative worker than a post-Fordist faculty department trying to decide on a vote for tenure?
I would, by the way, put in a vote for the paragraph on “Page 99” that begins with “The masterpiece of Italian capitalism...” as a brief answer to the “What is he up to?” question.

A few historical details

This may be only tangentially relevant, but I couldn't help noticing the inaccuracies/omissions in how the emergence and decline of the autonomist movement in Italy is recounted in the foreword. It mentions the "strategy of tension" and the supposed terroristic activities of groups such as the Red Brigades, but it fails to define what the strategy of tension actually was, or to mention that a lot of the acts of terrorism and violence were actually carried out by neo-fascist groups (sometimes in complicity with the secret services and the mafia), with the purpose of discrediting leftist radicalism and legitimizing repressive actions by the authorities (the most famous of the cases was probably the Piazza Fontana bombing, blamed on anarchists but actually carried out by fascists). The foreword also inaccurately blames the assassination of Aldo Moro on the Red Brigades, which is not an undisputed fact; the Red Brigades had nothing to gain by killing him and it has been alleged that the actual perpetrators were the aforementioned right-wing groups, trying to sabotage a potential coalition between the Christian Democrats and the Communists.

The relevance of these facts may lie in the fact that the revolutionary potential of autonomist resistance is undercut by its vulnerability to (state and non-state) repression. To give some non-Italian examples, autonomist tactics have been widely put into practice throughout Europe in the form of squats and autonomous centres. However, the success of these places of resistance has depended on the benevolence of the state. In the UK, the squatting scene was finished off in the 80s thanks to Maggie Thatcher, but in recent years there has been a crackdown on squats and autonomous centres all over Europe (Berlin, Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Barcelona etc). In Vienna, the EKH autonomous centre was evicted after the building was bought by a neo-Nazi organization.

Similarly, in the context of the information society, the revolutionary potential brought about by new labor relations is undercut by capital's ability to adapt to change and to devise new forms of repression and control.

Marcuse and Virno

I'll just pick on one of Virno's points, "Thesis 1" that states: "Post-fordism (and with it the multitude) appeared, in Italy, with the social unrest which is generally remembered as the movement of 1977". However, the association of new labor relations with new ways of defining potentially revolutionary social groups was not, uhm, new. Marcuse had challenged traditional Marxist concepts of class conflict and capitalist crisis back in the 60s. Here's a relevant quote, taken from a posthumous collection called The New left and the 1960s (sorry, I don't know how to do footnotes here):

"It seems to me that the concept of the new working class simply comprehends and anticipates tendencies that are going on before our own eyes in the material process of production in capitalism, namely that more and more highly qualified salaried employees, technicians, specialists, and so on, occupy a decisive position in the material process of production. And even in orthodox Marxian terms, just in this way become members of the industrial working class. What we see, I submit to you, is an extension of the potential mass base over and beyond the traditional industrial working class to the new working classes that extend the rage of the exploited."

Marcuse had argued as far back as in One-Dimensional Man for the revolutionary potential of (racial, sexual, ethnic) minorities, radical intellectuals and non-integrated groups in general. Since "multitude" as opposed to "people" represents plurality as opposed to collective integration, could we make connections between Marcuse and Virno? Or am I simplifying things too much?

Kafka on the Multitude

Kafka's story of the mouse folk and their virtuoso Josephine is telling. All the mouse folk could pip, they did it all the time as they did their work. A particular mouse could pip really well and eventually became a mouse celebrity. The point where this can become depressing is that the mouse folk can adapt to the various demands of the star until she becomes bother, to teach them all a lesson she decides to stop singing, the people no longer care, they all can pip.

Virno would not appreciate this cynical attachment, I appreciate Kafka. If Josephine were less like Brittney Spears her strategy would be for reversability of power relations not withdrawal from them. This is at least more optimistic then the ending of the Hunger Artist.

I like to relate most things to Kafka stories.

--dan

Exit?...No Exit!

I would like to examine Virno’s concept of “exit” as he explains it at the end of Day 2. I find the concept very strange, and perhaps easily dismissable. First, here’s what I think he’s saying:

Exit designates a defection (69). People exit from the state, and instead of seizing the means of production (as in the old Marxist model) and setting up a new state they choose otherwise. The examples Virno uses are American pioneers and young Italians in the 70s who decided they’d prefer to work only part-time. While both examples are of physical exits, Virno also shows that another type of exit is possible by disengaging part of the general intellect from labor (see end of post). These examples of specific instances of exit are clearly not feasible: in the first case there is no “free land” to exit to in the 21^st century, and in the second, part-time work is not an option open to anyone who needs to support more than him or herself. In this short final section on exit, what we exit from is vaguely assumed as easily identifiable and what we exit to is left completely untheorized. What would exit mean today? It could conceivably mean geographical exit (there are communes on privately owned land, for example), however this is unlikely. Does it mean defection from the general intellect? And is such a move possible or desirable? If we agree (as I think we did in class) that the general intellect is meant to represent sedimented ways of perceiving, knowing and being-in the world, then what kind of disruption would constitute a defection? The assumption of a schizophrenic subjectivity a la Deleuze and Guattari? Is the recipe to “make yourself a body without organs,” whatever that means? There is some hint of this in Virno’s phrases “exuberance of possibility” and “unrestrained invention.” However, let’s forget for a moment the fact that material constraints would seem to make exit an actual impossibility and think about it for a minute as a choice from the perspective of existentialism as a theoretical possibility. To make a bad pun, I’d like to ask if there can be any such thing as an exitentialism.

Do two bad jokes make one good one? Here’s another, just in case: When theorizing the multitude, we would do well to remember the sentiment captured in the famous dictum from Sartre’s play No Exit: “Hell is other people.” I bring up Sartre for another reason: is there some discrepancy between Virno’s theorization of the general intellect and his claim that the multitude is freely able to choose an “exit strategy”? In order to assume that exit is possible one must assume that the multitude can disrupt the regime of perception (the dominant modes of being in the world) enough so that they can attain escape velocity. As the television show Survivor (and more recently Kid Nation and the game Second Life—see my earlier posts) shows us this is hardly conceivable. In Survivor individuals are ostensibly removed the network of relations that sustain their domination (they exit). However, the world that these people are put into can only make sense to them through the maintenance of certain basic assumptions of capitalist society: private property, gender hierarchy, and a pervasive social Darwinism. What Virno’s assumption amounts to is the other existentialist dictum that “existence precedes essence,” even though Virno seems to say the exact opposite in his theorization of the general intellect (and given his association with French poststructuralist thinkers, we must guess that he would agree that there is no existence without socially essential pre-existing structures). This discrepancy is important for at least two reasons:

1) The assumption that exit can exist as an option for the multitude presupposes that something like existential choice is possible.

2) If the multitude can in fact choose, then it is responsible for the multitude as a whole, and so exit can only be understood as an irresponsible choice.

Sartre explains: “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism…. Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders. And, when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.” If we assume that we are capable of making ourselves then we assume responsibility (does “make yourself a body without organs” echo Sartre’s existentialism?). This is the contradiction between choice and exit that also links existentialism to a politics: if one can choose, one cannot ethically choose exit. Indeed, there is no exit.

Here’s where I get stuck: at the very end of Day 2 Virno writes: “What is at stake, obviously, is not a spatial "frontier," but the surplus of knowledge, communication, virtuosic acting in concert, all presupposed by the publicness of the general intellect. Defection allows for a dramatic, autonomous, and affirmative expression of this surplus; and in this way it impedes the "transfer" of this surplus into the power of state administration, impedes its configuration as productive resource of the capitalistic enterprise” (70). I’m going to lay out what I think this means in a series of statements:

1) Virno writes: “General intellect needs to be understood literally as intellect in general: the faculty and power to think, rather than the works produced by thought.” And “In so far as it organises the production process and the ‘life-world’, the general intellect is certainly an abstraction, but a real one with a material and operative function. However, the general intellect comprises knowledge, information and epistemological paradigms, so it also sharply differs from the real abstractions typical of modernity that embodied the principle of equivalence.” The faculty and power to think, it should be noted, is produced by pre-existing social structures (family, school, work, etc.) and so is not innocent or natural. In fact, it has a character that is specific to the current regime of production.

2) One form of resistance consists in disengaging the faculty of thought from the regime of production. The question I am asking is whether thought would make sense without the structuring principles of thought remaining attached to the social configuration that sustains them?

3) Virno frames the question like this: “Is it possible to split that which today is united, that is, the Intellect (the general intellect) and (wage) Labor, and to unite that which today is divided, that is, Intellect and political Action?” If the answer is “yes,” then this split must manifest a “non-state run public sphere.” This can take two forms: civil disobedience (a para-state public sphere) or exit (a public sphere in the absence of the state).

I am confused about how such a split is possible, because it seems that the general intellect is too tightly tied up with labor to be disengaged from it. I think Virno may realize this and that’s why he only wants to disengage only some “surplus,” but I’m not sure what or where that surplus is. In summation: exit presupposes a more tenuous relation between the general intellect and labor than I am willing to allow at this point, and in any event, the very assumption that such a disengagement is possible necessitates against choosing exit if we accept the existentialist doctrine that choice means responsibility. We can choose civil disobedience as a strategy of resistance because in this case we assume responsibility to everyone.