Tuesday night was song night, a small event put on by the education department of the union. A small collection of people gathered, the sort that a friend calls 'cultural wobblies'. My partner and I served as the youth crew, since we're under 50 (pretty far under). I brought my little red songbook (the only little red book worth mentioning) and the banjo and guitar wielding trio kindly obliged my requests for We Have Fed You All A Thousand Years and Dump the Bosses Off Your Back. My ear is terrible but it was fun singing with the small group. Sure, the songs and the style are dated - a little too 'Kumbaya' around the campfire for my hipster tastes - but I like the portability of it, and the 'everybody join in!' kind of vibe. Hip Hop Piquetero is awesome, but I have no idea how to participate. One woman sang a song by a folk singer named Charlie King, called Bring Back The Eight Hour Day. I heard it a labor movement related thing a few years ago, before I really got what was at stake. I'm older now, older in part form working and hating it, so it hit closer to home. There are lines about overtime (not having time to enjoy the extra money) and about salaried work and how it just means extra hours. Like Dalla Costa says, if you're not paid hourly then who cares how long it takes you to get your work done? There's also a line about commuting,more of that unpaid work for the boss, and uncompensated expenses that the bosses are happy to see expand. On the salaried work thing, my wrists have been hurting at my office job. I'm on the computer all day and I must doing something not ergonomically kosher. I have to watch that. "Immaterial" labor can still fuck up your body, especially for those of us who don't take adequate steps (enough sleep or exercise, etc) to preserve the saleability of our commodity. I went to another union thing last night, spoke with some folks in a shop who are organizing. They've done great stuff, and are keeping together despite management hitting back. It was really energizing and inspiring to be there. We told them how people are paying attention to their campaign all over the US in our union, and we expressed our support. And we said we want to work with them to develop support beyond moral support, that's being developed right now. One of the people at the meeting has some health problems partly connected to the work. Management makes the workers go to a company doctor - in their time off - to get excuses for work missed due to these types of health issues. More unpaid work. One thought that comes to mind is about this potentiality stuff in Virno and others. Clearly we have a potential to work, a subset of other potentials. And work can sometimes reduce both these sets of potentials - I can't play music when my wrists hurt, if I can't sleep I don't want to socialize or I'm less fun to be around, and these same conditions make me less productive on the clock. Capital digs own grave, maybe? Maybe, but who wants to get buried alive with it? One thing I thought of as part of my new job is about the continued erosions of the protection in place for people whose commodity (their body) becomes unsaleable. There's proceses to exclude people from unemployment, health care, social security pensions and disability, etc. Where I work now we have the option to pay certain expenses (commuting costs, health costs) with pre-tax dollars, reducing the amount of wages we pay tax on. And reducing the amoung paid into social security funds by employees, and the matching funds paid in by employeres. My partner, who has worked a lot in informal work, got her social security statement a while back. She has not paid in enough money to earn _any_ monthly stipend should she find herself permanently disabled and unable to work. I guess we'll just have to hope we find jobs that provide pensions and retirement health insurance before we're too old and worn out. This last makes me wonder again (or maybe I should say, admit my disagreement with) the idea that we're always productive all the time. (All the time? value productive? at the same rate?) I prefer to think in terms of a capacity, sometimes actualized for capital, sometimes actualized otherwise, maybe sometimes both at once, and maybe sometimes neither. This is I think particularly important with regard to the idea of a general income. Arguments, demands, actions, and practices for our reproduction and survival just can't be based on our productivity for the boss. That concedes way too much for me. "We are productive so we should get income" implies that anyone shown unproductive should NOT get income. On a micro-level it seems to me to mean that un- or less productive moments should be un- or less compensated, like my wrists and sleeplessness, or the person at the union meeting having to spend unpaid time to go to the doctor to keep a job after calling in due to health problems. Fuck that. Maybe this gets back to the legitimation stuff that Angela and I have been talking about. Wages, whether direct or part of the social wage, are not set by good arguments but by balances of force. Good arguments matter in so far as they impact balances of forces. That's all from me, my wrist's a little sore (it's a good think I took a break today at work and wrote this out on paper, I'm preserving my health and my productivity for the boss!) and I need to do the dishes. I'll try to remember sometime later to complain about the US healthcare system, labor law, and workplace organizing models. Over and out.

There's a punk band I quite like, called J Church. They have a song which includes the line "even my dreams these days have work related scenes". Ouch. At the last organizer job I had I started having work related dreams. Awful. My new job is more of a 40 hour a week thing, with normal daytime hours. Less hours but still tiring, especially since I'm an insomniac used to staying up and getting up late. Anyway, I stayed up super late downloading music Friday night, and at 7:20am saturday, four or so hours after turning in, I jolted awake, convinced I had slept through my alarm. I jumped out of bed, then realized it was Saturday. Like in that one Franca Rame monologue. It's really funny, unless one thinks much about it. Then it's awful. In the intro to Nights of Labor, Ranciere writes about some workers in 19th century France - "What they found intolerable was not exactly the poverty, the low wages, the uncomfortable housing, or the ever-present specter of hunger. It was something more basic: the anguish of time shot every day working up wood or iron, sewing clothes, or stitching footwear, for no other reason than to maintain indefinitely the forces of servitude with those of domination; the humiliating absurdity of having to go out begging, day after day, for this labor in which one's life was lost." He goes on to talk about the workers' "nights of studying, nights of boozing", as part of "other forms of existence beyond death, which may be beginning at this very moment in the attempt to put off as long as possible the entry into sleep, which will repair the powers of the servile machine." Reminds me of a quote by US punk icon Aaron Cometbus, talking about his time in high school. Having been told that he and his friends would be the building blocks of future society, Cometbus and his punk pals decided to fuck themselves up so badly that they could be the building blocks for nothing, nothing would be built on/out of them. I'll have to remember that the next time I can't sleep, it's somatic class war. I wonder about that, actually. My new job is a proper office job, tie and everything. I have to shave every morning, and had to buy new dress pants, dress shirt, and dress shoes (got a good deal on second hand stuff, outfitted myself completely for less than $100 including new shoes, in large part due to some creative - and time intensive - ebay searching by my partner). This is a cost of time, and of money. It means the wages are effectively less and/or it's additional unpaid work time. Housework? Maybe. Certainly reproductive labor, and makes it clear that reproductive labor is not the generic maintenance of bodies and making of new ones, but is reproduction of labor power in the specific form required for its sale in particular instances - clean shaven well groomed labor power with a tie at my newest place, labor power that is pursuing a Masters degree in education for one of my friends. Off to bed now, have to repair the commodity for its sale tomorrow morning, and its malcontent fantasizing tomorrow evening.

from some interview: "the separation of our lives and the public and private and the splitting of ourselves in the public and the private, is something that drains our power in a way. It delimits what we consider political and therefore what we can change collectively in our lives. The reason, at least I understand it from the us-feminist movements of the 70s especially, for that we consider the personal political, is because we want to say that these are relations that are social and open for collective transformation. If they are considered private, what it seems to me that designation does is to limit the collective political activity we can exert over them. In other words for me then, what the potential for liberation is that it opens up for political action; it opens up as a political issue and therefore as an object of our political activity. We don't in a way limit our scope of our politics. In other words, sexual relationships, relationships of intimacy, relationships between men and women, between men and men, between women and women - all of these are political and social relationships." "we're not particularly original with this thesis that the dominant paradigm of work is no longer the factory in the dominant countries. That's a fact which is more or less obvious to everyone. This doesn't mean, of course, that factory production no longer exists - it still exists in the dominant countries, it still exists in subordinated countries. What it means though, we have to reconceive what production means and what forms of labor are. One of our efforts has been to reconceptualize what's mean by labor, in a way broaden what the concept covers. There are two sources of inspiration or knowledge for this. One is, especially US or anglo feminist theory >from the 70s, trying to rethink questions of reproduction starting from domestic labor and thinking of how to conceive forms of labor that are not included in the wage system. one of the positive aspects of their efforts was broadening what is recognized as labor or production. The other is Deleuze/Guaratti and various theorists around them trying to think of explaining the concept of production for instance in their discussion of desiring production. It's another way of broaden the notion of labor and production." "end of the distinction between production and reproduction. It was not quite conceived as such but it was at least for me put on the agenda by US socialist feminist theory in the 70s because precisely that distinction between production and reproduction was used as a political weapon in a way against the kinds of work that was coded as reproductive. Anyway,, the ways in which the dominant forms of production have changed allow us today to recognize that perhaps never was this distinction sustainable. That's the way we're trying to think it now. This is also in a way the content of our notion of biopolitical production. It's not production of goods, or even goods and services but ultimately production of society itself. Production of subjectivities is also, and even fundamentally, what is going on. This requires an explanation of what we mean by immaterial labor. In the way we like to characterize the shift in global capitalist economy, beginning maybe from the 1970s - it's always difficult to date these things - is that there is now a hegemony of what we call immaterial labor. This doesn't mean of course that all labor is immaterial neither does it mean that the labor itself is immaterial. The term is supposed to grasp that the product of labor is immaterial in some sense meaning that in contrast, for instance, to the labor that produces a good such as a car or a television, this is labor that produces either knowledge or an affect. And these things are in that sense immaterial. Affect of production is an excellent example because obviously affect is all about the body. We're not merely talking about something incorporeal - it's eminently corporeal but the product is something immaterial. In this respect, because this kind of labor has achieved a hegemonic position in the economy meaning that it has the position of the highest productional value, it makes clear the unsustainability of such previous distinctions. The two most challenging ones are, like I said before, the distinction between production and reproduction which from the perspective of immaterial labor makes less and less sense; and the other is the distinction between labor time and the time of life. I mean, one is never not working if one considers production itself as the production of subjectivities." "when you take the variety of kinds of paid labor that involve affective labor, think of it from health care workers which are in a variety of scales: of course health care workers they're actually doing material work, too; but they also produce affect [...] nother example would be flight attendants who are also doing some sort of material work although a large part of their work is a production of affect. Once we start thinking of the production of affect, for me it's easy to move from that to production of subjectivity. What's important about this, too, is we recognize the production of subjectivity not as the metaphysical instance in the sense of it being done prior to us. Once we realize our active involvement in the production of our collective subjectivities then we can take the power of changing it and on acting on it. It seems to me in this sense at least that the production of subjectivity is a very "everyday act"." "nother example would be flight attendants who are also doing some sort of material work although a large part of their work is a production of affect. Once we start thinking of the production of affect, for me it's easy to move from that to production of subjectivity. What's important about this, too, is we recognize the production of subjectivity not as the metaphysical instance in the sense of it being done prior to us. Once we realize our active involvement in the production of our collective subjectivities then we can take the power of changing it and on acting on it. It seems to me in this sense at least that the production of subjectivity is a very "everyday act". "in previous periods, it could have seemed that production of goods was the object of capitalist production whereas increasingly now the biopolitical dimension is recognized more prominently." "One of the things that's so useful about the term subversion is the recognition of our already being implicated in forms of power. Subversion only happens from the inside. Sabotage too. You can start from Judith Buttler's notion of subversion in a sense of reperforming the norm but differently. So we're always already implicated in a certain performance of a normalizing social space but if we introduce difference into it, that's in a way a subversion of the norm." from Common Property " We developed our conception of affective labor from a series of studies by socialist feminists, mostly written in the 1980s, that tried to understand what has traditionally been designated as women‘s work with concepts like labor in the bodily mode, caring labor, kin work, and maternal work. One aspect common to these various studies was the effort to undo the conventional mind / body division – and particularly its correlate in the field of labor, intellectual versus manual – because it was an obstacle to accounting for what „women‘s work“ actually consists of. The concept of affective labor and immaterial labor as a whole thus is intended as an extension of this project to think labor outside the mind / body division. [...]n addition to challenging the mind body division, these and other socialist feminist studies of women‘s work also intended to challenge the economic division between production and reproduction. This project too is intrinsic to the concept of immaterial labor. In the context of communication and even more so in the context of the production of affects, the distinction between production and reproduction breaks down completely, because what is involved here is the production of social relationships and at the most general level the production of social life itself. These products are not objects that are created once and for all, but rather they are produced and reproduced in a constant stream of activity. The production and reproduction of social life – biopolitical production, the continuous production of the life of the polis – is from this perspective the most general activity and the highest scope of labor." "Aren‘t we distorting traditional communal activities by forcing them into the category of labor? My response to such objections is that indeed none of these activities are intrinsically labor – and in fact no activity is. The definition of labor is the object of struggles and what counts as labor today is the result of previous struggles. Capital seeks to define labor as any activity that directly produces economic value. Labor, from this perspective, must be read backwards in the production process: labor is what produces capital and all those activities that do not produce capital are not labor. It is important from the standpoint of capital, as I said before, that certain activities are coded as labor because labor is necessary to ground the right of property" "Here, I should note, we encounter another meaning of the term biopolitical production: all life activity is potentially today coded as labor and thus all of life is potentially under the control of capital. In fact, the progression toward all life activity becoming labor is advancing hand in hand with that toward all elements of life becoming private property. This might be called too the real subsumption of life under capital." "immaterial labor, and especially its affective component, challenges the traditional divisions between mind and body, posing instead a continuous interchange between the intellectual and the corporeal. This is where one should develop a theory of the productive flesh, since flesh is the name for that matter that is at once and indistinctly both intellectual and corporeal, subjective and objective. This is a flesh that produces and creates. In the second place, in the realm of biopolitical production, our practices, our performances, and our labor are constantly constituting all aspect of social life: norms, relationships, institutions, and so forth. Not only sex but all of life is produced and producible – and this is where one should develop a notion of monstrosity because the infinite producibility, transformability, mutability of life is the stuff of monsters, beautiful monsters and horrible monsters too. [...] The scene of biopolitical production is a stage on which the struggle for liberation has to be played out." "This new realm of production and this new producibility of life is reflected in the new forms of property that are emerging today. Corresponding to the newly central role of immaterial labor is a similarly central role of immaterial forms of property. This correspondence is no coincidence, I will argue, because the capitalist legitimation of private property has always been grounded on labor such that a shift in the forms of labor makes possible and necessary new forms of property. In particular, biopolitical production makes it possible that life itself can become private property." " My question, in other words, is not really can the security of the private immaterial property be defended against illegal threats – and indeed I assume that despite significant difficulties it can – but rather can the legitimacy of the private ownership of immaterial products be maintained? Force is secondary in the establishment and maintenance of capitalist relations of property; the logic of legitimation is its primary support." "arguments of social utility are very persuasive and carry great political value, but they too have little power within the capitalist legal framework. U.S. patent law does in fact state that „the promotion and progress of science and the useful arts is the main object of the patent system, and reward of inventors is secondary and merely a means to that end,“ but that does not mean that patents will be decided on that basis. Neither patents nor copyrights are awarded or denied on the basis of arguments of promoting the progress of science or social utility." "The knowledges that neem seeds can function as a safe pesticide and that turmeric as a healing agent were produced by hosts of agents that form a chain stretching over a long historical period. To credit as inventor the final individual to enter into this chain would be a great distortion of the process that produced the knowledge. Alternatively, apportioning accurate relative contributions to all the individuals involved would require an impossible calculation. In other words, legitimate property rights must involve an adequate representation of the production process but that representation here is thrown into crisis." "I do not think that this calculation difficulty and representation crisis of the labor logic of property is isolated to the knowledge production of traditional communities. I think rather that it is a general condition that affects all immaterial labor. First of all, in the realm of science this individual labor logic is based on a false representation of scientific practice. Scientific ideas are produced collaboratively, not only within each laboratory but in the scientific community at large. Think of attacking a scientific problem like adding weights that accumulated in a pile on one side of a scale. The work of each scientist adds a small weight and at some point the balance will tip. Crediting the solution to the individual who added the final piece is a very inadequate representation of the process as a whole. The only accurate representation would be that all the scientists who worked on it produced the solution collectively." " The same is true for the production of ideas, knowledges, and information in general. No one thinks alone; rather we all participate in a general social intellect. Consider, for example, the hypothetical case of an idea for an advertisement with a hip-hop musical theme. Imagine that the ad employee got the musical idea from a band he or she heard the night before and that band in turn developed its music out of a street vernacular. Who produced the idea? The individual attribution of ideas smacks of a false notion of genius. Originality is highly overrated. Thought is really produced socially, collectively. Finally, I would argue that all forms of immaterial labor are necessarily collective and social. Communication is an immediately cooperative, relational mode of activity. The production of affects too works through what is common."

If I were more conversant in Deleuze and Kierkegaard, I would try and argue that I am not being redundant, but rather enacting repetition as philosophical category. No can do, though. Instead I'm just going to hammer away repetively at this biopolitics thing and recognize that it is repetitive (though I do have a hope that it will work out good-repetitive, a la the Ramones, and not bad repetitive a la waged work). I mispoke when I said H/N think biopolitical/immaterial labor is new: "The argument, let me repeat, is not that immaterial labor did not exist before but rather that it has recently been accorded the dominant position in the economy and that such dominance has a series of important effects." (In Hardt, Common Property) That's almost weirder, though, because it means that the idea is that the hegemony of immaterial labor creates all this new human potential. Now, it could be that the hegemony of immaterial labor -- the hegemony of the sector/type of labor that bears the multitude-capacity -- means that now there is a chance that multitude can exist without getting killed off (an argument about contingent historical circumstances of power, conflict, and survivability). That kind of makes sense to me, but when I've tried to ask Hardt this he didn't like that idea (or else I wasn't able to pose the question clearly). The alternative, to say that there is some sort of new possibility for humanity opened up -- a sharing of the multitude-capacity, analogous to the party sharing it's revolutionary consciousness -- seems to me predicated on an idea of the working class as not itself a set/site of antagonisms and conflicts. That is, it seems to me to imply that there's this new capacity which needs to be handed out -- a problem of distribution -- rather than seeing a set of conflicting organizational and political etc goals in competition. (Reminds me of this Ranciere quote that I found,it's in the translator's intro to Night of Labor: "It is always in the heart of the worker aristocracy that a hegemonic fraction forms, presenting itself as THE proletariat and affirming the proletarian capacity to organize anohter social order, starting with the skills and values formed in its work and its struggle." [Ranciere, "Les maillon de la chaine (proletaires et dictatures)",Les Revoltes Logiques #2, Spring-Summer 1976, 5.] I took it to mean 'when someone expresses an essence of labor they are probably speaking on behalf of a labor aristocracy and universalizing one quality of the aristocracy in order to hide conflicts and power plays'.) On a related note, Brad Evans sent me a Foucault quote he found -- 'a question session On the geneology of ethics' reads as follows "q - isnt it logical, given these concerns, that you should be writing a geneology of bio-power? MF - I have no time for that now but, it could be done. in fact I have to do it!"' See also the text on the genealogies of biopolitics conference...

yet another in the continuing series of 'I should get the Marx books off the shelf again' moments for me ... I got in touch with Sabrina Ovan, who gave a paper (the abstract for which is online) on the novel Q and the general intellect at the Italian effect conference in Oz a while back. Sabrina sent me her paper. Very interesting. It's about the novel narrating general intellect, or enacting a moment of general intellect. Reading the paper a question struck me about general intellect, a question that now seems obvious, parallel to the questions I keep having about multitude -- is the category a category of philosophical anthropology/ontology (ie, a metahistorical or trans-historical category) or is the category a historical one, one for analysis of class composition (either political or technical)? The whole thing about biopolitics and labor that I've been thinking about with Angela parallels this question. I've said this before, but it strikes me that Hardt/Negri argue for a becoming-biopolitical of labor. This becoming is what makes multitude as a form of political life (subjectivity/organization) possible. They argue for this becoming-biopolitical on the grounds that labor is now affective etc. I'm not convinced. Here's my argument, roughly. Virno says in an interview that "the biopolitical is only an effect derived from the concept of labor-power". That seems silly. If we stand that on its head, though, we get what I take to be the most important part of the matter: "When there is a commodity that is called labor-power it is already implicitly government over life (...) because labor power is a paradoxical commodity,(it) is simply the potential to produce. As soon as this potential is transformed into a commodity, then, it is necessary to govern the living body that maintains this potential, that contains this potential." That is, labor power is biopolitical as such. To quote Panzieri on machinery "Capitalist 'planning' presupposes the planning of living labour". (And I think Panzieri is right when he says that planning is at the heart of capital. I would say, though he doesn't in these exact terms, that the planning of living labor is central to what capital is as a social relation.) A similar point is made by Federici's excellent book Caliban and the Witch -- primitive accumulation was a war on women, a biopolitical operation required for the creation of the commodity labor power. It seems to me that one can only say "now labor is biopolitical" by ignoring all of the above, which means effacing important histories and at least implicitly siding with the wrong side in many an opposition to historical movements. It also seems to me that it simply can not be the case that "now labor is biopolitical so now multitude is possible". To my mind, I think this can be cashed out one of two ways. One is to say that the capacity to be multitude (defined roughly as something like the capacity for autonomous production of social life in a fashion not determined by 'objective conditions', or as the ability to create political community not determined by/in the form of the state)has always existed in the biopolitical moments of social life, under capital and otherwise. So multitude is not new -- new idea, maybe, but not a new possibility. (Of course, it's historically specific, so 'multitude' now is different from 'multitude' at another point in time, but that's trivially true -- the same could be said of 'literature' or 'music' or any other term.) The other possibility is that the capacity to be multitude is not rooted in the biopolitical. If this is so then I think the whole matter turns into an analogue of one of the problems of Leninism: one sector (immaterial laborers/the party) has a certain capacity (produce itself as multitude/revolutionary agency) that other sectors don't have because they are limited somehow by the arrangement of production (the non-multitude/the 'masses' with their inability to get beyond trade union consciousness). The questions for this position would be as follows -- 1. how does the sector with the something special have the special capacity that it has? Why can it do what it can do, while the rest can not? This is a theoretical question. 2. How does this special sector relate to the rest? How does it put its special capacity in the service of the rest? This is an organizational/strategic question. I don't like this latter formulation of things, the multitude-as-vanguard or product of the vanguard, for political reasons as much as for theoretical onces. But, if there was a convincing argument made I would (by definition) be convinced. In the absence of such an argument, though, I'm going to go with the former formulation, the 'not so new after all' viewpoint. Not that there aren't new phenomena and new possibilities. (Every moment is unique, noveltly per se is not novel. The question is what is new that matters...) Rather, the newness is not one of "now labor is biopolitical" and "now multitude becomes possible". The newness is one that should be investigated, the situations or subjectifications or class compositions of the present and the political possibilities (in organizational terms) of the present. This was a long detour away from general intellect. Briefly, back on that -- there's a question in reading _Q_. Do we see general intellect as part of the framework of narration -- part of the story -- or do we see general intellect in the world that the story narrates? That is, does _Q_ embody/enact general intellect as part of the present, doing so in a way to tell a story about 16th century Germany -- a world without general intellct -- or does _Q_ tell a story in which we see that there is general intellect in the 16th century? (Again, general intellect is historical specific, like everything else, but that's not very interesting as a simple observation. This also leaves aside the general-intellect-as-literary-device thing, which I can't really do justice to.) If the latter, then this runs the same set of operations that were run above re: biopolitics/multitude, I think. That would mean that general intellect is also not new, and that one can not make claims for philosophical/historical novelty in order to say "now a new politics is possible". To try and put it as simply as I can, if there was general intellect in Muntzer day then it does not make sense to say that _now_ general intellect is important in production, and it does not make sense to say that _now_ there are brand new precedent-free political possibilities. (I think what is happening to me is a repetion of the Rorty maneuver that I was once very impressed with, that helped me stop feeling the need to obsessively read Hegel -- what I take to be the attempt to say "let's not use so many capital letters, let's think and write in lower case, maybe we can do that".) So maybe then the question is not "now that there is general intellect, biopolitics, multitude, what can be done?" but rather "what is the general intellect, biopolitics, multitude today, and what can it do?" If so, I think a corrollary is moving from reading/'doing' theory toward matters of militant research, and not just theorizing about it. It may be that all of this is just an elaborate justification that marches alongside the gradual shifts in my interests, but if so that's okay. Another project, then, is how to actually _do_ some of figuring out 'what is the body today' and 'what can it do', and not simply at a theoretical level. This inquiry work is daunting, though, as I don't know how to do it or where to start.

I don't know how to link directly to journal entries, but Angela's journal entry on Saturday April 02, 05 is interesting. She references a journal called Culture Machine that has an issue on biopolitics. I haven't read it yet, but it looks good. Looking back over one of my earlier entries I can't believe I wrote something about reading Marx in the context of the entirety of capital accumulation. Dear god, what have I become?! :) I think you're right about the equation of bare life and labor power, labor power and biopolitics. Not really sure what to do with these concepts, but I'm convinced they're important and that they're linked. The next step of trying work out that linked-ness is a little daunting. One of the things that concerns me with the biopolitics stuff, one of the underlying things behind my urge/tendency to want to say labor power and biopolitics is the same thing is this: I worry about a certain periodizing impulse. For instance, see this recent post to aut-op-sy. The post is trying to argue for some sort of anarchist point, which I'm sympathetic to. But it relies on a viewpoint that now, under real subsumption, anarchism makes sense. I see the same move in Hardt and Negri's work, which is to say: NOW labor power/production is biopolitical. And because of this becoming biopolitical, now multitude makes sense (and also, now reproductive labor is labor, now "women's work" is work, etc). This comes up I think in the electronic interview we did with Michael Hardt. In the interview, Hardt was asked: "Do you intend the concept of 'always-already multitude' to be a critique of the idea that only the one can rule, that the many can not rule itself (that is, the social and political body has always been multiple, the many has always been able to rule itself, and now we understand this) or a diagnosis of historical exhaustion of the rule of the one (that is, the rule of the one was the only possibility before, earlier attempts to produce multitude were pre-mature, only now is the era of the one's rule passing)?" and he replied "I would tend to agree with your latter formulation, that the exhaustion of the rule of the one and the formation of the multitude are only possible today for the first time. The "always-already" is meant to refer to the virtual existence of multitude. But I wonder if there really have been earlier attempts to produce multitude or rather if only today in retrospect we can read our history in those terms. Maybe it's something like that line of Marx in the Introduction to the Grundrisse about the anatomy of the human preceding the anatomy of the ape." It seems to me that there's an effort here to point toward a certain way of 'doing politics' and of thinking (the whole issue of what that way is, what multitude means in other less theoretical idioms, is a really important one but one for another day), which I like and appreciate. But the gesture seems to me to be one of "now is the time when this becomes possible", a periodization based on claims about biopolitics. That's the part I don't like. It erases a lot from history and sides with some pretty ugly and bloodstained characters - like the claim "Lenin would be pro-networks if he were here today" which implies "I would have supported Lenin's plans if I was around back in the day" (sorry, I just can't stop being sectarian about this). Angela writes in a comment, in reference to the equation of bare life and labor power, "it's your old-style party rhetorics, with a new dash of lyrical indignation borrowed from Agamben, which represents 'the working class' as a homogenous entity. Only state socialists are interested in that kind of representation." I think she's right. It seems to me then that the move I'm objecting to is one that claims to be anti-state and anti-representation, but operates what Angela is pointing toward: a homogenization, that operates by a periodization (once there was an era of the One, now is the era of the Many, once production wasn't biopolitical, now production is biopolitical). My gut response to this is say, "no, production was always biopolitical", to push against the periodization. I can see, though, that there's still a flattening move here in what I'm saying. Basically what I'm saying boils down to "what y'all say is new is not so new." Not that nothing has changed, just that everything is not new, at least in any non-trivial sense, and I think the aura of novelty produced actually works against trying to get at the specificity of our moment and its potentialities (and it also works against historical readings of the specificites of earlier moments). I'm not sure how to express this clearly, or to oppose the periodizing/flattening without making another flattening move of my own. Gotta think more about this. For me I think it much of this comes back to questions of possibilities of communism. Communism is always specific, and how can we think specific communisms without erasing any other specifities (ie, thinking communisms today in a way that erases past communisms and possibilities of communism.) I don't know, but if anyone figures it out, please tell me.

(thanks Angela ...) * Note to self: added spaces between the < 's and etc, so I can still see the terms here, rather than actually executing them. ** Note to self: gonna need to review these and practice a bit, in order to remember. this is how you add a link: OPENBRACKET a href = "http://blah_url.htm" CLOSE BRACKET Some text here OPENBRACKET / a CLOSEBRACKET And here is how you distinguish paragraphs. OPENBRACKET p CLOSEBRACKET Blah blah paragraph. Blah blah OPENBRACKET / p CLOSEBRACKET OPENBRACKET p >This is a new blah paragraph because it has it's own opening and closing paragraph tags. OPENBRACKET / p CLOSEBRACKET Remember to check that the html option (rather than text option) in the box below journal entries. Remember to include opening OPENBRACKET CLOSEBRACKET AND closing tags OPENBRACKET/ CLOSEBRACKET, and remember to make sure that there are double quote marks around the url, and it'll all work fine."

“what matters is not ideology, not even the "economico-ideological" distinction or opposition, but the *organisation of power*.” Deleuze, in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium “One finds the old trick being played everywhere again and again: a big ideological debate in the general assembly and questions of organization reserved for special commissions. These questions appear secondary, determinded by political options. While on the contrary, the real problems are those of organization, never specified or rationalized, but projected afterwards in ideological terms.” Guattari, in Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium “a simple dilemma: either one finds a new type of structure that finally moves toward the fusion of collective desire and revolutionary organization: or one continues on the present path and, going from repression to repression, heads for a new fascism” Guattari, ibid. “we cannot be content with these analogies and affinities; we must also try to construct a social practice, to construct new modes of intervention, this time no longer in molecular, but molar relationships, in political and social power relations, in order to avoid watching the systematic, recurring defeat that we knew during the '70s, particularly in Italy with the enormous rise of repression linked to an event, in itself repressive, which was the rise of terrorism. Through its methods, its violence, and its dogmatism, terrorism gives aid to the State repression which it is fighting. There is a sort of complicity, there again transversal. So, in this case, we are no longer only on the theoretical plane, but on the plane of experimentation, of new forms of interactions, of movement construction that respects the diversity, the sensitivities, the particularities of interventions, and that is nonetheless capable of constituting antagonistic machines of struggle to intervene in power relations.” Guattari, in Pragmatic/Machinic . From Dan Smith’s paper: Guattari- “Why have revolutions gone badly? Because, until now, there has not existed within the revolutionary field a social machine that did not produce something else—namely, an embryonic State apparatus, or a party apparatus, which is the very institution of repression. Until now, revolutionary parties have constituted themselves as synthesizers of interests, rather than functioning as analyzers of mass and individual desires. The question of revolution has to be pushed to the level of desire: if it is desire that organizes power, is desire capable of organizing a social machine that does not reproduce a State apparatus? It is not enough simply to say that escape, resistance, and deterritorialization is primary in any social system. What is necessary is an organization of power that is capable of organizing and uniting these modes of escape without reproducing a State apparatus. This is why, for Deleuze, it is the concept of the war-machine that poses the true problem of revolution: “How can a war machine account for all the escapes that happen in the present system without crushing them, dismantling them, and without reproducing a state apparatus?” [from the discussion following “Five Propositions on Psychoanalysis,” in Desert Islands, pp. 279-280: “Today, we’re looking for the new mode of unification in which, for example, the schizophrenic discourse, the intoxicated discourse, the perverted discourse, the homosexual discourse, all the marginal discourses can subsist, so that all these escapes and discourses can graft themselves onto a war-machine that won’t reproduce a State or Party apparatus.”] [in Smith, p19] D&G gesture toward “a war machine that does not necessary have war as its object, but it led to war only when it encounters a State apparatus that attempts to appropriate it […]the war-machine, which has its own objects, its own space, its own composition” [smith, p20] “the analysis of the war machine as an organization of power […] we need to recover this idea of the war machine in our thinking of resistance—but that, of course, is a topic for another paper” [smith, p20] [Two Concepts of Resistance: Foucault and Deleuze, Daniel W. Smith, presented at the SEP conference in August 2004]

Someone remarks, who escapes me at the moment, that the multitude does not have a general will, because it has a general intellect. That is, the multitude has common powers of production and constitution – powers of thought, in Agamben’s sense of thought, powers of autonomous sociality. The general intellect is the central productive force of postfordist production. So the thing that makes the multitude so productive for capital is also what makes it so dangerous. And yet... maybe there's something messianic here, something epochal as Angela puts it... Marx's delirious vision, I'll have to check, but I remember them being predicated on a historical shift in which general intellect becomes important. The multitude is the rule of the many over itself, against the rule of the one. And yet, to say this happens because of the general intellect? I'm not sure. It sounds like this is a theory of the exhaustion of the rule of the one, the end of the one, not a critique. More bluntly: it means that now, as good Leninists, we stop being the same type of Leninists there were in 1920, and adopt new tactics and strategies. It's post-party and seizure of the state, not anti- these perspectives. Communism is possible only now, and libertarian communism likewise. I'm not convinced.

I thought I'd left my preoccupations with Rorty and other less heterodox analytic types behind, and had given up on the idea that there's a political corrollary to attacks on the idea of language as representing reality. And yet ... Tim Rayner sent me (and others) a copy of a paper of his, in which he writes "In place of Hardt and Negri's insurgent multitude, driven by the 'will to be against', I would posit an insistent multitude, driven by the right to life." And suddenly, with that combined feeling that dreams have, of absolute familiarity and awkward vague half-rememberedness, I have a blurred rush of fragments from Rorty and arguments around him pop into my head. I've sold and given away many of those old books, and don't have the time or patience to reread them even if I found them again in the library, but I'm suddenly tempted. Here's the question: To say 'will to be against' or 'right to life' as drive of the multitude, what does this mean? What is the status of the person who articulates this drive to the multitude? Is it someone who knows the languaged and structure of the multitude? That is, this is the multitude in its own terms, the language the multitude itself uses? Or is the speaker someone who knows the essence of multitude, its truth, such that the speaker articulates the real language (the grammar?) of the multitude? This is the language the multitude would use to understand itself if it did (or could) understand itself, analogous to the idea of language understanding the world in the world's own terms (carving up the world at its joints). Or is the speaker an interlocutor for multitude, taking the many languages and making them intellegible [sp?], an act of translation and speaking for, an act of representation? Or is the speaker simply saying "here is one vocabulary by which we can analyze the multitude", with the merits of one or another vocabulary being judged by their effects (the possibilities they open and close, render clear and opaque)? My feeling is that the speaker is one of the latter two (interlocutor or analyst), and if the claim is to be one of the first two, then the speaker is definitely an interlocutor, and an interlocutor using (whether inadvertently or deliberately) questionable assumptions about language to mask the position of power that is interlocutor. To my mind, there is no "world's own language" and not "god's eye view" which we can speak or look from. Language, in a half-remembered quote from Rorty, is the repetitive use of a mark or noise. Our terms are tools, contextually relative, and best judged pragmatically. For instance, with temperature, neither 0 degrees celsius nor 32 degrees farenheit is any closer to the actual measurement by which the universe measures temperature. There is no such measurement. Terms are ours, and that's all. And with the multitude, part of the force of the idea, to my mind, is to say that people with all sorts of motivations and thoughts and vocabularies can figure out how to work together, to form organizations, without previously sharing or having to assume the same vocabularies and beliefs. Multitude as a concept points toward paying attention to the encounters between the various constituent moments of the multitude, and how they manage to relate. And surely the standard for success can not be the production of homogeneity, or the concept of multitude loses much of the point it is deployed for (the productive co-existence of difference that does not have to collapse into identity). Ie, to show again that I still have an embarrassingly old fashioned vocabulary in which I pose the questions that most matter to me, the multitude points to looking at material practices, not ideas and consciousness. And maybe at times there is a use to saying 'this practice expresses this will or this drive', but that will or drive must always be remembered to be a theoretical extrapolation, a useful fiction (which is not to say we can't use them), it is a tool we can and probably should use, but it's not the essence of the multitude, the truth underlying its actions regardless of what it (or its component parts) may think.