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.
