Rachael Shapiro

learner. teacher. maker.

Search Results Tag: marx

Horner, Bruce. “WPA as Broker: Globalization and the Composition Program.”

by Rachael

Published on: February 27, 2013

Categories: Globalization, Reading Notes

Tags:2012, bruce horner, lingua franca, marx, world englishes, WPA

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Horner, Bruce. “WPA as Broker: Globalization and the Composition Program.” Teaching Writing in Globalization: Remapping Disciplinary Work. Darin Payne and Daphne Desser, eds. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012.57-78. Print.

Summary

Horner describes WPAs as brokers who move between many constituencies and who negotiate between the doing of and the nature of their own work. Their actions ripple within and across their own programs, their relationships within their institutional situations, and the broader network of writing programs nationally, and now globally, as “the privatization and commodification of all aspects of education affiliated with the current globalizing of the market economy mandates that this brokering network be understood as extending globally” (60). Specifically, positioned within these global and institutional circumstances, WPAs are charged with brokering in the commodified skills of English as the Lingua Franca, especially for goods and services current within the knowledge/information economy (61). Drawing on Marx, Horner explains that WPAs participate in the fetishistic commodification of English skills and writing through an occlusion of “the concrete labor of readers and writers and the social relations necessary to the production of such values–and instead treating writing abstractly as having in itself particular values irrespective of the work of readers, writers, or the social relations in which the writing is produced” (61). This trend is apparent in the rendering of writing courses into for profit credit hours or section loads for students and teachers, respectively, which can later be exchanged in local and global markets in the form of abstract labor.

He also cautions against “friction-free” metaphors of fast capitalism, such as “the fluidity of capital,” which obscure the material work that comes with translation of meaning across contexts (62), and argues that WPAs’ brokering in the friction-free, abstract concepts of writing obscures and maintains the power relations associated with every act of writing as translation. Similar rhetorics lead WPAs to think and speak in terms of “flexible labor,” and “generalizable writing skills,” wherein contingent labor is unspecialized and, hence, replaceable. Additionally, WPAs are lead in the current moment to describe their choices in terms of local situations and problems, thereby impeding potential alliance building and recognition of the forces of globalization as the cause of many of the local factors with which they’re contending.

Horner argues that:

Alternatively, WPAs, composition instructors, and their students can examine the relationship between the institutional conditions in which they find themselves locally and the pressures globally to acquire the skills of producing “standard written English” as quickly and cheaply as possible, for example, with the results of burgeoning enrollments, exploited teaching labor, heavy student debt, and so on, and they can develop responses, if not solutions, to those problems that resist these pressures in meaningful ways that do more than simply adapt to them. (69)

In this way, we might work to recognize the urge to speak and act as if writing is a series of general skills that can be packaged and delivered by replaceable labor is received through the forces of globalization with attendant moves toward privatization and service of the needs of the global labor market. Horner suggests that an inquiry into English as imperialistic and multiple and imbued with power might be one programmatic curricular response that WPAs could make which would make a viable argument for the work of writing programs and “activat[e] students’ and teachers’ sense of the importance of writing practices and interests devalued by global capitalism” (72). He offers that this shift in WPAs’ brokering as pandering to globalization’s demands in the university to confrontation of those demands would affect the value of teaching writing in the following ways: 1) recognizing the heterogeneity of composition courses and their outcomes would unravel the conception of composition as interchangeable, exchangeable skills and thereby afford more merit to teachers; 2) enforcing recognition of that heterogeneity would mean that composition programs would be charged with teaching writing as the complex subject “whose valuation is politically and socially contingent” (72), and 3) more recognition of the professional nature of comp work, with all resultant benefits.

He concludes that:

…WPAs can achieve a more coherent balance and redeem their reputation as brokers and simultaneously the work they broker by mediating the work of writing and the learning and teaching of writing on terms that address more directly the contradictions of globalization and the necessary friction of the labor of reading and writing as meaning production rather than communication commodity. (74)

Quotes

WPAs work as “brokers” in the sense of being “intermediaries” or “middlemen” insofar as they mediate between the work conducted in the programs they direct and the demands made on that work. (59)

Eliding the “social characteristics” of the concrete labor involved in the work of both writing and the teaching of writing through commodification of these as abstract skills exchangeable on the marketplace occludes the arbitrary and contingent character of the valuations of those commodities and, more problematically, the demands of fast capitalism in the production of such valuations: the demand for writing that is clear (to all) and (thus) efficient in its communication of knowledge globally (62).

Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power.

by Rachael

Published on: November 28, 2011

Categories: basic writing, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1991, basil bernstein, distinctive deviations, linguistic capital, marx, michel foucault, noam chomsky, pierre bourdieu, saussure, sociolinguistics, william labov

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Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Print.

Summary

In “The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language,” Bourdieu critiques Comte, Chomsky (competence of the speaking subject), and Saussure (langue) as representatives of linguists’ failure to understand the politically constructed nature of “legitimate” language. He criticizes their tendency to “merely incorporate into their theory a pre-constructed object, ignoring its social laws of construction and masking its social genesis” (44). He describes the process through which the state (infused with the authority and values of the dominant group) aids in preservation of that group’s linguistic and social power through institutions such as labor qualifications, academic publication, and education. For Bourdieu, linguistic domination is distinctive in that the choice to accept a language’s legitimacy is unconscious, though only possible for those who have been socially constructed to be receptive to the intimidation or risk of not accepting its legitimacy (51). The power of suggestion readable to particular subjects is encoded not simply overtly, but rather in its silent saturation in everyday life (51-2).

Bourdieu argues that the differences between dialects and the politically legitimate language are more importantly thought in terms of sociological, rather than linguistic, differences, and that these differences can be thought in terms of a “linguistic market” with its attendant profits and capital and social exchange (54-5). Social capital and the maintenance of a language’s legitimacy is carried out largely in the academic and publishing fields through which it is parsed and then reinforced (56-61). Individuals are oriented to this code primarily through family and education (62). Changes in the linguistic code come primarily from the productive tensions between groups in varying relations to the dominant group (be it the middle class’s eagerness to adopt and enforce the dominant code or the upper class’s freedom to casually break it) (62-3). Ironically, the circulation and change within this system of exchanges and “distinctive deviations” does more to perpetuate the system than to disrupts it: its consistency relies on its fluidity (64-5).

Quotes

The official language is bound up with the state, both in its genesis and in its social uses. It is in the process of state formation that the conditions are created for the constitution of a unified linguistic market, dominated by the official language. Obligatory on official occasions and in official places (schools, public administrations, political institutions, etc.), this state language becomes the theoretical norm against which all linguistic practices are objectively measured. Ignorance is no excuse; this linguistic law has its body of jurists – the grammarians – and its agents of regulation and imposition – the teachers – who are empowered universally to subject the linguistic performance of speaking subjects to examination and to the legal sanction of academic qualification. (45)

The educational system, whose scale of operations grew in extent and intensity throughout the nineteenth century, no doubt directly helped to devalue popular modes of expression, dismissing them as ‘slang’ and ‘gibberish’ (as can be seen from teachers’ marginal comments on essays) and to impose recognition of the legitimate language. But it was doubtless the dialectical relation between the school system and the labour market – or, more precisely, between the unification of the educational (and linguistic) market, linked to the introduction of educational qualifications valid nationwide, independent (at least officially) of the social or regional characteristics of their bearers, and the unification of the labour market (including the development of the state administration and the civil service) – which played the most decisive role in devaluing dialects and establishing the new hierarchy of linguistic practices. (49)

In fact, while one must not forget the contribution which the political will to unification (also evident in other areas, such as law) makes to the construction of the language which linguists accept as a natural datum, one should not regard it as the sole factor responsible for the generalization of the use of the dominant language. This generalization is a dimension of the unification of the market in symbolic goods which accompanies the unification of the economy and also of cultural production and circulation. (50)

Thus, if one fails to perceive both the special value objectively accorded to the legitimate use of language and the social foundations of this privilege, one inevitably falls into one or other of two opposing errors. Either one unconsciously absolutizes that which is objectively relative and in that sense arbitrary, namely the dominant usage, failing to look beyond the properties of language itself, such as the complexity of its syntactic structure, in order to identify the basis of the value that is accorded to it, particularly in the educational market; or one escapes this form of fetishism only to fall into the nai’vety par excellence of the scholarly relativism which forgets that the nai’ve gaze is not relativist, and ignores the fact of legitimacy, through an arbitrary relativization of the dominant usage, which is socially recognized as legitimate, and not only by those who are dominant. (52-3)

A structural sociology of language, inspired by Saussure but con-structed in opposition to the abstraction he imposes, must take as ils object the relationship between rhe srructured systems of sociologically perrinem linguistiC differences and the equally strllctured sysrems of social differences. The social uses of language owe their specifically social value to the fact that they tend to be organized in systems of differences (between prosodic and articulatory or lexical and syntactic variants) which reproduce. in the symbolic order of differential deviations, the system of social differences.(54)

Since the profit of distinction resu lts from the fact thai the supply of products (or speakers) corresponding to a given level of linguistic (or, more generally, cultural) qualification is lower than it would be if all speakers had benefited from the conditions of acquisition of the legitimate competence to the same extent as the holders of the rarest competence, it is logically distributed as a function of the chances of access to these conditions, that is, as a function of the position occupied in the social structure. (56)

The position which the educational system gives to the different languages (or the different cultural contents) is s u~h an important issue o nly because this institution has the monopoly in the large-scale production of producers/consumers, and therefore in the reproduction of the market without which the social value of the linguistic competence, its capacity to function as linguistic capital, would cease to exist. (57)

Only the process of continuous creation. which occurs through the unceasing struggles between the different authorities who compete within the field of specialized production for the monopolistic power to impose the legitimate mode of expression, can ensure the permanence of the legitimate language and of its value, that is, of the recognition accorded to it. It is one of the generic properties of fields that the struggle for specific stakes masks the objective collusion concerning the principles underlying the game. More precisely, the struggle tends constantly to produce and reproduce the game and its stakes by reproducing, primarily in those who are directly involved, but not in them alone, the practical commitment to the value of the game and its stakes which defines the recognition of legitimacy. (58)

It follows that the legitimate language is a semi-artificial language which has to be sustained by a permanent effort of correction, a task which falls both to institutions specially designed for this purpose and to individual speakers. (60)

Given that the educational system possesses the delegated authority necessary to engage in a universal process of durable inculcation in matters of language. and given that it tends to vary the duration and intensity of this inculcation in proportion to inherited cultural capital, it follows that the social mechanisms of cultural transmission tend to reproduce the structural disparity between the very unequal knowledge of the legitimate language and the much more uniform recognition of this language. This disparity is one of the determinant factors in the dynamics of the linguistic field and therefore in changes in the language.(62)

This structural constancy of the social values of the uses of the legitimate language becomes intelligible when one knows that the logic and the aims of the strategies seeking to modify it are governed by the structure itself. through the position occupied in the structure by the agent who performs them. (64)

Said, Edward. Orientalism.

by Rachael

Published on: September 26, 2011

Categories: basic writing, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1978, edward said, foucault, franz fanon, gramsci, marx, orientalism, politics of dicourse, postcolonialism

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Said, Edward. Orientalism. London : Penguin, 1995. Print.

Summary

In his seminal work, Said describes Orientalism as a Foucaudian discourse–a socially established myth-turned-material problem as the West sought to define itself through the Othering of the East. While the imperial stereotypes and definitions–in literature, the academy, science, etc–were not based in reality, the West’s position of power and the sheer prevalence of these images gained force enough that the East has no choice but to work within/against/through the West’s narrative about itself. Orientalism is the project of understand and defining the process of discourse that makes a political situation. Thereby we can understand knowledge in service of power and its effect.

Quotes

Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, text, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is–and does not simply represent–a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world. (12)

I consider Orientalism’s failure to have been a human as much as an intellectual one; for in having to take up a position of irreducible opposition to a region of the world it considered alien to its own, Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also to see it as human experience. The worldwide hegemony of Orientalism and all it stands for can now be challenged, if we can benefit properly from the general twentieth-century rise to political and historical awareness of so many of the earth’s peoples. If this book has any future use, it will be as a modest contribution to that challenge, and as a warning: that systems of thought like Orientalism, discourses of power, ideological fictions–mind-forg’d manacles–are all too easily made, applied, and guarded. Above all, I hope to have shown my reader that the answer to Orientalism is not Occidentalism. No former “Oriental” will be comforted by the thought that having been an Oriental himself he is likely–too likely–to study new “Orientals”–or “Occidentals”–of his own making. If the knowledge of Orientalism has any meaning it is in being a reminder of the seductive degradation of knowledge, of any knowledge, anywhere, at any time. Now perhaps more than before. (328)

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth.

by Rachael

Published on: September 25, 2011

Categories: basic writing, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:2009, action, biopolitics, democracy, digital literacy, ethics, foucault, globalization, gramsci, hardt and negri, marx, multitude, neoliberalism, politics, resistance

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Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge: Belknap, 2009. Print.

Summary

In the third book of Hardt and Negri’s Empire trilogy, the authors seek to further refine their projection of the completion of the Marxist dream. Continuing from their starting point in which they had described Empire as an incomplete project that has been globally called into being, H & N seek to understand the conditions and strategies through which the multitude (those whose interests are compromised in the events and circumstances of global capital and privatization–namely, most of us) can use the disjunctions and fissures in Empire “to win back and expand the common and its powers” (ix). Love, connection, and recognition of the common, they suggest, can help the multitude exercise the latent positive political power in all forms of production (especially cultural) toward the greater good.

Notes and Quotes

Def of common: “those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth. This notion of the common does not postition humanity separate from nature, as either its exploiter or its custodian, but focuses rather on the practices of interaction, care, and cohabitation in a common world, promoting the beneficial and limiting the detrimental forms of the common. (viii)

“The multitude makes itself by composing in the common the singular subjectivities that result from this process.” (x)

“…the poor is not defined by lack but possibility. The poor, migrants, and ‘precarious; workers (that is, those without stable employment) are often conceived as excluded, but really, though subordinated, they are completely within the global rhythms of biopolitical production. Economic strategists can grasp the condition of poverty in negative terms but not the forms of life, languages, movements, or capacities for innovation they generate. Our challenge will be to find ways to translate the productivity and possibility of the poor into power.” (xi)

Def of multitude: “The multitude is a set of singularities that poverty and love compose in the reproduction of the common, but more is required to describe the dynamics and dispositifs of the becoming-Prince of the multitude. [...] The becoming-Prince of the multitude is a project that relies entirely on the immanence of decision making within the multitude.” (xii-xiii)

An apocalyptic discourse on the current moment, one which throw around words like sovereignty and fascism, “makes it extremely difficult to recognize, analyze, and challenge” the current problems of Empire (5). A deeper analysis shows the openings and productive tensions out of which the multitude may compose itself. Naturalization of capitalist power (law and capital, or, the republic of property) makes its “determination of the conditions of possibility of social life become ever more extensive and complete” (7-8).

“…Property and the defense of property remain the foundation of every modern political constitution” (15).

“The political project we propose is not only (with Kant) an attack on transcendent sovereignty and (against Kant) a critique aimed to destabilize the transcendental power of the republic of property, but also and ultimately (beyond Kant) an affirmation of the immanent powers of social life, because this immanent scene is the terrain–the only possible terrain–on which democracy can be constructed.” (15)

“Private property in its capitalist form thus produces a relation of exploitation in its fullest sense–the production of the human as commodity–and excludes from view the materiality of human needs and poverty.” (23)

Paradoxically, the production of bodies as commodity in the republic of property engenders within those bodies the very power needed to overthrow it. (27)

“…History is determined by the biopolitical antagonisms and resistances to biopower. The third axiom of [Foucault's] research agenda is that corporeal resistance produces subjectivity, not in an isolated or independent way, but in the complex dynamic with the resistances of other bodies.” (31)

“ Private property creates subjectivities that are at once individual (in their competition with one another) and unified as a class to preserve their property. […] The poverty of the multitude, then, seen from this perspective, does not refer to its misery or deprivation or even its lack, but instead names of production of social subjectivity that results in a radically plural and open body politic, opposed to both the individualism and the exclusive, unified social body of property. The poor, in other words, refers not to those who have nothing but to the wide multiplicity of all those who are inserted in the mechanisms of social production regardless of social order or property. And this conceptual conflict is also a political conflict. Its productivity is what makes the multitude of the poor a real and effective menace for the republic of property.” (40-1)

“Humanity is never naked, never characterized by bare life, but rather always dressed, endowed with not only histories of suffering but also capacities to produce and the power to rebel” (53).

“Our reading not only identifies biopolitics with the localized productive powers of life–that is, the production of affects and languages through social cooperation and the interaction of bodies and desires, the invention of new forms of the relation to the self and others, and so forth–but also affirms biopolitics as the creation of new subjectivities that are presented at once as resistance and de-subjectification.” (58-9)

“Biopolitics is a partisan relationship between subjectivity and history that is crafted by a multitudinous strategy, formed by events and resistances, and articulated by a discourse that links political decision making to the construction of bodies in struggle.” (61)

Antimodernity (or the power to resist), is paradoxically prior to modernity in that freedom is a necessary condition of those who can be colonized. (76-9)

“Recognizing modernity’s racism and coloniality as biopower helps accomplish the shift of perspective by emphasizing that power regulates not just forms of consciousness but forms of life, which entirely invest the subordinated subjects, and by focusing attention on the fact that this power is productive–not only a force of prohibition and repression external to subjectivities but also and more important one that internally generates them.” (80)

“We should not think of power as primary and resistance a reaction to it; instead common paradoxical as it may sound, resistances prior to power” (81).

In order to really resist, we must move beyond the particular subjectivity-producing realm of modernity, and even beyond antimodernity, into an altermodernity in which we are making and actively producing new subjectivities vital to the project of the multitude (the process of biopolitics, or becoming). (101-3)

In self-making and producing subjectivities as multiplicitous singularities, we establish the common in its wholeness unbound by the republic of property (111).

“The intellectual must be able also to create new theoretical and social arrangements, translating the practices and desires of the struggles into norms and institutions, proposing new modes of social organization.” (118)

“… what is required is a shift of emphasis from knowing to doing, generating a multiplicity of beings constantly open to alterity that are revealed through the perspective of the body, which is an assemblage of affects or ways of being, which is to say, forms of life–all of which rests on the process of making the common.” (124)

“Differences in perspective mark differences over not only opinions or principles but also what world we inhabit–when really they indicate that we inhibit different worlds. And yet every world is defined by becomings, constantly engaged with alterity. Where identity and difference stand in opposition, the common and singularity are not just compatible but mutually constitutive.” (125)

“No transcendent or transcendental force can stand between truth, citizens, and their power” (125)

“To raise productivity, biopolitical production needs not only control over its movements but also constant interactions with others, with those who are culturally and socially different, in a situation of equality. Contemporary economists talk a lot about creativity, in sectors such as design, branding, specialized industries, fashion, and the culture industries, but generally neglect the fact that the creativity of biopolitical labor requires an open and dynamic egalitarian culture with constant cultural flows and mixtures.” (148)

“Capitalist crisis does not proceed automatically to collapse. The multiplicity of similarities that produce and are produced in the biopolitical field of the common do not spontaneously accomplish exodus and construct their autonomy. Political organization is needed to cross the threshold and generate political events. The kairos–the opportune moment that ruptures the monotony and repetitiveness of chronological time–has to be grasped by a political subject.” (165)

“The powerful new tools in the possession of the multitude–linguistic tools, along with tools of communication, affect, knowledge, and so forth–have no necessary predisposition to the good but can just as easily be used for ill.” (167)

“The model of biopolitical economic production serves us here as an analogy for political action: just as a wide social multiplicity produces immaterial products and economic value, so too is such a multitude able to produce political decisions. [...] They regard the production of subjectivity rather as the primary terrain on which political struggle takes place. We need to intervene in the circuits of the production of subjectivity, flee from the apparatuses of control, and construct the bases for an autonomous production. […] Through the production of subjectivity, the multitude is itself author of its perpetual becoming other, an uninterrupted process of collective self transformation.” (171-3)

“Love–in the production of affective networks, schemes of cooperation, and social subjectivities–is an economic power. Conceived in this way love is not, as it is often characterized, spontaneous or passive. It does not simply happen to us, as if it were an event that mystically arrives from elsewhere. Instead it is an action, a biopolitical event, planned and realized in common.” (180)

The power of love… 1) “is the constitution of the common and ultimately the formation of society,” 2) is “a force to combat evil,” and 3) makes the multitude. (195)

In a changing world order in the context of globalization, ” we need to recognize the new forms of management, regulation, and control that are emerging to order the global system. once we adopt a new perspective, in fact, we can begin to see that there already exists a complex network of global norms, structures, and authorities, which is partial, incomplete, and in some respects fragile but nonetheless real and effective.” (223)

“… We hate the crowd except in its days of rebellion, when it achieves a kind of human poetry. This poetry of the future is what has to be composed to make the multitude.” (244)

“In order for the metropolis to be for the multitude what the factory was for the industrial working class, it must be a site not only of encounter but also of organization and politics.” (254)

” first, knowledge is no longer merely a means to the creation of value (in the commodity form), but rather the production of knowledge is itself value creation. Second, not only is this knowledge no longer a weapon of capitalist control, but also capital is in fact confronted with a paradoxical situation: the more it is forced to pursue valorization through knowledge production, the more that knowledge escapes its control.” (268)

“In the realm of the information economy and knowledge production is quite clear that freedom of the common is essential for production. As Internet and software practitioners and scholars often point out, access to the common in the network environment–common knowledge is, common codes, common communications circuits–is essential for creativity and growth. The privatization of knowledge and code through intellectual property rights, they argue, thwartz production and innovation by destroying the freedom of the common.” (282)

A new theory of value: ” value in the current situation must refer to life activity as a whole, and therefore the measurability and overflowing of productive labor is a process that traverses the entire biopolitical fabric of society.

Crossing the threshold gives us a first definition of the process a biopolitical exceeding, which overflows the barriers that the tradition of modern political economy built to control labor–power and the production of value. In epistemological terms, exceeding is a linguistic act of rupture and innovation, which is not satisfied with recomposing the continuity of language but instead reveals an accumulated and still unexpressed power of meanings, on the one hand, and an innovative expression of signs, on the other. In physical terms, or rather what we would call the biophysics of bodies, exceeding is the continual metamorphosis of modes of living and the ever more accelerated invention of new forms of social life in common.” (317)

” revolutionary thought, in other words, should not shun identity politics but instead must work through it and learn from it.” (326) three tasks: “the first is to reveal the violence of identity as property and thereby in some sense reappropriate that identity.” (327) “the second task of identity politics, then, is to proceed from indignation to rebellion against the structures of domination using the subordinated identity as a weapon in the quest for freedom–thus failing the traditional role of the conquest of state power.” (330) “The terminological distinction between emancipation and liberation is crucial here: whereas emancipation strives for the freedom of identity, the freedom to be who you really are, liberation aims at the freedom of self-determination and self-transformation, the freedom to determine what you can become. Politics fixed on identity immobilizes the production of subjectivity; liberation instead requires engaging and taking control of the production of subjectivity, keeping it moving forward. […] Another political task is necessary in order to support the first two tasks, keep the rebellious function of identity moving forward and carry identity politics toward a revolutionary project: to strive for its own abolition.” (331-332)

“What identity is to property, singularity is to the common. The distinction between identity and singularity corresponds, therefore, to that between the two notions of achieving freedom we cited earlier: identities can be emancipated, but only singularities can liberate themselves.” (339)

“The way out of the impasse is to bring the political diagonal back to the biopolitical paradigm, that is, to ground it in an investigation of the capacities people already exercise in their daily lives and, specifically, in the processes of biopolitical production. In the terms we proposed earlier, this means to explore the technical composition of the productive multitude to discover its potential political composition. […] In the biopolitical context, as we saw, the production of ideas, images, codes, languages, knowledges, affects, and the like, through horizontal networks of communication and cooperation, tends toward the autonomous production of the common, which is to say, the production and reproduction of forms of life. And the production and reproduction of forms of life is a very precise definition of political action. This does not mean that the revolution has already begun is the problem of transition has been solved because, first, the autonomy of biopolitical production is only partial, since it is still directed and constrained under the command of capital; and second, these economic capacities are not immediately expressed as political capacities. It does mean, though, that in the common fabric of the biopolitical diagram rest latent, potential, chrysalis-like the capacities for the multitude to determine autonomously the political diagonal of the transition. Realizing this potential, by means of political action and organization, would mean carrying forward the parallel revolutionary struggles through the instructional events that intersection to an institutional process of managing the common.” (360-365)

“The process of instituting happiness will constantly if accompanied by laughter.

Ours is, first of all, a knowing laugh, which accompanies our realistic critique of the dominant powers. […]

Ours is also a laugh of creation and joy, anchored solidly in the present. Our free and equal access to the common, through which we together produce new and greater forms of the common, our liberation from the subordination of identities through monstrous processes of self transformation, our autonomous control of the circuits of the production of social subjectivity, and in general our construction of common practices through which singularities compose the multitude are all limitless cycles of our increasing power and joy. While we are instituting happiness, our laughter is as pure as water.

Ours is finally a laugh of destruction, the laugh of armed angels which accompanies the combat against evil. Happiness has a dark side. […] The destruction of what causes harm is secondary to the increase of power and joy released by its removal. The extirpation in ourselves of our attachments to identity and, in general, the conditions of our enslavement will be extraordinarily painful, but still we laugh. And in the struggles against capitalist exploitation, the rule of property, and the destroyers of the common through public and private control, we will suffer terribly, but still we laugh with joy. They will be buried by laughter.” (382-3)

Hardt and Negri. Multitude.

by Rachael

Published on: February 16, 2011

Categories: critical pedagogy, diss, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:2004, globalization, gramsci, hardt and negri, marx, multitude

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Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Print.

Summary: The second in the Empire trilogy, this book shifts focus away from political economic analysis of global systems just a bit to zoom in on the foreground: people achieving democracy. As they put it: “The possibility of democracy on a global scale is emerging today for the very first time. This book is about that possibility, about what we call the project of the multitude. The project of the multitude not only expresses the desire for a world of equality and freedom, not only demands an open and inclusive democratic global society, but also provides the means for achieving it” (xi).

H and N theorize both the crisis in global tensions that makes democratic action necessary and explains that the conditions of those tensions also comprise the tools for conscious cultivation of democracy on a world network scale. Again, they concentrate on the productive possibilities of biopower and war, looking at the idea of just war and nation-building. New imperial war in Empire is concerned primarily with the distinction between “violence that preserves the contemporary hierarchy of global order and violence that threatens that order” (32).

In “Multitude,” they described the “hegemony of immaterial labor” that characterized the work world and its distributions over a diverse global territory. They write that:

The difference of immaterial labor, however, is that its products are themselves, in many respects, immediately social and common. Producing communication, affective relationships, and knowledges, in contrast to cars and typewriters, can directly expand the realm of what we share in common. This is not to say, we repeat, that the conditions of labor are becoming the same throughout the world or throughout the different sectors of the economy. The claim rather is that the many singular instances of labor processes, productive conditions, local situations, and lived experiences coexist with a ‘becoming common,’ at a different level of abstraction, of the forms of labor and the general relations of production and exchange–and that there is no contradiction between this singularity and commonality. This becoming common, which tends to reduce the qualitative divisions within labor, is the biopolitical condition of the multitude. (114)

As Commonwealth later expands, H and N site the problems of privatization, ownership, and private property as treats to the common (sec 2.2). The authors then seek to:

investigate the possibility that the productive flesh of the multitude can organize itself otherwise and discover an alternative to the global political body of capital. Our point of departure is our recognition that the production of subjectivity and the production of the common can together form a spiral, symbiotic relationship. Subjectivity, in other words, is produced through cooperation and communication and, in turn, this produced subjectivity itself produces new forms of cooperation and communication, which in turn produce new subjectivity, and so forth.(189) (They cite Butler and performance in this section.)

They pose the same question Gramsci does about whether politics necessarily means ruler and ruled when they write that “the entire tradition of political theory seems to agree on one basic principle: only ‘the one’ can rule,” regardless of the government system (328). This idea, they explains, is capitalist. But, just as economic factors act in diverse ways to produce a system without central control, the multitude can work together without a ruling body in a way that stands inbetween sovereignty and anarchy (336).

The multitude, as they conceive it, can use the conditions and features of its make-up toward the constitution of a new global, democratic political system that acts in the interests of the common (355).

Hardt and Negri. Empire.

by Rachael

Published on: February 16, 2011

Categories: diss, exams, pedagogy, Reading Notes

Tags:2000, agency, biopower, empire, foucault, globalization, gramsci, hardt and negri, marx, multitude, nation-state, resistance, transnationalism

Comments: No Comments

Citation: Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Print.

Summary:

Our basic hypothesis is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire. (xii)

Words like circulation, flow, hybrid, open, expanding, flexible, plural, networks, merged, and blended fill the passages in which H and N describe the situation of Empire–what they see as a heuristic concept for generating theory of contemporary logic of power. Empire, they explain, comes to replace modern sovereignty (or imperialism). Or, as they put it:

The passage to Empire emerges from the twilight of modern sovereignty. In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have blended in the imperial global rainbow. (xii–xiii)

Empire is about a new, singular rule of logic that is beyond the nation state, in which capital moves in global flows and wealth (and power) are concerned with biopolitical production. It’s most important tenets are 1) that it is beyond, before, outside of future or history, 2) it moves through and within and beyond all space(s), 3) it is concerned with biopower, large and small, and 4) it is dedicated (confoundingly) to peace and the pacification of all conflict (xiv-xv).

But the project of Empire is incomplete. While the whelm of Empire may make us long for the now whimpy-seeming nation-state, H and N argue:

…The Empire we are faced with wields enormous powers of oppressions and destruction, but that fact should not make us nostalgic in any way for the old forms of domination. The passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation. Globalization, of course, is not one thing, and the multiple processes that we recognize as globalization are not unified or univocal. Our political task, we will argue, is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges. (xv)

In part one, the authors describe the general constitution of Empire, looking first to juridical Empire, such as the example of the UN. Much like Wallerstein, H and N site the way in which power makes itself essential through the exception: with the constant goal of peace, Empire makes small, juridical steps toward constitution through the conception of contracts, laws, and agreements that justify intervening. Just war, or war for peace, is the most visible extension of this construct. (3-20)

Essentially, we, collectively made the Empire. As they describe it:

All conflicts, all crises, and all dissensions effectively push forward the process of integration and by the same measure call for more central authority. Peace, equilibrium, and the cessation of conflict are the values toward which everything is directed. The development of the global system (and of imperial right in the first place) seems to be the development of a machine that imposes procedures of continual contractualization that lead to systematic equilibria–a machine that creates a continuous call for authority. [...] Empire is formed not on the basis of force itself but on the basis of the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace. All interventions of the imperial armies are solicited by one or more of the parties involved in an already existing conflict. Empire is not born of its own will but rather it is called into being and constituted on the basis of its capacity to resolve conflicts. (14-15)

This leads us back to our fundamental questions: How can the actions of the multitude become political? How can the multitude organize and concentrate its energies against the repression and incessant territorial segmentations of Empire? The only response that we can give to these questions is that action of the multitude becomes political primarily when it begins to confront directly and with an adequate consciousness the central repressive operations of Empire. It is a matter of recognizing and engaging the imperial initiatives and not allowing them continually to reestablish order: it is a matter of crossing and breaking down the limits and segmentations that are imposed on the new collective labor power; it is a matter of gathering together these experiences of resistance and wielding them in concert against the nerve centers of imperial command. (399)

One might even say that the construction of Empire and its global networks is a response to the various struggles against the modern machines of power and specifically to class struggle driven by the multitude’s desire for liberation. The multitude called Empire into being. [...] Today nearly all of humanity is to some degree absorbed within or subordinated to the networks of capitalist exploitation. We see now an ever more extreme condition of radical separation of a small minority that controls enormous wealth from multitudes that live in poverty at the limit of powerlessness. The geographical and racial lines of oppression and exploitation that were established during the era of colonialism and imperialism have in many respects not declined but instead increased exponentially. (43)

The reason this is possible at all has to do with the crack in Empire, its incompleteness in the project of biopower. They write:

This is a radical transformation that reveals the unmediated relationship between power and subjectivities, and hence demonstrates both the impossibility of “prior” mediations and the uncontainable temporal variability of the event.[10] Throughout the unbounded global spaces, to the depths of the biopolitical world, and confronting an unforeseeable temporality-these are the determinations on which the new supranational right must be defined. Here is where the concept of Empire must struggle to establish itself, where it must prove its effectiveness, and hence where the machine must be set in motion. From this point of view, the biopolitical context of the new paradigm is completely central to our analysis. This is what presents power with an alternative, not only between obedience and disobedience, or between formal political participation and refusal, but also along the entire range of life and death, wealth and poverty, production and social reproduction, and so forth. Given the great difficulties the new notion of right has in representing this dimension of the power of Empire, and given its inability to touch biopower concretely in all its material aspects, imperial right can at best only partially represent the underlying design of the new constitution of world order, and cannot really grasp the motor that sets it in motion. Our analysis must focus its attention rather on the productive dimension of biopower. (26-27) (emphasis mine)

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