"Dossier: Scattered Speculations on Value"
Toni Negri
Introduction by Ronald Judy
In the spring of 1996, Marcia Landy and I organized a boundary 2 panel for the annual Rethinking Marxism conference held in Amherst, Massachusetts, in December of that year. We thought that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's speculation on the relationship between value and affect ("Scattered Speculations") afforded an opportunity for rigorous engagement with these concepts, their historical significance, and their viability for understanding the emerging social formations attending the global economy. We envisioned a format of collective discussion carried out through individual papers and followed by an open discussion with Professor Spivak. Among those who agreed to join in this Sprechstimme were Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Reda Bensmaia, and Etienne Balibar. Unforeseen circumstances prevented Professors Spivak and Bensmaia from taking part. Through the graciousness of Hardt and Balibar, however, the panel went ahead. We never planned for Negri to come, given his well-known political predicament -- although at the time he was free in Paris, he could not enter the United States. Still, he prepared and sent a paper that Hardt translated from the Italian and I read aloud, to which Balibar gave an informed and engaging response. Negri's paper and Hardt's talk follow in these pages. (They expand on these notions in their forthcoming book, Empire.) Despite the absence of two colleagues, the event was well received. We owe sincere thanks to those who attended the session. We want to thank Stephen Cullenberg for giving us the opportunity to present our conversation in the venue of the Rethinking Marxism conference. We are most grateful to Etienne Balibar, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. Our debt to Hardt and Negri is compounded by their agreeing to allow us to publish their papers in this issue of boundary 2.