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Theory

October 24, 2004 - 9:09pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"The Labor of Fire:
On Time and Labor in the Grundrisse"

Bruno Gulli, Found Object

Labor is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time. — Marx, Grundrisse

1. The Thisness of Time and Production

The Grundrisse is a work about time, and it is so in a fundamental sense. This means that time is the most fundamental category of the Grundrisse. Again, it means that time is the subject of Marx’s critique of political economy–subject in the double sense of subject-matter (or object) and of ground (or foundation). This becomes evident as soon as one opens the Grundrisse : "The object before us, to begin with, material production" (Marx 1973, 83). This is how Notebook M starts.

But material production is time, both as objectified and as subjective labor. The tense of this time, which is immediately labor, is alternatively the perfect or present tense: "The difference between previous, objectified labor and living, present labor here [i.e., in the accumulation of capital] appears as a merely formal difference between the different tenses of labor, at one time in the perfect and at another in the present" (465-466; brackets added). Material production is, then, time both as having been produced and as producing, as having become and as becoming. The difference between these two modalities is the difference between the substantial form of capital and living labor, between the capitalist and the worker. It is a difference, which presents itself immediately as antagonism and opposition. It is, in fact, the structural constitution of the class struggle.

October 24, 2004 - 8:18pm -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"The Italian Effect Conference: A Shambolic Review"

Tall Paul

The Italian Effect conference was an important event that brought together activists and academics from all over the world in early September. Leading up to the conference there was the usual debate amongst activist circles that the event would be mostly a talking shop amongst intellectual ‘gatekeepers’ intent on keeping the level of discussion at an abstract and inaccessible level to outsiders. This view stems from the belief that academics use social movements to further their careers, writing about participants in movement as objects without necessarily including them in the discourse as intellectual equals.

October 21, 2004 - 1:17pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Moments of Excess"

Leeds Mayday Group

We want to talk about ‘moments of excess’. We think this idea is
timely because the tactics of militant protest have recently
spread to the Countryside Alliance and Fathers 4 Justice, and this
can make it seem as if the direct action movement of the 1990s
and the anti-globalisation movement of the 21st century have
been usurped or hijacked. By considering moments of excess we
can see that, perhaps, what’s really happened is that our global
anti-capitalist movement has kept its participants one step
ahead. These days we are no longer satisfied with symbolic
protest – which can almost be seen as militant lobbying. Our
movement is leaning towards a more constitutive politics. People
are beginning to work out what they want, what they are for, not only what they are against. What is more, people are actually
‘acting’ for what they want: practice not just theory. Realising
that ‘we live in a world of our own making’ and attempting to
consciously (re)make it.

October 14, 2004 - 10:07am -- jim
Announcements
Theory

NOT BORED! writes:

This work was first published in Italian, in a privately printed, numbered edition, under the title Rapporto veridico sulle ultima opportunita di salvare il capitalismo in Italia (Milan, August 1975), and attributed to "Censor." In October 1975, the pamphlet was reprinted by a small commercial press. In December 1975, Gianfranco Sanguinetti revealed himself to be the book's real author and a scandal ensued. In January 1976, Editions Champ Libre published a volume that was translated from the Italian by Guy Debord, entitled Veridique Rapport sur les dernieres chances de sauver le capitalisme en Italie, and supplemented by Sanguinetti's December 1975 statement and a collection of press clippings relative to the "Censor" scandal. In February 1976, under great pressure, Sanguinetti left Italy and tried to enter France, from which he'd been deported in 1971; he was refused entry.

In 1997, Len Bracken produced a rough translation of the Italian original that was published under the title The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy. Finding this translation to be substandard, NOT BORED! made a new one between July and October 2004 — mind you, using Debord's French version, not the Italian original.

To Contact NOT BORED: Info@notbored.org

"Veritable Report on the Last Chances to Save Capitalism in Italy"

Censor (Gianfranco Sanguinetti)

In amicable memory of Raffaele Mattiolo, who taught us to be prodigal with the most precious of our goods: the truth.

Table of Contents
Preface

I. Why capitalism must be democratic and the grandeur it attains in being so

II. How capitalism has been badly managed in Italy, and why (1943-1967)

III. In which social war begins again and why nothing is more fatal than prematurely declaring victory (1968-1969)

IV. Why it is never good to only defend oneself, because victory belongs to those on the offensive

V. What the world-wide crisis is, and the different ways in which it manifests itself

VI. Who the communists effectively are, and what one must do

VII. Exhortation to deliver capitalism from its irrationalities and to save it

October 11, 2004 - 9:07am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"A Contribution on Foucault"

Toni Negri

Question 1
Are Foucault's analyses of actualité useful to understand the movement of societies? In which fields does it seem to you it that they should be renewed, readjusted, continued?

Answer 1
Foucault's work is a strange machine, it actually makes it impossible to think of history as other than present history. Probably, a great deal of what Foucault wrote (as Deleuze rightly underlined) should be rewritten today. What is astonishing — and concerning —, is that he never ceases to seek, he makes approximations, he deconstructs, he formulates hypotheses, he imagines, he makes analogies and tells fables, he launches concepts, withdraws them or modifies them… His is a thought of a formidable inventiveness. But this is not its essence: I believe that his method is fundamental, because it enables him to study and describe at the same time the movement from the past to the present and that from the present to the future. It is a method of transition where the present represents the center. Foucault is there, between the two, neither in the past where he does archaeology, nor in the future whose image he sometimes sketches — “comme à la limite de la mer un visage sur le sable.” It is starting from the present that it is possible to distinguish other times. Foucault has often been reproached for the scientific legitimacy of his periodizations: we I can understand the historians, but at the same time, I would want to say that this is not a real problem: Foucault is where the questioning lies, which always originates in his own time.

October 5, 2004 - 7:21pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Between Disobedience and Exodus"

Flavia Costa Interviews Paolo Virno

Perhaps it is distance, combined with a doubtlessly original thought,
that allows Paolo Virno to see a link, a principle of
comprehension, that unites the Argentinian cacerolazos with
antiglobalization protests. "There is a line that connects the
Argentinian revolt with the protests in Seattle and Genoa in 1999 and
2001", he affirms. And he adds that, beyond the singular, the
Argentinian case shares with the antiglobal movement the eruption of a
new political subject, the multitude, which emerges with the
postfordist mode of production and resists delegating its powers to
the state.


"Unlike the people," explains the Italian philosopher, "the
multitude is plural, it refuses political unity, it does not transfer
rights to the sovereign; its resists obedience and is inclined to form
non-representative democracy."

October 2, 2004 - 3:52pm -- jim
Reviews
Theory

Les C. Kressi writes:

"Double Crossing Back"
A Review Essay of the 2004 Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference

Anonymous


Part One: Send in the Spies?

Where is cultural studies?

Well it seemed like it was hiding in public at the headlining events of Crossroads. The two keynote speeches prompted a combined total of three questions. A star-studded plenary talk on the last day began almost twenty minutes late. "Why?" you may ask — was someone missing? were there technological problems? did someone forget their materials? None of the above. The speakers and the panel chair were standing and breezily chatting, while gazing at the audience. It was obvious, as one audience member observed, that they were disappointed with the turnout and were turning to the standard rock concert delay technique. The plenary was indeed one of the best moments of the entire conference, with provocative, engaging, and bold ideas. All the more reason it was baffling that Q&A almost didn't happen, as the silence went for so long the session almost closed. Three questions did eventually emerge, one of which came out of "friendship" from an audience member seeking to give a speaker a chance to talk. The paucity of questions, as well as the timidity of dialogue throughout the conference, makes one want to ask "Dude where's my conflict?"

September 27, 2004 - 9:45pm -- jim
Theory

"The Seductions of Islamism:

Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution"

Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, New Politics

February 2004 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of
the Iranian Revolution. From September 1978 to
February 1979, in the course of a massive urban
revolution with millions of participants, the Iranian
people toppled the regime of Muhammad Reza Shah
Pahlavi (1941-1979), which had pursued a highly
authoritarian program of economic and cultural
modernization. By late 1978, the Islamist faction led
by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had come to dominate
the antiregime uprising, in which secular
nationalists, democrats, and leftists also
participated. The Islamists controlled the slogans and
the organization of the protests, which meant that
many secular women protesters were pressured into
donning the veil (chador) as an expression of
solidarity with the more traditional Iranian Muslims.
By February 1979, the shah had left the country and
Khomeini returned from exile to take power. The next
month, he sponsored a national referendum that
declared Iran an Islamic republic by an overwhelming
majority. Soon after, as Khomeini began to assume
nearly absolute power, a reign of terror ensued.

September 22, 2004 - 3:21pm -- jim
Announcements
Theory

"Creative Philosophy: Theory and Praxis"

Call for Papers for Angelaki special issue on "Creativity"

Co-editors Felicity J. Colman (University of Melbourne) and
Charles J. Stivale (Wayne State University)

This Angelaki issue on "Creativity" seeks essays with collaborative, hybrid, and polyvocal research, linkages, and models of creativity in philosophical thought and artistic practices (e.g. literature, architecture, music, visual arts, new media, cinema). The thematic of creativity asks how creative interfaces operate, what forms of generic skills and community resources inform contemporary relations between ideas and creative expression and representation, and how and where creativity is produced.

September 13, 2004 - 7:56am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"The Collaborator and the Multitude:

An Interview with Michael Hardt"

Caleb Smith and Enrico Minardi, the minnesota review

A major event in political and critical theory, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (Harvard, 2000) turned orthodox thinking about imperialism around, proposing a decentered global network and redescribing capital, in the poststructuralist terms of Deleuze and Guattari, as a dynamic pattern of breaks and flows. The book is one fruit of the continuing collaboration of Hardt, a literature professor at Duke, and Negri, an Italian radical theorist; previously they co-authored Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State Form (Minnesota, 1994) and most recently they have written Multitude (Penguin, 2004), which develops a concept of cooperative resistance to the reimagined global order as an alternative to the idea of national liberation.

Before joining the faculty at Duke, Michael Hardt did his graduate work at the University of Washington. He is also the author of Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minnesota, 1993) and numerous pieces of political journalism and criticism. In addition, he has translated Negri’s The Savage Anomaly (Minnesota, 1991) and coedited Radical Thought in Italy (with Paolo Virno; Minnesota, 1996) and The Jameson Reader (with Kathi Weeks; Blackwell, 2000). Relevant to this interview, see also Michael Hardt's essay "Prison Time" in the Yale Review 91 (1997): 64-79. This interview took place on 5 March 2004 in Hardt’s office at Duke. It was conducted by Caleb Smith, a doctoral student in English at Duke, and Enrico Minardi, a lecturer in Romance Studies.

Smith: Most people will know you as Antonio Negri's collaborator in the authorship of Empire. Your new project, again with Negri, grows out of that book and the promises made in its final chapters. Did you have the sense from the beginning that Empire was unfinished?

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