Minor refusals

(The following is a guest post by Eric Beck, author of the weblog Recording Surface.)

Deleuze says somewhere that the beginning and the end are merely points, that it's the middle that is truly interesting. So it is for Tronti, who almost despite himself affirms that in the struggle against capital the action takes place in the center. For Tronti, the middle is the place of the refusal, nestled between the beginning, the workers as a "class for itself," and the end, the workers as a party demanding "total power." Near the end of "The Strategy of the Refusal," even as he insists that we must move beyond passivity and noncollaboration and as he avows his teleological commitment to the party form, Tronti reiterates that the struggle should be based on "the working class refusal to present demands to capital, the total rejection of the whole trade union terrain, the refusal to limit the class relationship within a formal, legal, contractual form."

So even in his invocation of an end, Tronti returns to the middle, the site where the working class rejects not only the commands of capital but also the institutional imperatives of official labor movements, the cultural authority of working-class intellectuals, and the state, which seeks to reduce the working class to juridical and democratic, i.e., nonpolitical, citizen-subjects. Tronti hints at, but doesn't detail, the ways in which the middle offers the working class fecund ground for creating a politics that gives voice to its refusals. The working class shares the cramped spaces of the middle with other political minorities, women, ethnic and racial minorities, migrants, the disabled. These minorities establish revolutionary connections and create revolutionary becomings in the autonomous space they share, and these minoritarian connections and becomings are responsible for demands that capital cannot tolerate:

The first demands made by proletarians in their own right, the moment that they cannot be absorbed by the capitalist, function objectively as forms of refusal which put the system in jeopardy. Whenever the positive demands of workers go beyond the margins that the capitalist is able to grant, once again they repeat this function--the objective, negative function of pure and simple political blockage in the mechanism of the economic laws. [...] In such circumstances, the demand as a refusal sets off a chain of crises in capitalist production, each of which requires the tactical capacity to make a leap forward in the level of working class organisation.

***

As well as being the space of minoritarian existence, the middle in another sense represents one pole of capital's axial production arrangement. For Tronti, the worker that refuses the social factor inhabits the capitalist center of the North, and finds its counterpart in the formerly colonized periphery of the South. In Tronti's time, as in ours, the distinction between center and periphery was increasingly dissolving. As capital moves technological and material production to the periphery and simultaneously expands and deregularizes work in the center, domestic Souths are created in the North, just as in the South sharper lines are drawn between the producers and the consumers of value. 

Delezue and Guattari outline versions of the state that roughly correspond to the North and South: the social-democratic and the totalitarian. In reality, these constitute oscillations of state tactics rather than concrete types. The state adds axioms to overcome the limits that working-class struggle reveals to the it. That is, northern social-democracies may respond to working-class demands by resorting to the deregulatory, privatizing, and wage-lowering tactics of "totalitarianism," just as social-democratic axioms such as increasing domestic demand and creating a large public sector frequently occur in politically "totalitarian" states (cf. China).

(It is worth noting, I suppose, that the United States is probably exemplary here, as in its post-Cold War phase it is able to embody both the "totalitarian"--minimal state with low wages and high stratification--and the social-democratic--an outwardly directed financial sector and an always-ready war-machine--with apparent ease.)

These oscillations between social-democracy and totalitarianism are capital's futile way of getting beyond its fundamental impediment to waging direct war on the working class: its need for political institutions to enforce its perogatives.

The capitalists have not yet invented--and in fact will obviously never be able to invent--a non-institutionalised political power. That type of political power is scecifically working class power. The difference between the two classes at the level of political power is precisely this. The capitalist class does not exist independently of the formal political institutions, through which, at different times but in permanent ways, they exercise their political domination. [...] On the other hand, quite the opposite is true of the working class: it exists independently of the institutionalised levels of its organisation.

Capital's task is to either rid itself of the need for representation or saddle the working class with the kind of mediation that dilutes the latter's power.

***

Though Tronti says very little about the specific content of refusal, he is clear that it is a weapon to be used, not a permanent stance:

[S]topping work [...] implies a refusal of the command of capital as the organiser of production: it is a way of saying "No" at a particular point in the process and a refusal of the concrete labour which is being offered; it is a momentary blockage of the work-process and it appears as a recurring threat which derives its content from the process of value creation. The anarcho-syndicalist "general strike", which was supposed to provoke the collapse of capitalist society, is a romantic naivete from the word go. It already contains within it a demand which it appears to oppose--that is, the Lassallian demand for a "fair share of the fruits of labour"--in other words, a fairer "participation" in the profit of capital.

Refusal draws strength from its "momentary" and "particular" usage. As soon as it becomes permanent, it's rendered impotent. As totality, refusal leaves its ground and becomes active. It then attacks specific instances as illegitimate, unnatural, or illegal, which only validates the state's right to decide the legitimate, the natural, and the legal. In short, refusal becomes ironic. But it should be humorous. Refusal should attend to the consequences of capitalism, not concern itself with establishing and policing principles. As the tactic of minoritarian politics, refusal must remain passive, because in its passivity it becomes absolute.

Perhaps the great literary figure of the Tronti's refusal is not Bartleby but the humorous Leopold Bloom, the unmanly dark-haired Jew inhabiting Europe's internal colony, Ireland. In the minoritarian space Bloom inhabits, he continually makes connections with the Orient and Africa and with women and children. Bloom's connections with minorities go beyond mere solidarity or sympathy, however. In the series of refusals that make up his life--the refusals of masculine imperatives, sexual monogamy, provincialism, nationalism (which, significantly, is simultaneously a rejection of anti-Semitism and racism)--Bloom acts out a radical becoming-other that ultimately rejects not just capital's commands but, finally, capitalist command.

Comments

[Keith]

I really like this post. Permanent refusal is rendered impotent, indeed. I'll be taking similar directions in my post come sunday via Deleuze, the middle, minority becomings...But I was struck when reading this by your suggestion that Tronti was proposing (albeit as you say "in spite of himself") a use of the middle and the minoritarian. Doesn't the worker elude the minoritarian by a becoming-major that would gather them under 'the party' and 'the worker', stalling the movement inside of representation itself? At least in Tronti I see that problem as particularly relevant, though less and less so as the trajectory of the workers' movement goes through autonomia and the emarginati...

[Eric]

Thanks, Keith. I look forward to your post.

To be sure, I've taken some liberties with Tronti, exagerrated and selectively channeled him. I definitely see the problem you point to, but I also see Tronti as struggling against representation even as he avows the party. It's a weird paradox. It's late and I must sleep, but there are some passages where he seems to me to be criticizing the party form.

But for now I'll add that whatever Tronti calls the party surely lacks the transcendental character of the Leninist party.

[Glen]

hi eric,

nice post. some rought thoughs, then I have a bit of a deleuzian question for you (well a d&g AO question).

I'll throw this in:

"Capitalist power seeks to use the workers' antagonistic will-to-struggle as a motor of its own development. The workerist party must take this same real mediation by the workers of capital's interests and organise it in an antagonistic form, as the tactical terrain of struggle and as a strategic potential for destruction. Here there is only one reference point - only one orientation - for the opposed world views of the two classes - namely the class of workers. Whether one's aim is to stabilise the development of the system or to destroy it forever, it is the working class that is decisive. Thus the society of capital and the workers' party find themselves existing as two opposite forms with one and the same content."

Reminds me of Agamben and the force-of-law ('force' crossed out), except here it is the force-of-production, 'potentia' maybe, later called the 'living activity of labour', but here as the axiomatised rendered as will-to-struggle. The two are not the same thing, and here lies my question. What I was curious about, why does tronti assume that such force-of-production is eventually/originally(??) organised to causally produce 'capital'/'antagonist-to-capital'? It is evident when he states "it is productive labour which produces capital" and elsewhere in his piece. Is this referring an ontogenesis of capital, ie the middle to which you refer? or a long lost historical moment whereby capital comes into being fully formed and everything else is a mere cascade of actuality, like a (non-state) communist butterfly flappppping its wing to create the storm of capitalism? anyway, that is not my question.

tronti then softens his tone and shifts tact slightly when he writes: "if there is no active life in capital without the living activity of labour power, if capital is already, at its birth, a Consequence of productive labour". labour is the living activity which "struggles against the iron laws of capitalist" ie the axiomatics of capital. The axiomatics have continually be remade, the battle over the axiomatisation of the living activity of labour power can only be subsumed by the class relation which enables the production of the capitalist assemblages. workers are as much capitalists as capitalists are workers. The capitalists operate according to the same axiomatics as the workers. such is tronti's pessimism that "the concept of revolution and the reality of the working class are one and the same." What a reality!?! Continual revolution!

The bourgeoisie have a truce ('resolution') with both sides of this struggle over the force-of-production. That truce is called 'culture'. "Culture in fact, like the concept of Right, of which Marx speaks, is always bourgeois. In other words, it is always a relation between intellectuals and society, between intellectuals and the people, between intellectuals and class; in this way it is always a mediation of conflicts and Their resolution in something else." Tronti tells us "progressive culture is a myth," rather, we carry the burden of enlightenment tradition and its 'monstrous divinities' as the hope of 'progress'. The truce takes the form of anti-humanism, irrationalism, and anti-historicism, or, in other words, all the grotesque stupidities fawning like frozen gargoyles over the aborted fetus of 'workerist revolution'!!

but, seriously, what is tronti's suggestion? "Once again, the crude proletarian origins of the modern worker need to be grasped and made to function within the present needs of struggle and organisation." Eat that apple worker! Good one.

Just as the workers are as much capitalists as capitalists are workers, both, within the assemblages of capitalism, are subject to the comfort of the bourgeois, their 'culture', the "subjective demands of the workers." so my question is: How do we get the petitie-bourgeois (workers and capitalists) not to 'refuse' capital, but to refuse the bourgeois truce?

[s0metim3s]

I liked the Bloom reference, Eric. And I'll have to read this over more than the once or twice.

But, for the moment, an initial remark. Tronti writes that he confounds the terms of Hegel's dialectic, "a bit". Though, it's hardly "a bit", is it? The force (or as Jon puts it, the style) is not with the origin and/or end, but in this "a bit". It's an inflection both modest and wry in the midst of the confidence that Jon notes.

[CR]

Bloom acts out a radical becoming-other that ultimately rejects not just capital's commands but, finally, capitalist command.

Save for the fact, of course, that he's an advertising agent, if only a semi-employed one. He rejects everything that you associate with capitalism, but not capitalism itself.

the refusals of masculine imperatives, sexual monogamy, provincialism, nationalism (which, significantly, is simultaneously a rejection of anti-Semitism and racism)

Are you quite sure that capitalism, in its outplay, doesn't reject many of those same -ives and -isms, or at least tries to, on a structural level? You know, per this:

All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

Because it's interesting, you know, that your list doesn't include the market, alienated labor, the commodity form, etc...

Bloom isn't on stike against capitalism. Rather, he's held in the purgatorial anteroom of casual employment. Neither fully employed, not quite unemployed. Ahead of his time, I think. As

(Moretti's essay in Signs Taken for Wonders is helpful on this point, I think....)

[s0metim3s]

Just as the workers are as much capitalists as capitalists are workers, both, within the assemblages of capitalism, are subject to the comfort of the bourgeois, their 'culture', the "subjective demands of the workers." so my question is: How do we get the petitie-bourgeois (workers and capitalists) ...

Tronti's remarks on workers being capital and capital being labour (or however the formulation goes) isn't the sociological motif of embourgoisification. It's about the dynamics of surplus value.

[Eric]

CR--Thanks for the reading suggestion, and I like your point that Bloom is precarious before precarity. Particulars aside, my feeling about your comment is that you are drawing lines, without admitting it, between the "merely cultural" and "real politics." In other words, that rejection of sexism and racism is less a rejection of "capitalism itself" than is the refusal of the commodity form and the market. I'm sure the distinction is lost on, say, a black feminist in the US. Are you saying that certain of capital's axioms are essential while others are merely superstructure, or am I missing something in my reading?

Angela--I've read this essay three times over the last few weeks, and each time I came upon that part about "confounding a bit the terms of Hegel's dialectic," it surprised me and made me laugh. Modest, yes, and ironic, too, as it seems to me closer to, well, a refusal than a confounding.

Glen--Glad you liked it, and thanks for the extensive comment. You've said a mouthful; hopefully I can do justice to at least some of it.

For what it's worth: That bit about "crude origins" made me cringe as well.

It occured to me as I was typing up the bit about capital needing institutions that, in Tronti's logic, the fact that capital continues to exist indicates that the working class has always had its political existence mediated. This is, of course, painfully obvious, but figuring out how and where this mediation takes place is crucial. I tend to disagree with you that the content of it is restricted to culture, if you mean culture in both the broad (ie, beyond just language and art) and the narrow (ie, excluding politics and economy) senses, but I very much like the concept of a truce. I was thinking of it in those terms, but I didn't specifically formulate it that way. I think that's accurate. As I said, I would expand it (Tronti did call culture a mediation, not the mediation), but I like that truce implies a suspension, not an ending, and "bourgeois truce" indicates that it's the bourgeoisie's only weapon, its way of forestalling defeat.

In answer to your d&g AO question I'm going to cheese out and give an easy d&g AO answer: desire. Specifically, desires that can't be met, that make the truce inoperable....And that's as specific as I'm going to get.

[Glen]

ange, since when has surplus value not been a social relation? or did you mean something else? unpaid labour in the recognition and administration of labour and labour value, or circulation of labour, capital, commodities, or 'productive consumption' of commodities (lefebvre)...?

the (embourgois) 'truce' could be thought of as a certain threshold for the organisation of (socially) expected levels of surplus value across all forms of production (ie the production of production).

if Tronti wants to reify capitalists, workers, and the bourgeois, so they are conceived as separate ('sociological') classes, well then there is a problem, because they are not separate. funnily enough, pierre bourdieu has written about this on 'the constitution of classes' or something like that.

isn't self-valorisation staking out a claim on part of this 'truce' making process? as negri writes:

"Capital has often accepted that the working class struggle is the motor of development - and has even accepted that proletarian self-valorisation should dicta the pace and nature of development: what it needs to eliminate is not the existence, but the antagonistic element of the working class movement. Taken this to (paradoxical) extremes, we could say that for capital there is no possibility of effective political stabilisation (ie no possibility of command and exploitation within a dimension of an enlarged reproduction of profit) except to the extent that it proves possible to take the proletarian movement as the base, the starting point for restructuration."

refuse the truce...

[Glen]

eric,

indeed, i was reading some of the ideas in your comments re thobourn's use of 'cramped spaces' (which is like negri's 'creativity of poverty'), which may lead to self-valorisation, but is instead leading to a viral like spread of a dissolving of an absolute centre-periphery distinction (ie the 'truce').

my problem with tronti is that I don't think refusal is possible in the strict sense of a specifically working class refusal, whereby the working class is precisely a 'class' and not a moment of relation to the means of production (ie part of exchange), particularly if a less reified (more realist) conception of class constitution is used.

[Nate]

Feel like I'm butting in here, but I'm not one to let that stop me - Glen, I think you're making more of this than Tronti would (or at least more than I do in reading Tronti, I'm not sure I can always tell the difference). Working class refusal is simply the refusal to play the role as producer of surplus value - the refusal in some sense to be the working class, by not working. ('Simply' at a conceptual level, not 'easy'.) If I go to work and don't do anything my boss doesn't accrue (sp?) anything as a result of the wages paid, so the differential that makes up surplus values (value produced by labor power set to work as greater than value advanced for purchase of labor power) doesn't get produced. Thus no accumulation of capital. I think your charge of reification is misplaced here. As for separate classes - you don't have a torturing prison guard and a tortured prisoner without a relation between them, so depending on where you set the frame of reference, you could say there's no separation between the two. But why do so? What's at stake?

[Glen]

nate, what is at stake is precisely the 'simple' you identify. what is the utility of tronti's thesis if such a 'simple' line is taken?

maybe i am reading too much into it, i am not sure??? as i have tried to indicate the 'refusal' to be productive -- to enable surplus value -- is impossible when productivity is not solely the domain of the 'working class'; there are other moments in exchange when surplus value is produced. so to retain a fidelity to tronti's thesis, ie 'working class' are productive, this means that there are mixes of capitalist, bourgeois, and working class elements to every person.

i am not sure what you are getting at with the torture thing, but it makes me think to ask the question: what are you trying to do, stop torture, free the prisoner, or destroy the prison? the prisoner saying, 'no' is not going to destroy the prison, but it may stop the torture. to destroy the prison means also freeing the guard.

[s0metim3s]

Glen, I have no idea why you think I was talking about whether surplus value is a relation or not. Nor where you get the idea that Tronti reifies classes. You (not Tronti) talked about both workers and capitalists being "subject to the comfort of the bourgeois".

[Keith]

Glen: "To destroy the prison means also freeing the guard"

And that's exactly what happened, except the prison destroyed itself, so to speak.

[Glen]

"You (not Tronti) talked about both workers and capitalists being 'subject to the comfort of the bourgeois'"

well, indeed, thank you for recognising that, ange, that is exactly what I am arguing. hopefully we have it established now. hence my question, what is the relevance of tronti's "refusal" as he formulates it?

nate provided the most convincing answer so far, it has to be thought of in conceptually 'simple' terms. if this is what you have to do for it to make sense, then fair enough. But you have to forget about a whole lot of stuff to be able to do this.

to make it a bit more 'complicated' (along this 'surplus value' axis):

1) either 'surplus value' is defined in such a manner that is utterly irrelevant to today's situation (some sort of archaic concept associated with the 'working class' as an actual, that is, sociological class), or 2) it is understood in terms of the ways value is produced a whole range of activities and practices. Which, in that second case, there are two ways to understand the 'refusal' either 1) it does not only belong to 'the working class', because the working class does not 'own' potentia as such (which, by definition, is problematic) or 2) that each subject is configured as constituted by various elements of what Tronti calls 'working class', 'capitalist' and 'bourgeois'.

of course there are other permutations of all these. for example, there is an 'actual' working class, but it hardly exists in any 'pure' state (separate from these other 'classes') in the western countries with which I am familiar. eric makes this point in his point re 'north'/'south'.

I am not arguing anything too crazy, Negri and others, including D&G (hence my questions under this posting), have made these sorts of points before about shifts in value, etc.

[Nate]

hi Glen,

The elements you identify in Negri (I don't know D&G) are part of why I've been moving away from him recently. Again, my take (which is sort of Negri/Tronti via Harry Cleaver via my own sloppy brain) -
the relevant point of surplus value is the imposition of work, as product of and medium of social control. In that regard, at work, my boss is subject to an imposition of work and imposes work on me. I'm concerned about the latter, not the former. Lower level management can worry about themselves. (With the prison metaphor: destruction of the prison doesn't have to mean liberating the prison guard, if, for instance, the prisoners all got out, blocked the exits, and burnt it down. I'm not calling for that, but, frankly, I want out and what happens to the guards is not anywhere near my first priority.)

I'm also in no way convinced that your case #1 - surplus value as outmoded - is actually the case. It's always been processual (if the pins made in the pin factory are thrown into the ocean by dockworkers elsewhere in the circuits of production then value advanced is lost not recouped and accumulated). The 'outmoded' narrative in Negri is, in my opinion, based on a tremendously reductive and orthodox marxist picture of what capitalism was like prior to postfordism. This narrative of outmodedness, predicated on informatic labor (because the later turn toward the body and biopolitical labor simply doesn't wash), also makes Negri's work susceptible toward universalizing one class sector in what is another very orthodox marxist move (hence all the gymnastics over what is meant by immaterial labor and the hegemony of immaterial labor).

Best wishes,
Nate

[Glen]

Nate, my understanding of Negri was the complete opposite of outmoded, that 'supply value' becomes hyper-relevant!! TCO makes the distinction in comments to your post regarding the difference between wage labour and labour power. My reading of Negri and others (D&G!) is that labour power -- what D&G would call the production of production to locate it in an even broader context -- is not only located in the wage labour relation. Labour power (potentia) is demanded of us everywhere. Of course, there is a difference between production and reproduction, and that difference is in the relation to capital. My example, which relates to my actual research, is the labour of mobility. People have to work at getting to work or try to get in to another country. Also, the simple boss/worker relation becomes extremely problematic in the context of share holders and public companies, etc. To a certain extent, I think we are actually in agreement about this?

My problem with Tronti's ideas for the contemporary era is precisely what is the point of the working class refusing to deliver their labour power, if the subsumption of labour power in a relation of capitalist command (surplus value) is not only located in the 'working class'.

My original comment was trying to get at (ie diagram, in the D&G sense) the power relations which define each of Tronti's figures (working class, capitalist, bourgeoisie). I suggested the separation of these figures is no longer accurate. However, to reclaim the 'refusal' I thought it might be useful to think at what point in these power relations would a refusal by more useful in the contemporary era.

It becomes a D&G sort of question, as Eric notes, because of what could be called the affective apparatus of capture, namely mass culture, everyday life, etc, which is also the location of of our desire (the production of production) from everything from the labour of looking in the economy of attention to menial household work.

[Nate]

hi Glen,
I don't agree with the becoming that you and Negri identify: you said that surplus value (I assume 'supply value' is a typo) becomes hyper-relevant. That means it wasn't before. Why wasn't it before?
Since I'm not convinced there's been some radical break between prior orders of capital accumulation and the present, I'm also not convinced by your argument that working class and capitalist class have become blurry categories. Why have they become blurry? You could argue they've always been blurry (which wouldentail that Tronti's argument never made sense rather than that it no longer makes sense), but the argument doesn't hold that they weren't blurry before and now are .
take care,
Nate

[Eric]

I go away for a day or so and look at all that happens....

The part here that's most important to me, but also the fuzziest, is the value-production part. Glen, I'm symphathetic to redefining surplus value, and hence value, but it feels to me like you are leaning towards a Negrian denial of value--perhaps an exagerration, and I should say that I haven't read anything he's written in the last 20 years, so I'm assuming accounts of him I've read are accurate, though even in Marx Beyond Marx he was on his way to dismissing the validity of value--rather than a D&G reconceptualizing of it. In C&S, as I recall, they retained the primacy, as it were, of surplus value (flow) and the difference between capital flow and labor flow. Which is to say, the ways that code/flows are produced and captured are not thought irrelevant by D&G.

Your point "that each subject is configured as constituted by various elements of what Tronti calls 'working class', 'capitalist' and 'bourgeois'" is intriguing--and one that I find myself still grappling with--but I wonder, doesn't it erase the potential for difference? And how can it account for antagonism, ie, how would it explain what's happening in France right now?

[ROGER]

While the line from Tronti to Negri is probably more historically "tight", the use of D and G, here, suggests another line -- from Deleuze to Latour and Callon, and the notion of agencement -- that is, the notion that power is distributed over the site, including over the non-human instruments in the site, and that we have to look at agency in terms of agent-networks.

Latour has explicitly related this to the desiring machines in Anti-Oedipus. All of which is forground for saying that a key point of your post,Eric, is hard to understand: "Refusal should attend to the consequences of capitalism, not concern itself with establishing and policing principles. As the tactic of minoritarian politics, refusal must remain passive, because in its passivity it becomes absolute" It is hard to understand, firstly, how refusal -- or its bearers, be they humans or cyborgs - achieves this position of having a perfect vision of the consequences of capitalism. I would like this to be the case, but I wonder if it ever could be the case. It would seem that the humor of refusing has to do with the capitalist claim to do just that -- to put in its inputs and predict its outputs. Refusing is refusing to see that, firstly, as a predicting machine in anything but a very limited simulation. Or so I would think. Further, as he act of refusing nears the absolute, it nears its own suicide - and sheds its use value as a model. At that point, it provides an eschatological excuse -- something we have seen a lot of in the last twenty years, as Labor and Socialist parties in Europe convey the message, sorry, we couldn't jump the logic of capitalism, now it is time to embrace it.

There is something intriguing, however, about locating refusal in a novel that ends, yes, yes. I wonder where Molly fits in with this schema.

[Keith]

"I can't go on, I'll go on."

Roger - I've been flirting with this idea myself, but thinking of the manner in which minority becoming grounds generic experience and meant to do some comparisons of Deleuze and Badiou's versions of Beckett. But with beckett it's this persistent desire to continue existing - a real struggle that contains some form of refusal too. I wonder what the actual number of times the word "no" appears in his trilogy would be? I think I'm going to go count...

[Eric]

Brett's post has all the answers to your questions, Roger. So just go read that. But seriously, his articulations of feminism and passivity were sort of what I had in mind in my post, only he said it much better than I could have.

I thought about the paradox of seeing refusal in the book with Molly's yes, but it's a fertile paradox, mostly because of the complex of becomings shared by Bloom and Molly If I or someone had the time--and money; I'd need to quit my job--it could be fruitful to insert some of the feminist writing on Deleuze and Molly into the refusal question.

Why should a political approach to consequences have to hold a "perfect vision" of them? I don't see that it's necessary. And perhaps absolute was an unfortunate term, but I wanted to imply an agendalessness (!), a lack of program, non-utopianiansim, that didn't readmit those things through the back door.