Long Sunday

Four notes on the periphery of a speculative morphology

1. "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" is, perhaps, for those who arrive at it from literature, cultural studies, philosophy or similar, Spivak's most 'difficult' or elusive of essays. It seems to be the one that, more than any other, makes readers blink, their eyes glaze over.

Sometimes, at best, this is expressed as a bewilderment as to what might be at stake in the argument or, as a slightly different question, as a consideration of what is at put at stake in reading at a particular conjuncture. At other times, with a more or less implicit embarrassment that Spivak herself notes, the readers' gaze is averted from the discussion of 'economics', or better: labour-power and value - which is to say, that which is least familiar and proper to the aforementioned disciplines but which, as it turns out, the essay is about.  Other times, still, the confusion that results from Spivak's indisciplined writing cuts the other way. But, indeed, "before there is language, there are languages", as someone would say  (though, it remains to ask whether this statement exists in its temporal, integrative sense, as the hope or promise of a lingua franca).

Questions on and responses to the Spivak piece.

The following is a guest post by Nate Hawthorne, blogger at the militant What in the hell .....

First, thanks to Jon and the Long Sundayista crew for holding this symposium. This is not a text I would have otherwise read. I look forward to reading the other contributions in order to understand it better.

Second, while I'm glad to have read it and grateful for the opportunity to participate in the symposium, it is unfortunately the case that I'm not sure what to do with this text. Much of the idiom and at least one of the major writers it references--Derrida--is very unfamiliar to me. I also find some of the philosophical uses of Marx in the essay bring out a proprietorial response on my part. I'd like to claim that it's because I prefer treatments of Marx to stick closer to the letters of blood and fire in which the history of capitalism is written, but that would be dishonest. I like a lot of abstract treatments of Marx. I don't know what it is about this text that doesn't click for me, maybe it's just that I don't really understand chunks of it. Hopefully some of you lot can and will help sort me out.

In any case, below is what I have to contribute to the symposium on Spivak's "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value." I have organized my contribution into three categories. There are two items under each category. I have numbered these items according to category.

The three categories in my contribution, in order of appearance, are:
- Questions that are nothing more than questions (QTANMTQ)
- Questions that are maybe a bit snarky and which are just as much comments as they are questions (QTAMABSAWAJAMCATAQ)
- Responses (R)

wrenching them out of their assigned function

I'm going to jump in here with a brief note on continuity and discontinuity in Spivak's text, "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value."

The nub of Spivak's argument is this: she presents a critique, first, of what she terms "the continuist version of Marx's scheme of value" (In Other Worlds 155), but second and more importantly, also of "all ideologies of adequation and legitimacy" (171).

The notion of value as continuity (of unruffled exchange, or even a series of more or less orderly exchanges and transformations) is at best mistaken, at worst ideological, and so complicit.

Hence Spivak's recourse to "the concept-metaphor of the text" (171) and textuality, to indicate the overdeterminations, the loose ends, the "situation of open-endedness" that characterizes the process by which value is produced as "an insertion into textuality" (161).

But the point is that there are discontinuities and then there are discontinuities.

The Invaluable

The following is a guest post by pomegrenade, a dissertator in Comparative Literature, and state school teacher in upstate New York, who is starting to set foot on the shores outside the academy...

Let me start with the end of the first scene from Jean Genet’s The Screens--as it kept coming back to me while reading Spivak on Marx, for which I had to constantly defer the preparation I had to do for a Wednesday class on Genet’s play. In this scene, Said and his mother, very poor Algerians in the period immediately before the war of liberation, are carrying a suitcase of dough to the house of Said’s prospective wife, for the wedding. The end of the scene comes with a frantic/incestuous(?) dance of mother and son in a state of exhaustion from the long walk carrying the dough in the hot sun:

SAID: Take a look at my mother, see how beautiful and proud she is beneath her sweat and on her high heels! THE MOTHER keeps smiling and dancing. You’re beautiful. I’ll carry the valise. Whee!...

He imitates lightning. He reaches for the valise, but THE MOTHER grabs it first. A brief struggle. They burst out laughing, imitate thunder and lightning. The valise falls to the ground and opens, and everything falls out: it was empty. SAID and THE MOTHER fall to the ground and sit there roaring with laughter.

How No Can You Go?

(The following is a guest essay by Keith Tilford, author of the weblog Metastable Equilibrium.  It is very long but, like everything on Long Sunday, hardly bored, or boring.  Update:  Part II is now here.)

Michael Blum, still from "Wandering Marxwards", 1999

What follows definitely took some liberties with a reading of Tronti.  I used “The Strategy of The Refusal” more as a point of departure than anything else, as I wanted to focus generally on the notion of refusal – on its creative/inventive capacities - and attempt to make visible some of the relationships between art practices since the 1960’s and the trajectory of operaismo and autonomia along with the theoretical works that have come out of Italy.  So perhaps in the spirit of Zizek’s book on Deleuze that he didn’t write, this can be my post on Tronti that I didn’t write.  The post is divided into four parts, the first two will be here at LS, but because of excessive length I’ll be posting the last two parts over at my blog if the reader is interested (one is a more in depth consideration of the work of artist Francis Alys, and the other on “anorectic subjectivities” which acts as a kind of conclusion).  This is really part of a wider research interest of mine, but I am very pleased that this symposium took place since it gave me the chance to return to some of those interest.  Call this a draft, then. Many of the themes taken up in the second part of this post are also adressed in Howard Slater's essay "The Spoiled Ideals of Lost Situations", which is meant to accompany a reading of the book Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, where most of the artist's writings I've used can be found.  Two artists that I have not been able to squeeze into this, but would highly recommend that anyone interested with what’s being said here check out are Thomas Hirschhorn (see here) and especially Santiago Sierra (a little about him here).  Also, I should point out that while the word “practice” appears throughout, many artists today (including myself) really don’t like this word.  I’ll skip giving reasons for the moment.  Perhaps Ranciere’s “ways of doing and making within the aesthetic regime of the arts” would have been better, though long-winded – and out of laziness I have not yet modified any of that.  However, the word does appear in inverted commas at several points, which I’m sure Matt will appreciate.

I. Double-Headed Histories

"Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults into a terrain of particles each containing its own void." – Robert Smithson

"The clear division between reality and fiction makes a rational logic of history impossible as well as a science of history." – Jacques Ranciere

With nearly forty years separating us from the first publication of Tronti’s essay “The Strategy of The Refusal”, a document showing that the struggle against work was actually essential to the development of capital, what to make of it now, in light so many radical, and at times even invisible or largely unnoticed mutations in the constitution of contemporary capitalism?  Perhaps some possible answers can be recognized in Tronti’s formulation that ‘against the old forms of struggle and resistance’ should be installed new forms of political organization and refusal.  It seems apparent then, that to think refusal today should invest in the same formulation – this time polemically positioned against Tronti.  Why?  Because from within the paradigm of “The Strategy of Refusal” is a rigorous division of class – and one that seems to run the risk of merely satisfying a dialectic and binary representational machinism; the categories of ‘worker’ and ‘party’ seem to end up installing themselves within the very representations that the workers would have intended to overthrow, a move which became thwarted by their own becoming-major.  So perhaps some solutions to envisioning contemporary forms of refusal might begin along the lines suggested by Deleuze and Guattari: to think minority instead of class.  To say this does not mean denying that there are classes, or that there is a ruling class; only that refusal, resistance – what composes and calls for them - are not reducible to the antagonisms of a class division.  As the Italian Futurist FT Marinetti once said, “language is the motherload of all culture”, and it is without doubt impossible to follow the consequences of Tronti’s initial formulations without encountering and taking into much consideration all the nominations which have entered and continue to circulate through the “post-Fordist” lexicon as a result of the ‘failures’ of the Italian operaismo: social subjectivity, social chain, multitude, social factory, the general intellect, generic will, compositionism, immaterial or cognitive labour…

In coincidence with the workers movement as a particular history of struggles and theoretical works lay another long history of artistic practices and revolutions that could be said to have aimed at constructing solidarities with such resistances and refusals.  If the artists and workers caught up in these histories shared a common enemy it was certainly ‘capital’ – though such an enemy will always express itself in different forms relative to a given situation or milieu.  In Italy it was the factory; with artists, the museum, institution, or gallery.  In both instances there was a resistance toward the system’s control that manifested itself in the engaged and active search for an outside set against received modes of subjectivity and the “conjugations of the axiomatic” (D & G); a search that concerned itself with the invention of new forms of life and work aimed at the embetterment of society as a whole.  This other history, with loose ties to the attitudes of such localized movements as the Bauhaus in Germany and the Russian Constructivists (or for that matter more diffuse movements such as Dada), initiated new inquiries into modes of aesthetic production conceived through a kind of ‘anti-aesthetic’ which intersected with the ambitions of the Italian workers and autonomia during the 1960’s and 1970’s.  Such coincidence figures into the attempts made by artists during this period to resist both the sedentary space of an elitist institution and the commodity form of the artwork in what came to known as Conceptual Art.

Five theses on Tronti

(The following is a guest post by Brett Neilson, author of the weblog Life during wartime.)

What is important about ‘The Strategy of Refusal’ is the strategy of refusal. This is its Copernican revolution, its exception. The rest is noise.

[O]nly afterwards, after a long-terrible, historical travail which is, perhaps, not yet completed, do the workers arrive at the point of being actively, subjectively, ‘a class against capital’.  A prerequisite of this process of transition is political organisation, the party, with its demand for total power.  In the intervening period there is the refusal - collective, mass, expressed in passive forms - of the workers to expose themselves as ‘a class against capital’ without that organisation of their own, without that total demand for power.

Refusal is the strategy of ‘the intervening period’, the hinc et nunc, the long Sunday.  Is it any accident that Tronti reminds us in La politica al tramonto that Kafka was born in Prague the same year Marx died in London?

Strategy of Refusal of Strategy

(The following is a guest post by Stephen Squibb, author of the weblog fugitive ethical.)

What is being refused in Tronti’s “The Strategy of The Refusal”?

"What is generally known as class consciousness is, for us, nothing other that the moment of organization, the function of the party, the problem of tactics – the channels which must carry the strategic plane through to a point of practical breakthrough. And at the level of pure strategy there is no doubt that this point is provided by the very advanced moment in which this hypothesis of struggle becomes reality: the working class refusal to present demands to capital… in the final event, this means depriving capital of its content, of the class relationship which is its basis."

Putting aside the specifics of Tronti’s account of class consciousness for a moment, it is certainly evident that this is a departure from the traditional understanding of the term. But this should not surprise us; Tronti warns at the outset that it might be worthwhile "to confound Hegel's dialectic a bit," by asserting that the working class is a class for itself before it is a class against capital. He is clear that this is a departure not simply from Hegel, but from Marx as well.

Notes on “The Strategy of the Refusal”

(The following is a guest post by Nate Hawthorne, author of the weblog What in the hell...)

Thanks very much to Angela for being the impetus behind getting this Tronti symposium going.  I'm enjoying it a great deal.  In what follows I deal with a few issues that I am concerned over in relation to a few different thinkers and within Marxism generally.  Some of this may well repeat things I have said elsewhere.  (One of the prices of friendship is that one sometimes runs out of interesting things to say, or simply forgets what one has said to whom, and so one repeats oneself to one's friends.  If this is so here, I apologize, and apologize as well for the length of this post.  I hope that at least in this instance affection beats boredom in the interpersonal emotional game of rock-paper-scissors.)  There are also many other things I wish I could address, and which are I think related to the concerns I deal with here.  I can't do so here due to limits of time, length and ability, and so relegate these matters to future conversation, reading, and discussion.  There's also a great deal in Tronti that I like very much.  I don't spend much time on it here because I'm trying to work out other problems with what I like less.

Tronti begins “The Strategy of the Refusal” with a gesture common in Marxism, that of positing the uniqueness of capitalism:  “the effective development of the productive power of labour begins when labour is transformed into wage labour, that is, when the conditions of labour confront it in the form of capital.”  I take 'effective development' to mean something like 'increase of.'  I'm not entirely sure what Tronti means by 'productive' when he says that labor becomes more productive under capitalism.  Since I didn't understand it, and since I don't like not understsanding things and tend to dismiss that which I don't like, I at first thought this was something I could just leave out in my selective read of the piece.  I no longer think that's the case.

Class and Subalternity

(The following is a guest post by George Ciccariello-Maher, occasional contributor to the illustrious Wrong Side of Capitalism.)

In thinking about Tronti's essay as well as other work I'm presently doing on hegemony, I found myself puzzling over a statement by Jon Beasley-Murray on the Marxist notion of class. Since Jon is joining us here, and since Tronti’s essay deals directly the questions involved, this is the ideal forum in which to raise the question. In his essay “On Posthegemony” (2003), Jon writes: “Here Marx was wrong: the history of all hitherto existing societies is less the history of class struggle than, at a still more primordial level, it is the history of the struggle to produce class.” This statement is part of a defense of the concept of the multitude as the operative concept in a posthegemonic period, and I would like to discuss briefly how Tronti responds to the same critique but does so within an understanding of class.

The radical character of Tronti’s position on class (and its fundamental proximity, I argue elsewhere, to that of Sorel) emerges most clearly in his markedly non-orthodox discussion of the class-in-itself (Klasse an Sich) versus the class-for-itself (Klasse für Sich). It is perhaps worthwhile to begin by noting that, even for Marx, the so-called “class-in-itself” cannot be reduced to pure objectivity, and we see this even in its alternative formulation as a “class against capital,” a class determined differentially vis-à-vis its enemy:

This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends becomes class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle (The Poverty of Philosophy). [This sentiment is echoed in The 18^th Brumaire as well as The German Ideology.]

Here, we see that the organic link between an oppositionally-defined class and its homogenization through struggle is already clearly present in Marx’s formulation. My point is less to defend Marx than to emphasize an ambiguity in the Marxist formulation, in which, in Jon’s words, we could see “the struggle to produce class” as intimately linked with class itself. In a passage that is so crucial as to be worth quoting at length, Tronti seizes upon this differential character of Marx’s definition to catapult himself beyond it:

2 Questions on Tronti

This symposium has been my first exposure to Tronti. I've benefitted from the posts and comments that have appeared thus far.

Most interesting to me is Tronti's insistence on the party, on a form for political action that corresponds to mass passivity at the level of production. On the one hand, refusal (passivity) is necessary to deprive capital of what it needs to control. On the other, the constitution of the party as a political actor is necessary in order to break the hold of the capitalist state. The party then is another space, a political alternative, a new site which does not issue demands but which receives or responds to those of capitalists. So, it seems as if his strategy involves an economic and a political logic, one that separates productivity from struggles and claims, and that establishes a specific task fitting for each.

All I can add at this point are two questions.