Resistance with irony

The following is a guest post by Brett Neilson, blogger at the irregular Life During Wartime.

1. ‘Triumphant global finance capital/world trade can only be resisted with irony.’ I am simultaneously drawn and worried by this claim from Spivak’s 2000 essay ‘From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom, What’s Left of Theory.’ Perhaps this is because the work of irony is never done. Reaching on the one hand toward insubordinate refusal and on the other toward an unbearable ontological lightness, irony holds forth a promise it cannot keep. As such, it provides no chart of programmatic action--no twelve steps for overcoming global capitalism. Its tactics are inevitably polluted with ideological longings that, as Spivak’s teacher Paul de Man points out, it can know but never quite overcome.

Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world

Is this precisely the impossibility that drives Spivak to rewrite her observations on reading Marx after Derrida so many times?

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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).

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Tronti blogweave

For your quick or leisurely perusal, the compilation of Long Sunday's recent symposium on Mario Tronti's "The Strategy of the Refusal", and some remarks.  The multitudinous, but alphabetised, contributions:

»Jon Beasley-Murray, The new barbarians
»Eric Beck, Minor refusals
»George Ciccariello-Maher, Class and subalternity
»Jodi Dean, Two questions on Tronti [follow-up]
»Roger Gathman Fantasy sites and the conquistadors of the planet
»Nate Holdren, Notes on "The Strategy of the Refusal"
»John Holloway, Adorno meets Tronti
»Doug Johnson, Intellectuals, the refusal of power, office workers' unions
»Brian Lamb, I would prefer not to bore you
»Craig McFarlane, Refusing to engage
»David McInerney, Tronti and Althusser
»Angela Mitropoulos, When will this labour end?
»Brett Neilson, Five theses on Tronti
»Stephen Squibb, Strategy of refusal of strategy
»Keith Tilford, How no can you go? Part I [Part II]

The preamble to the Long Sunday symposium, which includes links to related texts.  The relevant essay by Tronti is here, and a quick link to Long Sunday's Tronti folder. 

There were also a number of related posts elsewhere:  Destructive Creation, Northanger, Going Somewhere, Philosophy.com, pas au-delà, Attitude Adjustor. (Those are the most directly related to the discussion, though I wouldn't be surprised if I've missed some.)  And, not least, there is always the ongoing reading at Leggiamo Tronti.

My immense gratitude to all those who contributed their writings, readings and questions - those who simply took the time to read along with, and specifically those, such as Matt, who spent much time coding and uploading.

Already, Jon has the ball rolling for another reading, and I'm hoping that blogweaving continues, mutates and grows.  Not only because it creates a shared conversation that cuts across various blogs without converging along the one line, but also because - in ways that have yet to be fully explored - it marks an autonomy of writing, reading and research from the university that, particularly in times such as these, becomes an imperative.  Needless to say, what we read and write is related to how we read and write, no less than it is to the diificult questions of who, how and why this 'we' might appear, in that process.

Many thanks for the adventure.

When will this labour end?

Labouring against work. Mulling over the contributions and remarks made during the course of these readings, this is what strikes me as the first paradox, which is also the specific paradox of abstract labour and concrete labours that, in turn, characterises Marx's distinctive account of capitalism, that which brings all others paradoxes to the fore and makes them boil over. It's all about specificity, the difference and the cut. And is there anything more paradoxical than communism, a class politics that gears itself toward the abolition of class society? Operaismo - ie., workerism - against work. And Tronti's essay is nothing if not paradoxical.

Who would have guessed that a discussion of the refusal of work would result in so much toil?

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Adorno meets Tronti

(This is a guest post by John Holloway, author of Change the World Without Taking Power.)

It is clear that non-identity is the hero, the centre, the moving force of the world as Adorno presents it.  But what do we understand by non-identity?  Is it just a philosophical concept or is the conceptualisation of a social force?  The answer, surely, is that we are non-identity.  The force that does not fit, the force that contradicts all identification, the force that overflows is subjectivity, we.  And who are we?  We are the subject, uncontainable within any definition.  We can say that we are the working class, but that makes sense only if we understand "working class" as a concept that explodes against itself, a concept that bursts its own bounds.

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Refusing to Engage

Reading Tronti has been somewhat of an experience.  Consequently, I'm not sure how to proceed with my comments because my reading of Tronti has alternated between fascination and boredom.  Perhaps these two responses to Tronti are closely related because, Tronti, who I've never read before, appears both as  new and sedimented.  Some of the ideas are quite familiar and in this respect we might speak of Tronti as an origin and thus an interesting spark of creativity, but, at the same time, his ideas have appeared over the past forty years in fragmented form, most notably in Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno. Fascination & boredom; new & old.

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Tronti and Althusser

(This is a guest posting by David McInerney, editor of "Althusser & Us", Borderlands.*)

The following does not constitute a close reading of "The Strategy of Refusal", or its place within Tronti's work more generally.  Given other demands, the best I can do is relate Tronti's work to my recent study of Louis Althusser's defence/rethinking of the concept of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and its relations to his "aleatory materialism".  For me, the affinities between Althusser and Tronti stand out most clearly with respect to their shared opposition to both Eurocommunism and Stalinism, the difficulties that both faced in grasping the immanent demise of post-WWII social democracy, and the irruption of neoliberalism into European politics (which I think Jodi Dean commented on).  And yet, it is perhaps because of this fact that their work remains valuable, considering the pre-Marxist dross of "radical democracy" (the reanimated Bernstein that passes for "post-marxism") that dominates Left thinking today.

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Intellectuals, the refusal of power, office workers' unions

(The following is a guest post by Doug Johnson, from The Weblog)

A critique of culture means to refuse to be intellectuals.  Theory of revolution means direct practice of the class struggle. - Mario Tronti, "The Strategy of the Refusal"

So far as I know, Steve Wright's tendentious and hackneyed monograph Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism is unfortunately the best (perhaps only?) English language, book length account of the movement from which Antonio Negri arose.  Wright is highly critical of Negri, and basically attributes the downfall of Autonomia to the forsaking by Negri and others of Tronti's insistence that there be "no intellectuals," that "theory of revolution" must always be undertaken by those who "direct[ly] practice class struggle" through time in the factory.

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Apropos

An Update by the Sorbonne Occupation Committee in Exile - Communique # 4

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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.

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Fantasy sites and the conquistadors of the planet

(The following is a guest post by Roger Gathman, author of the weblog Limited, Inc.)

What would one have said, in 1976, about Tronti’s essay and the future it forecast? Here is my tendentious and unfair opinion: one of the things one could have forecast is that, as the privileged site of production became less and less like a nineteenth century factory, the term 'factory' would experience a metaphorical creep. And that this creep would disguise the increasing blurring of the analytic distinction between production and consumption, and thus miss what distinguishes the Keynesian period from its predecessors.

Let’s illustrate this with a little story. When Tonti writes: “… capital reach[ing] a high level of development it no longer limits itself to guaranteeing collaboration of the workers - i.e. the active extraction of living labour within the dead mechanism of its stabilisation - some-thing which it so badly needs. At significant points it now makes a transition, to the point of expressing its objective needs through the subjective demands of the workers, ” I imagine he was not thinking of the embodiment of that demand in union pensions. But, indeed, in the forties, fifties, sixties and the seventies, a lot of money flowed into union pensions (I am talking about the U.S.), and that money did a lot of things. I’m not talking about the most colorful things, like the way Teamster pension funds built Las Vegas. I’m talking about your standard pension investments in equities in general. In the eighties, those funds – to the disappointment of the new breed of body snatching Randians, eager to take down the traditional enterprise structures and replace them with a new structure dedicated to the proposition that an enterprise is an aphid, and the upper management is a super-ant – were mobilized by the traditional managers of capitalist enterprises against the LBO merchants. Schwab and Thomas, in a review of Union pension investment patterns published in Michigan Law Review, Feb 98, were much more prescient about labor and its place in influencing the internal composition of the capitalist enterprise than Tronti was in 1976:

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The new barbarians

Re-reading "The Strategy of Refusal," the verve, confidence, and daring of Tronti's formulations are striking.  What's established, then, in this and other early examples of Italian operaismo, is a style of intellectual engagement: brash, iconoclastic, sweeping, taking no prisoners. 

This is a style of writing that aspires to separate itself radically from all intellectual production hitherto, indeed from intellectuality as it has been traditionally conceived tout court.  No more "organic intellectuals" of the Gramscian inheritance; these are but parasites of the Communist party and the labour movement (16). 

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