On the notion of the political in postmarxist theory.


Syllabus 2008: On living labor

Form-giving fire
A critique of post-operaist Marxism and its concept of living labor

In his early "Parisian Manuscripts" Marx understood labor as an expression of human essence, of its self-production and self-actualization, an Feuerbachian and anthropological idea that he has abandoned in his subsequent writings, in the end turning to the idea of necessary work beyond of which the realm of disposable time is beginning. Post-operaism partially reverts to the anthropological positions of the early Marx. It thinks of living labor as a proto-communist germ that is inherent in the history of being, the content of a latent humanity which will actualize itself one day. Thereby the force of a transhistorical constituent power is projected into a progressing informatisation of production, culminating in the diagnosis that a communism of creative and cooperative activity is at the gates. From the post-operaist rejection of any negativity in political subjects it follows that the power inherent in the multitute has to be as creative as disruptive. In the forthcoming seminar I would like to debate in which ways an onto-technological trick is at work in this immanentist argumentation. The central critical question would be, how the (post-)operaist focus on the relationship of minoritarian struggles and class composition and of biopolitics and valorisation could be led to another theoretical outcome by rejecting its concept of living labor as constituent power.

The second part of the seminar series on the post-workerist concept of living labor starts with a discussion of Moishe Postone's analysis of value theory by which he rejects any use-value and appropriation oriented idea of living labor as antagonist content or creative potentiality. Capital, Postone argues, is not the mystified form of powers that acutally are those of the workers, rather it is the real form of existence of species capacities that are constituted historically in alienated form as socially general powers.

While Postone returns to the Hegelian current in Marx's critique of political economy, we will subsequently debate three different deconstructions of Marx's theory which avoid the dialectical short-circuit persisting in the idea of the social as effect of a law that explains it by having interiorized all its relations: Derrida's deconstruction of value theory, Balibar's deconstruction of Marx's shifting concepts of ideology and his 1840s idea of politics as pure proletarian act, Rancière's corresponding critique of Marxian metapolitics that displaces politics by class as both, positive social content of a false capitalist form and as negative pure excess, the immediate dissolution of the status quo, against which Rancière demonstrates how that which is proper to the political is precisely an absence of the proper.

Seminar meetings will regularily take place in the first week of the months, on thursday afternoon and friday morning, unless noted otherwise.


"Labor is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value."
Karl Marx, The Capital, Volume 1

February: Operaismo, class composition

7.2.2008 16-18 Room 204
Steve Wright: The Limits of Negri's Class Analysis. In Reconstruction 8, Spring Summer 1996
http://libcom.org/library/limits-negri-class-analysis-steve-wright

8.2. 10-12 Auditorium
Porto Marghera – gli ultimi fuochi, Manuela Pellarin, I 2004, 60 min, english subtitles
Steve Wright: The Limits of Negri's Class Analysis, 1996

March: Postoperaist Marxism

6.3. 16-19
Antonio Negri: Twenty Theses on Marx. Interpretation of the Class Situation Today. In Marxism beyond Marxism, edited by Saree Makdisi et.al., London and New York: Routledge 1996, pp. 149-64

Screening: Angela Melitopoulos: The cell. A video interview with Toni Negri, 130 min D/ I 2004
Angela Melitopoulos is present.

7.3. 11-13
Antonio Negri: Twenty Theses on Marx, pp. 165-180

April: Living labor, biopolitics

3.4. 16-18
Jason Read: Micro-Politics of Capital. Marx and the Pre-History of the Present (Chapter 2: What is living and what is dead in the philosophy of Marx: Politics and Ontology of Living Labor), New York, SUNY 2003, pp. 61-76

4.4. 11-13
Jason Read: Micro-Politics of Capital, pp. 76-90

Paolo Virno: A Grammar of the Multitude, New York: Semiotexte 2004 (Chapter 5.2 Equivocal concept: Biopolitics)
http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcmultitude3.htm

May: Socialisation of production, general intellect

6.5.
After Effect
The cool despair of young creatives. 86 min D 2007
Screening of a movie directed by Stephan Geene, followed by a discussion with the filmmaker

7.5.
Karl Marx: Grundrisse, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974, 690-706
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch13.htm#p690

Paolo Virno: Notes on the 'General Intellect'. In Marxism beyond Marxism, edited by Saree Makdisi et.al., London and New York: Routledge, 1996, pp. 265-272

Paper: Gal Kirn
Guest: Stephan Geene

9.5.
Jacques Rancière: From the actuality of communism to its inactuality, unpublished English manuscript, pp. 1-6, German translation in Indeterminate Kommunismus, ed. by Demopunk, K, Münster: Unrast Verlag 2005, pp. 23-30

June: Feminist critique of labor, commons

5.6.
Leopoldina Fortunati: The Arcane of Reproduction, Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital (Chapter 2: The Kingdom of Nature), New York: Autonomedia, 1995, pp. 17-27

Susanne Schultz: Dissolved Boundaries and Affective Labor. On the Disappearance of Reproductive Labor and Feminist Critique in Empire. In Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol. 17, No. 1 (March 2006), pp. 77-82

Paper: Marina Vishmidt

Guest Lectures:
Massimo de Angelis: On the question of commons
Anne Querrien: Biopolitical labor and machinic subjectivity
Pier Vittorio Aureli: Architecture and the project of autonomy

6.6. 
Massimo de Angelis: The beginning of history, Pluto Pr, 2007 (Chapter will be selected soon)
Workshop with Massimo de Angelis, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Anne Querrien

July: Marx with Bataille

1.7.
Debating "The mirror of production" by Jean Baudrillard
 Jean Baudrillard (1973): The mirror of production, St. Louis: Telos Press 1975, pp. 18-51

- Paper: Giorgos Papadopoulos

September Value and Capitalist Capacity

11.9.
Reading Moishe Postone's "Time, Labor and Social Domination"
 - Seminar
- Room 204

Moishe Postone: Time, Labor, and Social Domination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 144-158; 166-171

October: Deconstructing Value Theory

6.10.
Reading Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx"
 - Seminar
- Room 204

Jacques Derrida: Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, London and New York: Routledge, 1994 (second half of the last chapter), pp. 147-177 http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida2.htm

November: Tronti's Legacy, Balibar's Reading of Marx

3.11.
Steve Wright:
Tronti's Legacy: The Refusal of Labor
 - Guest Lecture by Steve Wright, Monash University, Australia
- Auditorium

4.11.
The non-totalizable complexity of the historical process
 Reading Balibar's "The Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism"
- Seminar with Steve Wright
- Paper by Ozren Pupovac
- Room 204

Etienne Balibar: Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism I. In Masses, Classes, Ideas, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 87-102

December: Negri's Political Spinozism, Rancière's Critique of Marxism

4.12.
Political Spinozism. Negri on Power.
- Guest Lecture by Martin Saar, University of Frankfurt/M.
- Auditorium

5.12
Marx's Metapolitics
Reading Jacques Rancière's "Dis-agreement"
- Seminar
- Paper by Emiliano Battista
- Room 204

Jacques Ranciere: Dis-agreement. Politics and Philosophy, London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pr, 1999, pp. 82-93