This evening it was my pleasure to introduce a reading by Cory Doctorow, science fiction writer and activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Cory is in Seattle to visit Microsoft, and try to convince them to scrap Digital Rights Management. He read a segment from a recently-written, and not-yet-published, short story, and answered questions, which were mostly about his work for the EFF. It was a pleasure to hear Cory’s wry, yet impassioned, take on digital culture.
This evening it was my pleasure to introduce a reading by Cory Doctorow, science fiction writer and activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Cory is in Seattle to visit Microsoft, and try to convince them to scrap Digital Rights Management. He read a segment from a recently-written, and not-yet-published, short story, and answered questions, which were mostly about his work for the EFF. It was a pleasure to hear Cory’s wry, yet impassioned, take on digital culture.
Lindsay Waters is the humanities editor at Harvard University Press, and his new book Enemies of Promise is a jeremiad about troubles in the world of academia and academic publishing. Waters says that too many academic books are being published, books that sell poorly for the most part, and that this situation is not sustainable either economically or intellectually.
Waters’ polemic is rather scattershot, and sometimes over-the-top rhetorically, but he makes a number of important points.
A lot of academic books get written, and then published, because they are necessary for tenure. If tenure weren’t so closely tied to publication, then this situation wouldn’t exist. This makes a great deal of sense to me; it’s often a waste of time and effort for a newly minted PhD to turn her/his dissertation into a first book, instead of moving on to a new project. (I was lucky that I had the time — partly because I was in limbo several years between finishing my PhD and getting my first job, and partly because I got generous time off as a junior professor — to write something new as my tenure book, and let my dissertation slip into deserved oblivion).
The requirement of a book for tenure is something of a bottleneck. It leads people to inflate good articles into lots-of-wasted-space books, which sell almost no copies. And in any case this way of doing things is not likely to remain sustainable, as university presses get underfunded and forced to cut back.
Waters recommends that faculties and tenure committees exercise more critical judgment when deliberating on tenure, instead of (in effect) offloading the work onto the university presses’ review processes. While this is admirable in principle, I am dubious as to whether it could actually be made to work. Less reliance on publication records would most likely mean, not more critical judgment, but more arbitrariness and more personal spite on the part of departments and tenure committees. Having an “objective” requirement for tenure, lame as it often is, protects professors from getting denied tenure simply because they are offbeat in their sensibilities, or insufficiently “collegial.”
So this is still a problem for which there is no good solution.
In the second half of his book, Waters makes some crucial points about the current hyper-professionalization of humanities departments and humanities publications. Junior scholars face “increasingly rigid norms for publication” (82). “The modern university takes the present organization of knowledge into separate disciplines, all those gated communities, as inevitable and as natural as the categories of niche-marketing. The blinkered professional who has become the norm is not an intellectual who reads promiscuously in the hope he or she might come upon a book that will change his or her life” (72). Instead, scholars are encouraged to master a very narrow field of study in depth, to embed him/herself in minutiae of the field, and above all, not to stray to other realms or make outside connections. The result is a “crisis of the monograph” (78), the waste of energy upon trivialities in specialist books that rehearse, but do not dare to step beyond, the prevailing focus of the author’s sub-discipline. Waters rightly excoriates Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, among others, as senior scholars who are responsible for this closing down of any broader intellectual discourse.
Though the media often mock academic writing in the humanities for being abstruse to the point of utter incommunicability, they generally blame “theory” or “cultural studies” or an abandonment of close reading and the traditional canon as the culprit. Waters rightly points out that, contrary to this picture, over-professionalized academic writing today is anything but theoretical and anything but anti-canonical. It may use theory words, but it refuses to think theoretically. (Fish and Rorty condemn theoretical thinking tout court). And it may discuss horror films or romance novels instead of Shakespeare or Dickens, but it narrows its focus in the same way that the worst old-fashioned scholarship of the canon did. Academic norms today make it hard to say anything new or interesting about either Shakespeare or Herschell Gordon Lewis.
There are all sorts of policing mechanisms that promote this hyperprofessionalization: tenure committees, to be sure, but also — quite notably — outside reviewers for academic presses. I can’t tell you how many stories I have heard of people whose writing was rejected by presses or journals because outside reviewers didn’t find it disciplinarily normative enough. (I have never published with Harvard University Press, but from what I can tell, it is far less guilty of this under Waters than are most other presses I know about).
Most importantly, the way we train graduate students is the main culprit in creating this situation.
Waters hits the nail on the head as regards the problem with academic discourse today, but I am not sure he provides any sort of solution. (Which is not really a criticism; obviously I don’t have any solutions either). At the end of the book, Waters praises silence; “it is possible to be a great thinker and not publish anything” (78), he writes, citing the obvious example of Socrates. Water urges scholars and critics to hold back, to publish less, to give their ideas more breathing space to develop.
This is a beautiful idealization, but I am not sure it is anything more than that. We don’t have anything like the Athenian agora today — unless it is the Internet, a possibility that Waters rejects.
I’d make a counter-suggestion: that rather than valuing silence, today’s critics learn to value writing. Most academic writing today is execrably written: something that goes along with being hyperprofessionalized. I don’t mean, of course, that academic writing should become as “transparent” as, say, articles in Newsweek or The New York Times. Great style means Proust or Faulkner or Pynchon, as well as late Beckett or Dashiell Hammett or Hunter Thompson. But the convoluted sentences of most academic discourse, filled with hyperspecialized qualifications and subordinate clauses, bespeak a mentality that sees written language as merely instrumental, merely a tool for getting certain pre-existing facts or ideas across. It ignores the importance of style, voice, mode of expression, affect, etc, in all of culture, popular as well as “high.” It’s particularly ironic, of course, that literature professors would view writing this way. But until academics think about writing style as well as content, we will never break through the wall of hyperprofessionalization.
Lindsay Waters is the humanities editor at Harvard University Press, and his new book Enemies of Promise is a jeremiad about troubles in the world of academia and academic publishing. Waters says that too many academic books are being published, books that sell poorly for the most part, and that this situation is not sustainable either economically or intellectually.
Waters’ polemic is rather scattershot, and sometimes over-the-top rhetorically, but he makes a number of important points.
A lot of academic books get written, and then published, because they are necessary for tenure. If tenure weren’t so closely tied to publication, then this situation wouldn’t exist. This makes a great deal of sense to me; it’s often a waste of time and effort for a newly minted PhD to turn her/his dissertation into a first book, instead of moving on to a new project. (I was lucky that I had the time — partly because I was in limbo several years between finishing my PhD and getting my first job, and partly because I got generous time off as a junior professor — to write something new as my tenure book, and let my dissertation slip into deserved oblivion).
The requirement of a book for tenure is something of a bottleneck. It leads people to inflate good articles into lots-of-wasted-space books, which sell almost no copies. And in any case this way of doing things is not likely to remain sustainable, as university presses get underfunded and forced to cut back.
Waters recommends that faculties and tenure committees exercise more critical judgment when deliberating on tenure, instead of (in effect) offloading the work onto the university presses’ review processes. While this is admirable in principle, I am dubious as to whether it could actually be made to work. Less reliance on publication records would most likely mean, not more critical judgment, but more arbitrariness and more personal spite on the part of departments and tenure committees. Having an “objective” requirement for tenure, lame as it often is, protects professors from getting denied tenure simply because they are offbeat in their sensibilities, or insufficiently “collegial.”
So this is still a problem for which there is no good solution.
In the second half of his book, Waters makes some crucial points about the current hyper-professionalization of humanities departments and humanities publications. Junior scholars face “increasingly rigid norms for publication” (82). “The modern university takes the present organization of knowledge into separate disciplines, all those gated communities, as inevitable and as natural as the categories of niche-marketing. The blinkered professional who has become the norm is not an intellectual who reads promiscuously in the hope he or she might come upon a book that will change his or her life” (72). Instead, scholars are encouraged to master a very narrow field of study in depth, to embed him/herself in minutiae of the field, and above all, not to stray to other realms or make outside connections. The result is a “crisis of the monograph” (78), the waste of energy upon trivialities in specialist books that rehearse, but do not dare to step beyond, the prevailing focus of the author’s sub-discipline. Waters rightly excoriates Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, among others, as senior scholars who are responsible for this closing down of any broader intellectual discourse.
Though the media often mock academic writing in the humanities for being abstruse to the point of utter incommunicability, they generally blame “theory” or “cultural studies” or an abandonment of close reading and the traditional canon as the culprit. Waters rightly points out that, contrary to this picture, over-professionalized academic writing today is anything but theoretical and anything but anti-canonical. It may use theory words, but it refuses to think theoretically. (Fish and Rorty condemn theoretical thinking tout court). And it may discuss horror films or romance novels instead of Shakespeare or Dickens, but it narrows its focus in the same way that the worst old-fashioned scholarship of the canon did. Academic norms today make it hard to say anything new or interesting about either Shakespeare or Herschell Gordon Lewis.
There are all sorts of policing mechanisms that promote this hyperprofessionalization: tenure committees, to be sure, but also — quite notably — outside reviewers for academic presses. I can’t tell you how many stories I have heard of people whose writing was rejected by presses or journals because outside reviewers didn’t find it disciplinarily normative enough. (I have never published with Harvard University Press, but from what I can tell, it is far less guilty of this under Waters than are most other presses I know about).
Most importantly, the way we train graduate students is the main culprit in creating this situation.
Waters hits the nail on the head as regards the problem with academic discourse today, but I am not sure he provides any sort of solution. (Which is not really a criticism; obviously I don’t have any solutions either). At the end of the book, Waters praises silence; “it is possible to be a great thinker and not publish anything” (78), he writes, citing the obvious example of Socrates. Water urges scholars and critics to hold back, to publish less, to give their ideas more breathing space to develop.
This is a beautiful idealization, but I am not sure it is anything more than that. We don’t have anything like the Athenian agora today — unless it is the Internet, a possibility that Waters rejects.
I’d make a counter-suggestion: that rather than valuing silence, today’s critics learn to value writing. Most academic writing today is execrably written: something that goes along with being hyperprofessionalized. I don’t mean, of course, that academic writing should become as “transparent” as, say, articles in Newsweek or The New York Times. Great style means Proust or Faulkner or Pynchon, as well as late Beckett or Dashiell Hammett or Hunter Thompson. But the convoluted sentences of most academic discourse, filled with hyperspecialized qualifications and subordinate clauses, bespeak a mentality that sees written language as merely instrumental, merely a tool for getting certain pre-existing facts or ideas across. It ignores the importance of style, voice, mode of expression, affect, etc, in all of culture, popular as well as “high.” It’s particularly ironic, of course, that literature professors would view writing this way. But until academics think about writing style as well as content, we will never break through the wall of hyperprofessionalization.
I had the pleasure of hearing Bruce Sterling give a reading the other day. He was touring on behalf of his new novel, The Zenith Angle, which he explained was a “techno-thriller,” rather than science fiction. The excerpt he read was funny and charming, in its affectionate portrayal of the book’s uber-geek protagonist. (I suspect tech people will get off on it much more than the general reading public). But what was really great about the reading was Sterling’s off-the-cuff riffs, during his introduction and then again during the Q&A, on subjects ranging from security holes in Windows, to the origins of Western capitalism in the building of medieval cathedrals, to advice on how to become a writer, to the limitations the English language when it comes to talking about the future. I’ve liked some of Sterling’s books better than others, but as a commentator/performer/futurist/theorist, the man is a national treasure.
I had the pleasure of hearing Bruce Sterling give a reading the other day. He was touring on behalf of his new novel, The Zenith Angle, which he explained was a “techno-thriller,” rather than science fiction. The excerpt he read was funny and charming, in its affectionate portrayal of the book’s uber-geek protagonist. (I suspect tech people will get off on it much more than the general reading public). But what was really great about the reading was Sterling’s off-the-cuff riffs, during his introduction and then again during the Q&A, on subjects ranging from security holes in Windows, to the origins of Western capitalism in the building of medieval cathedrals, to advice on how to become a writer, to the limitations the English language when it comes to talking about the future. I’ve liked some of Sterling’s books better than others, but as a commentator/performer/futurist/theorist, the man is a national treasure.
Laird Hunt’s The Impossibly is sort of like a Dashiel Hammett noir novel as written by mid-period Samuel Beckett. But maybe that description is unfair, since it sells short the novel’s originality. The unreliable narrator seems to work for some sort of spy or criminal organization. He kills people under its orders, sometimes fails in his missions and is punished, falls in love and then wonders if his beloved has betrayed him on behalf of the organization, gets old, tries to investigate his own death at the hands of the organization. Nothing is conclusive, of course. Hunt manages to perfectly weld the epistemological concerns of the detective/spy novel with those of experimental prose and post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. The gap between perception and conceptualization, or between gathering evidence and solving the mystery, is the same as that between rhetoric and meaning, or performative and constative, or affect and signification. The Impossibly produces the emotion (rather than the philosophical resolution) of all these gaps, as trains of thought are derailed and lead nowhere, aside from the experience of carrying them out, and as the tough-guy persona of American detective and spy fiction quietly implodes. A beautiful book.
Laird Hunt’s The Impossibly is sort of like a Dashiel Hammett noir novel as written by mid-period Samuel Beckett. But maybe that description is unfair, since it sells short the novel’s originality. The unreliable narrator seems to work for some sort of spy or criminal organization. He kills people under its orders, sometimes fails in his missions and is punished, falls in love and then wonders if his beloved has betrayed him on behalf of the organization, gets old, tries to investigate his own death at the hands of the organization. Nothing is conclusive, of course. Hunt manages to perfectly weld the epistemological concerns of the detective/spy novel with those of experimental prose and post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. The gap between perception and conceptualization, or between gathering evidence and solving the mystery, is the same as that between rhetoric and meaning, or performative and constative, or affect and signification. The Impossibly produces the emotion (rather than the philosophical resolution) of all these gaps, as trains of thought are derailed and lead nowhere, aside from the experience of carrying them out, and as the tough-guy persona of American detective and spy fiction quietly implodes. A beautiful book.
Last night I had the pleasure of doing a reading together with my old friend Charles Altieri, at Richard Hugo House. This was the first in what is planned as an ongoing series of readings called “Critics as Performers,” sponsored by Subtext, which is a major resource for experimental writers in Seattle.
I’ve also been reading Altieri’s new book, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. It’s a smart and very useful and important book, which does the crucial work of taking on the cognitivists and analytic philosophers who misconstrue affect by subordinating it to moralizing concerns, and ultimately to the imperialism of Reason. That’s my language, not Altieri’s; part of what makes the book powerful and effective is that Altieri takes on the cognitivists on their own terms, and shows cogently how their subordination of imagination to reason and of aesthetics to ethics, together with their general hierarchizing of the mental faculties due to their privileging of cognition, and of normative ethical goals, utterly fails to account for the complexities and richness of affective experience.
Reading the cognitivists always infuriates me: but for reasons that I am unable to articulate, since my language and starting assumptions are so different from theirs. (All I can really say is that my 20-month-old daughter’s temper tantrums are at least as important an aspect of what makes her human as is her learning to speak and to grasp abstract concepts).
What Altieri does for me is to articulate those reasons, refuting the cognitivists at their own game and on their own grounds.
It’s all the more effective in that Altieri sidesteps carefully around Deleuze; though he shares with Deleuze a love for Spinoza. Deleuze does provide a clear alternative to normative, cognitivist accounts of things like affect and emotion; but I often fear that my own (and others’) recourse to Deleuze provides too easy a shortcut. Altieri doesn’t take this shortcut; it makes his book difficult going for me in places, but I am learning far more from it as a result.
The centerpiece of the book is Altieri’s critique of Martha Nussbaum’s recent book on the emotions. I will not even try to summarize Altieri’s argument; but only note that it comes down to Nussbaum’s inability to adequately understand and appreciate Proust (page 173). Altieri writes: “For Proust the role of imagination is not to establish norms [such as Nussbaum tries to do] but to develop passions and compassions that make predicates like ‘saner’ and ‘more responsive’ [much valued by Nussbaum] seem painfully inadequate.” The Proustian lesson — if we can even call it a lesson — is that affective intensities involve us in singular experiences that we cannot but value, but whose valuation cannot be reduced to any sort of ethical (generalizable) norms, even humane and humanistic ones. To say this is not to invoke some sort of pseudo-Nietzscheanism cruelty or inhumanism, but rather to respect and honor singularity, against all attempts to call it to “reason.” (I am selectively following Kant here; if the ethical is the universal, then the aesthetic is the absolutely singular that cannot be brought under any universal rule, and that we “judge” therefore entirely without grounds).
(I fear I’m losing coherence here; so I’d better stop, and instead go back and parse Altieri more carefully).
Last night I had the pleasure of doing a reading together with my old friend Charles Altieri, at Richard Hugo House. This was the first in what is planned as an ongoing series of readings called “Critics as Performers,” sponsored by Subtext, which is a major resource for experimental writers in Seattle.
I’ve also been reading Altieri’s new book, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. It’s a smart and very useful and important book, which does the crucial work of taking on the cognitivists and analytic philosophers who misconstrue affect by subordinating it to moralizing concerns, and ultimately to the imperialism of Reason. That’s my language, not Altieri’s; part of what makes the book powerful and effective is that Altieri takes on the cognitivists on their own terms, and shows cogently how their subordination of imagination to reason and of aesthetics to ethics, together with their general hierarchizing of the mental faculties due to their privileging of cognition, and of normative ethical goals, utterly fails to account for the complexities and richness of affective experience.
Reading the cognitivists always infuriates me: but for reasons that I am unable to articulate, since my language and starting assumptions are so different from theirs. (All I can really say is that my 20-month-old daughter’s temper tantrums are at least as important an aspect of what makes her human as is her learning to speak and to grasp abstract concepts).
What Altieri does for me is to articulate those reasons, refuting the cognitivists at their own game and on their own grounds.
It’s all the more effective in that Altieri sidesteps carefully around Deleuze; though he shares with Deleuze a love for Spinoza. Deleuze does provide a clear alternative to normative, cognitivist accounts of things like affect and emotion; but I often fear that my own (and others’) recourse to Deleuze provides too easy a shortcut. Altieri doesn’t take this shortcut; it makes his book difficult going for me in places, but I am learning far more from it as a result.
The centerpiece of the book is Altieri’s critique of Martha Nussbaum’s recent book on the emotions. I will not even try to summarize Altieri’s argument; but only note that it comes down to Nussbaum’s inability to adequately understand and appreciate Proust (page 173). Altieri writes: “For Proust the role of imagination is not to establish norms [such as Nussbaum tries to do] but to develop passions and compassions that make predicates like ‘saner’ and ‘more responsive’ [much valued by Nussbaum] seem painfully inadequate.” The Proustian lesson — if we can even call it a lesson — is that affective intensities involve us in singular experiences that we cannot but value, but whose valuation cannot be reduced to any sort of ethical (generalizable) norms, even humane and humanistic ones. To say this is not to invoke some sort of pseudo-Nietzscheanism cruelty or inhumanism, but rather to respect and honor singularity, against all attempts to call it to “reason.” (I am selectively following Kant here; if the ethical is the universal, then the aesthetic is the absolutely singular that cannot be brought under any universal rule, and that we “judge” therefore entirely without grounds).
(I fear I’m losing coherence here; so I’d better stop, and instead go back and parse Altieri more carefully).
Marty Beckerman‘s Generation S.L.U.T.: A Brutal Feel-Up Session With Today’s Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace is actually not bad. Its naturalistic (apparently — no way I could really know) story of teen promiscuity, alienation, and suicide is fairly convincing and moving, its over-the-top satire is funny and pretty much on target, and its interpolated statistics, headlines, interviews, and autobiographical essays definitely intensify the effect, more because of the way they multiply and collage the text in McLuhanesque fashion, than because of their particular content.
All in all, as a satirist’s moralistic warning about the dangers of a generation growing up without love or passion, the novel is a bit compromised by its own enjoyment of all the scenes it describes (which range from drunken sex between 16-year-olds who don’t even know each others’ names to knockout drugs, gang bangs and date rape) — but if this is a failure in terms of the book’s moral intent, it is only to the good in terms of its artistic success. Beckerman clearly despises jocks, cheerleaders, and proto-frat boys, which is a good thing; but his own smartassitude isn’t as far from frat boy self-congratulatory humor as he might wish. Once again, something which compromises his message, and his clear intent, makes this a better book than it would be if he had carried through that intent unambiguously.
As for Marty Beckerman’s either being a genius or a fraud — he clearly wants us to think he’s one or the other — don’t believe the hype. I don’t buy it, or rather, I don’t think he is a skillful enough media manipulator to carry it off. On Beckerman’s own website, he links to this site, which denounces him as “The Jewish Antichrist”; of course this site is itself actually registered to Marty Beckerman. But the novel works precisely because it is quotidian rather than scandalous, and Beckerman’s attempt to gain some sort of extra cultural cachet by pretending to be scandalous is a dud.
Marty Beckerman‘s Generation S.L.U.T.: A Brutal Feel-Up Session With Today’s Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace is actually not bad. Its naturalistic (apparently — no way I could really know) story of teen promiscuity, alienation, and suicide is fairly convincing and moving, its over-the-top satire is funny and pretty much on target, and its interpolated statistics, headlines, interviews, and autobiographical essays definitely intensify the effect, more because of the way they multiply and collage the text in McLuhanesque fashion, than because of their particular content.
All in all, as a satirist’s moralistic warning about the dangers of a generation growing up without love or passion, the novel is a bit compromised by its own enjoyment of all the scenes it describes (which range from drunken sex between 16-year-olds who don’t even know each others’ names to knockout drugs, gang bangs and date rape) — but if this is a failure in terms of the book’s moral intent, it is only to the good in terms of its artistic success. Beckerman clearly despises jocks, cheerleaders, and proto-frat boys, which is a good thing; but his own smartassitude isn’t as far from frat boy self-congratulatory humor as he might wish. Once again, something which compromises his message, and his clear intent, makes this a better book than it would be if he had carried through that intent unambiguously.
As for Marty Beckerman’s either being a genius or a fraud — he clearly wants us to think he’s one or the other — don’t believe the hype. I don’t buy it, or rather, I don’t think he is a skillful enough media manipulator to carry it off. On Beckerman’s own website, he links to this site, which denounces him as “The Jewish Antichrist”; of course this site is itself actually registered to Marty Beckerman. But the novel works precisely because it is quotidian rather than scandalous, and Beckerman’s attempt to gain some sort of extra cultural cachet by pretending to be scandalous is a dud.
Gilbert Simondon’s book on technology, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (On the mode of existence of technological objects), is not quite as rich as his books on indivduation (which I wrote about here). But it’s still fresh and thought-provoking (despite having been published as long ago as 1958 — it discusses vacuum tubes at great length, for instance, but doesn’t mention transistors), and it offers radical alternatives to the ways we usually think about the topics it discusses.
Basically, Simondon opposes the commonplace view (held alike by “common sense” and by philosophers such as Heidegger) that opposes technology to nature, and sees technology basically as a tool or mechanism for controlling and manipulating nature. Against this view, Simondon argues that technology cannot be reduced to a utilitarian function, because it is more than just particular tools used for particular purposes. Rather, technology must be understood: 1) as an ensemble; and 2) as a process of invention.
As an ensemble, technology involves more than particular tools or machines; it also involves the relations among these tools and machines, and the relations between them and the human beings who use them, as well as between them and their environments, the materials with which they interact.
Some technology, especially in its simpler aspects, takes the form of a single tool — a hammer, for instance — used by a particular person (a worker or craftsman) for particular tasks.
But most of the time, “technology” cannot be isolated in this way. Tools don’t exist in isolation; they are connected in all sorts of ways. They are connected, first, by the tasks they perform, which are increasingly complicated and require coordination all through the technical sphere. But beyond this, tools are interconnected because of the conceptual schemes that generate them: these same schemes, or designs, can be used in different contexts, in different materials, so that technology is transportable and transferable (“deterritorialized” in the vocabulary of Deleuze, who was greatly influenced by Simondon).
This also means that technology exceeds any narrow utilitarian purposes. As technology expands, its discovers and produces new relations between people and things, or between people and people, or between things and things. Technology is a network of relations: far from marking our alienation from the natural world, technology is what mediates between humankind and nature. It undoes the dualism that such a division implies, by networking human beings and natural entities into all sorts of subtle relations of feedback and mutual dependency. Far from being something deployed by a subject in order to dominate and control nature reduced to the status of an object, technology is what breaks down the subject/object polarity: it is always in between these poles, and it ensures that no human “subject” is free from and uncontaminated by the natural or physical world, while conversely, no “nature” or “materiality” is ever purely passive, purely an object. Every “object” has a certain degree of agency, and every “subject” has a certain degree of materiality; technology is the process, or the glue, that makes the idealist hypostasis of a naked subject facing brute objects impossible. (I do not know if Bruno Latour ever mentions Simondon, but the basis of much of his account of science and technology can be found here).
Technology is also necessary to the expansion of knowledge, according to Simondon. It is not the mere application of scientific knowledge, so much as it is the precondition for there to be such a thing as scientific knowledge: if only because scientific knowledge is generated when technology doesn’t work as expected, when it breaks down or deviates from its utilitarian function. Even (or especially) in its failures, technology is still “working.”
Another way to say this is to note Simondon’s second point, that technology is a process of invention. That is to say, it is a continuing process, not a fixed product. Tools are not just passively used; they are reconfigured, reinvented, extended and mutated in the process of use. Simondon writes that the “alienation” that has been so frequently noted in modernist discussion of machines, is not the consequence of technology per se; nor is it just the result of exploitation in the Marxist sense, the fact that workers do not own or profit from the machines that they operate (though that certainly plays a role). More fundamental, Simondon says, is the fact that factory workers are not able to participate in the active construction/invention/reconfiguration of their machines, but are only allowed to be their passive operators. In a truly technological culture, where invention and operation would be combined, this alienation would not take place. Decades before the fact, Simondon is here theorizing and advocating what today would be called hacking and hacker culture. Indeed, I think that the culture of hacking still has not caught up with Simondon, in the sense that hacking is mostly justified in pragmatic and/or libertarian terms, whereas Simondon adds a third dimension, a depth, to hacking by showing how it is essentially tied to technology as a basic component of human beings’ presence in the world.
There are a lot more themes and arguments in Simondon’s book that I haven’t been able to bring up here — for instance, his theories on the evolution of technology (which is not simply parallel to biological evolution, but differs from it in certain crucial ways), and on the relation of technology to other basic human activities (religion, art, science, philosophy) and to the split between “theory” and “practice” (Simondon does not consign technology to “practice”, but insists that it is prior to the split, and that a better understanding of technology would help us to overcome the duality between theory and practice). But there’s a lot to think about here, and I haven’t been able to absorb it all in just one reading.
Gilbert Simondon’s book on technology, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (On the mode of existence of technological objects), is not quite as rich as his books on indivduation (which I wrote about here). But it’s still fresh and thought-provoking (despite having been published as long ago as 1958 — it discusses vacuum tubes at great length, for instance, but doesn’t mention transistors), and it offers radical alternatives to the ways we usually think about the topics it discusses.
Basically, Simondon opposes the commonplace view (held alike by “common sense” and by philosophers such as Heidegger) that opposes technology to nature, and sees technology basically as a tool or mechanism for controlling and manipulating nature. Against this view, Simondon argues that technology cannot be reduced to a utilitarian function, because it is more than just particular tools used for particular purposes. Rather, technology must be understood: 1) as an ensemble; and 2) as a process of invention.
As an ensemble, technology involves more than particular tools or machines; it also involves the relations among these tools and machines, and the relations between them and the human beings who use them, as well as between them and their environments, the materials with which they interact.
Some technology, especially in its simpler aspects, takes the form of a single tool — a hammer, for instance — used by a particular person (a worker or craftsman) for particular tasks.
But most of the time, “technology” cannot be isolated in this way. Tools don’t exist in isolation; they are connected in all sorts of ways. They are connected, first, by the tasks they perform, which are increasingly complicated and require coordination all through the technical sphere. But beyond this, tools are interconnected because of the conceptual schemes that generate them: these same schemes, or designs, can be used in different contexts, in different materials, so that technology is transportable and transferable (“deterritorialized” in the vocabulary of Deleuze, who was greatly influenced by Simondon).
This also means that technology exceeds any narrow utilitarian purposes. As technology expands, its discovers and produces new relations between people and things, or between people and people, or between things and things. Technology is a network of relations: far from marking our alienation from the natural world, technology is what mediates between humankind and nature. It undoes the dualism that such a division implies, by networking human beings and natural entities into all sorts of subtle relations of feedback and mutual dependency. Far from being something deployed by a subject in order to dominate and control nature reduced to the status of an object, technology is what breaks down the subject/object polarity: it is always in between these poles, and it ensures that no human “subject” is free from and uncontaminated by the natural or physical world, while conversely, no “nature” or “materiality” is ever purely passive, purely an object. Every “object” has a certain degree of agency, and every “subject” has a certain degree of materiality; technology is the process, or the glue, that makes the idealist hypostasis of a naked subject facing brute objects impossible. (I do not know if Bruno Latour ever mentions Simondon, but the basis of much of his account of science and technology can be found here).
Technology is also necessary to the expansion of knowledge, according to Simondon. It is not the mere application of scientific knowledge, so much as it is the precondition for there to be such a thing as scientific knowledge: if only because scientific knowledge is generated when technology doesn’t work as expected, when it breaks down or deviates from its utilitarian function. Even (or especially) in its failures, technology is still “working.”
Another way to say this is to note Simondon’s second point, that technology is a process of invention. That is to say, it is a continuing process, not a fixed product. Tools are not just passively used; they are reconfigured, reinvented, extended and mutated in the process of use. Simondon writes that the “alienation” that has been so frequently noted in modernist discussion of machines, is not the consequence of technology per se; nor is it just the result of exploitation in the Marxist sense, the fact that workers do not own or profit from the machines that they operate (though that certainly plays a role). More fundamental, Simondon says, is the fact that factory workers are not able to participate in the active construction/invention/reconfiguration of their machines, but are only allowed to be their passive operators. In a truly technological culture, where invention and operation would be combined, this alienation would not take place. Decades before the fact, Simondon is here theorizing and advocating what today would be called hacking and hacker culture. Indeed, I think that the culture of hacking still has not caught up with Simondon, in the sense that hacking is mostly justified in pragmatic and/or libertarian terms, whereas Simondon adds a third dimension, a depth, to hacking by showing how it is essentially tied to technology as a basic component of human beings’ presence in the world.
There are a lot more themes and arguments in Simondon’s book that I haven’t been able to bring up here — for instance, his theories on the evolution of technology (which is not simply parallel to biological evolution, but differs from it in certain crucial ways), and on the relation of technology to other basic human activities (religion, art, science, philosophy) and to the split between “theory” and “practice” (Simondon does not consign technology to “practice”, but insists that it is prior to the split, and that a better understanding of technology would help us to overcome the duality between theory and practice). But there’s a lot to think about here, and I haven’t been able to absorb it all in just one reading.
Songs of a Dead Dreamer is the first volume of short stories by Thomas Ligotti. (DJ Spooky later used the title for one of his finest albums).
I’m a bit embarrassed that I never encountered Ligotti’s work before now, because it is amazing. Ligotti specializes in short stories of horror (I don’t think he’s ever published a novel).
In a way, these stories are quite classical: in terms of imagery and content they are much closer to Lovecraft than to, say, Stephen King. As for their language, it is as gothic as Lovecraft’s, even though it is subtle, restrained and economical, where Lovecraft is always textually excessive. This may seem almost oxymoronic (how can something subtle and restrained be the slightest bit like Lovecraft?), but it is the best I can do. Put it this way: sentence by sentence and metaphor by metaphor, Ligotti’s language is heightened in much the same way that Lovecraft’s is. But where Lovecraft will typically write:
“Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to demoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell”
(– which is admittedly one of my favorite sentences in the English language),
Ligotti tends rather towards a sort of hyperbolic understatement (to desperately use another oxymoron), e.g.:
“He is still kneeling before the coffin as his features begin to undergo the ravages of various, obviously conflicting, phases of feeling. Eyes, mouth, the whole facial structure is called upon to perform gruesome acrobatics of expression.”
These sentences describe extremity, but hold back from it at the same time.
Ligotti’s themes are aesthetic and metaphysical, and here he is nothing like Lovecraft. There are no Cthulhus, no fish-people from Innsmouth, in Ligotti’s universe; no Lovecraftian dread of the Other. But neither is Ligotti’s dread psycho-cultural, in the manner of King and most mainstream horror.
Ligotti’s horror rather points depressively inward, to a claustrophobic, suffocating zone, where there is no longer any outside or Other, but where equally there is no more self, no more identity, no more culture. Many of his stories are written in the first person, with rather fussy and self-conscious narrators; but these narrators (as well as the protagonists of the stories written in the third person) are unmade by a metamorphosis that empties them of themselves, gives them over to forces of chaos and entropy, but usually without granting them the release of complete dissolution. They do not come face to face with some ultimate reality, but rather with a sort of unreality that (sometimes slowly but surely, other times with a disturbing rapidity) corrodes away all foundations, all points of reference, all solidity, to leave behind a kind of photographic negative of what Giorgio Agamben calls whatever-being: something without qualities, without any distinguishing marks, but only the dread of (in)distinction itself:
“These screams, the ones from beyond the door at the top of the stairs, belong only to a dummy who now feels warm drops of blood sliding thickly over his lacquered cheeks, and who has been left — alone and alive — in the shadows of an abandoned loft.”
Ligotti’s stories are like little time bombs: they are creepy when you first read them, but their profounder effects of estrangement only become apparent later, when you reflect back on them, and find their contours troublingly difficult to grasp.
Horror is a genre that tends to be beset, more than others even, by uninteresting repetition. (Think how often Poe, or Lovecraft, or George Romero, has simply been imitated, time and time again). Against this general tendency, I think that Ligotti is the most original horror writer of the last twenty or thirty years (and perhaps longer). Only Kathe Koja, who apparently is no longer writing horror, even comes close in terms of originality).
I need to read more of Ligotti’s stories.
Songs of a Dead Dreamer is the first volume of short stories by Thomas Ligotti. (DJ Spooky later used the title for one of his finest albums).
I’m a bit embarrassed that I never encountered Ligotti’s work before now, because it is amazing. Ligotti specializes in short stories of horror (I don’t think he’s ever published a novel).
In a way, these stories are quite classical: in terms of imagery and content they are much closer to Lovecraft than to, say, Stephen King. As for their language, it is as gothic as Lovecraft’s, even though it is subtle, restrained and economical, where Lovecraft is always textually excessive. This may seem almost oxymoronic (how can something subtle and restrained be the slightest bit like Lovecraft?), but it is the best I can do. Put it this way: sentence by sentence and metaphor by metaphor, Ligotti’s language is heightened in much the same way that Lovecraft’s is. But where Lovecraft will typically write:
“Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to demoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell”
(– which is admittedly one of my favorite sentences in the English language),
Ligotti tends rather towards a sort of hyperbolic understatement (to desperately use another oxymoron), e.g.:
“He is still kneeling before the coffin as his features begin to undergo the ravages of various, obviously conflicting, phases of feeling. Eyes, mouth, the whole facial structure is called upon to perform gruesome acrobatics of expression.”
These sentences describe extremity, but hold back from it at the same time.
Ligotti’s themes are aesthetic and metaphysical, and here he is nothing like Lovecraft. There are no Cthulhus, no fish-people from Innsmouth, in Ligotti’s universe; no Lovecraftian dread of the Other. But neither is Ligotti’s dread psycho-cultural, in the manner of King and most mainstream horror.
Ligotti’s horror rather points depressively inward, to a claustrophobic, suffocating zone, where there is no longer any outside or Other, but where equally there is no more self, no more identity, no more culture. Many of his stories are written in the first person, with rather fussy and self-conscious narrators; but these narrators (as well as the protagonists of the stories written in the third person) are unmade by a metamorphosis that empties them of themselves, gives them over to forces of chaos and entropy, but usually without granting them the release of complete dissolution. They do not come face to face with some ultimate reality, but rather with a sort of unreality that (sometimes slowly but surely, other times with a disturbing rapidity) corrodes away all foundations, all points of reference, all solidity, to leave behind a kind of photographic negative of what Giorgio Agamben calls whatever-being: something without qualities, without any distinguishing marks, but only the dread of (in)distinction itself:
“These screams, the ones from beyond the door at the top of the stairs, belong only to a dummy who now feels warm drops of blood sliding thickly over his lacquered cheeks, and who has been left — alone and alive — in the shadows of an abandoned loft.”
Ligotti’s stories are like little time bombs: they are creepy when you first read them, but their profounder effects of estrangement only become apparent later, when you reflect back on them, and find their contours troublingly difficult to grasp.
Horror is a genre that tends to be beset, more than others even, by uninteresting repetition. (Think how often Poe, or Lovecraft, or George Romero, has simply been imitated, time and time again). Against this general tendency, I think that Ligotti is the most original horror writer of the last twenty or thirty years (and perhaps longer). Only Kathe Koja, who apparently is no longer writing horror, even comes close in terms of originality).
I need to read more of Ligotti’s stories.
Alexander Galloway‘s Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralizationis a highly useful discussion of how power relations and ideological assumptions are built into the very formal structure of the Internet. Galloway is a professor of Media Ecology at NYU, as well as a net artist and former key figure at Rhizome, one of the key new media art sites on the Web. Galloway is one of a very few people who are equally well versed in poststructuralist cultural theory and computer programming, which makes him uniquely suited for the task accomplished in this book.
“Protocol,” in this context, is an underlying specification of code that helps to make the Net run; examples would include TCP-IP, HTML and HTTP, and DNS. Protocol doesn’t give the technical details of these specifications, so much as it surveys them on a meta-level, showing what kind of work they do, and what sort of effects this work has.
Basically, Galloway argues that such protocols are the way that control is exercised in our globalized “network society,” one where power is “distributed” laterally, rather than being hierarchically structured, stratified, and centralized, or even (merely) “decentralized.” A distributed network is a rhizome rather than a tree, in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari. Note that, although Deleuze and Guattari often seem to be praising the rhizome in opposition to hierarchical “arborescent” models, Deleuze also sees rhizomatic structures as key to the “society of control,” which increasingly replaces Foucault’s “disciplinary society” as the way in which power is exercised in our postmodern world. Galloway expands on this Deleuzian ambivalence. Protocol is what allows for the openness and many-to-many organization of the Net: this is because its underlying guidelines and mechanisms are open-source and indifferent to content. (A web page is formatted the same way, regardless of what words and images it contains). But Galloway points out that this is only one side of the picture: for protocol is also an extreme form of control, in the sense that it constrains and homogenizes all content: no matter what you say, you have to say it in the approved format (or else your statement will not be communicable or readable at all). “Standardization is the politically reactionary tactic,” Galloway writes, “that enables radical openness.” As a result, the Net is never simply “free”; it is always “a complex of interrelated currents and counter-currents,” which interact in “multiple, parallel, contradictory, and often unpredictable ways” (page 143).
Galloway goes through the establishment of protocol on various levels, from the technical (how code actually works to link computers together) to the institutional (how standards for the Net, and for computing devices in general, are actually established and adopted), and from the history of how the architecture of the Web was established, to the various subversive practices (by hackers, tactical media activists, net artists, and others) that test its limits and keep open the possibility of change.
Protocol is both thoughtful and informative; I have certain criticisms or disagreements, but I see these more as testimony to how thought-provoking the book is, than as flaws which would vitiate its impact.
Basically, I am not sure that Galloway addresses the question of how power works in the “society of control” as thoroughly, and especially as structurally, as he needs to do. On the one hand, he presents protocol as the locus of power in distributed networks; but on the other hand, he sharply differentiates such power from the power which comes from closed and proprietary “standards” such as those imposed by Microsoft, or those that currently govern the dissemination of so-called “intellectual property.” Of course Galloway notes that periodization is never closed or total, and that many “disciplinary” and earlier power formations coexist with those of the “society of control.” But I don’t think that things like Microsoft’s monopolies and “digital rights management” can thus be explained as resulting from the subsistence of older forms of power. Rather, it’s the same hardware and software technology, and the same Internet protocols, that generate both (for instance) P2P file sharing and the digital watermarking of files that allows their source to be traced, and restricts their dissemination. That is to say, though Galloway convinces me that “protocol” is one part of how power and control operate in the network, he doesn’t convince me that “protocol” is actually as central to such power and control as he tries to claim. The most insidious forms of power in the network, the ways that it both “incites, induces, seduces” us (to use Foucault’s words) and locates and tracks us, as well as the way that the “informatization” of everything is itself a kind of appropriation and control (as McKenzie Wark argues) — these are not sufficiently accounted for by Galloway’s discussions.
(To be fair, Galloway approaches a sense of all this on a few pages, when he notes that protocol doesn’t so much give us orders, as it puts us in a situation where we already want to obey such orders — pages 147 and 241 — but this is never sufficiently developed).
The result of Galloway’s failure to develop a sufficiently broad and deep conception of power and control in the network, is that when he discusses the forces of resistance to such power and control — as he does in the latter parts of the book — what we mostly get, disappointingly, is just a narrative of various conceptual art projects, some political and some formalist, by the likes of etoy, jodi.org, and RTMark, without the sort of broader theorization that we get in earlier parts of the book.
Still, Protocol is a book well worth reading, essential as a starting point for further considerations.
Alexander Galloway‘s Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralizationis a highly useful discussion of how power relations and ideological assumptions are built into the very formal structure of the Internet. Galloway is a professor of Media Ecology at NYU, as well as a net artist and former key figure at Rhizome, one of the key new media art sites on the Web. Galloway is one of a very few people who are equally well versed in poststructuralist cultural theory and computer programming, which makes him uniquely suited for the task accomplished in this book.
“Protocol,” in this context, is an underlying specification of code that helps to make the Net run; examples would include TCP-IP, HTML and HTTP, and DNS. Protocol doesn’t give the technical details of these specifications, so much as it surveys them on a meta-level, showing what kind of work they do, and what sort of effects this work has.
Basically, Galloway argues that such protocols are the way that control is exercised in our globalized “network society,” one where power is “distributed” laterally, rather than being hierarchically structured, stratified, and centralized, or even (merely) “decentralized.” A distributed network is a rhizome rather than a tree, in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari. Note that, although Deleuze and Guattari often seem to be praising the rhizome in opposition to hierarchical “arborescent” models, Deleuze also sees rhizomatic structures as key to the “society of control,” which increasingly replaces Foucault’s “disciplinary society” as the way in which power is exercised in our postmodern world. Galloway expands on this Deleuzian ambivalence. Protocol is what allows for the openness and many-to-many organization of the Net: this is because its underlying guidelines and mechanisms are open-source and indifferent to content. (A web page is formatted the same way, regardless of what words and images it contains). But Galloway points out that this is only one side of the picture: for protocol is also an extreme form of control, in the sense that it constrains and homogenizes all content: no matter what you say, you have to say it in the approved format (or else your statement will not be communicable or readable at all). “Standardization is the politically reactionary tactic,” Galloway writes, “that enables radical openness.” As a result, the Net is never simply “free”; it is always “a complex of interrelated currents and counter-currents,” which interact in “multiple, parallel, contradictory, and often unpredictable ways” (page 143).
Galloway goes through the establishment of protocol on various levels, from the technical (how code actually works to link computers together) to the institutional (how standards for the Net, and for computing devices in general, are actually established and adopted), and from the history of how the architecture of the Web was established, to the various subversive practices (by hackers, tactical media activists, net artists, and others) that test its limits and keep open the possibility of change.
Protocol is both thoughtful and informative; I have certain criticisms or disagreements, but I see these more as testimony to how thought-provoking the book is, than as flaws which would vitiate its impact.
Basically, I am not sure that Galloway addresses the question of how power works in the “society of control” as thoroughly, and especially as structurally, as he needs to do. On the one hand, he presents protocol as the locus of power in distributed networks; but on the other hand, he sharply differentiates such power from the power which comes from closed and proprietary “standards” such as those imposed by Microsoft, or those that currently govern the dissemination of so-called “intellectual property.” Of course Galloway notes that periodization is never closed or total, and that many “disciplinary” and earlier power formations coexist with those of the “society of control.” But I don’t think that things like Microsoft’s monopolies and “digital rights management” can thus be explained as resulting from the subsistence of older forms of power. Rather, it’s the same hardware and software technology, and the same Internet protocols, that generate both (for instance) P2P file sharing and the digital watermarking of files that allows their source to be traced, and restricts their dissemination. That is to say, though Galloway convinces me that “protocol” is one part of how power and control operate in the network, he doesn’t convince me that “protocol” is actually as central to such power and control as he tries to claim. The most insidious forms of power in the network, the ways that it both “incites, induces, seduces” us (to use Foucault’s words) and locates and tracks us, as well as the way that the “informatization” of everything is itself a kind of appropriation and control (as McKenzie Wark argues) — these are not sufficiently accounted for by Galloway’s discussions.
(To be fair, Galloway approaches a sense of all this on a few pages, when he notes that protocol doesn’t so much give us orders, as it puts us in a situation where we already want to obey such orders — pages 147 and 241 — but this is never sufficiently developed).
The result of Galloway’s failure to develop a sufficiently broad and deep conception of power and control in the network, is that when he discusses the forces of resistance to such power and control — as he does in the latter parts of the book — what we mostly get, disappointingly, is just a narrative of various conceptual art projects, some political and some formalist, by the likes of etoy, jodi.org, and RTMark, without the sort of broader theorization that we get in earlier parts of the book.
Still, Protocol is a book well worth reading, essential as a starting point for further considerations.
Negri on Negri is a book of interviews that gives a gentle introduction to Toni Negri’s thought. It’s worth reading because Negri is one of the few contemporary thinkers who is really trying to work out radical alternatives to our current regime of postmodernity and globalization. Negri and Michael Hardt’s book Empire is clearly one of the key texts of the new century, something that anyone interested in political change needs to come to terms with — even if I find much of it problematic.
Negri on Negri is a much “lighter” book than Empire, but that makes it good as an introduction. Negri goes into his life and political career — his work as a political activist in Italy, the disturbances at the time of the Red Brigades, with whom he had a certain sympathy but which he was falsely accused of supporting and even masterminding, his years in jail, his years in exile in France, his ultimate return to Italy and more time in jail. This all provides a background to a thought that remains, in spite of everything, incredibly cheerful and optimistic.
Negri’s current thought is grounded in the changes that the world has gone through in the last thirty years or so: changes from industrial capitalism to a “knowledge economy,” and from the Cold War to a global marketplace, in which corporations have become more powerful than nation-states. In this new economy, traditional distinctions of place and time, between physical and intellectual labor, and indeed between labor and leisure, have pretty much disappeared. This metamorphosis is what doomed the radical movements — left of the Communist Party — to which Negri devoted his life in the 1960s and 1970s.
For Negri, traditional Marxism, with its traditional notion of the “working class,” no longer makes any sense under these changed conditions. But this does not mean that he capitulates to the idea that the worldwide capitalist marketplace is the ultimate horizon of possibility, the only thinkable social arrangement. Instead, Negri seeks to reinvent Marxism for these changed conditions, for the changed (but still quite horrible) new configurations of capitalism.
Basically, Negri argues that capitalist “production” is no longer a specific category or specific portion of society. It is no longer the “base,” in comparison to which everything else would be a mere “superstructure.” Rather, capitalist production is everything and everywhere — and quite directly so. It’s brain power as well as machinery, leisure time as well as work time, recreation as well as reproduction, inner thoughts as well as outer actions.
This is the situation foreseen by Adorno and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, who presaged a state of society in which all independence would be exterminated, and everything would be subjected to the “laws” of capitalism, commodification, and instrumental reason.
But the situation that Adorno viewed with unalloyed horror is seen by Negri as a source of hope — seen with an almost insane optimism. For Negri, such a condition means that oppression is really in its last extremity: if globalized, informational capitalism seems to have appropriated everything, with no remainder, it’s because this “everything” is now something that we are all directly involved in, and that we can therefore reappropriate. Indeed, for Negri, the conditions have never been so propitious. Capitalism’s own mechanisms and technologies have made the overcoming of alienation, and of scarcity, possible for the very first time. Negri thus rejects the forms and categories of old-fashioned Marxism, in order the better to establish Marxism’s oldest utopian premise and promise, that of universal “communism.” Global capitalist oppression has ironically created the conditions for global freedom to be almost within our grasp.
Now, all this is so wildly, insanely optimistic that I don’t believe it for a second. Nonetheless, I can’t help finding Negri’s ideas beautiful and inspiring. For they rest on a sense of life as a joyous, ongoing process of creation and collaboration, of what Negri calls the “common,” or “the liberty of being-together”: the amassing of multiple “singularities” without them ever fusing into a fixed identity. These pages are filled with paeans (I can’t believe that I am actually using this word) to “the pleasure of singularity” (149), or to “the moment when the arrow of Being is shot, the moment of opening, the invention of Being on the edge of time. We live at each instant on this margin of Being that is endlessly being constructed” (104). I feel enlivened by Negri’s celebration of singularity, plurality, invention, and imagination, even if I am unable to share his materialist and (post)humanist faith.
I can’t remember who it was who said that the great thing about Negri was how he countered the self-deluding voluntarism of Gramsci’s “pessmism of the intellect, optimism of the will” with an attitude of “optimism of the intellect,” even in the face of an inevitable (given the history of how revolutions have been defeated, or turned into something worse when they succeeded) “pessimism of the will.”
Negri on Negri is a book of interviews that gives a gentle introduction to Toni Negri’s thought. It’s worth reading because Negri is one of the few contemporary thinkers who is really trying to work out radical alternatives to our current regime of postmodernity and globalization. Negri and Michael Hardt’s book Empire is clearly one of the key texts of the new century, something that anyone interested in political change needs to come to terms with — even if I find much of it problematic.
Negri on Negri is a much “lighter” book than Empire, but that makes it good as an introduction. Negri goes into his life and political career — his work as a political activist in Italy, the disturbances at the time of the Red Brigades, with whom he had a certain sympathy but which he was falsely accused of supporting and even masterminding, his years in jail, his years in exile in France, his ultimate return to Italy and more time in jail. This all provides a background to a thought that remains, in spite of everything, incredibly cheerful and optimistic.
Negri’s current thought is grounded in the changes that the world has gone through in the last thirty years or so: changes from industrial capitalism to a “knowledge economy,” and from the Cold War to a global marketplace, in which corporations have become more powerful than nation-states. In this new economy, traditional distinctions of place and time, between physical and intellectual labor, and indeed between labor and leisure, have pretty much disappeared. This metamorphosis is what doomed the radical movements — left of the Communist Party — to which Negri devoted his life in the 1960s and 1970s.
For Negri, traditional Marxism, with its traditional notion of the “working class,” no longer makes any sense under these changed conditions. But this does not mean that he capitulates to the idea that the worldwide capitalist marketplace is the ultimate horizon of possibility, the only thinkable social arrangement. Instead, Negri seeks to reinvent Marxism for these changed conditions, for the changed (but still quite horrible) new configurations of capitalism.
Basically, Negri argues that capitalist “production” is no longer a specific category or specific portion of society. It is no longer the “base,” in comparison to which everything else would be a mere “superstructure.” Rather, capitalist production is everything and everywhere — and quite directly so. It’s brain power as well as machinery, leisure time as well as work time, recreation as well as reproduction, inner thoughts as well as outer actions.
This is the situation foreseen by Adorno and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, who presaged a state of society in which all independence would be exterminated, and everything would be subjected to the “laws” of capitalism, commodification, and instrumental reason.
But the situation that Adorno viewed with unalloyed horror is seen by Negri as a source of hope — seen with an almost insane optimism. For Negri, such a condition means that oppression is really in its last extremity: if globalized, informational capitalism seems to have appropriated everything, with no remainder, it’s because this “everything” is now something that we are all directly involved in, and that we can therefore reappropriate. Indeed, for Negri, the conditions have never been so propitious. Capitalism’s own mechanisms and technologies have made the overcoming of alienation, and of scarcity, possible for the very first time. Negri thus rejects the forms and categories of old-fashioned Marxism, in order the better to establish Marxism’s oldest utopian premise and promise, that of universal “communism.” Global capitalist oppression has ironically created the conditions for global freedom to be almost within our grasp.
Now, all this is so wildly, insanely optimistic that I don’t believe it for a second. Nonetheless, I can’t help finding Negri’s ideas beautiful and inspiring. For they rest on a sense of life as a joyous, ongoing process of creation and collaboration, of what Negri calls the “common,” or “the liberty of being-together”: the amassing of multiple “singularities” without them ever fusing into a fixed identity. These pages are filled with paeans (I can’t believe that I am actually using this word) to “the pleasure of singularity” (149), or to “the moment when the arrow of Being is shot, the moment of opening, the invention of Being on the edge of time. We live at each instant on this margin of Being that is endlessly being constructed” (104). I feel enlivened by Negri’s celebration of singularity, plurality, invention, and imagination, even if I am unable to share his materialist and (post)humanist faith.
I can’t remember who it was who said that the great thing about Negri was how he countered the self-deluding voluntarism of Gramsci’s “pessmism of the intellect, optimism of the will” with an attitude of “optimism of the intellect,” even in the face of an inevitable (given the history of how revolutions have been defeated, or turned into something worse when they succeeded) “pessimism of the will.”