Wednesday Night 04.01.2009 — Imaginal Machines, Movements, and Academic Enclosures
Comments Off on Wednesday Night 04.01.2009 — Imaginal Machines, Movements, and Academic EnclosuresWednesday Night 04.01.2009 — Imaginal Machines, Movements, and Academic Enclosures
A discussion with Stevphen Shukaitis, Silvia Federici, and George Caffentzis
Contents:
1. About this Wednesday Night
2. About Imaginal Machines
3. Introduction
4. About Stevphen Shukaitis
5. About Silvia Federici
6. About George Caffentzis
7. Useful links
Electronic copies of Stevphen’s research will be made available via this site:
http://stevphen.mahost.org/academicenclosures.html.
Imaginal Machines: Compositions of Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life
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1. About this Wednesday Night
What: Discussion with Stevphen Shukaitis, Silvia Federici, and George Caffentzis
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor (directions below)
When: Wednesday Night 04.01.2009 @ 7:00 PM
Who: Open and Free To All
The defense of a PhD dissertation is a strange moment, one where what often starts as a collective process of the inquiry and the social production of knowledge is enclosed by the legitimating apparatuses of the academy. Something is gained for the individual upon whom a mark of academic is granted (PhD from the Latin philosophiæ doctor, or literally the status as a “teacher of philosophy”), but also something is lost within that process: the individual benefits, but often to the neglect of the flows of social and collective creativity from which their work draws. This is perhaps especially the case in forms of research and inquiry based around describing and theorizing political organizing, social movements, and radical politics. While searching out authentic moments of political discourse is often valued as a moment of data collection, the idea that there might be a role for more participatory forms of the evaluation of research and findings, role which goes beyond movements as data and breaks down the positions of researching-subject and researched-objects, is looked on with much greater skepticism, if not outright dismissal.
But what if it was otherwise? What if rather than a moment of professionalizing enclosure of knowledge, it was made into a moment for collective reflection and celebration of the collective creativity from which research draws? This would perhaps be to harken back to the origins of the doctoral degree as the ijazat attadris wa ‘l-iftta (“license to teach and issue legal opinions”) in the training of Islamic law, but rather with the difference that guiding focus is not the formation and constitution of the law, but rather the constituent processes that guide and continually compose social movements.
We invite you to join Stevphen Shukaitis, Silvia Federici, and George Caffentzis in a discussion and forum that will tentatively sketch out what such a process might be through enacting it. Stevphen will discuss his research on collective imagination, class composition, and processes of social movement, which George and Silvia will comment on, leading to a collective discussion and reflection, both on the research presented and the processes of academic legitimation in relation to politically engaged social research.
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2. Imaginal Machines
Compositions of Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life
Drawing from autonomist politics, class composition analysis, and avant-garde arts, Imaginal Machines explores the emergence, functioning, and constant break down of the embodied forms of the radical imagination. To invoke the imagination as underlying and supporting radical politics, over the past forty years, has become a cliché. A rhetorical utilization of ideas that are already in circulation, invoking the mythic unfolding of this self-institutionalizing process of circulation. But what exactly is radical imagination? And more specifically, what are the compositional capacities created by the emergence, transformation, mutation, and decomposition of collective imagination within social movements? Imagination is not something that is ahistorical, derived from nothing, but an ongoing relationship and material capacity constituted by social interactions between bodies. While liberatory impulses might point to a utopian (no)where which is separate from the present, it is necessary to point from somewhere, from a particular situated imagining.
The investigative task is to explore the construction of imaginal machines, comprising of the socially and historically embedded manifestations of the radical imagination. Imagination, not as something possessed by individuals, but rather as a composite of the capacities to affect and be affected by the world, to develop movements toward new forms of autonomous sociality and collective self-determination. From there it asks the question, what does it mean to invoke the power of the imagination when it seems that the imagination has already seized power (through media flows and the power of the spectacle)? Does any subversive potentiality remain, or are we left with simply more avenues for the rejuvenation of questionable fields of power and rearticulating regimes of accumulation? Perhaps it is only honest to think in terms of a temporally-bounded subversive power, one that like the mayfly has its day in the sun. It might be that imaginal machines, like all desiring machines, only work by breaking down. That is, their functioning is only possible, paradoxically, by their malfunctioning. By reopening the question of recuperation, the inevitable drive to integrate the power of social insurgency back into the working of capital and the state, we create possibilities for exploring a politics continually reconstituted against and through the dynamics of recuperation, to keep open an antagonism without closure that is continually composed and recomposed. To develop tools necessary in resisting the continual subdivision and suburbanization of the radical imagination.
to read further http://stevphen.mahost.org/academicenclosures.html.
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3. Introduction
The geography of the imagination should have a little bit more wilderness to it; I hate it when it becomes subdivided. – Tom Waits (2005: 72)
This intervention, it must be said, has no beginning or end. And how could it? To begin an exposition on the mutation and transformation of the radical imagination with something alleged to be a ‘beginning’ would be almost as absurd as declaring the ‘end of history’ or the end of time itself. But history has a funny way of not ending, despite numerous and exaggerated rumors of its impending demise. The banal requirements of form necessitate what appears to be a beginning, but this is purely incidental, or perhaps born of habit, repetition, or trauma. We actually begin in ‘a middle,’ in a muddle, perhaps a puddle, running across the street. In the gullet of a chicken without a road to cross. Likewise, the beginning and end may very well represent the same location, a non-place of (im)possibility, containing seeds birthing a radically alternative present, continually folding over itself and refracted through patterns, modulations, and intensities: spasms and shifts divided by recurrences and undercurrents. This exposition is an intervention with no end, which is potentially present, existing before its visible self-institution and creation. It is no roadmap or blueprint set out beforehand where sentences and pages unfold logically from one location to the next moving through a pre-set and well-charted territory. It is rather a gesture, or a series of gestures, a means without ends, an arrangement and collision of bodies, texts, concepts, and formations that both generates the space in which it inhabits while also collapsing its multidimensional self-fractured form, imploding and bending dimensions back over itself, reforming and producing new ones. Tesseracts.
But let us back up from that, at least for a second.
To invoke the imagination as underlying and supporting radical politics, over the past forty years, has become a cliché. A rhetorical utilization of ideas that are already in circulation, invoking the mythic unfolding of this self-institutionalizing process of circulation. In other words, at a certain point the recourse to the imagination as a source of potentiality in radical politics is no longer of enacting new forms of creativity, but rather of continually circulating forms that already exist and perceiving them as newly imagined. But what exactly is radical imagination? And more specifically, what are the compositional capacities created by the emergence, transformation, mutation, and decomposition of such collective imagination within social movements? Imagination is not something that is ahistorical, derived from nothing, but an ongoing relationship and material capacity constituted by social interactions between bodies. While liberatory impulses might point to a utopian (no)where which is separate from the present, it is necessary to point from somewhere, from a particular situated imagining. The investigative task is to explore the construction of imaginal machines, comprising of the socially and historically embedded manifestations of the radical imagination. Imagination, not as something possessed by individuals, but rather as a composite of the capacities to affect and be affected by the world, to develop movements toward new forms of autonomous sociality and collective self-determination.
But what does it mean to invoke the power of the imagination when it seems that the imagination has already seized power (through media flows and the power of the spectacle)? Does any subversive potentiality remain, or are we left with simply more avenues for the rejuvenation of questionable fields of power and rearticulating regimes of accumulation? Perhaps it is only honest to think in terms of a temporally-bounded subversive power, which like the mayfly has its day in the sun. It might be that imaginal machines, like all desiring machines, only work by breaking down. That is, their functioning is only possible, paradoxically, by their malfunctioning. By reopening the question of recuperation, the inevitable drive to integrate the power of social insurgency back into the working of capital and the state, we create possibilities for exploring a politics continually reconstituted against and through the dynamics of recuperation, to keep open an antagonism without closure that is continually composed and recomposed. To develop tools necessary in resisting the continual subdivision and suburbanization of the radical imagination.
Imaginal Machines and Compositional Inquiries
Social technical machines are only conglomerations of desiring-machines under conditions that are historically determined; desiring-machines are social and technical machines restored to their determinant molecular conditions. – Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1977: 129)
Thus we have laid down, in concentrated form, the problematic that will concern us for the rest of this work. Having laid this foundation, it becomes possible to pile layers on top of the core, tracing out different cartographies and structures, digging back through layers of questions, materials, and provocations, until, with any luck, some novel considerations and answers to questions emerge.
The concept of an imaginal machine is coined, but never fully developed, by Peter Lamborn Wilson, in his work on the traditions of initiatic dreaming and automatic writing within Sufism and Taoism, Shower of Stars (1996). He deploys these techniques as a means of exploring what he describes as the deep structures that underlie and largely unite various kinds of religious experiences and traditions (although these are not deep structures in the structuralist sense). The task set out for analysis is not to find structural similarities from an external perspectives (as might typically be the case in almost all works of comparative religion), but rather, to search for “resonant patterns that emerge directly from the material under consideration” (1996a: 10): rather than seeking to impose patterns and bases for comparison from an external perspective, to overlay and impose them upon the social phenomena, instead to develop categories of comparison between and within these quite different, but also quite resonant traditions of religious and mystical practice. The ‘imaginal powers’ (quwwat al-khayal in Arabic) are characterized by relations and resonances, and it is within these reverberations, and through other traditions of thought, practice, politics, and forms of life, that the workings of an imaginal machine are constituted.
On a literal level, one could define an imaginal machine as a machine that relates to the production or interpretation of images, or to the production of images by the body through its experiences and interactions. The imago is also the last stage in the development of an insect, after emergence from the pupae when metamorphosis is complete. This is ironic since the manifestations of collective imagination considered in this thesis can never really be said to be fully mature. They mutate, multiply, ossify, die, and renew themselves again and again in successive cycles of social movement. But for the purposes of this exposition, the term ‘imaginal machine’ will be wielded more in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari might use it, to indicate a particular arrangement or composition of desires and creativity as territorialized through and by relations between bodies in motion. Machinic, not indicating the presence of a specific configuration of technological apparatus, but in the sense of a machine constituted by nature and comminicating through the recurrence of particular ensembles of relations and conditions. The machine, as Deleuze and Guattari explain, is not a perceptive state of memory, but rather an “affective state” (1977: 122). Imaginal machines are composed by the affective states they animate, reflecting the capacities to affect and be affected by the worlds that are contained within them. They activate a cartography of thought as a space where the relation between subject and object blurs: “each new act of connective seeing develops in oneself a new organ of perception” (Sacks 2007: 37).
Just as Wilson’s analysis strives to avoid imposing categories by working with and elaborating forms of resonance between the materials under consideration, formal exploration of imaginal machines also require searching for these patterns of resonance rather than imposing them. To restore the social technical machines of a particular organizational form or movement, we need to attempt to identify forms of resonance between underlying desiring machines, between imaginal machines constructed and animated by similar underlying forms of constituent power. To pursue a form of conceptual development that resonates with the materials and questions under consideration requires techniques that closely resemble those described by Charles O. Frake as “cognitive ethnography,” (1968). This involves working within the categories and concepts used by people involved in a social situation to understand how that social situation functions.
Themes of imagination, creativity, and desire have long run through various sections of the radical left, and the so called “other worker’s movement,” to borrow Karl Heinz-Roth’s phrasing. While an emphasis on these themes did not appear on a mass scale until the late 1960s, they have long existed within a secret drift of history that runs from medieval heresies to dreams of the Big Rock Candy Mountain that ran through bohemian and hobo cultures during the 1930s. It is a drift that connects Surrealism with migrant workers, the IWW with Dada, and back again. Although these undercurrents are often renounced by the official institutions of the left, they find channels of influence through collective dreams and a pervasive yearning for freedom, which finally trickles down into tangible forms of theoretical expression and elaboration. The importance and power of the imagination can be found within Marx’s assertion of the architect’s superiority to the bee because of the act of imagination which precedes execution, or Spinoza’s placing of the imagination as the first and primary mode of knowledge, an eminently material capacity, which is a necessary prerequisite for any other kind of knowledge to exist. Even prophecy (and its political role), for Spinoza, is based far more on the particular imaginative capacities of the prophets, than anything that is miraculous or exceptional to the unified order of god and or nature (2004).
The key importance of the imagination finds perhaps it fullest expression in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis (1975) and his conception of the social imaginary as a radical, self instituting form: as the very capacity to create new forms of social relations and organizations that determine the course of social and historical development. The social imaginary is not a network of symbols, or a series of reflections, but the capacity for symbols and reflections to be created in the first place. It is these shared capacities, and their ability to give rise to new forms of what is thinkable, of new social possibilities or organizations and new modes of understanding. But social imaginaries are not emergent in and of themselves, they are composed through the workings of many imaginal machines, through social devices created through social relationships and struggles, that do not necessarily encompass the entire social field (even if they aspire to).
In the investigation of the emergence, mutation, and development of imaginal machines, it is important not to assume the homogeneity of a particular machinic composition over an entire movement or social sphere. This is essential because moments of minor mutation, while often occupying a seemingly insignificant role within the larger social fabric, act as a fulcrum on which larger transformations in collective imagination are initiated. These tremors of pivotal transformation can be identified in how the ideas of the Situationists and Socialisme ou Barbarie found traction and expression in massive forms of social contestation. They can be seen in the Italian movement of ‘77 to find new ways to socialize and expand the ideas and tactics of the avant-garde into mass methods for social conflict and insurgent creativity. These acute transformations are only revealed by not assuming a unified character over the situation. James Scott (1979) refers to this as the “revolution in the revolution,” or the constant movement and transformation contained within. Through exploring this one uncovers a minor tradition of rebellion whose ideas and structures often diverge from stated goals, ideas, and methods. It is here where the everyday life of revolution is renewed, where a new imaginal machine is constructed.
Beneath the Bored Walk, the Beach
The everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes. It belongs to insignificance, and the insignificant without truth, without reality, but perhaps also the site of all signification… hence the weight and enigmatic force of everyday truth. – Maurice Blanchot (1987: 14/20)
But let us delve further. For while the classic slogan of 1968 ‘beneath the pavement, the beach’ was used to indicate that beyond industrial technology and mundanity one could still find a passionate drive for a vibrant life, there seemed something more profound to be hinted at. That is not to mock the desire to unearth, beneath a crusted-over exterior, all sorts of hidden pleasures and exaltations, but to also discover forms of sociality that while existing within capitalism also are the seeds of recuperating it. One would not want to abandon the inquisitiveness and joy of ‘uncovering’ something precious, despite this being the very same emotion that has been mined constantly since the 1960s to fuel new shopping campaigns, design holidays, and countless other forms of commodification. The point is not to ignore the commodity and its fetish, its shimmering appearance of general equivalence that is constantly denied, but rather to turn the gaze in another direction for a second, namely the bored walk, the ambulatory motion of the one who walks slowly because there is no reason to walk any faster. That is, to consider more carefully the constant silent war taking place on the factory floor (or any number of workplaces), as work and domination are stealthily avoided, not through open resistance, but through foot dragging, feigned respect, or feigned stupidity. It is, as Anton Pannekoek argues, that “Every shop, every enterprise, even outside of times of sharp conflict, of strikes and wage reductions, is the scene of a constant silent war, of a perpetual struggle, of pressure and counter-pressure” (2005: 8) Rather than focusing too much on the spectacle and spectacular forms of resistance (which risk falling into a consumerist critique), this focus keeps the emphasis on the production, not strictly in the sense of economic production, but more broadly in all forms of production involved in the labor of the social itself.
Digging deeper, now into the subtitle, but beginning at the end, one curiously encounters a revolution of everyday life. Why revolution, and why everyday life? Following the ideas of the Situationists and many related currents of thought (particularly the ideas of Raoul Vaneigem), the idea is to refuse to fetishize particular dramatic, visible moments of transformation. This is not to say that those moments do not have any importance, particularly in the generation of new dramatic and mythical imagery, but rather to avoid the tendency to reduce the entire and much larger process of social transformation to these particular moments. This is to understand radical politics and social transformation taking place in a much broader and diffuse social milieu marked by points of materialization and the condensation of cycles of struggles, where the outward appearance and consciousness of the struggle is not the process in itself. These compressions in history might make good film sequences, but for well thought out revolutions, as Huey P. Newton famously argues (2002), the mistaking of a moment in a revolutionary process for the entire process itself is to risk falling into the mystifications of bourgeois thought. After all, if that is both the model and the expectation, if that magic moment never comes, then the long process and turmoil that that gives birth to another world can simply be written off as not being revolutionary because it simply lacked that fetishized moment.
It is a sense of revolutions in their everydayness, as the movement through and of the entire social field, which is nearly impossible to describe without betraying its nature by imposing closure on an open and constantly fluctuating process. It is this everydayness that Blanchot describes as a site of insignificance that escapes signification, and is at the same time, the source of all signification. It is this paradox that much of the creativity of radical thought over the past forty years has either worked with or tried to work around. This can be seen clearly in the work of someone like Michel De Certau, who understands the everyday not as a background or container, but rather the space of multiform, tricky, and stubborn tactics of resistance that lack a proper space or locus of their own. The tactics of everyday life which shift between and around fields of power that define the spaces of their existence, can be drawn from in the strategical development of radical politics, in the consideration of the relation between “a certain kind of rationality and an imagination” that marks successive stages in the elaboration of radical politics (1984: xxii).
Rather than assert the scope of investigation as a totality let us then break things down into the simplest bodies of meaning and build up from there. To start from clear definitions and concepts, and elaborate from there. What could be simpler? The problem is that even starting from the simplest aspects possibly might not be that simple. For instance, what do autonomy and self-organization, the substance of the compositions forming and animated through imaginal machines, mean? The problem is that both concepts are notoriously hard to pin down, and much ink shall be spilled in the following pages elaborating and drawing from the continual discussion in which the meanings of these change. There are also long and complex histories of how these concepts have developed. As George Caffentzis notes, notions of autonomy used within the radical left include
(0) the ability of workers to not be defined by the “laws of capital” and to transcend the confines of their role as a dependent variable in the surplus-value producing machine
(1) the attempt by the Italian extra-parliamentary left to “go beyond the contract” into the “territory” in the early 1970s (self-reduction of rents, electricity bills, transport, etc.)
(2) feminists who argued that women should make their political decisions independently of male organizations
(3) the politics of the squatters movement in Europe (especially Berlin, but also other centers) that rejected any negotiations with city authorities and other traditional “left” unions and parties
(4) the politics of Hakim Bey’s “Temporary Autonomous Zones” and related efforts by groups like Reclaim the Streets
(5) Negri’s notion of autonomy in Marx Beyond Marx as the power of the working class to self-valorize through its use of the wage not for the reproduction of its work function
(6) Harry Cleaver’s notion of “autonomous Marxism” (2006)
And surely one could find many more examples. Throughout this text, autonomy will be used in ways that mixes, combines and links features from all of these different notions. But putting differences aside for a second, it could broadly be said that in the usage employed here autonomy refers to forms of struggle and politics that are not determined by the institutions of the official left (unions, political parties, etc…). In other words, extraparliamentary politics; a rejection of the mediation of struggles by institutional forms, especially since representation and mediation are all too often the first step in the recuperation of these struggles. To borrow Wolfi Landstreicher’s description, autonomous self-organization is characterized by non-hierarchical organization, horizontal communication and relationships, and the necessity of individual autonomy in relation to collectivity. The last point is important for Landstreicher (otherwise there is no reason why states or corporations could not argue that they were also forms of autonomous organization). It is also a key point of debate and contention within radical politics as to the relation between the realization of individual and collectivity autonomy, and how best to go about creating spaces for realizing these relationships. For Landstreicher, “autonomous self-organization is the development of shared struggle based on mutuality for the full benefit of each individual involved” (n.d.: 3).
It is also important to not be simply uncritical about the notion of autonomy or calls for its realization. As David Knights and Hugh Willmott wisely remind us, the call to become autonomous can have a potentially dark side, especially when the nature of that autonomy and its emergence is not considered. For example, where autonomy may function as a mechanism for the self-discipline of the subjects in question. As they emphasize, autonomy does not in itself describe or even point toward a condition or state of mind that exists within the world; rather, it is a “way of imbuing the world with a particular meaning (or meanings) that provide a way of orienting ourselves to the social world” (2002: 60). And that is why the question of the composition, and the compositional process, is important, precisely because the point is not to fall back on the unstated assumption of the existence of forms of autonomy possessed by the enlightened subject inherited from liberal political discourse. Autonomy is not something that is possessed by an individual subject so much as a relation created between subjects; that is, it is a form of sociality and openness to the other created through cooperative relations. Relations composed of individual subject positions in the process of emergence, rather than something that is possessed by isolated individuals before an encounter. The assumption of the existence of autonomy, whether by individuals or collectively, might well be an important precondition in creating favourable conditions for its emergence, but this is another matter altogether. Autonomy is more a notion that is useful in mutual shaping and crafting of the social field, rather than something that precedes it. Similarly, is important to heed Randy Martin’s insightful exploration of how taking a notion of autonomy as a privileged ‘first cause’ or explanatory dynamic from which other processes are emergent can serve to limit the ability to appreciate forms of agency and social antagonism that emerge (2002: 73-89; 1994: 2006: 206-211). Martin suggests a politics founded on the formation and emergence of ensembles, a concept that has a good deal of resonance with the more open forms of (class) compositional analysis to be explored here.
And this self that is contained within the phrase, what is it and where does it come from? Are we talking about a self-contained and autonomous individual subject or some form of collectivity? Or perhaps we are talking about a particular kind of subjectivized individual self that emerges in the process of and in relation to the formation and maintenance of a larger form of social collectivity. What are the processes involved here? Are these forms of interactions involved in the formation of our various ‘selves’ a form of labor in themselves? It is these questions and queries that are to be explored in this thesis, even if from the beginning we acknowledge that the territories of the question are almost inexhaustible, and that social movements by their very nature will niftily side-step our questions by constitute new arrangements on which the same questions are revisited within a different context. But perhaps the most important element here, further complicating the mix, is the hyphen in self-organization. The hyphen conjoins and brings together words but also transforms the joined elements that are at the time kept separate even as they are joined. They are disjunctively united and made different in being made same. To borrow a phrase from Michelle Fine, this dynamic of “working the hyphen” of the self-other relationship is one which “both separates and merges personal identities with our inventions of Others” (1994: 70). One could half-jokingly suggest that in the phrase “self-organization” there exists a graphic illustration, namely the emergence and development of a self in relation and conjunction, but simultaneously separated from and through, the development of forms of organization. It is a process that unifies, conjoins, transforms, and separates the various social elements involved: a grammar of social antagonism mirrored and mired within a grammatical marking.
The question and task at hand is not trying to express and communicate these varied forms of struggle, because there is always something fundamentally non-transferable about expressing an experience that would frustrate such efforts. I do not attempt to represent these struggles or communicate them, that would be to transmit preformed subjectivities and methods that can be adapted in other situations, because there are now procedures and methods outside out of the situation. Rather, following the ideas of Colectivo Situaciones, this is a project and a question of research militancy, a question of finding patterns of resonance between these different projects and forms of organization. Research militancy does not represent or communicate struggles, but is useful for extending experimentation and exploring the forms of composition found within the situation, or in the various processes of interaction, collective valorization, and productive compatibilities found between different projects:
Research militancy does not extract its commitment from a model of the future, from a search for power (potencia) in the present…the labor of research militancy is linked to the construction of a new perception, a new working style towards tuning up and empowering (potenciar) the elements of a new sociability (2005: 68)
But this is also not just a question of looking at present existing examples of alternative forms of labor organizing and insurgency, but also historical and previous examples that existed as part of what one might be tempted to think of in Sergio Bologna’s framing as the tribe of moles, or the collective agglomeration of Marx’s old mole; in other words, organizing based not upon an embrace of the dignity of labor, but rather on avoiding and refusing work. Historical examples, not in the sense of something that is fixed and that one can exist outside of for the purposes of study, but rather history as an example of living memories, that resonate and flow through forms of organization that exist in the present. Here we could talk about instances found in the history of autonomous Marxism and organizing in Italy, the IWW, forms of council communism and workers’ parties against work, the efforts of the Situationists and the events of May 1968, of train hopping hobos and migrant labor that merged with Surrealism’s attempt to realize the marvelous and the materialize the power of the imagination in everyday life. Unfolding in the nexus between self-management of work and work refusal, these struggles articulate what might appear to be a contradictory position, a desire to have the cake and eat it too, but in many ways both struggles express a complimentary relation to organizing and political change. It is not that self-management and refusal are necessarily opposed, but rather that the refusal of work opens new ways and possibilities for exerting control over life and labor, and self-management potentially becomes a path through which it becomes increasingly possible to refuse work.
By teasing out the resonances and connections between existing forms of creative insurgency and attempting to find new paths for organizing the inherited wealth of knowledge and experiences of previous struggles, these layers and textures of materials move across places, times, and movements in the process of developing tools for continued subversion in the present. These moments, while often separated by time and space, are nonetheless connected by their mutual resonances in an overall movement toward abolishing the present conditions of exploitation they exist in. Resonating connections do not mean that these diverse and varied moments of rupture are all the same, nor are they subsumed into one thing, rather as argued by Antonio Negri, “there is no linear continuity, but only a plurality of views which are endlessly solicited at each determinant moment of the antagonism, at each leap in the presentation, in the rhythm of the investigation” (1991: 13). The fracturing of daily life and attempts to create something else, tessellate and build upon each other, drawing discontinous lines of flight creating an archipelago in insurrection and joy.
What then, might constitute conceptual tools that would be useful in furthering a rhythm of investigation toward a form of autonomous self-organization adequate for addressing the current social and economic transformations? Concepts, as described by Deleuze and Guattari, whose creation is the task of philosophy to form, invent, and fabricate are combinations and multiplicities, defined by their elements, existing as fragmentary wholes. Autonomous self-organization, as both a diverse set of practices and concept, has histories and becomings, zig-zagging through the embodied forms it has occupied, unfolding through history in ways defined less by spatial characteristics than the intensive coordinates of how forms of practice embody and express themselves. The concept is “the contour, the configuration, the constellation of an event to come” (1994: 32-33). The concept of self-organization is a point, acting as a center through which vibrations of energy flow, through which the desires of the working class are expressed. Concepts are embodied and animated through conceptual personae – for instance Nietzsche’s usage of Dionysus or Marx’s invocation of the figure of the capitalist and workers – that “show thought’s territories” (1994: 64). To find conceptual tools for this reconsideration implies creating the means to draw from and elaborate forms of practice and organizing that have congealed into the concept of autonomy and self-organization, and to evaluate whether these concepts and the conceptual personae animated in describing them continue to shape the forms of practice from which they emerged.
Compositional Analysis
Class composition – power, class composition – transition, the articulation of these relations are based on the materiality of the behaviors, the needs, and the structures of self-valorization. – Antonio Negri (1991: 11)
A form of analysis that is fitting for such a task involves a particular combination of organizing and reflection, known as class composition. This approach is most often associated with forms of heretical Marxism developed in Italy between the 1950s and 1970s. Class composition analysis, while difficult to treat as a coherent and unified whole, is marked by several distinct characteristics. Notable among these is the consideration of class not as immutable fixed identity, but rather as a constantly evolving form of social relations expressed through technical and political composition. Technical composition involves particular forms of labor that exist in a historical situation, while political composition expresses the formation of the working class as an evolving historical entity which develops through solidarity created during the struggle against capitalism. The focus on class struggle as a dynamic motor of changing class relations is an image capital has strived to accommodate itself to in an attempt to convert class struggle into the driving force of its own development. This is often referred to as the “reversal of perspective.”
The history of capitalism is all too often narrated in such a way that capital appears to be the principal, and sometimes the only, actor. At best, labor and social struggles merely react to the effects of a continuing pattern of development with little hope of exerting any real influence. Harry Cleaver describes this as narrating from capital’s perspective where ‘capital’ envisages the working class as “a spectator to the global waltz of capital’s autonomous self-activating development” (1979: 27). By shifting our focus to the self-activity of the working class and struggles against capitalism we pave the way for exploration of how transformations in capitalism are a product of responses to social struggles rather than simply an expression of the eternal dynamics of capitalist development. These continued and on-going struggles against capitalism and the attempt of capital to reabsorb those energies into its own workings create cycles of composition and decomposition. And a cycle of decomposition it little more, although that is more than enough, than the struggle of capital against its subordinate position in relation the determination by the insurgencies against it. Struggles increase the political composition and unity of the working class, its ability to act increasingly as a self-determining force, which capital then responds to with vast array of technologies of domination, from psychology to economics, use of machines and methods of labor discipline, monetary inflation, and planned crisis. One common example is the argument that the revolts and strikes against the factory work of the 1960s and 1970s caused capital to respond through the creation of new forms of decentralized flexible production and organization that workers had created for themselves by resisting the factory lines. It is argued that this is what caused the transition from the factory line (characterized by standardized, repetitive labor), to forms of flexible and mobile production forming a diffuse, social factory.
The goal of class composition was to analyze the relation between social struggles and the changing dynamics of capitalist relations, with a view to understanding these dynamics and better identifying how struggles could more effectively intervene to undermine and subvert the workings of capital. Class composition analysis then came to involve not only looking at struggles within the bounded factory and workplace, but also other forms of struggle that had not previously been considered as a component of class struggle, such as the unwaged, housewives, agrarian workers, and students. This reconceptualization and recategorization of the working class in a broader sense allows one to sense the diversity and strength of anticapitalist resistance in a brighter light than would be perceived based purely on the reactive struggle of factory workers to response to the latest dictates. As different moments and forms of struggle connect with one another and find ways to extend themselves in the creation of higher forms of social antagonism and resistance, they create a cycle of struggles.
Expanding cycles of struggle depend on understanding how struggles are communicated through what Romano Alquati referred to as their vertical and horizontal articulations (1970). Struggles are articulated vertically in their location within existing circuits of capitalist production and reproduction, while their horizontal articulation is characterized by how they are embodied and linked spatially. Understanding the changing nature of capitalist relations demands an appreciation of the varied and connected layers through which struggles articulate and operate, otherwise it is all too easy to fall back into an analysis that sees the working of capital as being a closed and self-determining system. The Zerowork Collective, attempting to summarize how these ideas had been developed and to find ways to adapt them to new circumstances, argued that an understanding of the dynamics and cycles of struggle could be broken down to four interconnected levels:
(1) The analysis of struggles: their content, direction, how they develop and circulate, the ways in which workers find ways to bypass the technical constrictions of production and find ways to affirm their own power
(2) How different struggles within varied sectors of the working class affect and resonate with each other, how they affect the relations of different parts of the working class under capitalism with each other and how they attempt to redefine and subvert these enforced divisions
(3) The relation between working class struggles and their “official” institutions (trade unions, political parties, etc), keeping in mind that struggles often do not originate from these organizations and may have to struggle against them as an obstacle to their own development
(4) How these aspects are related to capitalist responses and organization in terms of generalized social planning, technological development, patterns of employment, and the ongoing transformation of capitalist society (1992: 111-112)
Class composition in this sense, in the words of Negri, becomes an expression of the collective subjectivity of the struggles; it “restates the problem of power in a perspective where recomposition is not that of a unity, but that of a multiplicity of needs, and of liberty” (1991: 14).
But it would not be desirable to take these forms of analysis, however valuable and useful their origins and despite their apparent applicability, to directly transport them into usage in the current day. Similarly, the concept of worker self-management, developed over several hundred years, cannot be directly adapted to a contemporary setting without reappraisal. The world has changed and moved on from the point at which these concepts have emerged, similarly class composition also needs to be reappraised in its relation to the transformation of the social, political and economic world. But in this sense class composition, which was developed to understand the changing dynamics organizers found themselves in, can offer tools for deciding how such a form of analysis would need to be reworked to be useful. Class composition also developed within forms of politics and ideas that despite their value as tools also come with baggage that is somewhat less appealing. One of the main tasks of class composition was to identify the vanguard of emerging class sectors. It was argued that the vanguard held a privileged position that was essential to the workings of capital, and could be effectively subverted through intervention.
While many organizers employing such an analysis rejected the idea of the vanguardist party necessary to effectively lead the struggle, this method of looking for the emerging productive vanguard was in some ways held over in their form of latent, underlying assumptions, such as that certain sectors of the working class held a privileged position in their ability to resist capitalism. This emphasis, and the desire to identify positions of higher dependence for capital with a view to more effective subversion also commonly led to overemphasize certain struggles at the expense of others accompanied by a tendency to restate a “stagist conception” of capitalism, or the idea that capitalism needed to develop in certain ways before it could progress in new form. Given these reasons it would be unacceptable to adapt the tools and framework of class composition analysis without also appreciating its limitations and pitfalls. One might wonder why it would even be desirable to adopt such a framework given its limitations. Monty Neill, in his reappraisal of class composition analysis in light of the Zapatista revolution, argues that by moving beyond the workerist limitations and framework from which class composition emerged, is useful “not in order to locate a new vanguard, but also to help the many class sectors come together against capital” (2001: 122). To employ class composition analysis becomes a project of inheritance, not to attempt to replicate it as was employed originally, but rather to creatively work with, transform and update class composition analysis through using it in a different time, place, and location in a set of intensive coordinates (Jones 2002).
In particular, I want to expand the notion of compositional analysis by paying special attention to the overlap between aesthetic and class dynamics in cycles of struggle. To understand composition not just in terms of the quality and form an intervention or piece might take, but also as part of the aesthetic dynamics of political antagonism and organizing. In a similar manner as the dynamics of resistance are argued to determine the course of capitalist development, light may be shed on the way that resistant aesthetics, anti-art, and the avant-garde have greatly (unintentionally) shaped the development of artistic endeavors, and capitalism, to the degree that capitalism relies on rejuvenation through new images and imagery along with other forms of social energies. This is an area which has been tentatively explored in the work of Jacques Attali (1985) based on his understanding of the prophetic role of music in forecasting changes in the composition of political economic power. Similarly, his understanding of a coming mode of compositional production as un-coerced creativity and collaboration not determined by economic imperatives is quite useful, even if he seems to neglect the political and social struggles that would bring about such a condition. It could be argued that mode of socialized production has been realized (in commodified form) in the hypercapitalist networked world. Nevertheless, this provides an important starting point for consideration of the relation between class and aesthetics within a compositional framework, one that is enriched, stretched, mutated, and most likely broken and reassembled by such a consideration.
The Fire Next Time
I have not managed to conceive you
and you have already occurred
please be so kind and tell me
who it is that imagined you
– Antanas Jonynas (2002: 47)
The task ahead then is simply, and understandably, titanic. Perhaps even necessarily doomed to failure, albeit hopefully one of the more beautiful kind. It is the task of finding tools for what p.m. calls “substructing the planetary work machine” (1995). He argues that simply finding new forms of subversion and deconstructing forms of labor is not enough, precisely because, as also argued by many figures within the autonomist tradition, these gains can quickly come to be turned against themselves into new forms of self-discipline and capitalist power. Substruction is a process of combining construction and creation to open new possibilities for living in the spaces recomposed by subversion. The process of substruction is all the more tricky as it is important to realize that we are ourselves part of the workings of the planetary work machine, we exist as part of capital, and thus cannot discuss subversion or construction as if it exists as an external enemy. And this dynamic of being embedded within capital, as part of the machine, also provides obstacles for developing forms of self-organization, since it would be naive to believe that spaces can magically be created ‘outside’ of capital to completely avoid these dynamics.
Let us then give a brief overview of the chapters that will follow, perhaps as a bit of a teaser, as a bit of a warning, or to give some sense of coherence to an argument that will develop more in spastic fits and plateaus, walking Spanish down the hall: a vitality of resistance all too aware of what its fate will be, sooner or later.
First we wake up screaming, in the horrors of the capitalist workplace and real subsumption of society that exists today. It is in the moment of horror, of shock, of the scream of being dislocated from the workings of the world around us, that the emergence of the radical imagination begins. Amongst the zombies and wreckage it all seems an incomprehensible mess at first. But the question of ‘how did we get here’ is not one of lament or defeat or a rhetorical cry, but rather, a necessary prerequisite for founding a compositional analysis adequate to the weight of the present. By examining the violence which underlies the foundations of capitalism (primitive accumulation), and understanding how this violence of separation is not an isolated event, bur rather a dynamic that is constantly rearticulated and expanded in renewed rounds of capitalist discipline and expansion, we can open the question of the relation between social struggles and the renewal of capitalist accumulation. The problematic and shocking revelation is that social struggles do not die, but rather are turned against themselves, left in a zombified state of indeterminacy where their only desire is to eat the brains of the living labor of resistance. That is to say each renewed round of capitalist accumulation is precisely based on the ability to turn the energies of insurgency against itself. This sets forth the questions to be walked, as the Zapatistas might say, and concepts to be explored throughout the entire text in various forms and examples.
Next, we take a short excursion to explore the nature of the relation between revelation and revolution (“Revelation Vertigo”), namely through the mythic core of politics that seems to unite many disparate strands of radical thought: the backwards projection of the existence of an autonomous subject, collectivity, and capacity that is integral in creating the conditions for the possible realization and creation of such within the present. In other words, the assumption that a form of autonomous existence had existed in the past helps to create the possibility of its realization in the present. Thus the argument of the existence of an already present form of autonomy is part of a process of mythological self-creation and institution that needs to be assessed based on its ability to animate forms of autonomy and self-organization rather than on its literal truth or falsity.
From there we go on to explore the process of minor composition, or how social struggles find ways to redirect the energies found within pop culture motifs (as well as employing humor and satire), to create forms of autonomous organization within the collective imagination, understood as a shared and collective capacity. Minor compositions are premised not on the creation of hegemonic or representative forms of politics, but rather on the creation of forms of intense relations and spaces to create social movement from within. This is the process where the mythopoetic self-organization and self-institution, its revelation vertigo, starts and builds out from minor moments and ruptures. In particular this chapter draws from the history of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as a form of social struggle that creatively employs music in culture as part of labor organizing, as well as some examples from more recent times (such as collaborations on actions between the IWW and Billionaires for Bush).
The following chapter “Space is the (non)Place” explores the role of images and themes of outer space and extraterrestrial travel as a pole of imaginal recomposition. How do the forms of minor composition and rupture articulate beyond themselves to become more than a localized form of social creativity? Even when it seems that there is no physical space in which exodus is possible, an outer space of collective imagination can be created through the exteriority of the radical imagination. It is here one can find a diffuse cultural politics, from Sun Ra to the Association of Autonomous Astronauts that creates spaces of exteriority through the usage of space imagery. Space themes operate through the creation of an imagined space of exteriority from which other realities are made possible even despite (and perhaps through) the literal impossibility of the motifs used in constructing this space.
From the outer space of the radical imagination as exteriority, we turn more specifically to consider the role and on going importance of the avant-garde in constructing imaginal machines, as well as the limitations that are contained within such approaches. In particular the focus is on the constant drive within the avant-garde to put an end to art as a separated or reified activity and to reintegrate forms of socialized creativity throughout the social field. In contrast to an imaginal space as pure exteriority, the theme here is how the avant-garde ‘re//fusal’ of reification and separation works in two directions: both as a refusal of a separated sphere for aesthetic activity and a re-fusing of new creative energies entering the social field. This chapter elaborates the concept of affective composition within political aesthetics. Similar to Joseph Beuys notion of “social sculpture,” an approach to aesthetic based not upon considering the content of the work, but rather the kinds of relations and connections animated and made possible by it (that can be created or sustained through shared creation). This is a dynamic that is found within avant-garde currents, as well as zombified within the workings of similar phenomena in the focus on interactivity and participation within post-Fordism, the net economy, and cultural industries.
Next, “The Labor of the Imagination,” where the task is to examine ways in which forms of collective creativity and politics can be made durable through organizational forms, particularly in the case of worker self-management. Is it possible to create a space and form for the organization of collective labor and creativity without it being turned against its own aims and intentions? Or would this just be another example of turning avant-garde intentions and desires into a stabilized form that can be used by capital? Drawing from my experience as a part of Ever Reviled Records (a worker owned and run record label) as well as some historical examples, examines the potentiality found for recomposing autonomy within the organizational form of the self-managed workplace. The chapter concludes that self-management has a possible role, but one that is somewhat limited, given the tendencies of such projects to evolve into forms of collective capital rather than its subversion. This is the tendency for anticapitalist vampire hunters, once bit by capital, to become vampires themselves, even if now the scary looking castle on the hill is run as a cooperative. The question remains how to draw from and expand upon the potentials of self-managed forms of organization while undermining this tendency to become subsumed within the logic of capitalist valorization despite intentions to escape from it.
Moving away from questions about self-managed labor and its exhaustion, we turn to consider the roles of affective relations and spaces within the labor of creating communities of resistance (“Questions for Aeffective Resistance”). Drawing from the history of struggles around domestic labor (in particular campaigns such as Wages for Housework and more recent organizing by groups such as Precarias a la Deriva), this chapter considers questions of sustainability and collective joy within radical politics, especially when the sedimentation or ossification of the radical imagination in a particular or distorted form impedes the further development of collective movement. This is the space of the necessary overlap between the affectivity and effectiveness of political organizing, or the ways in which relationships and interaction are not something external or supplementary to politics, but are very much the micro-level everyday organization and continuation of autonomous politics.
The next chapter (“Precarious Politics”) draws from the debates and organizing that have occurred during recent years around the theme of precarious labor, and how this has acted as a pole of movement recomposition in the wake of the anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s. Although precarious labor is far from being new (it is perhaps, if anything, always been the condition of labor in capitalism), it is rather the ability to create new tools and methods for organizing within the current context that is the greatest value of such developments. It is the grounds for radical politics themselves that need to be constantly recomposed, if they are not to end up merely as a recreation of the Fordist-Keynesian welfare state. That is to say, the grounds for politics are also precarious, and will continue to be so.
Finally, in the last chapter (“Dance, Dance Recomposition”), we return almost exactly where we began, by reconsidering the nature of processes of recuperation and their relation to radical politics. Drawing from sources ranging from the work of the Situationists and more recent elaborations on recuperation prompted by Situationist writings, we can see that the phenomenon of recuperation is not a cause for alarm, defeat or cynicism, but rather that radical politics must be continually recomposed on the shifting social sands created by constant recuperation of social insurgency and energy into the workings of capital and the state. Zombies or no zombies, the logic of incorpse-oration is not one that is likely to be done away with anytime soon. Rather it is a question of how it is dealt with, to ward off the bony handy of the old world that constantly grasps and claws our feet just when we thought we had escaped. This is the defining task of any radical politics that seeks to remain so, to find ways to not be turned against its own intentions and transformed into another tool for capitalist valorization or state power: the continual rebuilding and reformulation of imaginal machines capable of animating new forms of self-organization and autonomy in the revolutions of everyday life.
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4. About Stevphen Shukaitis
Stevphen Shukaitis is a lecturer at the University of Essex and a member of the Autonomedia editorial collective. He is the editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labor. For more on his work and writing, see http://stevphen.mahost.org.
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5. About Silvia Federici
Silvia Federici is a scholar, activist, and professor emerita at Hofstra University. She is the author of Caliban and the Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004) and is the co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa.
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6. About George Caffentzis
George Caffentzis is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective and coordinator of the committee for Academic Freedom in Africa.
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7. Useful links
http://stevphen.mahost.org/academicenclosures.html
http://www.midnightnotes.org/
http://silviafederici.littlerednotebook.com/
http://deoxy.org/mormons.htm
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Globalization/Brief_Hx_StrucAdj_DGE.html
http://www.commoner.org.uk/01-1groundzero.htm
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/MidnightOilFedericiDevNigeria.htm