°Norm und Projektion
Yesterday I watched Katja Diefenbach’s contribution to the DictionaryOfWar, speaking on police war.
In that paper, she takes apart the normative fiction of a regular war, of a war regulated by and occuring between nation-states (of which Schmitt is one version), and the mourning that subsequently characterises certain discussions of a new form of war.
Impressed, I wandered over to read her “New Angels - On the Happiness of Being Communist: Multitude in Empire,” where she describes (criticises) Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude as “a wholly secularized and subjective angel, a Christian worker-angel.” That is, unlike Walter Benjamin’s concept of the messianic as a trace of the promise that might disrupt temporal flow, she argues that for Hardt and Negri
the angel no longer expresses a virtuality of time, still promising change in the face of catastrophe, but rather a virtuality of the subject. The angel has been unequivocated as the subject of production. […]
What underscores that this is amounts to a serious problem for their analysis and the politics that might flow from it is her subsequent remark that
This condition is open to reintegration, to a functional mobilization in an extremely differentiated capitalism that also exploits affects and feelings as human resources, as the productivity of style, of motivation, of the United Colors survival culture.
I’ll extrapolate, but I do not think her point here is not that there is nothing that cannot be recuperated, nor that there might be something that is which Hardt and Negri do not see. Rather, and as she will put it elsewhere, capitalism occupies both norm and deviation at the same time - a theme that runs through her reading of Schmitt, Benjamin, Negri, Foucault et al I think.
To extrapolate further, the continued recourse to Operaio understandings of subjective identity as the key to revolution, combined with valorisations of (by turns) frontiersman and innovative productivism, raises the question of to what extent figuration amounts to the idealisation (in both senses) of what is.
Her essay - “The Spectral Form of Value: Ghost-Things and Relations of Forces” - is also excellent. And here she takes firm aim at productivist humanism: “To put it directly: ‘doing’ is not the essence of man.”
