The latest edition of SubStance (36:1) significantly extends the essays from (post-)Operaismo translated into English. Extracts and/or comments in due time, and ask, preferably for specific ones, if you can’t access.
–Christian Marazzi’s “Rules for the Incommensurable”
– Virno’s “On the Parasitic Character of Wage Labor”
– Negri’s “Art and Culture in the Age of Empire and the Time of the Multitudes”
– Franco Berardi’s, “Technology and Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination” and “Schizo-Economy”
– Lazarrato’s “Strategies of the Political Entrepreneur” and “The Revolutions of Capitalism”
– Antonella Corsani’s, “Beyond the Myth of Woman: The Becoming-Transfeminist of (Post-)Marxism”
Also, in the latest edition of Postmodern Culture, a video (and audio) of a conversation between Spivak and Butler, “A Dialogue on Global States, 6 May 2006″.
Thank you for posting this and your blog in general.
I have enjoyed your writings on Ranciere and BSG as of late, although I must admit I do not have lost patience with the latter.
unemployed negativity [March 20, 2007 @ 3:28 am]
ain’t intellectual property a bugger. i got so excited. all looks interesting and looking forward to seeing more when you blog bits. the bifo looks good.
v
ps. note i am now on gmail.com
dr.woooo [March 20, 2007 @ 7:46 am]
Thanks UN, - and I’m sure Pom thanks you as well.
ps. I haven’t lost patience yet - currently betting on who the ‘final five cylons’ are. I’m guessing those who ‘heard’ the music: Tigh, Anders, Tyrol, Tori … and maybe Thrace. Messing with those neat distinctions between enemy and friend, of course.
s0metim3s [March 20, 2007 @ 2:31 pm]
Thanks for drawing our attention to this issue, hope all is well …
Steve (hunkered down a few streets west)
Steve [March 20, 2007 @ 9:11 pm]
Thanks for drawing attention to this (and for the Mbembe also). Lazarrato’s “Strategies” is excellent. He mentions Serge Daney’s analysis of publicity more than once: do you or any of your readers know where I might pick up some of his stuff (preferably online)?
Keep up the good work
slumberous [March 20, 2007 @ 11:32 pm]
I’m glad to see people are picking up and reading Mbembe more widely (more here, if you haven’t seen) - I’m curious about why now: you mention it, I think Influxus mentioned a reading group of some sort offblog, and some more at metaMute.
Looking back, perhaps it’s time for a more lengthy reading/engagement?
A quick search for Daney came up with this blog - which is likely the place to search around or ask.
s0metim3s [March 21, 2007 @ 10:42 am]
Thanks for this. I found this Daney article on the Gulf War and television, which is well worth reading:
http://www.rouge.com.au/8/montage.html
Mbembe was a new name to me, but his work seems an important and original point of intersection between postcolonial studies and work on biopolitical sovereignty, which has tended to be fairly Eurocentric till now. He’s very good on the privatization of sovereignty and public violence. At the same time, I tend to agree with some of your reservations about aspects of his work (his distinction between necro- and bio-power, for example). I’m also a little wary of his emphasis on cosmopolitanism, which seems a bit of a deus ex machina given the complex political terrain he’s covering. But this is all based on a fairly superficial reading, so a fuller engagement would be really welcome.
slumberous [March 22, 2007 @ 1:05 am]
Thanks for this Angela. I’m keen to know what you think of the pieces. I skimmed most of the pieces and found I was generally not as excited as I wanted to be, but that may be more indicative of some about where I’m at these days than about the pieces. Still it is really nice to have more this stuff around in English.
take care,
n8
Nate [March 23, 2007 @ 5:02 am]
Again with the skim reading? Nate, both you and Dr. Woo mention being initially excited, and then, scanning through, being somewhat disappointed … I haven’t settled down to read them all as yet, but maybe this rush (desire) to discover something new isn’t quite the way to read. But, from what I’ve read so far, I’d say that Antonella Corsani’s piece deserves more than a scan, and does cover stuff which I’m not sure you’ve come across as yet (though, that in itself, is no reason to read or not read). Likely the other pieces are worth reading too, but I couldn’t say really.
No one has to read them, of course - but I wonder why someone would scan and then feel it necessary to articulate reasons for not reading further. What were you expecting, the next manifesto?
I’m not trying to pick on you, or I am picking on you, but really and mostly, I’m curious. Is there a post-Empire, post-antisummit, ennui that, while critical of the clamourousness and celebrity, still craves that hit and those philosopher-celebs? Badiou, Ranciere, et cetera. A Next-Big-Thing-ism? Which would confirm Lazzarato’s argument of the indistinction between politics and economics in the spectacular/entrepreneurial, if not also Berardi’s discussion of inattentiveness … Or, maybe I’m also thinking here of myself as a writer and not just a reader, and wondering whether any reader who scans could ever make any sense of what I write, or wondering what possible sense the would make …
Slumberous, more on Mbembe when I get around to it - unless, of course, you want to kickstart something like a reading/symposium someplace, blogwise? Thanks for the Daney.
s0metim3s [March 23, 2007 @ 12:40 pm]
hi Angela,
Ouch. Part of my response to this is I think that I’ve climbed the ladder to some extent and so have less need of it anymore. My first encounters with all of this was huge for me, as you know. Subequent encounters initially had the excitement of following out lines that were quite productive, eliminating previously held bad ideas and acquiring/articulating new ideas. So part of my reaction it is simply familiarity. Now knowing at least the basics of the post-operaismo positions, there’s no more world-reorienting shock but I still have an association for this material providing that. I still want post-operaismo to sweep me off my feet as it did in those heady early days. New post-operaismo material (and material I’m familiar with) doesn’t do that anymore, which is understable but still it disappoints me. This may be unfair on my part, but it’s not so much an idea as a habit, one which I’m not sure how to change.
The other thing, which is more substantive, is that I now no longer agree with substantial aspects of the post-operaismo positions, such that a lot of what used to strike me as terribly productive or volatile now strikes me as rather inert. These days I find Tronti’s work post operaismo (but which is hardly “post-operaismo” in the same sense) and the stuff in operaismo ‘proper’ much more compelling.
These may be linked, such that my relatively new disagreements paired with my lingering desire to be dazzled predisposes me to disappointment (changing rose tinted for dark glasses). It may also be, as you suggest, part making the full adjustment from the summit cycle. I’ve been over summits, so to speak, for several years. It’s been a long time since I lived by activist time or sought out the highs involved, and that stuff is generally not present (and when it appears is not constructive) in the things I’m involved in presently. Maybe at the intellectual level I do still have an urge for that, though. If so, I think at least some of the post-operaismo work carries that same affect within it, the charge of declaring or exploring an allegedly new era (in its universal applicability/presence). Corsani’s is one of the pieces I read closely and made notes on actually.
take care,
Nate
Nate [March 24, 2007 @ 2:55 am]
Thanks for the frankness, that makes sense.
I suppose I got curious because a similar response was evinced more than once in quick succession (ie., by you and doc). That is, there’s the kind of boredom which amounts to indifference, in which case one doesn’t engage, moves on. And then there’s the expression of boredom which is an engagement, of sorts, as the vocal expression of a disengagement which is, nevertheless, contradicted by its being expressed. (And then doc has a deli-tag called ‘after-the-summits-then-what?’ - which strikes me as a kind of impasse to moving forward, insofar as it articulates this in the paradoxical form of a future-oriented nostalgia.)
Anyway, isn’t it possible to read this, and other stuff, in terms of an ongoing conversation/debate around certain themes? Little about post-operaisti writings seems static to me, even as I take my distance (as you know) from parts thereof on the question of identity, the subject and Eurofascination. But it’s always interesting to note the significant divergences that did and do exist under that broad (and likely always inoperable) heading.
So, whatever else this edition of Substance indicates, I’m quite sure it means that those ensconsed in the academy may - in fact probably for the first time - come across texts that suggest to them that Operaio/Autonomia does not equal Negri. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the lag that pervades the university, despite all pretensions otherwise.
s0metim3s [March 24, 2007 @ 12:00 pm]
hi Angela,
That’s well put. I like - and agree with - the last line in particular. I think in part your more measured response is related to your not having been so head-over-heels as I was for that media sensation Toni And The Autonomisti.
take car,
Nate
Nate [March 27, 2007 @ 1:41 pm]
It also may have something to do with my having come across Tronti’s and Sergio Bologna’s writings (in Telos) before that of Negri’s.
Btw, Hardt’s essay on/for Jeffersonian democracy is out in the latest American Quarterly. You can probably guess what I think of it.
s0metim3s [March 28, 2007 @ 12:19 pm]
:)
I thought of you as soon as I read it actually. It’s also going to be the introduction to the version of something by Jefferson published by Verso in their series with the Mao book.
Nate [March 29, 2007 @ 1:49 pm]