Antonio Negri /// Multitude or Working Class?

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The organisation of labour has indeed damned changed from the 18th century ‘until now, as well as the political and technical class composition; and also the way the class builds up its class consciousness is extremely different. If we use the concept of working class and the concept of organisation of labour homogeneously and uniquely we’ll be mistaken profoundly.

I think that after ’68 and with the beginning of the neo-liberal counterrevolution the structure of organising labour and in consequence the organisation, the making of class composition has changed profoundly.

The factory stays no longer in the centre of value production. The value is created by putting to work the whole of society. We call multitude all the workers who are put to work inside society to create profit. We consider all the workers in the whole of society to be exploited, men, women, people who work in services, people who work in nursing, people who work in linguistic relations, people who work in the cultural field, in all of the social relations, and in so far as they are exploited we consider them part of the multitude, inasmuch as they are singularities. We see the multitude as a multiplicity of exploited singularities. The singularities are singularities of labour; anyone is working in different ways, and the singularity is the singularity of exploited labour.

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Michael Hardt // Who is Toni Negri?

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In the early 60s Negri joined the editorial group of Quaderni Rossi , a journal that represented the intellectual rebirth of Marxism in Italy outside of the realm of the communist party. The philosophical framework developed in the context of the journal came to be known as ” operaismo ” (workerism) and one of its central political concepts was “the refusal of work,” which did not refer to a refusal of creative or productive activity but rather a refusal of work within the established capitalist relations of production.

In the 1970s, Negri’s work continued to focus on labor, but the primary site of analysis shifted outside of the factory walls. Earlier Negri and his colleagues had centered their analyses on the working class (by which they understood male industrial factory workers), but now they developed a broader notion of proletariat that was meant to refer to all those whose labor is commanded and exploited under the rule of capital. They conceived their analyses and practices as moving out of the factory and into society. In these years Negri developed a theory of the “social worker” that tried to grasp the new subjective figure of social production and revolt. In effect, this intellectual project drew into question the conceptual division posed by the traditional Marxist conceptions of productive and unproductive or productive and reproductive labor along with the traditional political divisions between waged workers, unwaged workers, and the unemployed. The primary political consequence of these theories was to recognize all the various figures of social production, the entire proletariat conceived in this broad sense, as capable of revolt. Negri’s theoretical work in this period culminated in Marx Beyond Marx, a reinterpretation of Marx’s work that extended it beyond the limits of Marx’s own time and vision.

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Sarat Maharaj // In Other’s Words (Interview with Daniel Birnbaum)

Posted in #4 International Now-Here | 0 comments

THAT SARAT MAHARAJ IS A BIT TOO INTELLIGENT for the art world, as a friend of mine recently claimed, I cannot accept. Without the presence of a few minds like his, the whole business would be just too dull. A biographical remark in a recent publication notes that the South African-born art historian, based in London since 1976, “has lectured and published throughout the world on cultural translation and difference. He is an authority on the work of Richard Hamilton, Marcel Duchamp, and James Joyce, and his experimental writings include essays on textile art, sound work [Maharaj’s “Xeno-sonics”] and visual theory constructions [the essay “Monkeydoodle”].” The contibutor’s note doesn’t mention his incredibly articulate manner. The pleasure I get out of listening to Maharaj is always countered by the depressing realization that I will never handle the English language–or any other–with such precision.

I met up with Maharaj at Berlin’s Humboldt-Universitat, where he became the first Rudolf Arnheim Professor of Art History last summer. He is spending a semester away from London’s Goldsmiths College, where he has taught art history and theory over the last decade. His seminars in Berlin are already famous, attended not only by academics in the city but by critics, architects, and artists as well. On the Thursday evening that I sat in on his lively class, two of the fastest talkers in the business, architect Rem Koolhaas and curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, bombarded the audience with more information than a university student typically receives in a semester. In another seminar, Maharaj discussed problems that originate in the analytical philosophy of science and branch out into domains as various as cognitive biology, the writings of Marcel Duchamp, and globalist economics. The author of such essays as “The Congo is Flooding the Acropolis: Black Art and Orders of Difference” (1991) and “Perfidious Fidelity: The Untranslatability of the Other” (1994), Maharaj has recently left the semi-obscure confines of advanced critical theory to join the group of curators assisting Okwui Enwezor in preparing and www Documenta11, which opens in Kassel this June. (The art historian has devoted a seminar titled “Thinking Documenta and Doing Documenta” to creating a reflective space for the critical assessment of this mega-event.) This year will also see the publication of two new books by Maharaj: an extensive collection of essays designed by Ecke Bonk and given the Joycean title Works in Progress: Experiments in Think-speak-write Sequences 1 (INIVA) and A Strife of Tongues: Richard Hamilton/Marcel Duchamp/James Joyce (Typosophic Society), which Hamilton is designing. Maharaj’s theoretical competence, combined with his willingness to bring the concepts of cultural, diversity and difference to a more public forum, makes him a key intellectual voice on the Continent today.

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