(Notes from Politics of Subversion – EE)
The argument here states that modernity is a finished
project, one positived feature of the crisis of modernity being the challenge
to a theodic and vanguardist idea of history, a 'progressive concatenation. Yet
there is something distinctly innovative about postmodern world, which can be
understood in a far richer way than the banal and pessimistic overutres in
Baudillard or Lyotard (libidinal economy) which share the notion of the
postmodern as the pluralism of languages, uncertainty of judgement and distintegration
of recieved forms of communication.
A comparison is drawn between posrtmodernism and the
romantic reaction to the enlightenment. In asking whether postmodern is such a
new romanticism, a postive and negative side are outlined. Negri is right here
to pose that the negative postmodern moment is a POLITICAL crisis, moveover,
one based almost completely in the culture of the left. This crisis is felt
within the world of symbolic exchange, commodification and crisis of meaning.
But behind this lies a deeper, philosophical or metaphysical crisis - a lack of
orientation within being - in short an end to the certainty of purpose and
progress.
Although eclectic, postmodernism has a descriptive power,
strengthened by the collapse of disciplinary boundaries. Communication is the
'preferred realm' of postmodern because it lacks ontological reference.
"Postmodernism, then, lies in the awareness of this
circularity of being, in this continuous circulation of commodities(which is so
fast as to ecome indecsribable), in this complete divorce between the sense and
meaning of propositions and actions, and finally in the absence of any possible
way out of all this (NOtes virilio, Speed and Politics) Postmodernism is a
world made up of an infinity of atoms that contingently forma an existence(and
they could equally destory it); it is a symbolic, imaginary and simulated
order; but there is no reality with which it can be comapred, it itself is
reality."(pp 202-203)
A strong paralell can be drawn here between Negri's idea of
the postmodern and the idea of the spectacle advanced in the 60s by Debord. In
the latters conception, the unreal is the real, and nothing lies behind it.
Negri here to seems to invoke a radical immanence to actuality, nothing in the
above conception is suggestive of a realist order lying beneath the depicted
surface of fragmentatary particles. Positing the contingency of this new order,
paradoxically, does seem to require a causal explanation (ee). But this state
of affairs is understood to be the postivie aspect of postmodernism, where
human societyis faced with a new problem, one that predominates 'not only in
the field of production, but also, and above all, in the field of
communication.' These insights however, concerning the immense power of this
transformation, must be related to real subjects, and for Negri, paradoxically,
those who have gone furthest in this are the Frankfurt theorists of
communication and action (Habermas, Tugendhat, Apel). These theorists have done
the most to restore 'absoluteness to the linguistic and communicative
perspective, identifying and describing its transcendental qualities'. (pp 203)
A familiar theme is then introduced, the transformation of
productive society, the totalisation of the capitalist labour process and the
transformation of society into a factory regime. These Marxian notions of
real/total subsumption, perform what post-industrialism or post-fordism do for
so many other postmodernisms, reaffirm an economic determination to new social
forms. In Negri's sense, postmodernism does mystify this moment, as it tries to
eliminate its antagonistic dynamic. The enormous contradiction of the social,
which has as its basis the complete abstraction of labour, lies in the
connection this has with the dissolution of singularities and the re-constitute
of communal, free activity. Negri talks of Niklas Luhmann's simplification of
the complexity of the political in systems theory which consists in
"abstracting the antimonies which have ontological foundation, in incorporating
them in a project of simulation, in short, in redefining them according to a
schema which is substituitive of reality". This substition for the real
tries to posit a lack of contradictions within contemporary society. Indeed
this seems to characterise the postmodern, in which contemporary soceities do
not solve the contraidctions of capitalism, but transpose them through notions
of fluidity and communciation, into a simulated universe. Despite this, a more
mature society is hinted at in the increasing richness of 'administrative
approaches and juridical definitions'(206).
Strangely enough, neo-liberalism is cited as an application
of the postmodern political model. Herein the state as facilator of the smooth
running of the system through its liberalisation is contrasted to the fact that
this process reveals its opposite: namely that atomistic individuals are not
the basis of society, rather the reality behind this formality, is that of the
collective individual.
In conclusion, Negri offers that postmodernism be read as
the 'mystified ideology of the new collectivities'. Despite the 'ambiguity' of
this project, postmodernism alludes to the 'scientific determination' of new
subjectivities in a Marxian manner.(206)Characteristic of these new forms is the
flexibility of te working day and intersubjective communication operating in a
new spatial dimension. "The real paradox is that the more mobile and
flexible the human quality is, and the more abstract the productive capacity
is, the more collecitve the world and the subject are." Postmodernism
reflects in real terms what the romantics documented in formal terms.
From: Politics of Subversion; A manifesto for the
Twenty-First century - Antonio Negri (trans James Newell) Polity Press 1989
Cambridge
EE - 12/01/02