Antonio Negri
p.56 The displacement occurrs in the process of real
subsumption. The tendency of real subsumption presents itself, formally, in
terms of a linear logic: the reality of capitalist domination realises itself
as systemic and totalitarian. The whole of society becomes productive. The time
of production is the time of life. At this point, however, the formal and
linear tendency must remember its own reality: it is a tendency of capitalist
development. But that capital is a relation, a relation of exploitation. The
deplacement of the development at the level of real subsumption is then an
antagonistic dislocation. The fact that everything has become productive does
not deny the asymmetry of the productive relation: it does not deny the
exploitation that constitutes the productive relation. The social realisation
of the capitalist productive relation overdetermines, does not negate but
rather accentuates exploitation.
p.52 The more processes of subsumption develop, the
more they create the collective. Time is given here as –already from the point
of view of capital – collective: collective capital, collective working class.
on circulation
p. 62 In order to perfect its formal functioning
circulation needs to ignore time. Every relation is relative: comparisons
between monetary quantities. Surplus value is annihilated in the indifference
of interest. The frame within which we move is that of reified equivalent. As
such, indifferent to determination, hence not circular.
p. 65 the whole history of bourgeois thought had
seen equilibrium (to which it aspired as its own absolute) in terms of
mediation. Hence the terms of the linear process of rationalisation, of
Aufhebung, of criteria of preferential rationality, of natural wisdom. Here on
the contrary, the regime of production of truth anticipates reality, and
functional rationalisation runs through paths that are constantly interrupted,
problematic, mobile –thought is tranformed into a constitutive strategy.
Bourgeois science must reconstitute itself, above and against a collective and
irreversible time, as abstract measure. As function of equivalence and
circulation – in other words, as money. Hegel, in order to make mediation work,
must now get rid of the paragraphs in the Phenomenology on ‘Enlightenment and
Terror’ – because here what generates science is not the struggle against
superstition and regulation of absolute freedom of capital, but rather
superstition and terror. Transcendence and the circularity of science, do not
come together in ‘overcoming’ but in ‘foundation’. Hence the insufficiency of
‘negative thought’ and of the reflection on Krisis, today, whatever form they
take: in the reference to Hegel that is characteristic to them, negative
thought is like a glove turned inside-out, uncertain between representing the
hand or the turning, between making apparent the reality of mediation or simply
narrating its necessity.
Going through the tautology of time and value allows
us to appreciate a concept of crisis that is cosubstantial to the actual phase of capitalist
development. Real global and somultaneous crisis, founded on the antagonism
that substantial plurimus times of subjects oppose to the analytics of command.
The crisis is then the adequate point of view to face
real subsumption. A crisis that is founded on the plurimus times and collective
subjects that the dislocation of real subsumption poses at the centre of social
space. But what does it mean to say plurimus, substantial and antagonistic
times? In Marxist vulgate, even the most recent one, the antagonistic
substantiality is reduced to the use value as independence and autonomy from
the exchange value. What is then the theoretical and practical relation that
can be defined between the traditional conception of use value and the
antagonism of plurimus times and subjects? Positing the problem in these terms
means to posit the problem of dislocation (of the new qualification) of use
value in real subsumption of labour under capital.
But to confront thes problems and solve them we
propose these intermediary these:
a)
use
value – the fundamental one, labour-force – is offered to exchange. It becomes
exchange value.
b)
Within
exchange, capital – that is constructive potenza – reforms, restructures
use value, in the combining of productive factors.
c)
Within
the capitalist construction of exchange value, the relative independence of use value can be found through (a
dialectics that shows) successive displacements in the composition of
the labour force.
d)
But
within real subsumption, totalitarian, of society under capital, this
relative independence is not conceivable anymore.
If this relative independence – ad absurdum –
carried on being possible, this would entail that the process is indefinite
(dialectically indefinite). But it isn’t so: unless we assume circularity and
eternal return as true images of the process, as in fact the analytics of
capital does in a mystifying manner. Marxian theory of the ‘normality’ of the
working day, in many ways ambiguous, becomes, from this point of view,
important since it poses a ‘superior’ limit (of the working day itself)
whose presence is essential in all equations. It is also useful to remember
here, to fix the limit, the temporal paradox of Harrod who demonstartes the
impossibility of a ’total affluence’ on the side of consumption (there is
insufficient time to buy all commodities on offer).
e)
Use
value could be at this point defined as subtraction, antagonistic as
negative quantity, inside and against real subsumption. This subtraction is
formal and material.
f)
By
formal subtraction we mean generic subtraction from capital command. The
ghetto. The crisis of the law of value, in its realisation, is here conceived
as end of any paradigm of value: and one refuses this end. It is however an
iullusionry condition. Even if it can work as precondition
[…]
On time (secondary)
The time of political economy is nomenclature,
self-declaration of value, command. It is therefore negation of real time,
which is perceived as antagonistic, or –rather- reduction of it within formally
dialectical schemes: the cycle and the cyclical movement, the market and
the plan –in other words, time is configured, in the cyclical movement,
in the form of and according to the ordering criterion of the economic space,
as reversibility of all points, circulation, currency. Ideal time
is, from this point of view, balanced space. This reduction is valid for
theories of the state as much as for political economy, and in general also for
all human sciences. […]
Here we need to get to the hard core, that point of
logical proposition and practical project that, in the extreme separation,
capital offers as validity, justification of its existence –justice,
qualification of its being.
In this respect three passages need to be
identified.
1)
capital
doesn’t present itself only as measure and as system, it presents itself as progress.
This definition is essential to its legitimation, both internal and external.
In this perspective political economy is all keen to take into the time of
administration (accumulation as administration, reversible time, eternal
return, the cyclical) the innovative element that history produces
anyway. Jetzt-Zeit, innovative punctuality, utopia: capital regards them
as its own. Progress is eternal return enlightened by the lightening of Jetzt-Zeit.
Administration is enlightened by charisma. The city of the Devil is enlightened
by Grace. Elements of innovation are reduced to numerical and quantitative
measures and only as such referred to progress, itself enlightened and
commanded. Progress is the representation of a process of leaps forward in
which however all factors are reducible to proportion. The difference is only
qualitative. The economic cycle is the clearest example of capitalist progress:
all its terms are modified according to substantially quantitative effects and
trajectories. So, the Jetzt-Zeit and the utopia are presented as
innovation, as taste of the real, inside of the routine of the temporal
being of command. Utopia and routine are presented as abstract identity,
necessity. Economic determinism, the hidden hand that is the natural law and
hence becomes state law, keeping the numinous and obligatory character of
natural law –here we are in the hard core, where necessity is identified
with interest and with self-representation of capital as
progressive.
[…]
The science and the practice of capitalist power
operate a dislocation of the point of view when they realise the real
unsustainability of the antagonism implicit to subsumption. […]
The second dislocation assumes the irresolvable
character of the relation, it presupposes antagonism. The bourgeois point of
view wants to represent here one and only one pole or the relation. If
innovation is always aporetic, if it is always fed by antagonism, -if it
originates outside of the system of power- then it must be annihilated.
The content of the second dislocation, on the side of capital, is the ontological
zero. The time of capitalist revolution ends in that of the resetting of
real time. Absolute hegemony of the war industry. Progress triumphs into
nothingness.
Here we need to digress. Let’s ask ourselves: this
idea of zero time of innovation and of permanent capitalist revolution, wasn’t
it once a much more powerful and extended notion than what it appears in the
analysis of its direct field of application- the world of bourgeois ideology?
Isn’t this myth of innovation as Krisis, as
systemic project, capable of being applied to ideological behaviours beyond the
frontiers of bourgeois thought? The answer is yes: the thought of innovation,
understood as exclusive capitalist self-determination of development, based on
the time of command, of measure –isteresis of development, has invested the thought
of socialist revolution. “A historical materialist cannot do without the
notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still
and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself
is writing history. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained
by the whore called ‘Once upon the time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains
in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.”
“History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty
time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetzt-Zeit]” …”…the time of
the now which is shot through with chips of Messianic time…” As W. Benjamin
writes in the thesis on the philosophy of history. Well, this notion is
ruinous. Far from being the destruction of historicism and its perverse
political effects, the notion of messianic Jetzt-Zeit is the greatest
modernisation of reactionary thought: it is conversion of historical, plural,
punctual, versatile materials into the taumaturgic illusion of empty
innovation. The concept of messianic Jetzt-Zeit reduces the tautology of
subsumption to mysticism –and mysticism always stinks of master
(whatever Agamben and Fachinelli say). In Benjamin one finds again the paradox,
equivalent and opposed to the stoic one, of the creationist notion of
measure-time. Agostino d’Ippona: ‘time was created simultaneously with the
world, and with the creation of the world change and movement were also
created, as is evident in the order of the first six or seven days’. Exactly.
If an innovative mythology is established in a formal universe, it loses the
flavour of materialism and of the creativity of the only creative time: that of
the masses. The historical continuum is thus reduced to elementary series and
posed in the condition of being systematically reorganised. The only real
practice of the now-time is that of abstract rupture, of the abstract unit of
productive time –hence, it is the mechanic and methodical dimension of
equilibrium. The Jetzt-Zeit is a kind of measure-time.
Random sections translated by Arianna Bove