Negative and Positive Autonomism

julio 30, 2011 Article and Chapters / Español

Or

Why Adorno? Part 2¹

John Holloway

To ask why Adorno, we start this time the other way round, not with Adorno but with the operaista or autonomistinversion of orthodox Marxism.² Where orthodox Marxism, and indeed nearly all left discourse, starts from capital or domination, the operaistas insisted on starting from below, from the struggle of the working class, or, more broadly, anti-capitalist struggle. This is an inversion of fundamental importance, simply because to begin from domination means to enclose oneself within the categories of domination, so that the only possible way of breaking from domination is through the intervention of an external force, such as a vanguard party. The inversion is therefore of crucial importance in liberating Marxism from the dead weight of the vanguard party tradition.

Nevertheless, there are two different ways of interpreting the autonomist inversion, a positive and a negative one. This distinction has important political and theoretical implications and it is in this context that the tradition of negative or critical theory (Adorno, Bloch, Marcuse, Benjamin, Horkheimer and so on) acquires crucial political relevance.

2. Positive autonomism: In this interpretation, the autonomist inversion goes only half way, for it is not accompanied by a conceptual revolution.³

The working class is seen as the starting point, but it is understood as a positive subject. The working class replaces capital as the driving force of capitalism. It struggles against capital on the basis of a certain class composition; capital responds, trying to decompose the working class, which leads to a recomposition of the working class and a new wave of struggle, a new decomposition, and so on in a constant movement of composition – decomposition – recomposition. Capitalism develops under the impulse of the struggles of the working class, and the working class recomposes itself with each wave of struggle.

It seems that this movement dissolves everything, and to some extent this is the case. However, since there is in this approach no questioning of the positivity of the categories, attention is focussed almost exclusively on the composition of the working class, and this becomes easily confused with a sociological analysis. This reproduces within the autonomist inversion an identitarian concept of the working class not dissimilar to that which characterises orthodox Marxism. Thus:

– The flow of composition-decomposition-recomposition becomes replaced in practice by a static concept of composition, that is, by the attempt to identify the present class composition, to classify, to construct paradigms. Thus, the movement of composition is seen in terms of a series of jumps from one paradigm to another: from mass worker to social worker to multitude, with corresponding steps in the development of capitalism, from factory to social factory, to integrated world capitalism (IWC), to Empire – all petrifications and exaggerations of real tendencies. This paradigmatic approach is accompanied by an explicit rejection of dialectics as a method.

– There is a slippage in this paradigmatic thought from the emphasis on the force of struggle to a characterisation of the present phase of capitalism. That is, the original inversion of operaismo becomes forgotten or, at most, there is a token obeisance to the initial autonomist impulse, followed in practice by a focus on the analysis of domination.

– Since the conceptualisation of the subject is positive, the polar antagonism that gives meaning to class as class, gets lost. Contradiction is dissolved in a multiplicity of differences and the struggle against capital becomes diluted into a struggle for genuine democracy.

– Since the centrality of the struggle against capital is lost, the struggle can easily reappear in the form of a struggle between different expressions of capitalism: between European capitalism and US capitalism, between progressive capitalism and reactionary capitalism.⁴

3. Negative autonomism: This approach starts from a much more radical interpretation of the initial inversion. The starting point is not just the working class in place of capital, but also negativity in place of positivity.

The point of departure is the struggle of the working class and the point of departure is no, the scream. That is, the point of departure is the working class as negation, not as a positive but as a negative subject.

The working class exists as negation of capital, that is, as crisis. The emphasis, then, is not on the restructuring of capital (as tends to be the case in positive autonomism), but on crisis. Crisis is not so much an empirical statement as a theoretical option. Crisis is the centre of thought because what interests us is not the stability of capitalism but its instability, its fragility. Marxism is not a theory of the reproduction of capitalism, but of its crisis.

The working class is the negation and crisis of capitalism and therefore the negation and crisis of itself. To negate capital is negate that which creates capital, that is, abstract or alienated labour. To negate abstract labour is to struggle for the emancipation of that which is negated every day by abstract labour, that is to struggle for the emancipation of useful or creative doing, that doing that pushes towards its own emancipation. Class struggle is not just the struggle of labour against capital, but, at a much more profound level, the struggle of doing against (abstract or alienated) labour and therefore against capital. And that means the struggle against the whole edifice of classification that is constructed on the basis of abstract labour, and that means a struggle against the working class itself as class and as (abstractly) working.

The subject of anti-capitalist struggle is, therefore, an anti-identitarian subject. We can call the subject the working class, but only if we understand by that an anti-working anti-class, that is, the movement against being classified and against being subjected to alienated labour. Or we can call the subject simply we, but understanding we not as an identity but as an anti-identity, a negation, an open question. Or perhaps we can call ourselves the anti-identity, the subject without name.

As anti-identity, we do not seek to define, but move against-and-beyond all definition. Or, more precisely, we define but go beyond the definition in the same breath. We are indigenous, but more than that. We are women, but more than that, gays but more than that. If the negation of the definition is not included in the definition itself, definition becomes reactionary. We conceptualise because we cannot think without concepts, but we negate the concept in the same breath because every concept is inadequate, every concept becomes an obstacle to movement and therefore the class struggle. Every concept contains, but does not contain, and we are the force of that which does not allow itself to be contained, we overflow. Our struggle is the struggle of non-identity in-against-and-beyond identity.

The movement of anti-identity opens. It is not simply negative, but a movement that opens towards a different doing, a movement of negation and creation, a movement of creating cracks in the texture of domination, spaces or moments of alternative creation: cracks that expand and multiply.

Anti-identity attacks identity and opens it, seeking its own movement which identity contains and does not contain. It attacks the categories of political economy to discover the antagonism between abstract labour and useful or creative doing, which the categories contain and yet do not contain. It attacks all the categories of bourgeois thought in an ad hominem critique, a critique that constantly seeks human doing and its contradictory existence as the source of all movement. It attacks nouns to liberate the verbs that those nouns hold imprisoned, frozen, and yet not frozen. It attacks clocks that contain and yet do not contain the creative rhythms of doing, and shoots at them to show that the only revolution is revolution here and now,⁵ that the idea of a future revolution is non-sense. It attacks the state to find that which it contains and yet cannot contain: the struggle for self-determination. The movement of anti-identity is the movement of the revolution without name.⁶

4. Two autonomisms, then. One that is positive, that classifies, seeks to put everything in its place, slides into sociology, flirts with progressive governments. The other a delirium, a vertiginous critique, a corrosive movement of non-identity, with no paradigms, nothing firm to hold on to, an asking not a telling. The one trapped still in the identities of abstract labour, the other pushing against and beyond all identities, part of the budding and flowering of useful-creative doing. The distinction matters politically.

5. Why Adorno, then? That’s why.

References

Benjamin W. (1969) “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books), pp. 153-164

Hardt M. and Negri A. (2000) Empire (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard U.P.)

Hardt M. and Negri A. (2004) Multitude (New York: Penguin Press)

Holloway J. (2005) Change the World without taking Power (new, revised edition) (London: Pluto)

Negri A. and Cocco G. (2006) GlobAL: Biopotere e Lotte in America Latina (Rome: Manifestolibri)

Tronti M. (1979), “Lenin in England”, in Red Notes, Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis (London: Red Notes)

Vaneigem R. (1993) The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Left Bank Books and Rebel Press)

Virno P. (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude (New York: Semiotext(e))