A New Communism (Of Singularization) Pt II

Communism has nothing to do with the collectivist barbarism that has come into existence. Communism is the most intense experience of subjectivity, the maximization of the processes of singularization – individuation which represent the capability potential of our collective stock. No universality of man can be extracted from the naked abstraction of social value.

Communism no longer has anything to do with any of this [blind, reductionist collectivism]. It is a matter rather of manifesting the singular as multiplicity, mobility, spatio-temporal variability and creativity.

Politics today is nothing more than the expression of the domination of dead structures over the entire range of living production

The historical communist parties, prisoners of antiquated paradigms of production, did not even succeed in imagining the revolutionary force of the social mode of production which was in the process of emerging. Incapable of separating themselves from centralist organizational models deriving from a paradigmatic split between the avant-garde and the masses, they found themselves disoriented and frightened in the face of the unexpected self-organization of a social movement.

A Social Without Solidarity

Yes, communism is possible. It is true, more now than ever, that it haunts the old world. 1968 revealed the fragility of the social contracts installed successively to contain the revolutionary movements of the beginning of the century, those which followed the big crisis of 1929 and the movements which accompanied and followed the second great imperialist war. However one views the events of 1968, it is undeniable that they revealed the failure of this social compromise to eliminate or supersede the antagonistic contradictions of the capitalist systems. […skip two paragraphs…]

…work and life are no longer separate; society is collapsed into the logic and processes of capitalist development.

A New Communism (Of Singularization)

From this perspective, communism is the establishment of a communal life style in which individuality is recognized and truly liberated, not merely opposed to the collective. That’s the most important lesson: that the construction of healthy communities begins and ends with unique personalities, that the collective potential is realized only when the singular is free. This insight is fundamental to the liberation of work.

Lenin: Coming Between Guattari and Negri

We now come to a central aspect of the question of the organisation for liberation, of the form of militant social practice of liberation. This entire discussion revolves around the name, Lenin.

It is clear – more or less explicitly – that when Guattari warns against  ‘authoritarian disciplines, formal hierarchies, orders of priorities decreed from above, and compulsory ideological references…’ (p. 124) he is warning against what we might call the Leninist temptation.

Repeating Lenin is not Returning to Lenin

So, while Žižek is arguing – quite correctly – that Lenin refuses the revisionist tendency to await for the ‘objective conditions’ to develop to a sufficient degree, that the ‘stages’ of social development unfold, that it is only with the say-so of these conditions, stages, laws that the process of revolution is justified; nevertheless, his challenge to opportunism (to use of good Leninist epithet) that revolution cannot rest upon the big Other, does not amount – as Žižek suggests – to the statement that the revolution must rest on nothing other than itself, the ‘abyss of the act’, to legitimate itself. Is this not effectively to substitute an ethics of the revolutionary event for a politics? By this move Žižek takes one step forward and two steps back.

Let us return in conclusion to Negri then

Neo-liberalism is the problem of how to govern through the autonomy of the governed when they are no longer virtuous

Dean, Governmentality 2nd edition, 190-1

Neo-liberalism, in this form at least, is a response to a kind of ‘political reproduction’ problem that is posed by neo-conseratives in the United States and is embodied in the Republican Contract with America (Cruikshank, 1998). This is the problem of how to govern through the autonomy of the governed when they are no longer virtuous.

A post-welfarist regime of the social

The ‘social’ is no longer the diverse sector that is subject to the ineluctable logic of bureaucratic rationalization under the aegis of the welfare state. Rather, the social is reconfigured as a series of ‘quasi-markets’ in the provision of services and external to the state, and the forms of ‘natural liberty’ on which they depend, to one of constructing centres of agency and activity, of making them durable, and of implanting continuous relations of authority. These centres are then placed under the discrete and indirect surveillance of regulatory authorities in order to normalize, stability, and optimize activities, identities and power relations.

A post-welfarist regime of the social [Dean, Governmentality, 2nd edition: 200-3] 

PhD Exam Reading List

Area 1: Non-linear Historical Materialism

Hung Jury

It seems impossible to travel on the streets of El Alto without coming across hanging dolls. Whether in the main avenues or the more secluded and quiet neighborhood streets, the figures are testament to a peculiarity that distinguishes the Aymara city.  Some display posters (“Death to thieves,” for example), but most of the dolls made and hung by the residents simply have their heads turned sideways, simulating death by beheading. Other are covered in red paint symbolizing bloody, signifying punishment and death. “The hanging dolls mean that here is a house that has been robbed.”n1