Theses you should write on tour
I’m currently in Minneapolis for a conference which features, among other things, a panel on 24. Some might consider that a little excessive.
You can look at my notes for my presentation (Word format only for the moment, sorry), if you like. It’s a bit scrappy, but I like the basic idea.
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Hey Tim. Nice to see your work presented. I tried to read Negri’s ‘Time for Revolution’ but I found it way to dense and apocryphal to understand. Maybe you should make a tutorial on it some day :-)
Yours, manos
Comment by manos @ 10/20/2005 12:41 am
hey Tim,
Great to meet you in Minneapolis. I was just looking over your presentation notes - the presentation was great, by the way - and had a thought about these two quotes:
“There are many discussions of capitalist temporality and changes in capitalist temporality, but I want to consider the agency that might bring about a non-capitalist temporality”
“I attempt to understand temporality in terms of the subjects who produce that temporality, as well as being themselves subject to it.”
It seems to me that you’re dead right in the presentation about a lot of things. I think I’d want to say that any change should be looked at in terms of its link to agency, how it’s rooted in class struggle. (That is, objectivism of any sort is not very interesting, changes are acts of and on agents.) On the other hand, I think that maybe there’s an ambiguity in noncapitalist time - on the one hand, there’s post-capitalist temporality (after the capitalists have all been hung with the guts of bureaucrats), and there’s current attempts at noncapitalism that exist in tension and conflict with capitalism.
In either case, what I wonder at is this: when you say you start phenomenologically, I take you to be saying “I start from the first person perspsective of the agent(s) involved”. If that’s the case, then the paper is talking about following on after activities - deriving ideas about agents from acts. On the other hand, if the idea is a programmatic one - working to build future noncapitalism - then this seems to be in tension with the phenomenological perspective. Does that make sense?
If I’ve misunderstood please let me know - I haven’t read many of the figures you’re referencing. In any case, the presentation was great and makes me feel I need to read Sartre and take him seriously.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate @ 10/23/2005 9:53 pm
Hi Nate, it was great to meet you too. Thanks for the comments. You make two good distinctions, but I guess what I’d like to do is collapse both the distinctions. That is, I’d like to see a fairly strong relation between contemporary anti-capitalist time and a potential post-capitalist time; I’m tempted to say we just can’t sensibly talk about post-capitalist time except in terms of the moments of resistance in contemporary capitalism. That’s why I like Marx’s description I quote of the proletariat, as both the act of negating private property (contemporary anti-capitalism), and the state-of-affairs of private property having been negated (future post-capitalism).
Likewise, I agree with the point Tzuchien made in the discussion, that Agamben’s coming community is a good model for the kind of negativity I was getting at, which does put into question whether ‘negativity’ is quite the right term to be using.
I have, I guess, a related response to your distinction between phenomenology and revolutionary strategy. Although the distinction is definitely there, I worry about disconnecting the two altogether. I’d like to be able to link questions of what we do to questions of where we are, or what the situation is, the idea being to seize the specific possibilities of our current time. This also connects to the discussion of whether or not revolution is possible at all times, about which I want to post something shortly.
Sorry, that’s not very clear. I hope I’ve understood your questions, at least.
Comment by Tim @ 10/26/2005 10:35 pm
Hi Tim,
I think I’m complete agreement. I think starting from where we are and what the situation is is key, and I definitely think that phenomenology and strategy/tactics have to inform each other. Thinking again of your remarks on negativity, could we say that its important that neither negate the other? That is, neither situation nor strategy/tactics should totally subsume the other (the total primacy of former might lead to the exclusive privileging of sectorial interests in a way that feeds back into intra-class division and hierarchy, the primacy of the latter would involve giving and taking order from some central body, and in a way also risks universalizing sectorial specific interests). I hope that makese sense.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate @ 10/27/2005 7:51 am