The electronic journal e-flux, in collaboration with the publishing house Verso released a book titled Supercommunity: Diabolical togetherness Beyond Contemporary Art in 2017. To be honest, I would not have chanced upon it had I not been searching for Negri’s recent work, fresh as I was from reading his ‘Notes on Communism: Some thoughts on its Concept and Practice’ from ‘The Idea of Communism’ conference held at Birkbeck, London in 2009; a lively and suggestive introduction to his thought which I felt did offer the possibility of reconsidering certain rather dusted structuralist reasoning, especially in its re-charting of institutional affinities.
Approaching Negri as a reader of Marxist traditions, a philosophe would be delighted to discover that this is a militant who actually does engage with that strange afterglow of post-structuralism we know to be Deleuze and Guattari. All the queerer to an orthodox Hegelian, given that this is an individual with some commitments to the workers movement in Italy, who would still whole heartedly support the strategy of strikes in an age of the self-entrepreneur, which may after all be no different from our capitalist from yesteryears that we were all impelled to be.
This is an attraction, if you will that would not be altogether strange were we to consider that often it was the workerists who resisted organised unions, all innuendo’s intended, including of course the Party - that antiquated Leninist apparatus which even the Maoists were organising something of an exodus from.
Indeed, it is hard here not to introduce Negri without first prefacing the revolution in philosophy, for counter tendencies aside it was indeed that - which Gilles Deleuze ushered into France, almost under the noses of Althusserians, Foucauldians while seemingly still claiming a fidelity to an old teacher in Sartre.
History aside, the program was changing. The iron curtain was not the blackboard and history was not sexuality - even if some capital were to be cordoned off to an accursed share to facilitate it. A quote may reveal to us the kind of tendency Deleuze represented among the old guard of structuralist Marxists holding fort at the time. “The struggle for modern subjectivity passes through a resistance to the two present forms of subjection, the one consisting of individualizing ourselves on the basis of the constraints of power, the other of attracting each individual to a known and recognized form of identity, fixed once and for all. The struggle for subjectivity presents itself, therefore, as the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis.” - Foucault by Gilles Deleuze.
The right to metamorphosis, seemingly the molecular correlate of the right of nations to self-determination. A capacity which governments indeed would have much to say about, and we would do well to recall that Alexandre Kojeve, a resident Hegelian in Paris was a chief planner of what would come to be the European Common Market.
A theme can be traced through some of these manoeuvres, perhaps emblazoned by Foucault, of discipline - whether to the party line, or the family no longer being a virtue. You may of course say that the former was perhaps reflective in Sartre himself, and with the French distance from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, prefiguring as it may the rise of Euro-communism, and that this loss of faith as it were is readable as an eternal recurrence which Nietzsche once spoke about in an age where Europe itself found that it could no longer answer to the Church. A declension as it were which Foucault does acknowledge a debt for.
So what is to become of becoming, or metamorphosis as it were? If classes are no longer able to mobilise alliances and antagonism amongst them, or worse if such alliances have been ossified by familial bonds, then individuals would (again) be expected to emerge into the open field gleaning scratches, signs - for the next hole to burrow in if only to repeat disassociations from grander questions of purpose in history. Two contemporary philosophers familiar with this sequence would term this a disjunctive synthesis; Lecercle and Balibar.
If you notice, the Deleuzean moment - of a plane of immanence, of lines of flight, and spatial becomings and their animistic correlates to forms of movement, was immanent and a page in History says that philosophy was not the same again.
The editors of the volume before our consideration are not unmoved. - “I convert political desires to economic flows and data, and then I convert them back again. I convert revolutions to revelations. I don’t want security, I want to leave, and then disperse myself everywhere and all the time.” Existential liberation, without singularity in pure expressionism.
But, Antonio Negri sees - guided by the title, and raised by the assemblages of an echolocated kitchen; supercommunity. Not multitude mind you. A gay science as it were, for the 21st century, dammit I coughed historical. Fatalism. That is the enemy, and no Laconic tragedy will cure this humor.
Finally, and with some relief - I note that our militant does ask the squiggly question. Whether this new senate in a techno-amazon world will stand up to or comply with a Rome that would seek no ties to a calendar.
Supercommunity however is not the multitude. While conceding the latter’s reliance on industry - even as it resists it by dragging its feet or squatting, our new concept is one which allows a snorkel hole into singularities, I eat my words - but also their consequent subjectivations - a new society of the spectacle anyone?
But what may this supercommunity be? Well, it is customary now to define it in terms of what it is not - that is a monopoly first of all. This is, or would be a new composition of the labour movement - a hypothesis as it were, if this word is not too Badiouian.
Reaching out into the future, our militant philosopher discovers long lost roots in the German romantic movement - and Schelling, Hegel along with the poet Holderlin are invoked along with a renunciation of foul ends as myth and rationality are once more in synchrony. Not our author’s strongest suit, if I may add. Yet, were I to persist - I would have to identify what to me would appear as a coincidence of the new or rediscovered pantheon which Negri is invoking as the ‘mythology of reason’, and what a college department may refer to as the canon.
What is of note - from our militant who wrote of a similar subject while in prison; is the time which such a traversal, from a nowhere now, coagulated by materials amidst the assemblage of a power structure which barely appears to be even capitalistic, and a hypothetical future which may incidentally already have bets riding on it - is in my less poetic moment, a season in hell. To quote “Survival becomes less terribly brutal and more thrillingly ambiguous. The future becomes a vector for investment into the dreams of clairvoyant artists who might or might not make artworks. Artworks themselves become prey to a new class hoarding surplus information to accrue future interest. Now there are special discounts on roundtrip airfares between life and death. Whether you live surrounded by the walking dead or have already arrived in the afterlife, you can travel freely back and forth and still get to work Monday morning, refreshed and ready to fight.”
And while thrillingly lyrical in depicting the nightmarish monstrosity that the Umwelt of proletarian subjectivity has been, does he achieve anything beyond raising a silent whisper to a looming, and dare I say knowing spectre of conservatism? Indeed, can we not say that this is the unavowed bet which the present, nay the life in question seems to be devilishly insured by, behind his back yes - enchantingly, but also beyond his reach.
Amidst our mechanic enslavement, which is perhaps more manifest in social circuitry than in any mechanism per se - we have managed to identify ourselves, having lost the capacity to take a distance from oneself. Our gaze hence is a product of pastiche galleries we have been conditioned to see, amidst prefabricated confines we only look through. The past is myth, the future hypothesis. And I repeat Jameson’s refrain, that never has a generation had a poorer sense of historicity.
Can we not but re-invent art here? We must. But, now? Someone should raise this question, which will have to account for where it stands vis-a-vis the narrative it appears to be banking on.
Negri does put life into the notion of Supercommunity, at this step, rather desperately. Working Artists and the Greater Economy (WAGE) and Global Ultra Luxury Faction (GULF) are invoked as possible factions who may embody some of these convictions. The desperation of such bids is a position which Negri attests to, a courtesy which we could possibly excuse ourselves from were we to perhaps see how such movements may constitute and collaborate with that project which Negt and Kluge refer to as a proletarian public sphere, which perhaps has more of a foothold now in universities, publications and parties then it did when their work Public Sphere and Experience was first released in 1993.
The courage to do what our intellect thinks to be necessary. This is the stake which any such party, even if it were to be invisible may form. The organization of space, and its capacity to facilitate new lines of flight, and coalesce old ones to reveal unexplored dimensions in our common heritage is the live possibility of this artistic trench, dug in 2017. Can we hold and make inroads from this line, is the inquiry of our struggle.
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