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Exodus |
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Keywords: | Multitude | ||||||
Key figures: | Paolo Virno, Toni Negri | ||||||
The political aspect of exodus is seen to be its potential for 'innovation', 'the exit can be seen as free-thinking inventiveness that changes the rules of the game and disorients the enemy', in 'social conflicts that manifest themselves not so much as protest, but most particularly as defection.' [p. 199 Radical Thought in Italy]. If one sees this politically first as a form of 'radical disobedience' that by the very fact of not 'confronting' power on its own grounds constitutes at once its delegitimasation and the positing of a progressive alternative, it makes sense. However once combined with the types of power operating on the level of social production exodus requires many different modes of analysis. Beyond the scientific
knowledge embodied in fixed capital, immaterial labour also characterises
the direct production of social relations and above all, of subjectivity.
In the 10th thesis on Marx, Negri says that 'capital transfers the program
of control of society from the outside (the factory) to the inside (communication)
of society itself', through the destruction of the factory and the expropriation
of social knowledges. In this and the next theses Negri sees social
cooperation as--ontologically, again?--prior to its 'being put to work',
its value-producing usage by capital. In this sense, as a means of production
immaterial labour is not all the exclusive property of capital, and
the possibilities of rutpures and the vulnerabilities of the current
mode of production Negri and Hardt refer to in Empire and Mulitude
are greater when seen in this light. In concrete terms it is more
difficult to think of examples but mainly because we are often not aware
of their existence, exodus employs an exiting from the field of fire
and the field of view. Forms of immaterial labour that practice exodus
could include for instance all those that ignore copyright laws. The
possibility of positing these practices as really existing outside of
the capitalist mode of production under its total subsumption is a different
question. One doesn't think one can. But the political point here is
possibly that the proliferation of modes of productive activity that
use social cooperation in the sense of exodus, would produce 'against'
capital by being 'in spite of it'. |
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Né qui, né altrove- Migration, Detention, Desertion: A Dialogue; Sandro Mezzadra & Brett Neilson |
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