User:Tancre/RW&RM/From Autonomism to Post-Autonomia: From Class Composition to a New Political Anthropology?
From Autonomism to Post-Autonomia: From Class Composition to a New Political Anthropology?
- Author: Joost de Bloois & Frans Willem Korsten
- Publisher and date: 'Rethinking Marxism', Volume 26, Issue 2, April 2014
Abstract
This essay is a summary of the historical and ideological development of Post-Autonomia starting from the operaist and autonomist movements to its international situation. Where the beginning of the '80s signed the closure of the opening of an era of uncertainty and precarization, instead of a new horizon of self-valorization and autonomy, Post-Autonomia tries to resynthesize the old discourse and translate it to face to the new complexity of the relation between capitalism, state, multitude and subjectivity with the intent of delineate the role of the new non-subject in constant transformation.
Synopsis
In 1970 Autonomism exposed the new role of the state and the intimate working of biopolitics and surveillance in the Italian crisis context called 'years of lead', with the aim to put into practice self-evaluation and autonomy in the very moment of its historical disappearance from the core of the social factory' (Tronti), later neo-liberalism. At the end of the '70s and with the repression of autonomism in the early '80, the end of every possibility to implement the emancipatory ideal and the birth of a new series of suffering subjects was decreed. Here the debate from premonition of an anthropological mutation (Autonomism) moves on the research for a possible antidote through the direct confrontation with the complexity of the real (Post-Autonomism).
The analysis of the social condition in the new 'state of exception' (Agamben), is seen as the need to create a new social sphere outside of power (Berardi), in a reality in which a radical disjunction has occurred. Sometimes perceived as rupture (Morfino) or an ontological metamorphosis, that manifests itself in a general 'absence of memory and future' (Negri) that needs a search for continuity (Shukaitis). In this context the formation of a new subject is emerging. Assuming that the solution of the state to the crisis consists in reconstructing the system by reintegrating the antagonistic components (Negri), and that this process generates an ambiguity of values and an inability to develop a radical imagination (Shukaitis), arise the needs for awareness of such mechanisms, of how self-valorization is absorbed and twisted by the perversion of the state and capital (Berardi), and the need to avoid capitalist narratives of reappropriation. The focus then shifts to the role of 'cognitariat'. Where the bipolar logic, hyperactivity of work and consequent depression, characterizes the contemporary subject drained by the crisis and transformed into a non-subject opposed to its juridical person, the only solution is the autonomy of mental labour, capable of recombining the social elements in their perennial mutation according to a non-accumulative / non-competitive / non-aggressive principle (Berardi).
The analysis of the new subject is also articulated in its relationship with the multitude. Where the politicization of the processes of subjectification has generated branded and distorted subjects (Tiqqun), the work of the multitude is described as an animal body, embodying the 'animal spirit', feeding the parasitic economy of advanced capitalism. Here the redefinitions of the commons enable us to face this 'evil' nature of the multitude, and means recovering the productive animal force before its turned into the dark matter of capitalism.(Pasquinelli). This ambivalence of the multitude is also seen as the force of negation of language that radicalize aggression, and the reconfiguration of the political animal as a linguistic animal.The uncertainty introduced by the multitude, derives from the impossibility open to the world of leaving the natural state, and the self-government, against this ambivalence of language, is configured in the use of the ritual as a process of acknowledgment of the uncertainty, primal setting of the original hominid and not as something that should be removed(Virno).
In conclusion the discourse is addressed into an anthropological investigation, social and individual, as the main feature of Post-Autonomism, capable of criticize the different incarnations of the anthropological subject, to not be stuck in a 'common' as voluntary servitude and self-dictatorship. The reappropriation of the 'common' must first of all produce a drastic auto-critique and this lead to the necessity to rethink the character of academic knowledge production and the intellectual. Starting from the observation that universities are not anymore the avantguard of knowledge-production, is proposed the 'machinic intellectual', one-man, interface and resistor of the circuit in contraposition to the intellectual as representative of a large social cause(Bratich), and the critical use of academic disciplines to expose underground realities as cartography (Casa-Cortès, Cobarrubias).