A redefinition of historical conflict is needed, not intellectually: vitally. (12)
Given Semiotext(e)’s recent translation of Tiqqun’s This Is Not a Program into English, I thought I would sketch out some of my thoughts on the text.
This Is Not a Program teases out many of the complications and difficulties of their Introduction to Civil War; in many ways, the interventions made in This Is Not a Program seem to be assumed and refined in Introduction to Civil War. Embedding the work of the collective within a long history of anti-capitalist struggle, from the Black Panthers and the Red Army Faction to a more substantive engagement with the multiple and sometimes conflicting movements of Autonomia, This Is Not a Program works to thoroughly rearticulate political resistance under empire. As indicated in the quote above, the dominant problem of This Is Not a Program is that of partisanship–to redefine absolutely the terms of conflict and resistance. To continue the quote, Tiqqun writes, “I say redefinition because a definition of historical conflict precedes us in which every existence in the pre-imperial period had its part: the class struggle. That definition no longer holds. It condemns us to paralysis, bad faith, and empty talk . . . to continue the struggle today, we will have to scrap the notion of class and with it the whole entourage of certified origins, reassuring sociologisms, identity prostheses” (12). It is thus the eschewal of class that gives rise to a concept of partisanship that is bound neither to a dialectical operation nor its reduction to a fundamentally bi-partisan relation, something like a friend/enemy relation. Enter the form-of-life and its composition in resistance, The Imaginary Party: “When the hostis is no longer a portion of society–the bourgeoisie–but the society as such, the society as power, and when, therefore, we find ourselves fighting not against classical tyrannies but against biopolitical democracies, we know that every weapon, just like every strategy, must be reinvented. The hostis is Empire, and, for Empire, we are the Imaginary Party” (27).
It is in this attempt to redefine partisan relations that Tiqqun’s aversion to Negrism is more fully fleshed out. Where, in The Introduction to Civil War, a critique of Negri is given a mere 2 to 3 pages, two full sections are dedicated to dismantling both Negri’s concept of the multitude and any attempt at fomenting a positive bio-political project. Varying somewhat wildly between biting invective and concise critique, Tiqqun’s engagement with Negri’s thought begins with a critique of citizenship:
The accidents and the rationality that produce the citizen all point to the heart of the imperial enterprise: to attenuate forms-of-life, to neutralize bodies; and the citizen advances this enterprise by self-annulling the risk he represents to the imperial environment . . . There is therefore a factory of the citizen, whose long-term implantation is Empire’s major victory; not social, or political, or economic but anthropological victory . . . The objective [is] to purge the productive center of a society in which production was becoming militarized, to purge it of all the ‘deviants,’ of all the at-risk individuals, of all the agents of the Imaginary Party. (103-104)
It is of this understanding of the citizen and the mechanism by which society is sanitized or purged that Tiqqun refutes Negri on questions of bio-politics and the multitude:
The three watchwords typical of political Negrism–for all its strength lies in its ability to provide informal neo-militants with issues on which to focus their demands–are the ‘citizens dividend,’ the right to free movement (‘Papers for everyone!’), and the right to creativity, especially if computer-assisted. In this sense, the Negrist perspective is in no way different from the imperial perspective but rather a mere instance of perfectionism within it . . . Hence political Negrism’s incestuous relationship with imperial pacification: it wants reality but not its realism. It wants Biopolitics without police, communication without Spectacle, peace without having to wage war to get it. Strictly speaking, Negrism does not coincide with imperial thought; it is simply the idealist face of political thought. (117-118)
So, the importance of a redefinition of partisanship comes to the fore. Not only does Tiqqun consider class to be an antiquated and inadequate means of framing partisan relations in the contemporary moment, articulating a concept of partisanship that distinguishes itself from Negri’s multitude is what remains vital; where the multitude exists as a reconceptualized form of citizenship, citizenship in either local or cosmopolitan iterations must be refused precisely because of its status as an idealized imperial socio-political composition.
On a more general note, This Is Not a Program offers a thorough history of the movements and factions of Autonomia that pairs well with Steven Wrights’ Storming Heaven and the introductory components of Autonomia: Post-Political Politics. Embedding their work firmly within German, Italian, and French Autonome movements, Tiqqun’s This Is Not a Program is in many ways the contemporary antagonistic voice that works to criticize and render undesirable the reformist lines of thought and action that have resulted from Autonomia. Further, I think that This Is Not a Program would serve as a great companion piece to Foucault’s later lectures at the Collège de France, particularly Security, Territory Population, The Birth of Bio-Politics, and The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Where Foucault revisits questions of partisanship, bio-politics, and the form-of-life in these lectures, Tiqqun seems to be intent on elaborating the implications of Foucault’s genealogies of and premises on these subjects in the contemporary moment.
–MLA
Filed under: Everything's Political, The Invisible Committee, Tiqqun, Foucault, Negri, partisanship, This Is Not a Program, Tiqqun
