ARCHIVE - corpus - george katsiaficas on negri and the social cyborg

From "The Subversion of Politics"

From the Fetishization of Production to the Production of Fetish

Negri developed the term "social factory" to include as "producers" women in the home and students in schools and a vast number of other people. For Negri, the "collective work experience" is more than primary; it is the only real activity of humans. He organizes his own theoretical schema according to his notion of production, and every arena of interaction is understood through that prism: "Production and society have become one and the same thing."⁶ In contemporary societies, he understands an extension of the principles of production: "Work and life are no longer separate." Negri's mentor Althusser saw theory as a form of production; Deleuze and Guattari portray the unconscious as the producer of desire;⁷ and now Negri tells us that revolution is a production led by "machines of struggle."⁸ Metaphors for revolutionary organizations have had interesting formulations: organs of dual power, vehicles for the propulsion of revolutionary consciousness, a transmission belt of revolutionary ideas to the working class, and now Negri's "machines of struggle," or better, his new formulation, "cyborg":

The cyborg is now the only model available for theorizing subjectivity. Bodies without organs, humans without qualities, cyborgs: these are the subjective figures today capable of communism.⁹

His choice of words reveals a fetishization of the labor process also present in his idea that human beings can so easily be emptied by the social economy of qualities that differentiate us from machines. Negri can only think in terms of this one dimension, so even his political strategy is transformed into a type of production:

Instead of new political alliances, we could say just as well: new productive cooperation. One always returns to the same point, that of production—production of useful goods, production of communication and of social solidarity, production of aesthetic universes, production of freedom.

His attempt to analyze all reality from within the category of production is part of his systematic reduction of life to work, of the life-world to the system, of eros to production. This is precisely the reduction of human beings that is made by the existing system. It quite escapes him that if revolutionary movements in the future were to adopt his categories, they would be rendered incapable of going beyond the established system. In essence, Negri makes the whole world into a point of production. In a society overwhelmed with the fetishization of commodities, is it surprising that production, the central activity of capitalism, is itself fetishized?

It seems sort of shrill appeal to an a priori or "self-evident" distinctions between "humans" and "machines" as a basis for a liberatory politics, but at the same time one can't help but realize how beneficial the breakdown of the "Enlightenment distinctions" can be to Apple and Microsoft.