[p2p-research] taking the standpoint of the body ... some questions

Tue Apr 27 13:47:21 CEST 2010

Thank youy Andy, very illuminating,

Michel

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 6:40 PM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hiya,
>
> I haven't read the book, but just looked up a summary.  So don't quote me
> on this first section!
>
> It seems to be connected to their view of biopolitics/biopower.  I've
> always found their view of biopolitics/biopower rather insubstantial
> compared to Foucault's.  They're a bit inclined to pick up poststructuralist
> terminology without much sense of its distinct meaning, and deploy it in
> rather dubious ways.  If I understand them, biopower is the collective power
> of the multitude (constitutive power), whereas biopolitics is the
> exploitation of this power by Empire (constituted power).  This hasn't got
> much to do with the body, since biopower is also about meanings, affects,
> immaterial labour, the general intellect, etc.  So I would expect this new
> emphasis on the body to also be rather insubstantial.  They might have in
> mind the idea that Empire has to be resisted physically, as in Ya Basta type
> tactics.
>
> More broadly, the politics of the 'body' is associated with
> poststructuralism and postfeminism, and is quite widespread in certain
> fields of cultural studies/critical theory.  It follows from the classic
> poststructuralist strategy of deconstructing binaries.  In postfeminism, it
> is argued that men are associated with mind and women with body, hence that
> women's empowerment must come through revaluing of the body.  In Foucault,
> the body and biopolitics/biopower are associated with regimes of confinement
> and restriction of bodies, of the production of 'docile bodies', usually
> through means of coercively acting on bodies in such a way as to bypass the
> mind and 'soul' (for instance, prolonged confinement, physical shackling,
> mind-numbing routine).  In Deleuze there is the 'body without organs' and
> the separation between 'molar' and 'molecular' selves.  The 'body without
> organs' is an embodied experience of immediacy without division, while
> 'molar' selves are imaginary unified selves separate from people's actual
> 'molecular' constitution as collections of flows and becomings.  Judith
> Butler has written a book 'Bodies that Matter' which is rather influential.
> I think the body in Butler is connected to the idea that identities are
> performed (socially) rather than inherent - hence identities are expressed
> through the body.  Donna Haraway is another major figure - she argues that
> identities are altered by the 'hybridising' of bodies through the use of
> material props and adjuncts, such as wheelchairs.  In a lot of the secondary
> works, these various distinct meanings get melded together.  A lot of the
> use of the body in poststructuralist writings is also rather metaphorical -
> one finds social bodies, political bodies, bodies of evidence and so on.
> One also finds claims that for instance, the body can bear memories and
> scars of what the mind has forgotten.  This carries a sense of the
> psychoanalytic idea of hysterical symptoms.  Sometimes the body also
> encompasses matters such as desire, emotion/affect, etc - as in the idea of
> 'embodied subjects'.  An 'embodied subject' is a subject who feels, desires,
> etc., as distinct from the abstract subjects of liberal theory.  An abstract
> concept can also be 'embodied' through being brought into a particular
> setting (hence people might be said to be 'embodying' the nation, democracy,
> etc., by giving it a performative reality - one might find phrases such as
> 'the experience of trench warfare as embodiment of modern nationalism' for
> instance).  The turn to the 'body' can also be a reaction against the
> prevalence of social-constructionism, and an insistence that practices such
> as violence have a 'reality' on a level which is not simply socio-symbolic.
> This is particularly important in critiques of gender violence and of
> colonialism.
>
> As to only going half the way - poststructuralists are quite divided as to
> how politically radical or otherwise they are...  They all like to seem
> radical, but quite a few of them - particularly the secondary exegetes and
> appliers of the theories - are actually rather conservative, or Third Way.
> They have a certain aversion to antagonism, instantly dismiss anything 'too'
> radical as 'essentialist', and see their work as a never-ending process of
> unpacking, problematising and uncovering the implications of a dominant
> logic they don't really believe will ever change.  Hence their main role is
> to point to what is elided - in this case the body - rather than
> reconstructing any kind of 'beyond'.  There are others, among the second
> tier as well as many of the founders, who are extremely radical, attached to
> something akin to an autonomist politics in which hierarchies are to be
> permanently destroyed and relations are instead to be constructed on a
> networked basis (very much p2p politics).  In these kinds of theories, one
> would find something very similar to what you suggest of 70s/80s
> experimentation: the aim is to go beyond the separation of mind, body and
> spirit towards an experience which is more immanent, intense and holistic
> (body without organs is conceived along these lines; in Foucault's case it
> would be the ethics of care for the self which plays a similar role).  Where
> do Hardt and Negri fit in?  I'm not entirely sure.  They aren't really
> immanentists in the Deleuzian sense, they are far too committed to unity for
> this.  On the other hand, they're not really 'endless task of critique'
> types either.  They believe some kind of social change is possible.  I've
> read Empire and Multitude and I get a strong sense that they're actually
> rather classically Marxist: labour is the basis of social life, capital
> exploits labour, labour needs to free itself from capital and actualise
> itself as a (unitary) new society, except that today labour is networked and
> immaterial, and now apparently embodied too.
>
> Hardt and Negri's implications for peer-to-peer politics are relatively
> clear: they see networked activity as socially productive labour, they
> believe contemporary capitalism is exploiting the totality of networked
> activity, but that this activity is irreducible to capitalism and that it
> can form the basis of a liberated society, which would be an entirely
> networked society which nevertheless operates as a totality and produces
> outcomes which operate akin to decisions.  I think they're a little naive
> about how peer-to-peer networks actually work, and in particular, that they
> wrongly assume that all networks necessarily form an integrated meta-network
> (simply because they all involve social labour) and that this meta-network
> is something like an integrated whole whose parts display a kind of
> unity-in-difference.  In actual networks there are forks, branchings,
> schisms, crypto-hierarchies, issues of the emergence of reactive formations,
> cyber-chiefs...  it's a lot more complicated than Hardt and Negri seem to
> realise.  They seem to think that if capital/Empire was eliminated, the
> world would just be one big happy network.  They're particularly reluctant
> to get into the plane of psychological repression and reactive desire, which
> persist as problems even when networks are *formally* open and
> non-hierarchical.  Networks construct diffuse power, but structures of
> desire determine how and to what ends people will use the diffuse power they
> obtain within networks.  Hardt and Negri instead assume something like a
> unity of will, a recurrence of the old 'species-being' idea I suspect.
>
> bw
> Andy
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 10:02 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Dear Andy and others,
>>
>>
>>
>> I’m reading Commonwealth from Negri and Hardt,
>>
>>
>>
>> In the first chapter, they discuss the turn to the standpoint of bodies. I
>> have a hard time understanding what this means. What I understand is that a
>> central category of Marxism was ‘consciousness’, so a shift to the body
>> makes some sense. N/H also relate it to the shift to the point of view of
>> the struggles (Tronti), subaltern studies, and castoriadis.
>>
>> Some context. Part of my generation in the seventies and eighties, who
>> felt divorced from our bodies and others, undertook an intensive path of
>> going back to the body, a ‘regression in service of the ego’ if you like,
>> but the aim was re-integration in the body-mind, or better yet,
>> body-mind-spirit. So the turn to the body, the emotional and instinctual
>> body, to the relatedness in group dynamics, was, at least in the best
>> efforts, geared towards re-integration in a higher unity. (I’m by no means
>> claiming that all these efforts were successful, and indeed a lot of
>> regressive efforts in that sense led to spiritual authoritarianism, aided by
>> the suspension of critical cognitive functions)
>>
>> In this context, a language of a return to the body seems regressive, an
>> indication that only half the effort has been done.
>>
>> But of course, this interpretation which comes from juxtaposing two
>> different cultural contexts may make no sense.
>>
>> However, to relate a personal experience, in the recent greek meeting
>> around Mignet, which some of you may know went very badly, all the talk was
>> about the ‘body’, yet, I have never seen people so divorced from their own
>> bodies and stuck in cognicentrism as in these kind of social milieus.
>>
>> So, I’m puzzled, what is this turn to the standpoint of the body, what
>> does it mean politically, or is it just an ideological compensation from
>> isolated and cognicentric academics?
>>
>> To what degree are these just compensatory language games, to what degree
>> is this a serious turn with practical consequences?
>>
>> Any impact on a peer to peer understanding of our world.
>>
>> Michel
>>
>>
>> --
>> Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think
>> thank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>
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>>
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>

-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
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