richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

... and Now 143really did appear as though Deleuze and Foucault thought their onlyresponsibility was to transparently allow the subaltern to speak.But this is perhaps to put too narrow an interpretation on thepossibilities of the process that Deleuze and Guattari called becomingminor. As Rosi Braidotti has pointed out, this is commonly thoughtto involve a kind of Kerouackian ‘narcissistic self-glorification’ (1997:68), something suburban White men do in their twenties beforesettling down and becoming stockbrokers or university professors. 5On this reading, becoming-minor would involve not only lack of carefor others, but lack of care for the self as well. Braidotti, however,sees this process as ‘life on the edge, but not over it; as excessive,but not in the sacrificial sense (exit Bataille). It is definitely antihumanistic,but deeply compassionate in so far as it begins withthe recognition of one’s limitations as the necessary counterpart ofone’s forces or intensities’ (68). Forces and intensities, Braidotti adds,necessarily involve interaction with others, and therefore ethicaland political commitments—particularly a commitment to a ‘spaceof becoming … posited as a space of affinity and symbiosis betweenadjacent forces’ (69). Thus the minority appears as ‘the dynamic orintensive principle of change’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s work (68),where change is explicitly oriented to avoiding becoming major,is in fact defined in such a way as to associate it inseparably withnon-hegemonic practices. This is the space of Guattari’s molecularrevolution, Foucault’s micropolitics, a particularly poststructuralistpolitics of affinity that has been picked up by theorists and activistsworking within and across a number of different traditions. Althoughthey have remained to a great extent disparate, these endeavourspose a common question that is both current and ancient: howcan a micropolitics simultaneously be a communal politics? Thatis, how can we organize ourselves so as to minimize dominationand exploitation, particularly in a world increasingly colonized byneoliberal globalization and the societies of control? Autonomistmarxists and postanarchists each offer their own answers to thisquestion, which I will now set out to discuss and critique.AUTONOMIST MARXISM AND THE CONSTITUENT POWER OF THE MULTITUDEAlthough it can trace a lineage back to at least the 1940s, 6 autonomistmarxism remained relatively unknown in the English-speaking worlduntil the publication of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire(2000). Because this is such a wide-ranging text, I will not attempt