richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

Ethics, Affinity and the Coming Communities 183of sewing everyone up into the same bundle somehow avoids theproblem of suffocation.It is on this basis that I would disagree with Agamben regardingwho is likely to build the coming communities and, more importantly,who is already building them. I don’t think it’s those who are mostwrapped up in consumer capitalism and the state form. Rather, Ithink that the coming communities are more likely to be found inthose crucibles of human sociability and creativity out of which theradically new emerges: racialized and ethnicized identities, queerand youth subcultures, anarchists, feminists, hippies, indigenouspeoples, back-to-the-landers, ‘deviants’ of all kinds in all kinds ofspaces. To the extent that these communities are the sources of energy(‘difference’) upon which postmodern states and corporations rely fortheir very existence, it could be said, as the autonomists say, that theyhave created the state and capital. But this process of co-optation, asthey also note, is often contested, sometimes subverted, and nevertotally successful. This struggle defines the coming communities fromanother direction, as those identities that are not acceptable to, or atleast not yet entirely normalized within, the global system. At theirmost radical limit, they present that which cannot be represented,that which must not signify—they are the disavowed, unconsciousunderside of globalizing capital, the Real that, just as it must berepressed, must just as surely return.The disparities that allow the coming communities to act ascrucibles for social change also mean that the simple dichotomyAgamben sets up between ‘state’ and ‘humanity’ is impossible tomaintain. There need to be struggles not only between ‘the state’(the bad?) and ‘humanity’ (the good?), but within ‘humanity’ as well.To postulate any identity category as unmarked and undifferentiatedis, as I noted with respect to ‘the multitude’ and ‘the proletariat’,to assume a unity that not only must be striven for, but will neverfully arrive. It appears possible only if one postulates a ‘fundamentaloppression’, a substructure upon which all other oppressions aresupposedly erected. As I pointed out in the previous chapter, however,this mode of analysis has become all but impossible to maintain.Pushing earlier critiques of the New Left to their logical and politicallimits, transnational feminists have convincingly argued that thegreat levelling and totalizing efforts of neoliberalism must be seen asjust that—efforts, attempts, hegemonic constructs, fantasies imposedupon a field of endless and various struggle. As Chandra Mohantypoints out: