Spittin' Change

I saw this review by Scott McLemee of the newest translations of Antonio Negri’s work on the blog Void Manufacturing.  Currently, I am reading Negri’s Time For Revolution, which is not within the purview of McLemee’s review.  Yet, it offers an example of the ways that Negri’s work, while issuing calls for such grand, seemingly externally verifiable things as “revolution,” also is a theoretical engagement that resists practical application in order to remain internally consistent.  That is, like much critical theory, the value of Negri’s work is not in its practical application, but in the ways that it expands the realm of the possible.  So, when McLemee claims, for instance:

The great perplexity involved in reading Negri comes from the sense that surely his concepts must, sooner or later, enter sublunary orbit, and hover over the terrain of politics, and provide something resembling an actual plan of action. But this is not quite what happens. The problem is not that the framework is abstract. Rather, it is that the system is just too beautiful. When actualities run counter to the theory, they are absorbed, and the theory instantly corrects itself by making flaws into features.

In my view, there are other ways to understand what McLemee describes as a perceived weakness in Negri’s theories.  The most compelling route starts by recalling Gilles Deleuze’s influence on Negri and then pointing out that Deleuze describes philosophy as the creation of concepts.  That route would proceed through a discussion of the ways that critical theory is generative rather than only and always descriptive and prescriptive.  Isn’t making flaws into features another way of characterizing survival?  A mode of political engagement?  I don’t know for sure, but McLemee’s review of Negri’s recent work and his expectations about how it enacts a politics raises these questions for me.  So, I thought I would get them out of my own head and out into the world.  Not to apologize for Negri, but just to see what happens.