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Scattered Speculations on the Notion of Inquiry |
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Written by Stevphen Shukaitis
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Tuesday, 22 January 2008 |
“I know that things are getting tougher /When you cant get top off from the bottom of the barrel / Wide open road of my future now... Its looking fucking narrow / All I know is that I don't know /All I know is that I don't know nothing.” – Operation Ivy
I'd like to use my intervention in this round of the edu-factory discussions to make a few scattered speculations on the notion of inquiry, which I hope will provide somewhat of a bridge between the themes of hierarchization and the autonomous university. I say scattered speculations not simply because my remarks may very well be diffuse and scatterbrained in their nature (as they are written in the period of a marathon grading), but more because in saying so I am thinking of Spivak’s famous essay on the question of value. I mention this essay not to invoke its legendary density (it took me at three reads to even scratch at it), but because of her rather interesting description of labor not as work, but rather as the “the irreducible possibility that the subject be more than adequate – super-adequate – to itself.” In other words, to understand labor not as the particular forms of work that comprise the labor process (although one can never forget them), but as the possibility of this process to create something that goes beyond itself. And this seems a fitting point to begin a discussion for the renewal of the practices and politics of inquiry, as well as considering what comprises the labor of that inquiry. And more precisely, to bridge between Operation Ivy and Spivak, to renew an inquiry that starts from its not knowing, not as a mark of failure or inadequacy, but rather as a means of maintaining an open status to which is it always has moved beyond before coming to an awareness of this state: to keep up a constant process of questioning and discovery without falling into uncovering knowledge as object.
But I am getting ahead of myself, as would be fitting. So let’s take a
few steps back before proceeding to what is already known yet
constantly needs to be articulated.
I first became interested in inquiry and politically engaged research
several years ago when I began grad school in New York. At the same
time I was becoming enmeshed in various circles of political organizing
and media production coming mainly out of the globalization movement.
Naively enough I was interested in social movement theory, because I
thought such would be a space for elaborating political theory and
ideas in conjunction with forms of organizing already in motion. I also
had the mistaken idea that since the institution where I was located,
the New School for Social Research, portrayed itself in all its
advertising as the inheritor of a grand tradition of critical theory
and politics, that it would be especially open to this kind of work.
Unfortunately I was wrong on both counts: for the most part ‘social
movement theory’ was boring and irrelevant rubbish, and the New School
was more of a bastion for former Marxist humanists come washed up
social democrats more concerned with endlessly rehashing some strange
imaginary Foucault-Habermas debate than anything else. That’s not to
say that you couldn’t talk about politics, on the contrary, one could
discourse-ify about anything you wanted as long as you did so with the
proper distance and detachment from your subject matter, and made sure
to publish in publications (in such a manner) that in the rare event
more than five people actually saw what you wrote it wouldn’t matter.
Oh, yes, and you were to accept this strange fate and celebrate it as
“doing politics.”
Now I could go on ranting about such for quite a long time (right until
all my student loans are paid off to be precise), but I won’t. The main
point of this biographical flashback is to point out that even in a
place where one might reasonably expect to be open to academic work
with radical political intent, this was not to the case. Or more
honestly I should say there was, but the constraints place upon that
‘radicality’ were such to render it not at all. There simply just
wasn’t support for anything else. And it was this realization that
motivated me to search out for other tools and traditions for the
development and elaboration of political theory in a non-vanguardist
manner, one that does not objectify and reify the protagonism of social
movement. And so for the past several years I’ve worked on this,
gathering resources and ideas mainly from comrades and at various
encuentros and gatherings, drawing from the tradition of participatory
action research, the history of radical education projects, and the
writings of collectives such as Colectivo Situaciones, Precarias a la
Deriva, and Kolinko’s writing on call centers. In particular I’ve found
practices of workers inquiry and class composition, as elaborated
within the operaisti tradition (if one can say that there is one),
especially for the emphasis that inquiry is not really particular
practices involved but a perspective and on-going process; inquiry
operates, to borrow Raniero Panzieri’s wording, as “a permanent point
of reference for our politics” that underlies particular investigations
and goes beyond them (here one can see a parallel between the labor /
work distinction and the possibility of being more than adequate). So,
rather than thinking about inquiry as the particularities of an
investigation, rather it is the realization that as forms of struggle
shift the ground on which they occur there is a constant need to
re-evaluate how the grounds for political intervention have shifted,
and to re-orient to these shifting grounds. Inquiry then is always an
open question, because the situation in which one is inquiring from and
investigating is always shifting according to the ways in which
insurgency determines its development within the present.
These efforts, not surprisingly, congealed into several print projects,
most notably a collection that I edited with David Graeber and Erika
Biddle for AK Press, Constituent Imagination. This book, along with the
efforts of many other wonderful projects (such as transversal,
ephemera, Generation On-Line, and others), as well as the infinitely
valuable and often underappreciated work of many translators (such as
Arianna Bove and Nate Holdren), has helped to start in English speaking
circles discussion and debates that have been going on in much more
substantial way in the invisible (anti-)empire of romance language
radicalism for some time.
Despite trying to get away from the reifying / vanguardist approach to
theory production, coming at radical politics as object to be studied
rather than as a common project to be elaborated, this dynamic
strangely continues in ways and places one would hopefully not expect.
To take an obvious example, one can see how ‘anarchist studies’ (which
grown much greater prominence over recent years) all too easily slips
into becoming nothing more than the study of anarchism. In other words
to approach an already existing, strangely reified object that is
constantly and self-referentially regenerated in discussion of it as
object. This can be contrasted to understanding anarchism as an ethics
of practice, a particular approach to politics, and therefore
understanding anarchist studies as the elaboration of knowledges useful
and immanent to these politics. Shockingly enough, it is not yet
another tome about the life of a bearded 19th century figure or
re-telling of the glories of Spain 1936, which would offer tools for
the rethinking of radical politics in the present.
To make perhaps a risky claim, I would argue that part of the reason
that there has been many more people turning to autonomist thought in
recent years (at least in an English speaking context) is precisely
because while radical politics have more and more drawn inspiration of
anarchism as a form of embodied ethics and approach to organizational
questions, this has not been met with any corresponding development of
something that one could really call an anarchist approach with any
theoretical depth. So, the response has been to call on something else,
whether workerist thought or continental philosophy (but then again
maybe not at all), to use that as a theoretical supplement. This might
be quite a problem, but not necessarily in the lack of a specifically
‘anarchist’ theoretical framework, as much as it has helped people to
overlook some aspects of traditions they’re boring from that they would
be less enthused about if they were made more obvious.
For instance, one of the things I worry about in whether inquiry and
class composition has thoroughly or completely shed its vanguardist /
Leninist heritage. The risk is that the point of inquiry becomes to
find the new hegemonic figure of resistance fitting to the current
political-technical composition of class struggle with capitalist
development. When I asked Gigi and Anna about this two years ago when
they gave a presentation on inquiry at Bluestockings in New York, they
commented there is a certain lingering nostalgia to rediscover the
hegemonic workerist subject in a new form, but such need not be the
case. In other words the purpose of inquiry need not be investigating
the development of the ‘highest’ state of capitalist development with
the expectation that new forms of protagonism will develop there, but
rather to tease out the subversive potentiality of any social
positionality and relations there. As George Caffentzis points out, it
is often those who seem to be the weakest, rather than most advanced,
that can have the greatest impact of fermenting new revolutionary
subjectivities. For that reason it is perhaps not all that surprising
that more inspiration for struggles have come from the Zaptistas,
Agentinean piqueteros and unemployed workers unions, and movements
against neoliberalism across Africa and Asia, rather than the rebellion
of insurgent IT workers and coders.
This is not to disregard the efforts of digital resistance, the
capacities of the socialized worker, etc. It is simply to say that one
cannot simply deduce revolutionary potentiality, capacity for political
composition, from forms of technical composition. This connects quite
closely to a point made by Angela in her contribution (and which she
explores with brilliance through her work more generally), namely the
question of how we can approach commonalities in the undercommons, to
find ways to inquire about them and develop a non-exploitative politics
around them, without creating a new figure of normalization. Forms of
politics which presume a potentiality in a certain position, or worse
yet, that there is inherently a common interest between different
positions because of their inherent links, risks falling into just
another version of essentialist fetishism, no matter what kind of fancy
theoretical clothes its dressed up in.
This is the very process that inquiry should strive to avoid: to risk
conflating forms of technical composition and analysis with the reality
of political alliance and connection. One of the ways this dynamic was
most obvious was in discussions of the relation between the riots in
the banlieues and the student anti-CPE actions in Paris. Just because
there is a structural similarity or conceptual parallel in forms of
precarity (or in forms of affective and immaterial labor for that
matter) does not mean that there are ready made lines of political
alliance drawn. Rather, if anything, it is these lines of alliance that
have be drawn to be elaborated, through finding and elaborating of
common grounds, rather than assuming that such already exists or
declaring that is the case. Sometimes is also useful to question
whether working toward that is always the best plan, rather than
assuming that an endless proliferation of networks and connections is a
good in itself.
Finally, I want to raise some questions about the relation between
inquiry and visibility. One of the most positive things about
conducting inquiry is it can bring to light all sorts of connections,
solidarities, relations of affinities, and so forth, that already exist
within the workplace or social field more generally, of which we might
not have been aware. Ironically enough one of the unintended downsides
of inquiry is exactly the same thing. What does that mean? Well, simply
that these phenomena, by becoming more visible, also become
recuperable. If we take seriously the autonomist argument that is forms
of resistance and insurgency that drive capitalist development through
their reincorporation and decomposition, then inquiry, by making these
known, can inadvertently take part in this process. Let me give an
example that should make this a bit less abstract. Last year I was
giving a seminar on workers inquiry using texts by Kolinko and Marta
Malo de Molina. At one point during the seminar one of the students
observed that workers inquiry must be very useful to companies. Taken a
bit aback by this comment I asked why that was. He responded that most
of the time if one sent in a management consultant or someone like that
to conduct a survey into the workings conditions in an organization he
or she should would be treated with suspicion, disdain, and in general
lied to and deceived – most of the time with very understandable
reasons. However, if the workers began conducting inquiries into issues
in the workplace and what dissatisfied them, there is both no need for
the company to pay for this work at all, greater likelihood that people
will be honest in their responses, and no reason why the results have
to be used in a particular manner once made visible, i.e. publicly
available. In other words the results on the inquiry could easily be
used against the interests of those conducting it in the first place.
Although I am unclear if many companies have attempted to use the
outcomes of workers inquiry for their benefit, I could certainly see
how this could be the case quite easily. This raises the questions that
when considering workers inquiry it is not just a question of
investigating the compositions of labor and social forces in question,
but also of who wants to be understood by and how to use the results in
ways that they do not instantly get turned against themselves.
This is not to raise the ongoing question of recuperation as one of
defeat, but rather an dynamic that must be anticipated and dealt with
on an ongoing basis for any politics to retain its radicality. As Jean
Barrot argued in his critique of the Situationist International, the
counterrevolution does not take up revolutionary ideas because it is
manipulative or short of its own, but rather because revolutionary
movements deal with real problems which the forces of reactions are
also confronted with. So, to the degree that one inquires about
something worth struggling over, one’s results always have the
potentiality to be used against the purpose the inquiry in the first
place. If there was something that could not be turned against itself,
was not worth reupcerating into the workings of capitalism and the
state, it would also be completely useless to ongoing struggles.
This is not a new observation by any means, and was argued by Mario
Tronti (as well as many others) for years now. The point of inquiry is
to constantly find ways to understand the field of struggle and how it
is being modified by the forms of resistance already in motion. In so
far as there are always forces attempting to make these resistances
functional to the system, the task is to find new avenues for
recomposition by making this no longer the case. The autonomous
university then is not the creation of an actual space, formed along
the lines of a workers cooperative (I share Nate’s concerns with this
kind of approach), but rather the process of knowledge generation and
inquiry that is immanent to this ongoing process of inquiry and
compositional analysis. It is a diffuse intellectuality that has less
to do with how one generally think of a university, and more to do with
what Alexander Trocchi refers to as the “invisible insurrection of a
million minds,” a project of constant cultural outflanking and creative
regeneration through these hidden networks and connections. At its best
inquiry is one part of this constant renewal of these undercommons, a
process through which the resistance is always more than adequate to
itself, but negotiates questions of visibility through constant
reversals of perspective.
References
Jean Barrot (1996 [1979]) “Critique of the Situationist International.”
What is Situationism? A Reader. Ed. Stewart Home. San Francisco: AK
Press: 24-62.
George Caffentzis (2003) “The End of Work or the Renaissance of
Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and Negri.”
http://www.korotonomedya.net/otonomi/caffentzis.html
Marta Malo de Molina (2004) “Common notions, part 1: workers-inquiry,
co-research, consciousness-raising,” transversal.
http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406
Raniero Panzieri (2006 [1965]) “The Socialist Uses of Workers' Inquiry,” available at www.generation-online.org/t/tpanzieri.htm
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1985) "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value," Diacritics Volume 15 Number 4: 73-93.
Alexander Trocchi (1997 [1962]) "Invisible Insurrection of a Million
Minds," A Life in Pieces: Reflections on Alexander Trocchi. Ed. Allan
Campbell and Tim Niell. Edinburgh: Rebel, Inc: 164-176.
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