[Generation_online] non-place&virtual-actual

[Keith Hart]

Thanks to Matteo and Erik for referring us back to the source. I still feel
a bit guilty that the only message to address the passage we are supposed
to be reading together has gone without comment. There is an issue of
language politics, about whether we should use words in their agreed
dictionary sense (especially when for so many English is a second or third
language) or follow the usage developed by specialist thinkers. But I agree
that on this list we seek to discover the value of Negri's thinking or
specifically the sense of the book Empire.

Beyond measure (the virtual)

"...'beyond measure' refers to the vitality of the productive context, the
expression of labour as desire, and its capacities to constitute the
biopolitical fabric of Empire from below. Beyond measure refers to *the new
place in the non-place*, the place that is defined by the productive
acitivity that is autonomous from any external regime of measure. Beyond
measure refers to a *virtuality* that invests the entire biopolitical
fabric of globalization. By the virtual we understand the set of powers to
act (being, loving, transforming, creating) that reside in the munltitude.
We ahve already seen how the multitude's virtual set of powers is
contructed by struggles and consolidated in desire. Now we have to
investigate how the virtual can put pressure on the borders of the possible
and thus touch on the real. The passage from the virtual through the
possible to the real is the fundamental act of creation. (Note a).  Living
labor is what constructs the passageway from the virtual to the real; it is
the vehicle of possibility. Labor that has broken open the cages of
economic, social and political discipline and surpassed every reugulative
dimension of modern capitalism along with its state-form now appears as
general social activity. (Note b)" (p. 357).

Note a refers to Deleuze and Guattari What is Philosophy? and especially to
Deleuze Bergsonism. Bergson (and Deleuze) affirms the virtual-actual couple
over the possible-real, since it captures the unforeseeable novelty of the
act of creation. H & N beg to differ in that they insist on the creative
powers of virtuality, but also insist on th ereality of what is being
created.

Note b considers the relevance of Marx on abstraction (in Grundrisse) to
this question of virtuality and possibility. They suggest two versions. The
abstraction of capital separates us from our powers to act and "is
therefore the negation of the virtual". But also abstraction on the side of
labour is "the general set of our powers to act, the virtual itself."

"The power to act is constituted by labor, intelligence, passion and affect
in one common place. This notion of labor as the common power to act stands
in a contemporaneous, coextensive, and dynamic relationship to the
construction of community." (p. 358).

"This ontological apparatus beyond measure is an *expansive power*, a power
of freedom, ontological construction, and omnilateral
dissemination....Whereas the definitions of the power to act in terms of
the singular and the common are Spinozist, this last definiton is really a
Nietzschean conception. The omnilateral expansiveness of the power to act
demonstrates the ontological basis of transvaluation, that is, its capacity
not only to destroy the values that descend from the transcendental realm
of measure but also to create new values." (p. 359)

In the face of this, one has to ask whether the authors are more interested
in communicating their ideas or in covering themselves against all attempts
to penetrate them. Don't you love "omnilateral dissemination" for "spread
the word around"? Just when you have been ploughing through their own
sentences, you are told to take a course in Spinoza. Just when you thought
it was a good guess that they were following Deleuze, you get the opposite
in a footnote.

The weird thing is that I think I may have been posing similar questions to
theirs when I tried to find out what people really do in their economic
lives, as opposed to what is imposed on them by capitalism and state
bureaucracy. I called it the informal economy and I used a straight Kantian
(or neoKantian) dialectic of form and its negation as my conceptual basis.
I also struggled with Hegel's Science of Logic to find ways of thinking
about the movement from the actual to the possible or vice versa. This pair
was one excluded from their in-house dispute with Deleuze (and Bergson). 

I suspect that H & N have mistaken Deleuze and assimilated the virtual to
the ideal. But this text alone is an inadequate as basis for such a
judgement. What is clear, however, is that their notion of the virtual has
nothing whatsoever to do with the digital revolution oc communications in
our day. And it is remarkable that the authors of a book published in 2000
should feel able to discount popular usage in this respect. It even
misleads casual readers into imagining that they are addressing the world
we confront in our daily life.

I would not have taken the trouble to copy out these texts, if my only aim
were to dismiss them. I hope that someone on this list will elucidate them
without simply displacing the argument to some other text or author.

Keith