conrecerca

I'm sitting in the panopticon - which I'm lately starting to think about as the Great Gatsby of academic libraries, its massive empty space (and dearth of books) in the middle of space-starved downtown manhattan as equivalent to Gatsby's shelves of unread volumes, as conspicuous consumption transitions to conspicuous waste.

Anyway I'm trying to finish one of two remaining incompletes, on Gramsci's "Americanism and Fordism," and i'm about three pages in.

On the subway in from Brooklyn, i read Nick Dyer-Witheford's peice on class composition and multitude theory in Werner Bonefeld's new Subverting the Present, Imagining the Future, (Autonomedia 2008) which Andy hipped me to (did i just say "hipped me to?" This is what happens when you go to grad school. You forget how to speak/write/think because you're so anxious about the academy's pathological, reactionary politics of value and unspoken - at least in public - ethics of competition.) It's a really smart and useful attempt to evaluate the critiques of Hardt and Negri from other autonomists, to think about the utility of the multitude concept in a modified form, and to suggest and highlight forms of inquiry and analysis which proceed from such a utility, like Precarias a la Deriva and Collectivo Situaciones. It's a really useful, synthesis, as so much of Dyer-Witheford's tend to be. I'm already thinking about how to integrate some of the insights into my diss proposal.