Alberto Toscano

The Open Secret of Real Abstraction

This article revisits the Marxist debate on ‘real abstraction’ in order to evaluate the relevance of this concept to a period marked by the rise of cognitive capitalism and a proliferation of discourses on abstraction in social theory. The article touches on the interpretive debates around Marxs 1857 Introduction and tries to identify the tensions and contradictions at work in the distinctive contributions of Louis Althusser, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and Roberto Finelli to thinking on the specific status of abstraction, in terms of both the methodology of Marxism and the logic and ontology of capitalism. These foundational debates are then contrasted with attempts by Paolo Virno and Lorenzo Cillario to think the contemporary figures of abstraction in terms of its politicization, on the one hand, and its operational role in the labor process, on the other.

Vital Strategies: Maurizio Lazzarato and the Metaphysics of Contemporary Capitalism

In the heat of the revolutionary councils movement of Turin in 1921, this was one of the epithets hurled at the likes of Antonio Gramsci for his supposed spontaneism, so at odds with the gradualism and evolutionism that had characterized much of the Second International’s use of Marx’s Capital (Gramsci, 1921). Such a perceived conjunction of radical politics and Bergsonism – a philosophy which, to all intents and purposes, presents itself as anything but militant – might strike today’s reader as exceedingly peculiar. All the more so if we consider that the Bergson renaissance we have been privy to over the last decade or so has been driven by concerns which are not primarily political, or even sociological, in character. An initial survey of this return to Bergson would suggest that it may be regarded as a theoretical option taken by thinkers working either within the Deleuzean or the phenomenological camp, broadly construed. Here Bergsonism operates in a twofold manner. Defensively, it is a brake on the thoroughgoing, quasi-mechanicist materialism that characterizes a certain Spinozist tendency present in Deleuze (and Guattari), as well as a step back from the single-minded concern with the analysis of late capitalism evinced by those who place their work in the wake of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. Prospectively, it advocates a reinvigoration of philosophy which, in the aftermath of postmodernism’s patent exhaustion, seeks to circumvent discourses of derealization by postulating a method of intuition that would be capable of tracking and diagramming a virtual real, and thus ‘keep up’ with social and scientific mutations that are supposedly taking us beyond the confines of a ‘reductive’ materialism.1

From Pin Factories to Gold Farmers: Editorial Introduction to a Research Stream on Cognitive Capitalism, Immaterial Labour, and the General Intellect

Th is article introduces a series of essays on the related concepts of cognitive capitalism, immaterial labour and the ‘general intellect’, which will feature in the pages of Historical Materialism from this issue onwards. It outlines the stakes of the theoretical discussion around these concepts and welcomes the recasting in Marxian terms of debates which have oft en been monopolised by apologetic treatments of capitalist development. It also identifies five areas which future articles in this ‘research stream’ will be preoccupied with: (1) the interpretation of Marxian notions, especially arising from the Grundrisse; (2) the philosophy of history and the schemata of social change that underpin concepts such as cognitive capitalism; (3) the identification of hegemonic social figures (e.g. the immaterial labourer, the ‘cognitariat’); (4) issues of philosophical anthropology bearing on the definition of knowledge and intellect; (5) the role of debates on value (and its possible crisis) in assessing the idea of knowledge as a productive force.

Filming the Crisis: A Survey

How can cinema represent, let alone dramatize, the impersonal and amorphous complexities of modern-day fnancial capitalism, especially at a time of crisis? This article provides both an historical account of past attempts to and a survey of films that struggle with the problem of fnding cinematic form for the 2008 banking collapse.

Beyond Abstraction: Marx and the Critique of the Critique of Religion

This article reconsiders Marx’s thinking on religion in light of current preoccupations with the encroachment of religious practices and beliefs into political life. It argues that Marx formulates a critique of the anticlerical and Enlightenment-critique of religion, in which he subsumes the secular repudiation of spiritual authority and religious transcendence into a broader analysis of the ‘real abstractions’ that dominate our social existence. The tools forged by Marx in his engagement with critiques of religious authority allow him to discern the ‘religious’ and ‘transcendent’ dimension of state and capital, and may contribute to a contemporary investigation into the links between capitalism as a religion of everyday life and what Mike Davis has called the current ‘reenchantment of catastrophic modernity’.

Divine Management: Critical Remarks on Giorgio Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory

This essay seeks to evaluate the methodological and theoretical relevance of Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory to a radical critique of contemporary politics and economics. In particular, it explores what is meant by the “theological genealogy of the economy and government” announced by the book’s subtitle. This involves subjecting to scrutiny Agamben’s reliance on a certain understanding of secularisation, of the kind that permits him to declare that modernity merely brings to completion the Christian “economy” of providence, or indeed that Marx’s notion of praxis “basically is only the secularisation of the theological conception of the being of creatures as divine operation.” The paper tries to show that Agamben’s work relies on a type of historical substantialism that clashes with his claim to be engaging in a genealogy. It also investigates the blindspots in Agamben’s treatments of the crucial themes of money and administration.

The Sensuous Religion of the Multitude: Art and Abstraction in Negri

Abstract Through a detailed reading of Antonio Negri’s collection of letters on art, Arte e Multitudo, this article enquires into the place and the uses of art in his writings. It identifies abstraction as the pivotal theme in the Italian philosopher’s reflections on aesthetics. Abstraction is a cipher for the defeats of the extra‐parliamentary left and the imposition of a seemingly inescapable postmodern capitalism, but it is also the starting‐point for an attempt to reconstruct a potent political subject in the midst of a world wholly subsumed by capital and the commodity‐form. The article critically explores Negri’s attempt to tie together a theory of the periodisation of capitalism (and anti‐capitalism) with a prophetic discourse on sensuous politics which explicitly repeats the early German Idealists’ search for a ‘sensuous religion’ that would serve as the prelude to a new politics.

Spectres of Marxism: A Comment on Mike Savage's Market Model of Class Difference:

This article is a critique of Mike Savages ‘From the “problematic of the proletariat” to a class analysis of the “wealth elites”’. It first rejects the notion of the ‘problematic of the proletariat’ – the importance of a dividing line between the working and middle class – instead situating the argument within contemporary debates on class analysis. The critique introduces the broader context of neoliberalism and financialization, alongside a consideration of class globally. It stresses the importance of exploitation for understanding class and inequality, rather than moving to the notion of ‘advantage’, as proposed by Savage, which expels an understanding of power. While the focus on elites in class analysis is welcomed, it is argued that there is a continuing interdependence between classes and that race and gender must also be considered.

Powers of pacification: state and empire in Gabriel Tarde

Abstract The thought of Gabriel Tarde has recently been presented as a radical alternative to a modernist tradition in social theory that continues to rely on supposedly moribund concepts of class, action, statehood, and the like. Focussing on Tardes political writings, this article seeks to counter this prevalent vision of Tarde as a thinker of molecular social processes who provides us with the tools to think beyond the parameters of sovereignty and to embrace a transnational understanding of social change. Tardes thinking of politics is analysed in terms of its reliance on a political anthropology of obedience, its ambivalent attitude towards the democratization of the political sphere, its image of the state as an enabler and filter of inventions, and its attempts to articulate the relation between the social and the political. By means of the notion of ‘empowering pacification’, the article concludes that the significance of Tarde for the present lies in his contradictory and symptomatic conceptualization of the persistence of political power and institutional centralization in the midst of a tendency towards the global expansion of the field of social interactions, as well as in his strategic attempt to imagine forms of power that would neutralize the possibility of social turmoil and class conflict.

Factory, Territory, Metropolis, Empire

New figures, or larval forms, of political organization and often opaque redistributions of geopolitical power, coupled with a welter of communicative, technological, and economic mutations, have given rise lately to what some regard as a “spatial turn” in the social sciences. The unrelenting and often inconsistent proliferation of discourses on so-called globalization, accompanied by a host of descriptive enquiries into the changing patterns of contemporary life, display a marked obsession with all things spatial; a relentless, if often monotonous, usage of topographic metaphors and topological concepts. We are swamped by diagrams, cartographies, networks, dwellings, frontiers, and so on. The sources for this tendency are very heterogeneous, but they do appear to derive, whether sociologically, philosophically or politically, from a mounting suspicion of models of modernity that couple the lucid rationality and imposing will of a sovereign ego with a res extensa reduced to an indifferent, objective domain of coordination, calculation and control, itself directed by the temporal dimension of a project. Whether we are dealing with debates over the “global” or with the turn to Heidegger’s nostalgic ontology of habitation, spatial specificity is often enlisted to inhibit or undermine the pretensions of the kind of universal theory or politics that would smooth over the folds of particularity. When a commitment to such a universal account remains, spatial differentiation schematizes the general theory into a particular conjuncture. Whilst work of this kind maintains a commendable balance of scientific ambition and non-reductionist attention to the different logics, political and economic, at work in the spatial reality of politics, it arguably suffers from a tendency to envelop spatial differentiation within systemic logics that elide the generative role of political subjectivity, and social antagonism. This is not at all to say that such approaches need to be supplemented with a kind of phenomenology of resistance or, worse still, with an anti-universalist discourse of spatio-cultural particularity or difference. The point instead is that the “spatial turn” is often marked by what could be termed a deficit of praxis, of that exquisitely materialist concern with the effects of collective political action, subjectivity and organization on the composition of the social and the functions of command. If the vast and multifarious interrogation of the multiple spaces of contemporary social experience is not to turn into a more or less reactionary, anti-modernist nostal-