premodern lurv?
By shag carpet bomb • Oct 9th, 2009 • Category: Books & Book Reviews, Critical Social Theory, Feminist Fight Clubsince a bunch of people i respect are recommending the work of hardt and negri, i started poking around reading reviews. i read this:
Multitude contains solid concepts undermined by nuttiness: “We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love. We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern traditions.” If love is the only thing that can save the day, we’re in more trouble than we thought.
it’s from a village voice review: http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-08-10/books/love-actually/
I can’t fathom that commentary went uncriticized. Of course, it’s quite likely that the reviewer just snipped unfairly, so who knows what they mean… but if they are serious, then they need a feminist slap upside the head for that boner.
shag carpet bomb is
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Unfortunately, N&H serve up a heaping helping of ’snips.’ If not ‘love’ you could find a any number of other sillinesses.
I gotta say N&H, don’t do it! don’t do it! Postone was mush, these guys are aether.
I smell Hardt’s hand in that. I know he’s been “working” on love. I’d hoped he’d work a little harder than that though.
By the way, I meant to get back to your question about truck drivers, but I’ve gotten busy again. And I don’t know that I would recommend H&N. I’m interested in some of the stuff they are working on, but I don’t think they are careful enough, are too enthusiastic, and make some serious theoretical errors. To get an idea about “multitude” (or contemporary investigations into class composition), I’d recommend Virno’s Grammar of the Multitude before H&N. You can read the whole thing here:
eric — actually, I got thinking about it and they say “public and political” so it’s not quite as bad as I thought. Because I had to wonder, at first, what the hell they were talking about. Premodern love… well, all I could think of us was the rise of romantic love, etc. Not tomention I had to wonder about whatever gender analysis had been left out of the attempt to recuperate premodern love.
i look forward to the truck drivers/computers stuff. i have an interest mostly as a sociologist of work where we study what’s called “rationalization” — part of which would be a discussion of Braverman’s deskilling thesis. I am always fascinated by folks in other disciplines who are working on similar topics but who end up pursuing things quite differently. Hard to explain. It is just fascinating when, say, I learn that people speak of functionalism in literary criticism and I want to know how it relates to the way we’d speak of it in sociology.
when I read you, you’re always coming at things from a theoretical framework that means you put just a slightly different spin on it that it makes me have to stop and consider what is the slight difference. Zizek is like that for me too. Although he has a background in sociology, and I can see all kinds of sociological ideas advanced in his work, there’s just this slight spin or difference. Judith Butler — another example. A lot of what she says was covered by sociologists — Erving Goffman. But then she advances an understanding of the subject that is wholly different than the sociologist’s concept of “the self”.
Interestingly enough, for me this is also what is going on with Michaels. He has this theoretical framework he’s advancing which makes the criticism of multiculturalism rather different from the criticism of zizek on multiculturalism and different from the criticisms of Spival on multiculturalismdifferent from the criticisms of Brown on multiculturalism.
If your theoretical framework, indeed your grounding axioms and assumptions commit you to certain ways of thinking what is gained and lost by that? Those things fascinate me sometimes. I think Janet Halley would tell me I have a compulsion to try to converge — try to see all the connections and possibly gloss over crucial differences — but then I stop myself by focusing on the, hmmm, narcissism of small differences or sumpin’.