A conversation with Brian Massumi about qualities of radicalism
This is an interview I did in 1993 with Brian Massumi -- radical academic, translator of Deleuze and Guattari, editor of Hardt and Negri, etc. This was the first time I'd ever had a conversation with anyone about Autonomia.
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BEN: I've been working on a magazine collectively produced by non-Anglo and Aboriginal people, without any hierarchical processing of "literature" or "art". A big part of it was creating ways to perform problems in cultural politics, rather than to transmit particular ideologies.
BRIAN: That's very important. It's an almost artistic-aesthetic function that's also immediately political; it's also the creation of (basically) new social forms, because to do all this you have to network with people, create a basis for communication and cooperation that didn't exist before, so you're building something positive, even if it's often disused when it is received. I think that's extremely important.
Creating social networks and social forms is extremely important as an alternative to participating in the organisational forms as we find them, but in a way it's also exactly what the economy does now. In a sense it's participating in a creative aspect of capitalism, which (according to a lot of theorists now) is precisely about that: the products which capital produces are less consumer objects, but the forms of cooperation that go into making them. You can see that in relation to the information economy -- not only in the media, and circulating forms of cooperation, but also in cybernetics and informatics, creation of software, games, networking through computers, billboards and other kinds of (as yet fairly uncontrolled) ways of communicating. It's conveying a difference and creating something on the order of a new form of cooperation, while it's also participating in a general movement in the economy.
One of the fatal flaws of progressive movements in the Sixties and early Seventies was the idea that you could simply step out of the system -- drop out and attack it from outside. That's a way of not seeing what you bring with you, because you've internalised a lot. The way you stay alive is by having a job and participating as a supposedly productive member of capitalist society; you have to deny that to operate in this framework -- as if there's a kind of purity that you can step out into -- and that's unsustainable, especially when unemployment is most developed countries is running to ten to thirteen percent... most people don't have the luxury anymore.
BEN: On the subject of US politics: if Reagan was a walking amputation, and Bush was a "thing", what's Bill Clinton?
BRIAN: Bill Clinton is a network, I think.
BEN: A network.
BRIAN: A network.
BEN: Of...?
BRIAN: On the level of popular media he represents interminable discussion in an attempt to have (to some extent) non-hierarchical decision-making within the Government. That is a fairly frightening thing, because if it actually succeeds, it's obviously not going to undo the hierarchies in the Government -- particularly in the military or the judiciary. What it means is that it will make these systems more adaptive, because they'll become more responsive, and they'll be able to move out a little bit more horizontally.
BEN: So the appendages can get stronger?
BRIAN: The appendages get stronger, but the kind of containment has to do with a weaving together of parts; the weave itself is predetermined, but the parts themselves may have a certain amount of say or responsiveness. So it's a kind of self-reproducing system that includes adaptational mechanisms. So before he makes a decision, Clinton will do a huge amount of talking to people, getting opinions, trying to sincerely involve a broader range of people in the decision-making. But that decision-making is subordinated to one end: toward making government cost less, and making business more profitable. So on the level of what goals are imposed, it becomes a different kind of dictatorship.
BEN: I keep thinking that social democracy is heading toward disaster somewhere along the line, but I don't know what kind of disaster it's going to be.
BRIAN: It's going to have a lot to do with concepts of sovereignty, the State and unity, and it does have to be rethought, and that the relationship and the group, as well as the relationship between the group and the group-of-groups -- the totality of the State -- has to really be fundamentally rethought. I think it needs to be rethought outside of terms of territory and boundary-setting, and more in terms of exchange, interference and hybridisation.
BEN: ...which brings us back to liberatory projects, and Communism. Guattari and Negri say that State bureaucratic collectivism is bad because it "terminates the individual". While this is probably correct in a manner of speaking, don't you think that in using this rhetoric, there's a potential to slide into bourgeois individualism, especially within the academy?
BRIAN: Oh yeah, I think there definitely is. But thinkers like Negri and Guattari are coming out of a different way of thinking about the relationship of the individual and the group; when they speak of individuals realising their potential and call that "freedom", they're not thinking about it in the same way that it's often thought about -- as if the "potential" was something essential in those individuals that pre-exists their social existence. They see the individual as being always suffused with the social; the idea that a society is composed of individuals is a non sequitur -- it's composed of relationships, at various points, that could be called individuals. A person is always born into a very complicated web of social relations, and their growing sense of individuality is actually an internalisation and selection and transformation of those collective relationships, and playing them out on the level of their individual bodies.
I don't see it as a conflict between the individual and group; I think that what's the most creative and most exciting in all of us has to do with a playing out of our connections with others -- an exploration of different ways of being, and speaking, and seeing, and doing. So our individuality is a group phenomenon expressed through a single body. Someone like Guattari would think of individual expression in that way: as a group expression that has a single body as its point of application.
What would an individualist capitalist be without a competitor? Already a social relation. What would a Stalinist head-of-state be without a population to oppress? It's a question of different kinds of group relationships and different modes of expression, and I think that the relationships that are the most liberatory are the ones that increase people's group connectedness, but allow it to be played out differentially.
BEN: Do you think there's anything useful in the counterculture of the Sixties?
BRIAN: I think there is. It's extremely important not to fall into the trap of awe about the Sixties, because there was a lot of naivete -- there were a lot of extremely strange things done. But at the same time, it was a time of massive change and experimentation, and our images of it -- particularly as we get it from the music and the mass media -- are highly selective. I think it's important to go back to the Sixties, but also to go back to earlier moments to look for what might be useful.
In the Sixties I think there is quite a bit of use. I think that there were forms of media intervention that were highly effective, and at the same time extremely radical. I think the media strategies of the Yippies have a lot to be learned from -- in fact I think a lot has been learned from or perhaps reinvented by groups like ACTUP: performative intervention, in a way that establishes an often very disruptive media presence. Again there's the sense of something going on there that can't be conveyed in the content of the media, which is an extremely important message to be sending, because there are people who are disaffected or searching everywhere, and it's important to let them know that there are things happening that aren't digestible by the media -- to give them the kind of hope that there are perhaps other ways of doing things.
So I think there is a certain performative attitude toward the media that used humour as its main weapon. It's extremely important not to fall into over-seriousness or over-sincerity, because sincerity can be one of the most oppressive of political tools. Another thing that can be leaned from the Sixties: in North America there was a lot of very sustained experimentation and different forms of collectivity, and the memory of that is often extremely negative -- most of them failed: different kinds of communes, different kinds of family or non-family situations; different forms of economic activity were experimented with; also, consensus-based decision-making was put into fairly broad use in the Sixties. In a lot of ways it's been an interrupted history; it was an attempt, an experiment with ways of living together that came up against extremely strong barriers, both outside (in relation to the State) and inside, through the repetition of oppressive structures -- the microfascism that we talked about earlier. But then that's not surprising: people spend a lifetime being taught how to be jealous, how to be selfish, how to put their own economic self-interest head of others', and it's not surprising that a few years of experimentation isn't going to break that.
BEN: Is it then more appropriate to be sad, rather than cynical, about these failures?
BRIAN: Neither. It's something to learn from. I think it's important not to go back to the personal, to personal failings, e.g. that THAT didn't happen. There's also political defeat and failures that had a lot to do with the kinds of forces the State was willing to bring to bear against them. I don't think cynicism or sadness is called for; I think what is called for is a rootedness in this situation and its complexities. I think the Sixties were the first outpouring of the kinds of complexities that have really taken root now, and I think the student generation now is extremely aware of them. Probably the most productive way to have a non-nostalgic search through some of those forms of experimentation to see if any of them are adaptable now (I doubt that any of them will be directly) is not to take models, but to try to correct for the situation now, and recreate forms of resistance and forms of productivity.
I think that in the French context there wasn't that much sustained experimentation of collective forms, so there was a huge outbreak that lasted a couple of months, where forms of social-political power that had been in place simply melted, and there's a tremendous, spontaneous exodus outside of those traditional forms, onto the streets, where new forms of sociality were starting to take form. It collapsed much quicker in France, but there was that moment when the walls seemed to come down, but it has haunted them for the rest of their lives and was never really lived up to. I think that a spontaneous revolutionary approach is not something to be imitated, because the situation is far more complex now; most States are less centralised, so it's less likely that there's going to be a moment when the walls come down again.
Maybe some of the more suggestive leads may be found in Italy in the Seventies, rather than France or North America in the Sixties. There's a long, very sustained history of that kind of experimentation that went back to the early Sixties, all the way through to the late Seventies, so it straddles a much larger time-frame. Towards the late Seventies, the State and the economy were already in the form closer to the one we see now than they were in the Sixties. So I think it's extremely important -- again, without nostalgia and without imitation -- to go back and look at the these histories of the Left, and to use them as laboratories.
The Autonomia movement in Italy is perhaps one of the more important places to look and the least known. It started as a fairly traditional working-class movement within the large factories in the North of Italy, but it distinguished itself from other working-class movements in that its rallying cries became the refusal of work, so rather than asking for better pay and better working conditions as ends in themselves, the workers were making demands that amounted to directly taking over the factories, and control over what was produced and how they produced things. So if demands were made for increased salaries, it was conceived as a form of sabotage, of bankrupting the factory or the State. Forms of direct sabotage were practiced very widely.
It wasn't the working-class trying to come to consciousness of itself and institutionalise itself on a State level; it was the working-class that was trying to destroy itself and it saw its own extinction as its end, because it saw even the factory system itself as the enemy -- not just who profited by it. I think that's a very brave and perhaps very foolish step to make; I think that self-extinction is perhaps one of the most important goals that an individual or organisation can make, in the sense that if you really are affirming potential, and the future, you are in a sense negating what you are now. To become, you have to undo yourself, and your organisation will have a built-in lifespan, a kind of planned obsolescence.
The Italian movement was able to reinvent itself periodically, and accept that its modes of organisation, or particular organisations themselves, were to die. Or that other struggles might leave the factory, which they did, as production was decentralised in society. By the Seventies, it was perceived that the economy was no longer factory-based in the same way, and that that wasn't the most important point of tension, but that forms of capitalist production were being disseminated throughout the social fabric. One of the new slogans was, "All of society is now a social factory" -- there were forms of capitalist production that were unrecognised or perhaps unpaid (e.g. women's domestic work) and that the struggle had to become as decentralised as capitalist production and power was. So it became a movement of the marginalised: the unemployed; students who at the time who felt that they had no future; new sexual dissidents; so it was a huge, tension-filled coalition between forms of social marginality.
The site of resistance became society-wide, and people looked for these points of marginality and forms of sabotage could be applied anywhere that people lived. One of the basic forms of sabotage was refusing to pay for social services and public transportation. Boycott, taken far beyond the way boycott was normally used. All of that came to a very sudden end, when the State used literally Fascist strategies against them: bringing up laws that dated from the Fascist period that were still in the books. They broke the movement with extreme repression, including political prisoners like Negri, who were on trumped-up charges. Then again, I don't think that any of those strategies are useful right now, but it provides a history of forms of struggle, following step-by-step the recomposition of the economy and capitalist power.
Now, people like Negri think that another step has been taken, and that figures of marginality aren't as key as they were, since the economy itself has learned how to profit from marginality, to profit from difference, and to actually create difference. Now they're looking around for strategies for situations where the centre is the margin and vice versa. There isn't a margin that exists anymore; the economy is completely global -- it's taken over the entire ex-Soviet-bloc; it's intensely colonising or re-colonising the "Third World", so there isn't that inside/outside, margin/centre. But at the same time, that means that forces of production are being decentralised and disseminated everywhere, and that they have to deal with the creation of new potentials that might be hijacked towards non-capitalist ends.
BEN: That's a lot of intense global and local specificity to strategise. In the 1960s, workers' strategies for taking over the workplace were condemned by the "Old Left"...
BRIAN: In Italy, all of this was done in opposition to the Communist Party, which was an assimilationist party then; it was moving in social democratic directions -- it wanted to take over the apparatus of the State. The Autonomy movement wanted to undo it.
BEN: I'm worried about certain aspects of revolutionary theory becoming all too "convenient", as it were -- for example, crude workerism is an excuse to perpetuate certain forms of organisation. So when you say that difference isn't important...
BRIAN: I would say marginality, not difference. Difference is extremely important, but it also becomes the engine of capitalism: the production of new fashions, new ways of inventing new styles, new objects... it has become generative, in the sense that it no longer produces objects -- it produces the means of producing different objects. It's all about difference. But so is resistance. I wouldn't say that difference is not the key; difference isn't the same as being Outside or being on the margins; difference is now at the centre, and (in a sense) resistance is also, which means that wherever you are there's probably a point of tension that could become a point of resistance.
The present Italian post-Autonomist theorists call this theory an "immaterial worker", where you do "immaterial labour", because "immaterial labour" -- by their definition -- is that creation of ways of creating difference, which isn't necessarily only an upper-class job, because in the way that factories are being reorganised, it is the workers that are being reorganised into teams that do quality control work, that teach management how to become more productive and more profitable, that are involved in the creation or production of new products. So they are creating new modes of productivity -- qualitatively different ways of doing things, modes of cooperation and networking.
I'd say that the message is very different: difference is everywhere -- find it where you are, and further it. I think it's self-serving to take these negative stances: "you should not do this, because it doesn't meet my standards of action". One of the refrains of traditional Marxist thinking is "the conditions aren't right -- don't do it"; that's what was said in Italy, that's what was said in May '68, that's what was said in the States during the Sixties... there's a continual refrain: "we have to have a complete, correct analysis before we act" -- and that means that they never act, or they act to keep people from doing things. I think what's important is to keep thinking and acting in the situation you're in: attempting to connect it with larger situations and global patterns, but never pretending to function on that global or totalising level -- because that also is a fiction. It's only a disciplinarian move; it's to try to create a definition of the proper kind of action and the proper conditions.
BEN: I was thinking of your optimism, and was wondering if it is informed by your critical thinking, or something else?
BRIAN: I don't know if I'd accept the term "optimism". I don't think it has as much to do with optimism/pessimism as it has to do with desire. As opposed to self interest. Talking in terms of self-interest is maybe a good way you can get at it, because the idea that progressive politics can organise itself -- and be content with ideas of self-interest or serving-the-interests -- is inherently conservative, because it assumes that there are pre-existing populations that have interests that you can find out, express and then give in to them like a service (or allow themselves to give into themselves). Those interests are really the expression of their complicity with the situation as it is now.
It seems to me that there's a need to beyond self-interest, but not in the sense of selflessness; I would call the difference between self-interest and desire the difference between conceiving yourself as being complete but somehow stifled and trying to find a way to express what you are and have it recognised and attended to... and the idea that you're in a world: you're directly open onto it, you're under its influence, you don't necessarily have control over that, but you're always responding, reacting and acting within it; that you're constantly being changed, and changing, whether you perceive it at a particular time or not... that the world is a cauldron of change. And that's beautiful. I guess I would see it more as aesthetic -- to put yourself on the side of change, against self-interest -- because if you do change, you'll no longer be that self, and will no longer have the same interests. I see desire as trying to hook up with potential, rather than with interests; I think there's a difference between potential-to-become-something-different and an interest in being who-you-are to a greater extent.
BEN: Just recently, there's been a lot of activist nostalgia about mass mobilisations against university fees that were very impressive, but that didn't really have very much of a politicising basis. I'm caught between this nostalgia and the realisation that I've participated in some really interesting, successful and non-monolithic organisational experiments. Is our panic partly just a residue of past conceptions of "organisation"?
BRIAN: I think so. I think that has been around at least since the 1970s. There has been generation after generation of activists who have this sense of the impossibility of things. If I had to choose between optimism and pessimism, I would rationally choose pessimism, because the problems seem so overpowering -- on the environmental level, with forms of oppression in the developing world...
To go back to self interest and pessimism about that: at the same time that I was saying that it's important to go beyond it, I think you have to operate on that level also. The kind of Queer politics that are going on now couldn't have been possible without the kind of more liberal activity that happened for a long time -- trying to create a certain level of acceptance, for gains. There's a kind of self-interest in the development of a constituency, but it's also self-deconstructing, because as soon as it gets a certain amount of success, there are going to be people saying, "wait a minute -- that's your self interest, not mine", and differences within the community will start to be made visible and valorised. So that liberal stuff of recognition (and coming to the point where you do have a certain amount of representation) is inseparable from the kind of escape that brings into view differences that couldn't express themselves before.
There's a whole flowering of Queer politics that exceeds ideas of self-interest and representation, because it deals with ideas of community that aren't bounded, and it accepts that there's a lot of fluidity in people's behaviour and orientation -- that your identity is only a part of who you are and what you do. It valorises some kind of fluidity as precisely as what is important and exciting about being a part of a social movement. So I think it's important (even if rationally you have to be pessimistic) not to allow that to paralyse you, because every little game you make is creating as a side effect (in a differentiation) a new invention. And that in itself is a very exciting and very important process; and that's exactly what's important -- the process -- because if you say that you're cynical because things haven't turned out the way could have, or that past activism has turned out to be too self-interested, it's not taking that larger situation into account -- it's assuming that there's a goal that we can know, now or in any present, that we can anticipate and get to. Which is a way of not thinking about that mutability, that fluidity, because as soon as you take one step the ground that you're walking on is different -- there's no way of projecting an end point. So although you can have vague ideas of where you're going or where you want to be, it's very important not to have too detailed a sense of it, partially because I think it's a way of not affirming the present and the potential in the present, because it's projecting a certain kind of potential from the present, but not taking into account that the ground is going to change under your feet.
So I think it's much more important to affirm the process of that differentiation, of that change, and to revel in it, and to find your desires in it -- pleasures. If you're a member of any organisation, and it's not an intense experience, well, then it's probably not worth doing. So I think there has to be a valorisation of the present moment and the untapped potential in the present, and that's what you should really be oriented towards, because if you're oriented towards a possibility that you can project from right now... even if you get there, you won't be satisfied -- it will be a shadow of what really could have been, because the potential of the present is always much greater than any possibility we can extract from it, or give a name or image to. I think that's one of the lessons of feminism and maybe one of the lessons of the Sixties: the process itself is much more important than the end point, and so the question of "were they self interested?" becomes irrelevant. Instead: were they alive? Were they intense? Are there ways that we can connect with that, and attempt to further it, and further differentiate it? So it's more like an ethics of invention and intensity, rather than a moral politics saying that "people failed, so let's be pessimistic, so let's not do anything."
BEN: But how do you overcome that, on a mass scale?
BRIAN: On the mass scale, I think it has been escaped. The majority of people expect their future to be worse than the present; there's no longer a pretence that we're on a road to progress, that things will get better. There's perpetual crisis. So again, yes: the utopianism that still exists in the Left is really a holdover. I think the general culture and the economy that we're in is beyond utopianism. And it's important to integrate that into your thinking. You have to find other ways of motivating yourself, which again I think has to do with pleasures and intensities, and affirmation that you can find in your present, in the people around you, in new ways of moving through the world, and expressing yourself.
I came from an intensely utopian background -- but at the same time apocalyptic and utopian. As a high school student in the early Seventies, I was very active politically, and there was a complete fiction among people in activist circles: basically that the end of History was at hand, that there was a big, massive environmental crisis, that there was going to be a race war in the United States, that the social fabric and the economy were on the point of collapse... an apocalyptic vision. But then there was also with that this utopianism: "if that will happen, then that's wonderful because a new society will grow from it". I had a far too specific idea of what that community would be. Speaking now as a thirty-seven-year-old in the 1990s, I have very little in common with the content of the vision of utopia. Very little at all -- I can hardly believe that I actually thought like that. [Laughter.] None of that stuff happened. The apocalypse didn't happen, the utopia didn't happen. Things have kept going on, and there's an incredible adaptive power in capitalism, at its state. That means that although it's not impossible for revolutionary things to happen, it's just more and more possible for things to be left alone.
