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ralowe's review against another edition
2.0
have i read movement studies before? when the zapatistas turn up early on in michael hardt's and antonio negri's activist self-help book, what keeps it from feeling like they actually, haptically, know what they're talking about? throughout the matter of political organizing feels dissociated, like an aside, but not always in a bad way: i appreciated the time to reflect upon autonomous governance, or assembly, outside a deeper direct reference, the socialization of labor which represents the world's transformation into fixed capital, but i'm not sure how useful that time will be for everyone. if this is the modus operandi of movement studies i can see where it gets its bad reputation. the first mistake is negri and hardt making the idea, perhaps accidentally, of political organizing novel and quaint. they cram too much in. that's what the peripheralization of political organizing here for the sake of abstract universalization accomplishes. it's a shame because i didn't really disagree with the centaur tactics-leadership inversion thing until like the very end. it was too pat, meant to be general advice, and what organizing experience are you speaking from precisely? i do wonder whether it is truly possible to undertake an anthropology of self-administration given how this polymorphous autonomy in every instance would of necessity precede likeness: magic words to conjure a riot? this problem could be overcome if hardt and negri could write from the positionality of actual zapatistas, you know, as if they really were zapatistas. or: at least through some deft rhetorical artifice accomplishing a similar effect. the problem is that they want to be one of those little annoying semiotext(e) books while also making the subject matter accessible, dumbing it down. but is this no more than rhetorical strategy or a confession of negri and hardt's ethical commitments? i don't want the right and the left to meet in the middle, i don't want a left or a right. these limits to the imagination emerge despite the emphasis on social relation a little glissant. these confessions of an "extreme center"ќ additionally come along multiple times with fucking machiavelli and schmitt. the topics requiring this reach across the aisle rubs a current resident of san francisco the wrong way, particularly the talk about "entrepreneurship"ќ. i can not only see this text being taken up by over-enthusiastic students on campuses nationwide, but techies looking for the lingo to pass astroturf off as the wild kingdom. particularly, the extended engagement with money as social relation sounds like a paean for cryptocurrency.
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