Generation-online reading schedule

After finishing Empire, we elected to look at some of its major issues in a thematic way, to draw upon the kind of sources participants might have available and not be held to one particular book. Please feel free to suggest other concepts or texts to include.

Themes:

1. Living labour, social ontology, Capital
2.Political ontology and metaphysics of Marx and Spinoza
3.Conception of the state and constituted power
4.Postmodernity as societal state
5.Postmodern epistemologies and method
6.The multitude
�

See our reference section for more resources

1. Living labour, social ontology, Capital

Concepts:

Bio-power, Domestic Labour debate, labour theory of value/ beyond measure, material/ immaterial labour, formal/ real subsumption, productive/unproductive labour.

Texts:

Empire parts 3 & 4
Marx beyond Marx,

(Intro to Marx beyond Marx by Harry Cleaver)
Grundrisse ('Fragment on Machines')
Negri�s 20 Theses on Marx (in Marxism Beyond Marxism)
'Results of the Immediate Process of Production' printed as appendix to
Capital Volume 1 (penguin ed.)[On formal and real subsumption]
Theories of Surplus Value Volume 1 Chapter 4 [On productive & unproductive
labour]

Intellectual and Manual labour; A critique of Epistemology - Alfred Sohn-Rethel�

2. Political ontology and the metaphysics of Marx and Spinoza.

Concepts:

Multitude and strength, desire, potentia,

Texts:

The Savage Anomaly,

Insurgencies and of course Empire.

Lukacs' ontology of Social Being

The New Spinoza and

Warren Montag's Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and his contemporaries.

People: Hobbes, Spinoza, Deleuze

3. Conception of the State and constituted power

Concepts:

Potestas, Empire, power

Texts:

Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise, Political Treatise,

Insurgencies, Marx's critique of Hegel's philosophy of the state etc.

Agamben's Homo Sacer

Empire pt 1&2 & 3.5 & 3.6

People: Balibar (spinoza et la politique),

4. Postmodernity as societal state - (postmodernization, globalisation, post- nation.

Concepts:

Post-fordism, immaterial labour, communication.

Texts:

Insurgencies,

Empire pt.3, esp. 3.3-4.1.

Postmodern condition/

Limits to Capital (David Harvey)

Capitalism and the Modern World-System: Rethinking the Non-Debates of the

1970s" by Giovanni Arrighi

Various by Frederic Jameson

5. Postmodernism as method, as relation to knowledge

Concepts:

Aleatory Materialism, epistemological relativism, skepticism and

cynicism, de-centred totality

Texts:

Althusser � Pour Marx (on overdetermination/ materialist dialectic)

Lyotard

Zizek (politics of truth in Ticklish subject),

Benhabib: epistemologies of the postmodern

Laclau/ Mouffe: Hegemony and Socialist strategy

Negri (the Late Althusser article) Auf Deutsch �

6. The Multitude

The Coming Community: Agamben

Paolo Virno: Politics of the Multitude

Selections from the multitudes journal.

Other

We have collated a wider a collection of relevant resources here

Non updated bibliography of Negri's works in English

Text extracts and some bibliography (en Francais)

You can view the archives of the previous generation_online discussions here:

July to September 2001: 

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/generation_online/messages
October 2001 onwards:
http://coyote.kein.org/pipermail/generation_online
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