ABSTRACT
The injunction of Marx’s proletarian unnamable is an ever renewed engagement with the social plane of capitalized life – a plane that is at once manifold and mutating, cramped and constraining. In Chapter 3 this plane of capital was presented in general terms. This chapter now turns to consider the specificity of the contemporary capitalist socius. It does this not through a general mapping of Deleuze’s and Marx’s position, but, following the methodological logic of the minor and the proletarian unnamable, by exploring one manifestation of a political critique of capital. It follows a thread through a particular current in Italian Marxist research and politics – a current known in the 1960s as operaismo (‘workerism’)1 and in the ’70s as autonomia (‘autonomy’). This current can be seen as performing Kafka’s ‘double flux’ (K: 41) inasmuch as it analysed capital as an open system which configures around lines of flight, and sought to take these lines elsewhere, whilst – as I explore in Chapter 5 – situating this politics in a cramped space without a delineated people. A central figure in the development of this current is Antonio Negri, and this chapter considers his work in some detail.
