Posthegemonic Comments
Auctoritas might also be the figure for what elsewhere goes by the name of hegemony: some kind of explanation to the question as to why constituent power so often ends up, alienated and inverted, as constituted power. (A question that Negri never answers.) It is in and through auctoritas that potentia is harnessed to potestas: auctoritas is the transmission mechanism that simultaneously gives constituted power its (borrowed) life and deadens, blocks, constituent power.
No kidding -- I've been re-reading Insurgencies quite carefully to find the answer to this (at least Negri's answer). All he ever gives is a name for the apparatus of capture: the Thermidor. Quite infuriating.
A possibility -- and one that is never developed by Negri; only mentioned -- is in a brief paragraph in the first chapter of Insurgencies where he's laying out various liberal democratic responses to the relation between constituent power, the constitution and revolution. He refers briefly to Weber's typology of power (in connection to Schmitt; the relation is reversed, I think, and not only temporally: The Concept of the Political is, in part, a response to Weber's "Politics as a Vocation", a lecture Schmitt attended); i.e., charismatic, traditional and rational.
"Throughout the core of his political sociology where he defines the theory of the types of legitimacy, it is clear that for Weber constituent power is situated between charismatic and rational power. Constituent power derives from the first the violence of innation, and from the second its constitutive instrumentality. It suddenly forms positive law according to an innovative project that grounds a paradigm of rationality" (Insurgencies, 7).
His discussion moves to Weber's analysis of the two Russian revolutions, commenting that "the attempt fails because Weber's methodology remains, despite every effort to the contrary, founded on a fixed typology a typology not so much of the form of production as of the figures of consistenty of law and the State" (8 ). He then criticizes Weber further for his 'myopia' that prevents him from seeing the "perverse effects of constituent power" -- i.e., constituted power".
And, suddenly, we are at Schmitt's decision... At times, Negri seems to resemble his critique of Weber.
this may be coming out of left field in the context of Agamben's wonderful historico-legal POV, but...
I have been thinking about charisma in a 'machinic' sense due to Tom Wolfe's use of Weber in his 'Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flaked Streamline Baby' article. The enfolding of a machinic 'charisma' in one's collective and personal identity in the case of car cultures takes becomes an 'enthusiasm'. However, the charisma is quasi-transcendental in that the object of reification -- the car -- must be animated by the labour of enthusiasts.
In effect, it is the productive labour of enthusiasts that (re)produces charisma and produces a machinic surplus value that can be extracted through the 'rationalization' of the culture. Something that has interested me is the way this labour of enthusiasm comes to be commodified, so there is a tendency for the labour of enthusiasts to be one purely based around that of the spectator (and reverse tendencies that produce anti-spectacles/antiproduction). Rationalization, the best examples would be a war economy or the complete auto-industry, seems to be more related to the production of a temporal series whereby contingency is factored into the enthusiastic production of machinic surplus value for capitalists and the enthusiastic reproduction of a structurating charisma for politicians. Or both...
Craig, I guess I should go back both to Negri on Weber, and to Weber himself (in whom I'm miserably ill-read).
Glen, ditto. Though do you think of charisma in the sense of auctoritas or "authority" à la Agamben? And you might have to unpack that final paragraph a little further.
I guess the shift from charisma or auctoritas could be conceieved in terms of rationalization. At first sight that makes sense.
In any case, the next step would seem to be to think the relation between constituent power (the "labour of enthusiasm") and authoritarian charisma as the means by which constituted power is secured, in and through the state of exception.
Again, my suspicion is that a return to the various syntheses of Anti-Oedipus would be handy.
Don't worry -- Economy & Society is only two volumes, of which the political sociology comprises roughly 60%. The secret with Weber, however, is that the good stuff is in the footnotes. Or at least most of it.
I'd be very interested to hear more about the "figure" and the "fictive link" with respect to Agamben and Auctoritas.
Amie, thanks for the encouragement. Have just embarked (so going backwards) on Homo Sacer, though I doubt I'll be done with it any time soon.
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