IV/3/A Antagonism

The emerging struggles of late capitalism, including fans' negotiations over compensation and ownership in the context of convergence, bear little resemblance to the class struggles of traditional Marxism. For what was once a revolutionary theory, the disintegration of any effective framework for mass resistance has been conspicuous, and today Marx's predictions that capitalism would inevitably collapse under the strain of its own contradictions ring hollow. Autonomist Marxism relocates resistance in the constitutive autonomy of the immaterial laborer, who works within collective networks and through subjective communication that cannot be fully rationalized or contained. We might envisage fan communities, for instance, in Negri's assurance that "during the course of capitalist development, there have always existed gaps -- partially in the sphere of circulation -- which are independent of direct capitalist control. In these gaps, certain use-values have been defined, and sometimes, communities which are rooted in such values have come into existence" (98). Today, workers' "antagonism which has never ceased to exist" (84) gathers new intensity "by virtue of the socialized worker's independence" and "capacity to reappropriate control of the labour process" (85). Moulier's introduction to Negri's book summarizes the fundamental doctrine of Autonomism, which harmonizes with other post-structuralist formulations of resistance from within: "On a theoretical level operaismo affirms the internal and structural limits of capitalism's capacity for integration. For operaismo in fact, the working class must certainly be within capital, but above all against it, otherwise capital could no longer function. Therefore the unilateral domination of capitalist control can never obtain. Subversion and revolution constitute a permanent possibility which lies at the very heart of the system" (25). This viewpoint is conceptually seductive, but suffers some of the same difficulties as Marx's original hypothesis, in that it seems to assume subversion as an automatic function of immaterial labor, with little attention to the specific praxis that might constitute cohesive antagonism as opposed to reincorporation. In his analysis of Lazzarato, Antonio Toscano suggests that the reconstitution of the idea of a general intellect "is in a sense an attempt to prolong the autonomist belief in the priority of productive or constructive resistance over its capture by the mechanisms of power and its reproduction, a way of thinking cooperation as prior to and relatively independent from capitalist self-valorization... it might be worth pausing to question the almost unbridled optimism of this thesis" (79). In answer to this provocation, I pause here to scrutinize the Autonomist concept of antagonism more closely.

I turn to Jason Read for the most trenchant and measured synthesis of this position, which effectively mediates between the optimistic and pessimistic poles of the Marxist continuum. Read opens with an acknowledgement that, today, "it is more and more clear that world is made and transformed by the immense productive powers of labor, which produce not only the wealth of objects but also the knowledge, affects, and desires that constitute the lived world, and yet capital's domination of the productive power seems to me more and more entrenched" (15). His book is an attempt to puzzle out this apparent contradiction between intensifying "subjectification" and "subjection," that is, "between the total subjection of sociality and subjectivity to capital and the concomitant development of a subjective and social power irreducible to abstract labor" (119). Read argues that we should understand the antagonism intrinsic to this contradiction not as a by-product of capitalist domination, but as the very productive force driving capitalist development toward real subsumption, as Marx chronicled in his account in Capital of the proletarian struggle to shorten the length of the working day. Following Marx, Read theorizes that "the technological and social transformations of the capitalist mode of production are neither the pure product of capitalism nor of resistance to capitalism but rather are formed by the antagonistic interplay of the competing strategies: capitalist strategies to expand surplus value and the workers' strategies to expand needs and desires" (111). He thus posits the coextensivity of expanding techniques of both domination and resistance as a defining characteristic of the capitalist system.

Our contemporary circumstances are no different, and "subjection too produces, or at least makes possible, its own resistances... The subjection/subjectification of living labor does not resolve the basic antagonism of living labor but, rather, displaces it" (144). Late capitalism brings an amplification of this dynamic, however, because "as real subsumption penetrates all social relations, it increasingly puts to work forms of social knowledge that it neither owns nor directly controls" (133). Building on the Autonomist assessment of today's configuration of immaterial laborers in the social factory, Read observes that, "in continually stressing the active participation of living labor and of cooperative networks" (149), industry "produces fixed capital not as machinery but in the subjectivity of the worker... [which] exists and is produced outside of the temporal and spatial control of the capitalist" (130). In other words, as subjection under capitalism escalates, so too does the capacity of subjectification to subvert and exceed its limits. Read's analysis doesn't solve the crisis of advanced Marxism by offering a coherent revolutionary program: his instantiation of resistance remains rather abstract. But we must acknowledge that his teleology is different from Marx's -- at issue is not the overthrow of capitalism, but collective interventions in its evolution that wrest control of greater degrees of freedom, creativity, and justice. By continuing to pry open the cracks in capitalism's containment of labor power, we can pressure capitalism to innovate toward increasing accommodation of autonomous subjectivities. The concept of antagonism frames laborers, including fans, as a collectivity whose desires are not commensurate with those of a corporate system, and this alone is a crucial corrective to the prevailing understanding of convergence culture.

At this point it may seem warranted to investigate another axis of antagonism that is often absent from studies of fan production, namely queer theories of political action. I view sexuality as integral to the femslash fandoms that I'm concerned with in this project, and admittedly, the aspiration to preserve such queer subcultures in the midst of transformations in our media economies animates my inquiry. Many scholars have analyzed the homonormativity at work in constituting the ideal gay (as opposed to queer) consumer for neoliberal capitalism, most notably Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, and mounting a critique of The L Word on this front is a worthy endeavor. Within a framework that claims subjectivity and collectivity as productive for capitalism, however, I am not convinced that queerness is the sine qua non of resistance, despite my own emphasis on the potential of open erotic fan communities. On the side of skepticism, Rosemary Hennessy conducts a trenchant indictment of a trend she calls "avant-garde queer theory," exemplified by such thinkers as Michael Warner, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Gayle Rubin, and David Halperin (54). In Profit and Pleasure, she positions this nexus as part of the intellectual heritage of a "pervasive ideological mandate to disconnect sexuality from capitalist production" (37) that has plagued Marxist thought since Engels's "historical inability to understand the role of domestic labor in capitalist production" (41) in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. This blind spot was exacerbated by psychoanalytic attempts to materialize sexuality, beginning with Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, who ultimately "contend that sexuality originates in innate instinctual drives... [so it] remains in fundamental ways outside the social order" (42). After "a short-lived but vital willingness to make use of Marxism as a critical framework to link sexual oppression to global capitalism" (45-46) on the part of the Gay Left in the 1970's was frustrated by "the intractable refusal of many of the existing socialist groups to meaningfully address sexuality" (49), the rise of cultural studies meant that the "retreat from Marxism and alternative rush to Foucauldian materialism virtually dominated the analysis of sexuality" (49). This paved the way for the maturation of queer theory in the 1990's which, following the early prominence of a "textual approach to identity as signification" (53), came of age with a turn to cultural materialism, most significantly by the "avant-garde" theorists listed above.

Hennessey makes a crucial distinction between these resolutely post-marxist cultural materialists and Marxist historical materialists: the former, while they may discuss capitalism and class relations, are finally "founding their conceptions of materiality only in symbolic processes [which] means that social struggle, or what they call antagonism, is anchored only in the sign" (61). This school of thought unfairly rejects the Marxist approach as necessarily totalizing, when in fact "historical materialism understands social life to be historically and materially produced through relations of labor... [but not] without the ways of making sense, normative practices (culture-ideology), and the laws (state organization) that are part of the material production of social life" (59). The danger of the cultural materialist orientation, according to Hennessy, is that its political program will amount to "a left sexual politics" that focuses on "civil rights within capitalism" (67). A case in point is that the "porous, gender-flexible, and playful subjects" celebrated by avant-garde queer theory are easily adapted to "postindustrial economies [that] increasingly require a high-tech systems management consciousness that knows that identity, like knowledge, is performative" (68). Given that "since the late nineteenth century the growth of consumer culture has depended on the formation and continual retooling of a desiring subject" (69), desire does not stand outside capitalism and ground resistance in and of itself. Instead of a politics of perversions, performance and polysemy, Hennessey calls for "a ruthless interruption of the often less visible relations of labor that have made use of dominant as well as counter-hegemonic sexual identities" (68). On this basis, I will set aside, for the purposes of this chapter, queer theory's analyses of how particular normative subjectivities (including heterosexuality and homosexuality) are constructed by capitalism in opposition to queer counterpublics, and ask rather how queer forms of desire sustain the economy of immaterial labor while also exceeding its bounds.

Kevin Floyd's work suggests one avenue for situating this virtual excess within the intrinsic contradictions of capitalism, while proposing (more magnanimously than Hennessy) a potential detente between Marxism and queer theory -- despite noting, once again, that the former has been notoriously insensate to issues of sexuality. While their theory is deeply involved with subjectivity and the economic role of reproductive labor, the Autonomists have hardly been an exception in this regard, despite interventions in the 1970s by important but largely peripheral Italian feminist Marxists Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Leopoldina Fortunati. In his book The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, Floyd argues that we could read recent developments in queer theory, characterized by intersectionality and a refusal to particularize and compartmentalize sexuality from other dimensions of cultural experience, as converging with Marxism on the basis of a shared concern with social totality. He posits that today, "the ever more complex internal differentiation of capitalist social relations, in particular a reification of sexual desire" (197) has paradoxically set the stage for new forms of "queer worldmaking," or, "the production of historically and socially situated, bounded totalities of queer praxis inherently critical of the ultimately global horizon of neoliberalized capital" (199). Floyd observes that political economists (including Harvey) describe capitalism as a system constantly troping toward crisis due to its "constant tendency to undermine the very institutional preconditions that ensure the prospects for additional accumulation" (34). Given this "fundamental social volatility that capital's objective contradictions consistently produce... socially broad, historically conditioned strategies [are] necessary to keep crisis at bay" (34). While Fordism, he claims, was "highly dependent on the corporate and governmental construction of a certain kind of social stability... the breakup of Fordism... makes accumulation increasingly dependent on social instability" (195). This instability can furnish the conditions of possibility for "socially subordinate, historically conditioned publics defined by critical practices and knowledges inseparable from the labor of sustaining these publics" (208). However, Floyd also sees in this transition a worrying "dispersal of a queer population... as part of a more general strategy of population dispersal, a strategy that has among its objectives neutralizing the forms of collective praxis of which such populations are capable, privatizing collectivity itself out of existence" (204). Now, Autonomist Marxism would assert precisely the opposite, emphasizing that late capitalism's labor regime requires communicative networks and autonomous collective action. Without necessarily embracing this optimism, queer Marxisms would benefit from an engagement with Autonomism's sophisticated account of subjectivity's intimate relation to capitalism, particularly its framing of antagonism as constitutive of this relation. Like queer desires, antagonism is situated inside the horizon of capitalism, and I propose that queer desires can in fact be an aspect of antagonism.