beasley-murray posthegemony

notas sobre la intro y conclusion de las versiones nuevas. va sin citas por inedito pero aca esta bastante.

Beasley Murray proposes to break equally with the concept of hegemony and civil society, and with this he makes a citic of cultural studies and the social studies of civil society. He proposes to rewrite the relation of the cultural with the political, and what is culture and politics, through the concepts of habit (Bourdieu), affect (Deleuze) and multitude (Hardt and Negri). The book critiques theory as well as it critiques the state, meaning, constituted power, trascendence, distance, closure, and many other (as for example the organizational dichotomies of subaltern/hegemony) as principles constituting the social, in this his critique is also situatited within the social, his study is not a better presentation of the world to then better act on it but is situated within, attempting to provide "constitutive" concepts.

The critique to hegemony is double, it is in a way temporal, as it is in the context of postmodernity that people seem to not be convinced of any elite conduction and by any grand narrative of ideologies, but is also transversal and terminant: "there is no hegemony an never has been". If critiques of post modernity agree in claiming that power has lost its location in the state, it has now diffused in the social, for him this is not an expansion of hegemony, but rather the consolidation of power as biopower as a control over the body, the "small" everyday and "private" actions.

By using this term cultural studies make a problematic sustitution: the state is taken for granted and replaced by (dominant) culture. The theory of civil society, by assuming a rational subject as agent, disregards culture and only focuses on politics. The critique to hegemony is over the work it does as a concept: it generates the "hegemony of hegemony" making and presenting the consensus as a need for society, and thus the state as necesary. Civil society takes a reasonable subject as its base (and of a mind that guides action), and thus the agreement of reasonable minds will derive into harmonious, non self destructive actions. Cultural studies take discrete identities at its base and thus understnads the social as articulations of equivalents in a chain of meaning. Both disregard the state as a construction of habit, and reinforce state's power by its interest in discursive regimes and transcendence. But he claims the social is not gathered by agreement -a contract whose grantor is the state- but rather by habit and affect.

By habit he follows Bourdieu, in his claim that social order is neither created by rule nor by consensus but rather through the internalization of a social world through the repetition of habit. Habit is embodied practice not pre-announced by conscious decision making but by a embodied knowledge of how to act. Habit is the structure of dispositions for actions, and is not mechanical reproduction nor automatous motion. Thus habit explains how the social is activated and recreated, and how the state is also embodied habit (in this he is close to Abrams but not exactly).

In introducing affect he follows Deleuze to focus on the inter/ impersonal and embodied flows that activate or decrease action. Affect is also in a different avenue than consciousness, discourse and emotion, all of the manifestation of the canalizing and capture of affect. Affect is also not restricted to the human, but is a capacity of any body/idea/configuration of affecting other bodies, and the capacity of them to being affected. The question is then about surfaces, contact and the possibilities of enhancing, diminishing transforming that affect rather than a question of interpelation, representation, resignification.

In taking the Negri's notion of the multitude he is simultaneously distancing of the ideals of popular democracies, that he claims would be the regime backed up by cultural studies, and of a civil society controlling the state, a model that is the bases of many political studies projects. The multitude is the subject constituting society, it is always prior to the state and any form of constituted power. It is like the working class to value, but in producing society, it generates it and then allienated form it (esto es una cita que no encuentro). Thus is feared by both state and the sovereign as this other that holds the power in which their dominium rests. The multitude is linked by affect and habit and thus is pre individual.
The multitude is also always open. It prevails as long as multiplicity of singularities remain acting as a single (composed) body, when the intensities and speeds are two different and the distance is such that what affects a body does not affect the others the multitude disolves, or dies as a body/subject. The multitude thus overflows the distinction of hegemony and subaltern, as it tends to the absolute by the constant expansion of limits. This expansion is done by contact rather than a contract, teh contract for him is what founds civil society by capturing the multitude and transforming it. Revolt, insurgency are part of the expanding force of the multitude who always betrays constitutive and the contract. The contract creates a separation and projects it as a natural distinction the people and the state, it creates the individual subject of law and frames it as a necessity for human and social, when in fact they capture and formalize affect and encode habit.

The multitude works over and results form what are common resources, the triggering of the common are love (as pleasure from an encounter with other, desire of togetherness), money (as an also fluid ubiquitous and connecting force), corruption (as a connecting expanding force that overmines established rules, unlike Negri for the author the question is wether it is self destructive or not). It is it continuously expanding and thus creates a continuous commonality.



Termino despues me falta recorrer rapidamente el analisis:
Latin America: requerimiento, peronism, sendero, salvador, chile, venezuela. Que loco estoy buscando la version final de esto y no lo encuentro estuve un par de dias rellenando esto con los distintos analisis y se perdio maldicion.
preguntas