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138 ▪ Chapter 6 to question not its merits but above all its finalization; in other words, its goal was to develop the production of knowledge for political organization rather than for the market. such a trajectory risked on the one hand to repropose, albeit in a completely unprecedented manner, the idea of a neutral science that it was sufficient to appropriate; on the other, the production of knowledge that was constitutively destined for the use of an external subject, the party or the union, reinforcing in this way the classic division of labor between the political and scientific spheres. Conricerca’s hypothesis, which clearly underlies its definition, is the potential for demolishing this separation: the production of knowledge is immediately the production of subjectivity and the construction of organization. The con prefix does not presuppose a submission to the pure empirical data, or much less to a voluntaristic lack of distinction between the interviewer and the interviewed in the name of an egalitarianism with populist flavor. instead, it alludes to the crisis of that division between intellectuals and political action that enervates the system of representation, in order to situate the problem of organization entirely within class composition. in other words, within a trajectory in which the positions of different singularities are not negated, but translated into a common process, the strength of which is measured by the capacity to destructure existing hierarchies. once again, horizontality and equality are what is at stake in a struggle. With respect to inquiry, the temporality with which the relationship between politics and knowledge, between organization and subjectivity , are all imagined changes. on this path, in fact, the science’s critique comes to a halt at the moment of its use, in the implicit acceptance of its intrinsic goodness spoiled by an “evil” destiny and therefore in need of recuperation in a future that is more or less near, in order to propose hic et nunc, within social cooperation, the problem of a radical alternative to its epistemological statute. in the practice of conricerca, the question of subjectivity is, in this way, materialistically posed beginning from the necessity to free ourselves from the idealistic implications of the classic problem of class consciousness, which it is the task of an external subject to reveal and develop. This has allowed “co-researchers” to read worker passivism neither as the definitive pacification of the factories, positions Brief Observations on Method ▪ 139 that were widely held by the institutions of the worker’s movement in the 1950s, nor as its irremediable integration within Western countries , according to the well-known thesis of the Frankfurt school, but rather as the refusal of labor and the estrangement from labor representation , as the hatred for rather than pride of their own condition. even the subtraction of themselves from struggles, in determinate situations, could be a form of struggle. This withdrawal, in turn, took on indecipherable or even monstrous features for the traditional socialist-communist conception of consciousness, including demands for “more money less work” rather than justice, practicing the irreducible partiality of their own perspective rather than taking on responsibility for the general interest. The universalist assumptions of the marxist tradition definitively died in the production of worker subjectivity within which conricerca was situated. This is where the relationship between technical composition and political composition was posed, outside of any deterministic implication of “base” and “superstructure.” in this sense, the supposedly specular relationship between capitalist cycle and the cycle of antagonistic subjectivity, the development of which was seen as tied to the linear maturation of a certain degree of consciousness, was broken. even if it is internal to the capital relation and its hierarchies, the emergence of political composition is formed in the “aleatory”—to use althusser’s terminology once again—encounter between location within the productive system, processes of subjectivation, and the capacity for antagonistic organization. For this reason the “mass worker” was a central figure of the struggles not due to any numerical dominance, but because he was the subject within which that aleatory encounter was concretely incarnated. in the light of the characteristics that have briefly been described here, it is useful to be clear that the criticism of the neutrality of science and of its universalist framework has been extended by “coresearchers ” in a direction that is radically different than that of the end of “grand narratives” announced by a vast literature on the postmodern. instituting a new relationship between theory and practice , one that is completely...

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