Finishing Empire

My reading of Empire is in fact something like timely. In the fall, perhaps in October, Commonwealth, the third volume in what I suppose to be a trilogy, will be published. Good to start at the beginning.

The project of the book is to delineate and argue for a particular reading of the contemporary world. Hardt and Negri argue that we have entered a phase of history they call Empire (conceptually related to previous Empires, such as the Roman Empire, but rigorously distinguished from 19th century European imperialism). The goal is to understand the particular logic of this phase in the development of capital in order to understand how it may be resisted, and where alternatives should and should not be sought. The book is organized into four parts. The first part is an introductory clearing of the ground, and presentation of the problematic, the concepts. The middle sections present, from two different angles, an interpretation of modernity and its transformation into Empire. The second section is something like an intellectual history of the idea of sovereignty from the early modern period through to the present day; the third section tells the same story from the perspective of the means and relations of production. The backstory told, the interpretive framework set up, the final section is an analysis of Empire itself. I found the last section to be written in quite a different voice from the rest of the book. Oddly more abstract, unsurprisingly more messianic. Significantly more difficult to read.

The book is enormously rich, and intervenes in any number of debates and bodies of scholarship. I plan to look over some of the reactions to and reviews of the book in the next week. At that stage, I may present some more specific arguments. At the moment, I want only to record the questions, or miniature research projects, that I want to pose and propose to and of this text.

From the perspective of late 19th century Marxism, I find the voluntarism of the text extraordinary. For Hardt and Negri, the driving force for structural innovation in capital is not competition between capitalists, as I have understood it to be for Marx, but rather resistance to capital mounted by the proletariat. This perspective—in which worker resistance is what changes the system—is of course more congenial in the 21st century. It is also, in certain respects, closer to the facts. Hardt and Negri mention the slow end of the Caribbean slave system, pointing to arguments that slavery was not abolished when it ceased to be profitable, but rather long after it had ceased to be profitable, when the tempo and tenacity of slave rebellion made it impossible to sustain. It might be pointed out that by the middle of the 19th century the slave system was no longer central to the global economy in the way that it arguably was in the 18th century. This argument about the structural changes in the capital (and, importantly, in the constitution of sovereignty) is made largely in terms of basic metaphysics and broad periodization, rather than with specific examples. Can finance capital in the 1980s really be explained by the broad rejectionism of the 1960s? From Vietnam to Berkeley? Perhaps. If I knew the Marxist tradition better, I would understand, I think, the stakes of what I call Hardt and Negri’s voluntarism. My sense is that it is a position fundamental to certain strains of Italian Marxism with which I am not familiar. It meshes well also, it seems, with the Deleuzian anti-structuralism and anti-formalism of the authors.

Biopower is a crucial concept in Empire. Having recently read Foucault’s later lectures, I am curious about the compatibility between Hardt and Negri’s account of the contemporary world and Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism. It is possible that they are simply tangential to one another. It might be argued that Empire is simply an exaggerated and developed form of the market ideology that so interested Foucault. It would, at any rate, be interesting to take careful note of how Hardt and Negri use Foucault. My sense is that they are using his work as something of a bridge between Marx and Deleuze. Indeed, in the preface, they say that Empire was inspired by two large, interdisciplinary books: Capital and Thousand Plateaus. It seems to me that the historical transformations they chronicle from modernity to postmodernity might also be that from Marx to Deleuze.

It is crucially important for Hardt and Negri’s analysis of the contemporary world that the relationship between Multitude and Empire is not mediated. The center may be reached from any point, because the center is not geographically located. There is no mediation because there are no levels between which mediation would be necessary. Everything is mixed into a smooth geometrical soup. Or at least tends to be. For me, this raises the question of the unity of the Multitude. It seems that for Hardt and Negri, every division within the Multitude (into nations or peoples or even, perhaps, classes), is a pernicious tactic of the corruption of Empire. So, indeed, is any attempt to assert a unity of all people beyond the singularity of Multitude. Yet the task for the Multitude is to assert itself as political subject. No doubt political subjecthood does not exactly require unity in any pre-poststructuralist sense, but I’m not sure that I understand how all this is supposed to work.

Finally, I was struck by the use, in the concluding section of the book in which something like concrete possible demands of the Multitude are suggested, by the use of the language of rights. Hardt and Negri clearly have a somewhat tortured relation to the so-called republican tradition. They are not definitive in their use of such words—several times they talk about postmodern republicanism, but eventually claim that the latin verb posse is to be preferred to res-publica as a description of the victory of Multitude. (If their most recent book is to be titled Commonwealth, perhaps they’ve reconsidered this). Yet it seems to me that Arendt’s observation that human rights are nothing without citizenship is applicable here. Isn’t Empire’s conception of global citizenship caught in just the same exclusionary bind as any other form of citizenship—that is, doesn’t it also implicitly exclude from humanity all those not included within Multitude? And this in a more radical way than simple nations? Is the creative being of Multitude supposed to solve this problem?

Very likely, this and other questions will be addressed in the next volume. It will also be interesting to see how well my impression of this book tallies with that of the professional reviews.

Starting Empire

Reading Hardt and Negri’s Empire now, a decade after it was written, is an oddly comforting experience. The vocabulary and movement of the text are reassuring. It is as though I have found the common ancestor who explains an otherwise troubling similarity between several of my casual acquaintances. I now understand better, for instance, the motive for extravagant attention paid to Carl Schmitt and the late Foucault’s analysis of liberalism.

Having only just started the book, I want to withhold comment. I want to note only one striking thing. At a certain point (60ff), wrapping up what I understand to be a long introduction to the rest of the book, the authors evoke the Austro-Hungarian double-headed eagle in order to suggest that the symbol of contemporary Empire should be a similar eagle, but with the heads facing one another in combat, rather than away from one another in peace as in the model. Multitude and Empire, locked in combat, really part of the same body. This may be regarded either as an expressive metaphor or, correctly it seems to me, as a violation of the principle of immanence loudly espoused earlier in the text. How, I want to ask, can Empire be both “parasitical” and “immanent”? This makes me think of my basic objection to a no doubt poorly-understood Marxist labor theory of value. Why doesn’t everything count as labor? Marx had his reasons. Do Hardt and Negri introduce this binary for political reasons? It does not seem to me that it can have, from their perspective, ontological status—or rather, it seems that elsewhere in their text it does not have ontological status.

Might they respond that on one level, Empire is coextensive with multitude, but that on another level or in another sense, precisely the ontological one, multitude is prior and Empire is parasitical? Perhaps, however, I am not reading them right. They say, “philosophy is not the owl of Minerva that takes flight after history has been realized in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to the event” (48-49). One might say that the text itself desires to render Empire known and therefore parasitical.

I intend to post further comments on this book later, and possibly also its companion volume.

Cold War Modern

Some months ago I saw the exhibit “Cold War Modern” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I see now that the relatively new journal Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History has published a review of this exhibit. The basic argument of the brief text is that the exhibit, despite its critical and popular success, makes a basic historical and ideological error. It emphasizes the parallelisms between East and West during the period from the end of the Second World War up through some time in the middle 1970s. This period, called the Cold War, is presented as having been something like a close race toward an open-but-common modernity. East and West both, the exhibit shows us, deployed beautiful design in order to claim modernity for themselves. This is wrong on one level because the design that we see on the Western side (the first model of the Vespa scooter, for instance) actually entered into daily life, while the design we see on the Eastern side (the sketch for a never-built apartment building in Moscow) existed only in show-rooms. Both did serve propaganda purposes, but it is a gross historical error to say that they had the same content. Further, the very concept of the Cold War is a western one. The words and the idea were important and in common use in the West all through the period—nothing like this existed in the East. The reviewer concludes that the positive reception the exhibit has received in what used to be the East is evidence that the western metanarrative (or, as the author of the review prefers, communicative memory) of the Cold War is winning out even in the old East.

As is perhaps evident from the uncomfortable capitalization in the above paragraph of ‘East’ and ‘West’ and ‘western’ and ‘eastern,’ the narrativization of the Cold War is a very delicate thing. It is very easy to forget where ideas come from, and just which imagined realities they express. I don’t think that the reviewer—Dr. Muriel Blaive—is wrong, as far as her argument goes. But, I must say that I did not experience the ideological content of the show in quite the same way. I’ve got to go on my memory here, which is much less reliable than her treatment of the catalogue. Still, it seems to me that the point of the show was perhaps less real parallelism than a race for it, and the, in a certain light, very remarkable degree to which it in fact existed. At many points, it was possible to see just how far apart the two ‘modern’s were. For instance, I recall a treatment of two peace memorials, one on the west side and one on the east. The communist memorial was socialist-realist: strong-jawed and rugged (but clean) soldiers of the Red Army, standing in a heroic pose—I’m certain that one of them had a broadsword. The capitalist (I’ve no choice if I called the other one communist) memorial was never built, but the plans were for a Giacometti-type sculpture of wires that look as though they were once human and retain of their humanity only pain. Interestingly, neither memorial fit especially into the aesthetic of the ‘modern’ so nicely paralleled in the front room of the show.

Blaive’s point about the struggle over the memory of the postwar period is not at issue. Inasmuch as I am entitled to an opinion (which I am not), she seems to me correct. But I will say that she rushes rather too quickly past the ruptures and failures of parallelism in “Cold War Modern” in her desire to find an ideologically compromised history. Just as a work of art, it has no doubt been said, rewards close attention to its flaws as well as its perfections, it seems to me that the show in question should not be judged too quickly. Or even, if it comes to that, on the basis of what the curators say about it.