The French Commonwealth

The excellent website La Vie des Idées has just posted a review of Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth written by Stéphane Haber. The review is positive, but brief and aware of the difficulty of reviewing such a book briefly. It makes none the less some interesting points that I want to summarize here yet more briefly.

First, Haber notes the strong engagement with, or return to, what might be called the technical vocabulary of Marxism. Hardt and Negri find themselves in a moment somewhat different from that of Empire or Multitude, in which, “apparemment, il ne faut plus craindre le reproche traditionnel d’économicisme.” Their critique of capitalism is a communist critique. Haber’s summation of Hardt and Negri’s basic economic diagnosis of the contemporary world gets, I think, only half the picture. It is rightly pointed out that, somewhat problematically, Hardt and Negri put ‘immaterial production’ at the center of the contemporary economy. It seems to me that their analysis of the turn to rent, as opposed to surplus value, as a source of capitalist profit, is also of enormous importance. For them, the contemporary world is typified by capital’s tendency to capture the product of the common—the new enclosure. This is important not least because it suggests that we are, perhaps, on the way to (rather than in the midst of) a revolution in the mode of production.

Haber’s comments are organized into three fundamental thematics: production, the critique of capitalism, and the philosophy of poverty.

The essential objection in the realm of production is that, it seems, it tends to include potentially everything. What Haber calls Spinozist, and what I myself would call a Bergsonian, monism includes everything. This seems to bother Haber—I can’t say that it bothers me:

Le schème du travail, relayant le monisme spinoziste, permet ainsi de couper court aux tergiversations : le monde (y compris dans celles de ses composantes que nous sommes tentés de qualifier de « naturelles »), tout comme nous-mêmes, sommes toujours déjà pris dans le cercle de la production inventive et collective dont « nature » et « société » ne forment que des moments isolés par abstraction. Tout cela ne manque pas d’allure, philosophiquement parlant. Mais la question reste posée de savoir si un écologisme quelque peu articulé (ne serait-ce que sous la forme d’une préoccupation minimale pour le « développement durable »), en tant qu’inévitablement orienté en direction de la préservation d’un environnement existant, peut trouver son compte dans une telle élaboration. Il lui faudra bien, ouvertement ou en catimini, une ontologie qui ménage une place à ce qui vient avant le travail humain. Voilà qui symbolise sans doute la difficulté du parti-pris néoproductiviste, si immatérialisé soit-il.

If I understand Haber correctly—and things are compressed here, I am writing on the fly, so perhaps I do not—then it seems to me that he misses the whole force of refusing to partition ‘the natural’ from ‘the human.’ Radical ecology is not the recognition that we must protect mother nature, but rather the recognition that there is no mother nature, that we must regulate ourselves for ourselves—in fact, radical ecology is clearly a critique of capital or, better put, a critique of capital is radical ecology. The point is that nothing comes before human labor—this is precisely why it is so important to understand the limits internal to this labor and its social formations. David Harvey makes a similar point about the inclusion of ecology within the critique of capital in the new preface to his big book. This brings us to Haber’s next point.

Hardt and Negri conduct a rigorously immanent critique of capitalism. Haber finds it unusual: “Ce qu’il y a sans doute de plus étonnant dans leur livre, c’est le sérieux avec lequel Hardt et Negri prennent au pied de la lettre le mot d’ordre de la « critique immanente ».” So immanent is the critique, in fact, that it turns out not to be sufficiently critical for Haber of life as it is lived ‘under capitalism.’ What is wanted and not supplied is a treatment of alienation (as we would find in the Frankfurt school, or on the contemporary French left in so many places—the comité invisible, say).

Ainsi, le passage au communisme suppose non pas la réinvention de régulations (dans le style d’ATTAC) ou la promotion d’institutions économiques nouvelles (une position actuellement défendue par la social-démocratie associationniste), mais la libération des forces productives existantes qui, d’elles-mêmes, s’assumant elles-mêmes, se soustrayant au pseudo-soutien que leur offre le capital tel qu’il existe aujourd’hui (en fait une force de contrainte et de parasitage) sont censées pouvoir favoriser l’avènement de la société désirable.

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Hardt et Negri critiquent non pas l’autonomie aliénante du capitalisme comme « système » (inhumain, anonyme, poussé à l’autoreproduction élargie constante, délié de la volonté et de l’intelligence etc.), mais cet aspect bien particulier du capitalisme qu’est la privatisation, c’est-à-dire en fait la sous-utilisation, des richesses produites en commun, un « vol » qui est d’ailleurs aussi censé expliquer la misère des exclus.

Haber is put off by this lack. It seems to me to be one of the signal virtues of the book. Capitalism is productive, and not only of misery (which Hardt and Negri hardly ignore), but also of possibility and innovation (although that word has been co-opted by CAppleitism). Haber recognizes that this perspective connects Hardt and Negri to the Proudhonian tradition—this is a tradition that seems to me, in parts, salvageable.

Lastly, Haber recognizes that Commonwealth takes the human suffering inflicted by capital as its starting point. How is this done, how might it be done? After discussing several possibilities, Haber describes the one in which Hardt and Negri can be located:

Un intersubjectivisme participationniste. Ici, les conditions de vie décentes, non-misérables, sont considérées comme faisant partie des supports empiriques d’une délibération digne de ce nom. Présupposé dans ces approches, l’argument trivial selon lequel on n’est pas prêt à bien délibérer lorsque l’on est dans le besoin suffit à la fois à emporter la conviction et à orienter la discussion. L’idéal d’une participation démocratique inclusive et authentique y forme donc le point de vue à partir duquel les situations socioéconomiques concrètes se trouvent évaluées. Dans le champ contemporain, Habermas a fourni une légitimation influente de ce genre d’approches d’aspect plus républicaniste.

Republican is right. One might also describe this, nodding to Petit: ‘freedom as (collective?) non-domination.’ But, for Haber, problems arise because the authors of Commonwealth link this collective participation not necessarily to fundamental bare-life issues such as drinking water or rule of law, but rather to participation in bio-political production. This is indeed difficult. It seems to me here that, on the one hand, Hardt and Negri are being faithful to a certain relativism in Marx, one that might be shorthanded as ‘time socially necessary.’ On the other hand, it is unjust to first admit that the authors begin with the problem of human misery, and then object when they subtract misery as such from the solution to the problem. This may be related to Haber’s relative discounting of the shift from a regime in which profit is based on the extraction of surplus value to one in which it rests on rent. It is not, it seems to me, empirically unrealistic to say—with many ‘official economists’—that poverty is the result of not-enough globalization. This ‘not-enough’ is required by capital. Remove it, and you allow the fruits of production to be distributed in a more egalitarian way.

Haber’s review, I think, hits many of the right points. Its incompleteness should be ascribed to its length rather than anything else. The final word of the review is positive and, it seems to me, rightly points out that the most appealing aspect of Hardt and Negri’s work is the attempt to grapple with the empirical reality of new economic formations in a critical and even revolutionary philosophical mode. The clear (although unnamed) foil here is Badiou. I’ll reproduce the last lines:

Les difficultés de la position défendue par Hardt et Negri forment la contrepartie de leur façon nette et décidée de répondre à cette exigence, et c’est pour cela que, sûrement, elle jouera à juste titre un rôle important dans la discussion contemporaine. Ne serait-ce que parce que, en ce qu’elle a de plus intéressante pour nous, l’impulsion marxienne a plus de chance de survivre dans une tentative sincère pour concevoir les transformations du travail et de l’exploitation que dans une quelconque spéculation déliée sur l’essence du Communisme comme Exigence pure.

A universal yet disinterested sympathy

In the preface to Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri define for us several of their key concepts. First of all, the common. It is most obviously ‘natural’ resources (such as air), but is “also and more significantly those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth” (viii). It will be argued that contemporary forms of capitalism are caught in a trap: they rely on the common, but are able to generate profit only by capturing—privatizing—the common and thereby destroying its productive capacities. Ultimately, it will be argued, this most recent cycle of capitalist accumulation has little to do with the production of wealth, and more with the seizing of previously common wealth, something like a new enclosure. What do we call this new regime of production over which capital is struggling so paradoxically to retain control? It is the biopolitical. The authors say that, “the ultimate core of biopolitical production…is not the production of objects for subjects as commodity production is often understood, but the production of subjectivity itself” (x). Biopower is what the authors call the control that capital attempts to exert over this new form of production. New or renewed concepts will be required, the authors say, to understand the new situation. They identify at the outset the two central such concepts: poverty and love. Many more concepts will be added to these by the end of the book, in particular Spinoza’s conception of joy, but corruption is mobilized as an idea with philosophical content, and in the very last pages of the book we find a particularly grisly figuring of revolutionary laughter.

The authors have, in the past, been accused of idealistic (in a non-technical sense) messianism. They take a more ‘realist’ tone here, saying, “we…believe that…intellectual force is required to overcome dogmatism and nihilism, but we insist on the need to complement it with physical force and political action. Love needs force to conquer the ruling powers and dismantle their corrupt institutions before it can create a new world of common wealth” (xii). The issue of force and violence is treated relatively openly by Hardt and Negri. In essence, their position is that the multitude must withdraw from capital, and that this act of force will doubtless require the support of violence, just as—and they return to this example more than once—the Jews could not leave Egypt without some violence, the Pharaoh would not let them go. How, then, do they define this multitude that must perform an exodus from capital? They say, “the multitude is a set of singularities that poverty and love compose in the reproduction of the common” (xii-xiii). The multitude has as yet only a shadowy existence. It is, on the one hand, the economic foundation of the current structure of capital—but on the other hand, it does not yet exist as a political form. The project of this book, then, after Empire and Multitude, is to articulate the “political construction of the multitude with Empire” as an “ethical project” (xii). The authors are fully engaged in the Leninist critique of revolutionary thought that fails to think the transition between present possibilities and the future. They say, “the becoming-Prince of the multitude is a project that relies entirely on the immanence of decision making within the multitude. We will have to discover the passage from revolt to revolutionary institution that the multitude can set in motion” (xiii).

Such an ambitious project might be vulnerable in many ways. I expect to be thinking about it for some time to come. For now, on the heels of my reading, I have a few questions, or challenges.

It is crucial for Hardt and Negri’s argument that the biopolitical economy does not suffer from scarcity. Industrial production, on the other hand, was ruled by scarcity. What does scarcity mean? Here it refers not so much to the problem of ‘not enough,’ but rather to the fact that something owned by one person cannot be owned by another. This is to say that while scarcity certainly can mean the absolute dearth of, for instance, food, it also refers to a whole system of ownership. The industrial economy is ruled by prices, which are determined, at least in theory, by supply and demand—scarcity. The biopolitical economy, for Hardt and Negri, is in a sense defined by the tendency towards immaterial production. Immaterial products, unlike cars, can be in principle enjoyed by an unlimited number of people. A television show, once produced, is infinitely repeatable and distributable. This means, for Hardt and Negri, that the biopolitical economy is essentially an economy of the common—a concept that replaces the bourgeois/capitalist notion of a division between public and private. Various pieces of empirical evidence are brought in at this point, for instance the increasing reliance of economic value on ‘externalities,’ paradigmatically in real-estate.

Biopolitical production, enabled, we might say, by the trend in the direction of the immaterial, is centrally defined by the production of subjectivities. I would like to understand better the relation between these immaterial products and subjectivities. Subjectivity is, in a certain sense, an immaterial product. But there are other immaterial products that may be, in the hands of a bricoleur, turned into subjectivities. Biopolitical production draws on and expands the common. Yet, I wonder if we might not find a logic of scarcity at work in the production of subjectivities through the common as well. Contrary to the Jeffersonian image (the flame of my candle is not diminished when you use it to light your candle), it seems to me that subjectivities, in as much as they are conceived as identities, are necessarily exclusionary. In the game of identity, this is to say, my candle (or really, our candles) signifies less if you have one as well.

This objection may be a failure of revolutionary imagination on my part. Certainly, Hardt and Negri discuss the various traps into which identity politics falls. Chapter 6.1, “Revolutionary Parallelism” is a wonderfully lucid exposition of how to differentiate the essentially parallel revolutionary identity politics from the many competing non-revolutionary identity politics. The goal is to get beyond the “frequent embarrassment that accompanies reproducing the catalogue race, class, gender, sexuality, and so forth. (The ‘and so forth’ is especially embarrassing)” (343). In essence, the distinction is that identity politics is bad when it in the end only re-enforces the identity around which it organizes. It is good (revolutionary) when its practice and goal are the dissolution of that identity. The paradigm here is obviously the proletariat, supposedly the only class that makes revolution in order to eliminate itself. For Hardt and Negri (specifically against Zizek), it is patently obvious that certain kinds of feminism, for instance, also seek to dissolve the category of woman, and are therefore revolutionary. The distinction here would be between the essentializing practice of certain feminisms, (although Hardt and Negri don’t mention it, we could say Cixous’ écriture feminine) and the destabilization practiced by queer theory (they do give us the positive example: Butler). Hardt and Negri find a similar division between essentializing black nationalisms and those forms of black radicalism that ultimately transcend these racial categories. Fanon, for instance, rather than simply affirming the blackness that has been denigrated, sees that in the end it will be necessary to destroy both whiteness and blackness. This whole chapter, in my view, is both brilliant and entirely correct.

So what am I doing talking about exclusionary identities? In the context of queer theory, we get the quote from the Anti-Oedipus: not 2 sexes, not 0 sexes, but n sexes. All that I am saying is that even in a world with n sexes, there is no reason to think that it will not be possible to make a commodity out of each singularity in the multitude, thereby reintroducing the logic of scarcity into what had been the paradise of the common. No doubt this objection springs from a smearing-together of important distinctions, or a misunderstanding of the goal. Perhaps the authors would simply shrug—the point isn’t that everything will be perfect, but rather that the problems will be new. Does it even make sense to speak of the commodity in the era of biopolitical production? I see no reason why we can’t, although the concept would need some elaboration in order to be applied to subjectivities—no doubt this work has already, somewhere, been done.

Commonwealth is an enormous and lucid synthesis not only of post-Revolutionary social thought, but also of the last two generations of academic critical theory. Together with Empire and Multitude, we have on our hands a thoroughgoing attempt to renew the empirical, philosophical, and political gambit of Marxism. This trilogy is not a philosophical treatise, nor a political program, nor a study of economic morphology. It is certainly also not a ‘theoretical intervention.’ Indeed, what I admire most about this body of work is precisely the fact that it dares to be empirico-political rather than simply theoretical and philosophical—this is what connects it to Marx and the best tradition of theoretical political writing. I mean by this that the authors begin with a given conceptual framework, and critique and expand these concepts, replacing them as necessary, with resources drawn not only from the observed world, but from what they judge to be the edge of the world in its becoming. This is a fancy way of saying that the authors have examined the evidence and made a bet about the direction in which it is pointing, and staked themselves philosophically and politically on this judgment. It seems to me that the language of wager is appropriate here in a way that it generally is not in situations that are primarily philosophical, empirical, or political.

It would be very interesting to look at Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth as a trajectory. For one thing, Commonwealth opens with a round denunciation of the contemporary obsession with sovereignty, an obsession that, it seems to me, has a great deal to do with the analysis of sovereignty undertaken in Empire. If this first book was, perhaps justly, criticized for being messianic about revolution, the same cannot, or ought not, be said of Commonwealth. We have there a remarkably clear and honest gaze into the abyss of revolutionary violence. I am even surprised that the authors were as willing to condone violence as they seem to be. The last sentence of the book is “they will be buried by laughter.” This, together with the image of the apocalyptic Exodus, is strong stuff. Similarly, the reintroduction of corruption as a meaningful category is slightly alarming. It is none the less necessary, because it allows the authors to provide guidelines for distinguishing between good and bad forms of the common—the movement of their thought here is in many ways parallel to Alain Badiou’s ‘negative’ account of evil. This parallelism, together with a renewed attention to the evental nature of revolutionary action is something that I believe was missing from Empire. Verifying this, and examining the ways in which the geopolitical changes since the era of Empire (although Commonwealth argues that no major structural changes have in fact taken place in that time) have changed the authors’ conception of the world, would I think be instructive. These, though, are projects I can’t undertake at the moment.

Echoes of Bergson

Biopolitics, in contrast to biopower, has the character of an event first of all in the sense that the “intransigence of freedom” disrupts the normative system. The biopolitical event comes from the outside insofar as it ruptures the continuity of history and the existing order, but it should be understood not only negatively, as rupture, but also as innovation, which emerges, so to speak, from the inside. Foucault grasps the creative character of the event in his earlier work on linguistics: la parole intervenes in and disrupts la langue as an event that also extends beyond it as a moment of linguistic invention. For the biopolitical context, though, we need to understand the event on not only the linguistic and epistemological but also the anthropological and ontological terrain, as an act of freedom. In this context the event marked by the innovative disruption of la parole beyond la langue translates to an intervention in the field of subjectivity, with its accumulation of norms and modes of life, by a force of subjectification, a new production of subjectivity. This irrpution of the biopolitical event is the source of innovation and also the criterion of truth. A materialist teleology, that is, a conception of history that emerges from below guided by the desires of those who make it and their search for freedom, connects here, paradoxically, with a Nietzschean idea of eternal return. The singularity of the event, driven by the will to power, demonstrates the truth of the eternal; the event, and the subjectivity that animates it, constructs and gives meaning to history, displacing any notion of history as a linear progression defined by determinate causes. Grasping this relation between the event and truth allows us to cast aside the accusation of relativism that is too often lodged against Foucault’s biopolitics. And recognizing biopolitics as an event allows us both to understand life as a fabric woven by constitutive actions and to comprehend time in terms of strategy.

Foucault’s notion of the event is at this point easily distinguishable from the one proposed by Alain Badiou. Badiou has done a great service by posing the event as the central question of contemporary philosophy, proposing it as the locus of truth. The event, with its irreducible multiplicity, that is, its “equivocal” nature subtracts, according to Badiou, the examination of truths from the mere form of judgment. The difference between Badiou and Foucault in this respect is most clearly revealed by looking at where, temporally, each author focuses attention with respect to the event. In Badiou an event—such as Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, the French Revolution, or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, to cite his most frequent examples—acquires value and meaning primarily after it takes place. He thus concentrates on the intervention that retrospectively gives meaning to the event and the fidelity and generic procedures that continually refer to it. Foucault, in contrast, emphasizes the production and productivity of the event, which requires a forward- rather than backward-looking gaze. The event is, so to speak, inside existence and the strategies that traverse it. What Badiou’s approach to the event fails to grasp, in other words, is the link between freedom and power that Foucault emphasizes from within the event. A retrospective approach to the event in fact does not give us access to the rationality of insurrectional activity, which must strive within the historical process to create revolutionary events and break from the dominant political subjectivities. Without the internal logic of making events, one can only affirm them from the outside as a matter of faith repeating the paradox commonly attributed to Tertullian, credo quia absurdum, “I believe because it is absurd.”

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth [2009], pgs 59-61.

These are two paragraphs, about a one and a half pages, from Hardt and Negri’s new book. I read Empire a few months ago, and have just run through Multitude, and begun on this. This particular passage is from the “concluding discussion” of the first part of the book. The section generally is concerned to elaborate the authors’ reading of Foucault, in particular the distinction between biopower and biopolitics that they believe Foucault ultimately makes, even if his usage doesn’t reflect it. Biopower is the power to ‘make live’ that Foucault spent much of the 1970s discussing. Biopolitics is the resistance to this power. But, as this passage makes plain, it is more than that. I wonder to what purpose the authors have decided to enter into a discussion of the event. Although one would need more textual support (and perhaps this will be clearer when I have read the next 300 pages of the book), it seems to me that this is a turn back to Bergson. Biopolitics is the counter to biopower in the same way that the élan vital is a counter to simple matière. The first is innovation and freedom (literally) incarnate, while the second is predictability and fatality. I paused over this because they criticize Badiou for what I found the single most compelling schema presented in Being and Event. Subjectivity as fidelity to an event is interesting only because the event is past, and the conflict—and for Badiou this conflict is legitimate—is over what it means to practice fidelity to this event. This conflict is what constitutes the event as an event. It is wrong to say, as Hardt and Negri do, that meaning is given to the event retrospectively. It seems to me that the event exists only retrospectively. Hardt and Negri seek to avoid relativism. I applaud Badiou most for what is in fact a courageous head-on admission of a certain kind of relativism. Oddly for an engagé (but perhaps not for a Sartrean engagé), Badiou’s relativism is political—ontic—while his metaphysics, his ontology, are not relativistic. Hardt and Negri base their politics in the same way, it seems to me, that Marx did. They have performed an empirical analysis of the world, guided by a certain critical-philosophical perspective, and made a judgment about what the past and contemporary world means will happen in the future. There is great value in this. But it is not what Badiou is about. Certainly Badiou does not grasp the link between freedom and power, but Badiou at no point, as far as I know, even attempts such an analysis. In my no doubt partial and impoverished reading, Badiou has provided us with a way to think about the nature of the subjectivities to which some people still aspire, although they often are not able to explain why.

Again, it seems to me that Hardt and Negri have reproduced here (and perhaps more broadly) the conceptual scheme Bergson presents in which, in a sense, freedom is the force that rises against the falling force of material. The forms of life, constantly diversifying, are like the spray of a fountain, always reaching up. Except that Hardt and Negri do not see a contradiction, as Bergson so clearly did, between the radical freedom of the élan vital (the biopolitics of the multitude) and any kind of rationality. Perhaps, for Hardt and Negri, the material against which life moves is already cracked and grooved in ways that make it possible to predict to some extent the form that new subjectivities will take as they break it apart. It might be that this cracking-apart constitutes a biopolitical event; and certainly their perspective on it differs from Badiou’s. I would, myself, call Hardt and Negri’s approach historical and objectivist in a way that Badiou’s is not. But I do not see the contradiction suggested by these paragraphs between the two ways of thinking. This is perhaps because of how broadly Hardt and Negri are using the term ‘event,’ and how muddled may be my recollections of Badiou. I will end recklessly: Hardt and Negri must accuse Badiou’s event of constituting a credo quia absurdum because their perspective of immanence does not allow what seems to me one of Badiou’s basic principles: we are always outside ourselves.

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.

Negri

Negri, Antonio. "Art and Culture in the Age of Empire and the Time of the Multitudes," SubStance, vol 36, no 1, 2007.

Having read neither Empire nor Multitude, nor anything else Antonio Negri ever wrote, I am not well placed to take much away from this little text, published in English only last year (2007).

I am, I hope, slowly developing a personal ‘historical sense’—otherwise said, self-knowledge. This article has the taste of something that at first I think is gassy, at once too obvious and too subtle, but that later I come to appreciate. We’ll see.

The degree to which Negri relies on conceptual forms that I identify most strongly with Leibniz (monads) and Spinoza (materialist monism, something like this) is remarkable. I understand this to be a desire to return to some kind of pre-Kantian, (and therefore pre-Hegelian?) world. Although I’m not sure, I think this is best described as being a Deleuzian world-view. Parts of it strike me as foolish, in this case the description of globalization as an elimination of the ‘outside’ (point 5). Negri seems to be suggesting that the role of the artist in the contemporary configuration (situation)—or, rather, what constitutes art—has to do with reconstructing the larger world from within the body, through flesh, itself. The argument seems to be that since we can’t go out any longer, we can only go in. The premise is wrong, in my opinion, but even given the premise, the conclusion isn’t terribly inventive. No doubt I misunderstand. The most sensible, or comprehensible to me, possibility that he invokes is that of “engaging in politics by leading all the elements of life back to a poetic reconstruction” (point 6, pg 54). And this sounds to me very like Rancière, who himself sounds not unlike certain versions of Rorty.

No doubt I’ve much misunderstood Negri. I have a copy of Multitude, and perhaps soon I’ll read it.