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April 30, 2004
There is a remark over at jahsonic.com about the Slovenian critic Slavoj Zizek, in Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, attacking what he sees as the "radical chic" Deleuzians (he names, among them, Hardt and Negri's Empire), arguing that such projects turn Deleuze into an ideologist of today's "digital capitalism."
Really? Or is this Zizek's particular take?
Hardt and Negri's text, Empire, is Deluezian in so far as it argues for "a decentred and deterritorialising apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers" (xii). This can be seen as a radicalised version of those current understandings of "globalisation", which refuse the traditional Marxist understandings of U.S. imperialism. Hardt and Negri's vision of a post-modernised global economy holds that no nation-state, even the U.S., can act as a centre for an imperialist project today.
Is this radicalization not an important shift? Does not this account promise to be an innovative analysis of the contemporary global order? With globalisation we are witnessing a ‘new imperialism’, but one that is not a repetitition of an old form of domination eg., the US assuming the place, for example, of nineteenth-century Britain. The new terrain is that the contemporary global condition represents a novel departure from the previous world order.
Why not interpret the process of globalization through a reading of Marx from perspective of Deleuzian and Foucaultian categories of thought? This would give us a notion of a postmodern global Empire: ‘a decentred and deterritorialising apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers’ (xii). This suggestion is that this universal form has emerged from the slow death of modernity, and that we now stand on the precarious edge of a postmodern epoch. So Empire is the form that the spatial and temporal organisation of capital is rapidly assuming.
That account makes sense so far does it?
If we think of this spatial and temporal organisation of capital in the neo-liberal terms of the competitive global market, then this new form of Empire cannot be reduced to state forms and their spatial projection. Nation states are losing their power to shape events: that is very clear from Australia's experience. And the global market can be conceptualized as a network of powers and counterpowers structured in terms of what people in the global financial institutions call an 'architecture’. The structures and logics of power of this order have no clear centre or boundary, even if there is a definite hierarchy (the G7?) with the US at the pinnacle.
Hence we have a new form of power, whose flows of money, ideas and internalised systems of representation, are spread throughout the international system without it being grounded territorial base or state forms of sovereignty.
Is this not a radical reworking of the neo-liberal understanding of the global marketplace? To give it a theoretical twist, the reworking can be interpreted as a categorical analysis in which the categories deployed by classical economics to explain the global market are developed and revised by Hardt and Negri. It is along the lines of what Marx did with classical political economy.
I think that we can put Slavoj Zizek's 'radical chic' to one side.
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