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Empire: corporations

Hardt and Negri continue. They say that the international institutions represent the old institutional framework that contributes to the formation and education of the administrative personnel of the imperial machine, the "dressage" of a new imperial elite. The shapers of biopolitical and economic reality are the transnational corporations.

"The huge transnational corporations construct the fundamental connective fabric of the biopolitical world in certain important respects. Capital has indeed always been organized with a view toward the entire global sphere, but only in the second half of the twentieth century did multinational and transnational industrial and financial corporations really begin to structure global territories biopolitically. .....The activities of corporations are no longer defined by the imposition of abstract command and the organization of simple theft and unequal exchange. Rather, they directly structure and articulate territories and populations. They tend to make nationstates merely instruments to record the flows of the commodities, monies, and populations that they set in motion. The transnational corporations directly distribute labor power over various markets, functionally allocate resources, and organize hierarchically the various sectors of world production. The complex apparatus that selects investments and directs financial and monetary maneuvers determines the new geography of the world market, or really the new biopolitical structuring of the world."

The corporations produce not only commodities but also subjectivities within the biopolitical context: they produce needs, social relations, bodies, and minds-which is to say, they produce producers. In the biopolitical sphere, life is made to work for production and production is made to work for life. The interlinking assemblages of interactive relationships can be seen in the communications industries:

"Communication not only expresses but also organizes the movement of globalization. It organizes the movement by multiplying and structuring interconnections through networks. It expresses the movement and controls the sense and direction of the imaginary that runs throughout these communicative connections; in other words, the imaginary is guided and channeled within the communicative machine.... [The reason why the] communications industries have assumed such a central position. They not only organize production on a new scale and impose a new structure adequate to global space, but also make its justification immanent. Power, as it produces, organizes; as it organizes, it speaks and expresses itself as authority."

They say that it is at this point that we can address the question of the legitimation of the new world order. The legitimation of the imperial machine is born at least in part of the communications industries, that is, of the transformation of the new mode of production into a machine. It is a subject that produces its own image of authority. This is a form of legitimation that rests on nothing outside itself and is reproposed ceaselessly by developing its own languages of self-validation.

Empire: Corporations

As have seen, Hardt and Negri's exploring of the sovereign power that governs the present-day world as the political form of capitalist globalisation takes them beyond the juridical perspective to analyzing the transformation of the paradigm of rule from the perspective of biopolitical production.

By this they mean ‘the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another’. As we have seen they utilise both Foucault’s concept of the society of control, and Foucault’s insights into the nature of biopower (i.e. a ‘form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it').

Many would throw up their hands by now. They would have waded
ed resolutely through a woefully obscurantist pseudo-philosophical obstacle course bristling with jargon. Hardt and Negri have little to say, they
would conclude

Hardt and Negri now shift from the production of life to considering corporations and communication. In this subsection they displace a liberal internationalism that focuses on international institutions of governance:

"In asking ourselves how the political and sovereign elements of the imperial machine come to be constituted, we find that there is no need to limit our analysis to or even focus it on the established supranational regulatory institutions. The U.N. organizations, along with the great multi- and transnational finance and trade agencies (the IMF, the World Bank, the GATT, and so forth), all become relevant in the perspective of the supranational juridical constitution only when they are considered within the dynamic of the biopolitical production of world order. The function they had in the old international order, we should emphasize, is not what now gives legitimacy to these organizations. What legitimates them now is rather their newly possible function in the symbology of the imperial order. Outside of the new framework, these institutions are ineffectual. At best, the old institutional framework contributes to the formation and education of the administrative personnel of the imperial machine, the "dressage" of a new imperial elite."

Ther is somethning here. Recall the debates over the Iraq war between the unilateralists and those who favoured the United Nations. The UN was the touchstone for many, including philosophy.com, of the supranational juridical constitution.

Empire: biopolitical production

In Empire Hardt and Negri understand their task to be one of building on:

"...these partially successful attempts to recognize the potential of biopolitical production. Precisely by bringing together coherently the different defining characteristics of the biopolitical context that we have described up to this point, and leading them back to the ontology of production, we will be able to identify the new figure of the collective biopolitical body, which may nonetheless remain as contradictory as it is paradoxical."

It is a mouthful, isn't it. You can see why there is a concern about the process of "assemblage", or the technique of ripping conceptual ideas away from their historical contexts.

I guess the "potential of biopolitical production points to the way that the new form of global sovereignty, which knows mobile boundaries, undercuts, the concept of the people as representation and as unity within the nation state. We have to rethink the way that we conceptualize "the people" as a population within a nation state.

This re-conceptualization takes us beyond economics with its inter-capitalistic competition that results in overcapacity and overproduction, unemployment and de-industrialization combined with the global market's inability to self-govern then we have something along the lines of a perpetual crisis in the global economy. If we accept that account (eg., Robert Brenner’s “The Economics of Global Turbulence” in New Left Review, 1998), then we need to consider the inherent social implications of the free capital flows of the global capitalist system operating in an essentially unplanned, uncoordinated and ruthlessly competitive manner.

This takes us beyond the economic focused approaches to global governance based around capital flows and the Anglo-Saxon versus Asian capitalism of a Robert Wade.

The social implications---massive dislocation, unemployment, poverty and suburban wastelands---within nation states need to be politically managed. So the biopolitical context becomes important, if not crucial. It refers to the management or governance of our subjectivity. That is what neo-liberalism, as a mode of governance, has been doing. This mode of governance has being shaping us so that we leave the world of citizenship and social democracy behind, and enter the turbulent world of the global market as consumers and producers.

What is being developed here in Empire is a theoretical framework relevant to the current period of global neo-liberalism and international capitalism.

Empire: Deleuze & desire

If we go along with Hardt and Negri's claim that Foucault failed to grasp the real dynamics of production in biopolitical society, what then? Where do we go? What do we do?

A familar move is made. We turn to Deleuze and Guattari. Dam. I have to read Deleuze and Guattari again. I struggled through Anti-Oedipus and recoiled from A Thousand Plateaus in a reading group a couple of years ago. I'd rather not re-read those texts. They are difficult, the language was unfamilar and full of neologisms, whist their work (particularly A Thousand Plateaus) lacked a coherent argument or structure.

Hardt and Negri say that we need to turn to these two thinkers because:

"Deleuze and Guattari present us with a properly poststructuralist understanding of biopower that renews materialist thought and grounds itself solidly in the question of the production of social being. They focus our attention clearly on the ontological substance of social production. Machines produce. The constant functioning of social machines in their various apparatuses and assemblages produces the world along with the subjects and objects that constitute it."

Okay I accept that Deleuze is a political philosopher who regards society as a machine, that he regards philosophy as a political activity, and that philosophy should respond to problems that are posed outside the academy. They are anti-capitalist but non-Marxist because they reject the Marxist's mode of production approach to history in favour of abstract machines of desires and power.

From what I remember of Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guatarri understand desire in terms of process of social production. So we have the control, coordination and coding of desire. If all social relations are power relations and desire relations, then we can look at social institutions in terms of both their networks of power and circuits of desire.

Desire is not a drive in the Freudian sense, nor structure in the Saussurian model of language. It is about bodies, energies and connections and investments between and within bodies Desire is treated as a primary active force, as a process of production, involves intensities, is present in given assemblages and produces reality.

So a striking political aspects of this text is its refusal of "traditional" Marxist understandings of U.S. imperialism. Hardt and Negri contest the assumption that any nation-state, even the U.S., can act as a centre for an imperialist project today.They challenge the assumption of philosophy.com that the nation-state to protect can protect us against the dynamics of global capital. This is a post-Seattle wave of thinking that rejects a localist opposition to globalisation because it rests on false assumptions.

Empire: modernity and biopolitics

Hardt and Negri end the section of biopower in the society of control on a flourish. They say:

"From this point of view, the biopolitical context of the new paradigm is completely central to our analysis. This is what presents power with an alternative, not only between obedience and disobedience, or between formal political participation and refusal, but also along the entire range of life and death, wealth and poverty, production and social reproduction, and so forth. Given the great difficulties the new notion of right has in representing this dimension of the power of Empire, and given its inability to touch biopower concretely in all its material aspects, imperial right can at best only partially represent the underlying design of the new constitution of world order, and cannot really grasp the motor that sets it in motion. Our analysis must focus its attention rather on the productive dimension of biopower."

So right ineeds to be supplemented with biopower if we are to grasp the motion of the world order. Hence Foucault's category has been appropriated. If I am reading this text right--as a categorical analysis--- then the next move would be to highlight the limitations of the old categories.

And this is what we find in the next section on the production of life. They say that even though Foucault had powerfully grasped the biopolitical horizon of society and defined it as a field of immanence he never:

"... succeeded in pulling his thought away from that structuralist epistemology that guided his research from the beginning. By structuralist epistemology here we mean the reinvention of a functionalist analysis in the realm of the human sciences, a method that effectively sacrifices the dynamic of the system, the creative temporality of its movements, and the ontological substance of cultural and social reproduction....In fact, if at this point we were to ask Foucault who or what drives the system, or rather, who is the "bios," his response would be ineffable, or nothing at all. What Foucault fails to grasp finally are the real dynamics of production in biopolitical society."

What Foucault's work disclosed though is how the biopolitical context was progressively put at the service of capitalist accumulation in the development of modern liberal capitalist society. He shifts the focus awaay marxist acounts that placed an emphasis on the control of society over individuals through consciousness or ideologyby highlighting the importance of the body. In liberal capitalist society it is biopolitics that is most important.

Empire: Biopower

There is a useful bit of summing up of the recent passages in chapter I of Empire. Hardt and Negri say that, "though the state of exception and police technologies constitute the solid nucleus and the central element of the new imperial right... the biopolitical context of the new paradigm is completely central to our analysis....Our analysis must focus its attention rather on the productive dimension of biopower."
So the account of global governance is going to focus on the way the productive force of the resources of science, bureaucracy and literature are being used to shape the size, longevity, and bodies and culture of whole populations. Though Foucault situated this new kind of power within his analysis of the transformations accompanying the rise of the nation state, Hardt and Negri extend this to a range of contemporary global issues.

Would this be how social bodies are reshaped and re-presented against the backdrop of gendered normalcy in differing national contexts?

In this account it is said that:

"...biopolitics is concerned with population as a political and scientific problem, as a biological issue of the exercise of power. Biopower does not act on the individual a posteriori, as a subject of discipline in the diverse forms of rehabilitation, normalisation and institutionalisation. It rather acts on the population in a preventive fashion, its legitimacy stems from its preoccupation with optimising life chances, and it operates through surveys for the prevention of epidemics and scarcity. Its government works through management and the regulative mechanisms that are able to account for aleatory and ‘unpredictable’ phenonema on a global scale, by determining an equilibrium and keeping events within an acceptable average. Biopower is not just discipline but regulation on a global scale, it is ‘the power to make live."

Biopower is a regulation of the body.

Empire: having some problems

I've taken a break from reading Hardt and Negri's Empire by way of short chunks of text over these last few days. I've encountered some problems. It is not just that the fragmentary nature of reading leaves the threads hanging.

The problem I'm having is that the text has become so very abstract. Theory's conceptual wheels are spinning madly; new concepts are being developedall over the place; we shift from one theoriest to another---eg, from Foucault to Deleuze and Guattari at a fast clip; and the concepts have become free floating.

I'm not sure what is retained, what is discarded and what has been achieved from one passage to another.

I accept that philosophy is about the creation of new concepts. But the concepts in the Empire text are proving to be difficult to pin it all down. You can see why people get frustrated with this book and throw it away in a corner.

That would be a mistake.The text is trying to do something important. My response has been twofold.

I've gone back to the old posts and reintroduced new material--starting from here--- to spell out things in more detail.

Secondly, we need is some hook in reality to stop the free floating of concepts. What sort of hook into reality could that be?

Lets make a good solid one. The Middle East. Here and here is enough of a hook, don't you think? That is enough meat on that for the concepts to work on? There is enough paradox of plurality and multiplicity there.

Empire: paradox of power

Hard and Negri continue to use Foucault's tool box. However, they make the turn to others who have gone before them. Those who have rifled through Foucualt's tool box, found some useful concepts and worked them up.

One of these concepts is the paradox of power. Hardt and Negri say:

"What Foucault constructed implicitly (and Deleuze and Guattari made explicit) is therefore the paradox of a power that, while it unifies and envelops within itself every element of social life (thus losing its capacity effectively to mediate different social forces), at that very moment reveals a new context, a new milieu of maximum plurality and uncontainable singularization-a milieu of the event....These conceptions of the society of control and biopower both describe central aspects of the concept of Empire."

In Discipline and Punish Foucault employed the concepts of contrast and contradiction. The idea that prison contains its own failure is a good example. In the History of Sexuality Vol. 1 Foucault addresses the modern paradox of our discourse on sexuality: we proclaim loudly that we are repressed, yet we talk so much about how we can't talk about sex.

A muted form of dialectics rather than a paradox?

Well, we all know that French poststructuralism is hostile to Hegelian dialectics. So a way is needed to think the paradox of power unifying and envelops within itself in every element of social life and simultaneously disclosing a new milieu of plurality and singularization. Hence the turn to Deleuze and Guattari.

Empire: from Marx to Deleuze

The story so far. Hardt and Negri have been rifling through Foucault's tool bag to develop the mode of governance exercised by Hegel's concept of public authority. What they found useful in the toolkit were the concepts of a disciplinary society and biopower that are assembled into a particular mode of governance.

However, as we are on the cusp of modernity and postmodernity, Foucault's disciplinary society gives way to a society of control. Hardt and Negri say that they understand the society of control to be "that society which develops at the far edge of modernity and opens toward the postmodern."

So what has changed in this transformation? In what way can we map the changes? What drops away? What comes into the foreground?

Hardt and Negri say that in such a society:

"the mechanisms of Command become ever more "democratic," ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens. The behaviors of social integration and exclusion proper to rule are thus increasingly interiorized within the subjects themselves. Power is now exercised through machines that directly organize the brains (in communication systems, information networks, etc.) and bodies (in welfare systems, monitored activities, etc.) toward a state of autonomous alienation from the sense of life and the desire for creativity."

Hardt and Negri then add that two ways in which things have changed:

"...the society of control is characterized by an intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices. But in contrast to discipline, this control extends well outside the structured sites of social institutions through flexible and fluctuating networks."

What seems to have slipped in the shift to the intensification of control through informational networks is the idea of governmentality as the art of government in the name of the reason of state. Here the exercise of power produces reality through "rituals of truth" and which creates a particular style of subjectivity with which one conforms to or resists. Governmentality also includes a growing body of knowledge that presents itself as "scientific," and which contributes to the power of governmentality.

True, the concept of networks of power working internally to to shape, affect, or change the conduct of a person or persons so that our subjectivities is constituted by others, by official discourses, and by power/knowledge is retained. But sovereignty in the form of public authority has become vague and slipped into the background.

Hardt and Negri then go onto address the intensification process of the reshaping of culture and social relations. They say:

"In this passage from disciplinary society to the society of control, then, one could say that the increasingly intense relationship of mutual implication of all social forces that capitalism has pursued throughout its development has now been fully realized. Marx recognized something similar in what he called the passage from the formal subsumption to the real subsumption of labor under capital and later the Frankfurt School philosophers analyzed a closely related passage of the subsumption of culture (and social relations) under the totalitarian figure of the state, or really within the perverse dialectic of Enlightenment. The passage we are referring to, however, is fundamentally different in that instead of focusing on the unidimensionality of the process described by Marx and reformulated and extended by the Frankfurt School, the Foucauldian passage deals fundamentally with the paradox of plurality and multiplicity-and Deleuze and Guattari develop this perspective even more clearly."

Let us read that again. "The intense relationship of mutual implication of all social forces that capitalism has pursued throughout its development has now been fully realized." That sounds pretty reductive.

Has capitalism been fully realized? Bio-power, which was directed at and through the body at the health and sexuality of individuals, and through individual bodies at populations, is at odds with porn culture now entering everyday life and directed at the subjectivity of the person. The images of the porn industry circulatign through the netwotrks on the internet activates the resitance of a conservative culture.

Has not global capitalism set up its own political reactions? In Australia the integration of the Australian economy with the global one, and the attempt to subsume society and culture to the free market market economy has resulted in the assertion of the power of the nation state vis-a-vis other nation states.

The Australian nation state has become a fortress. This fortress looks defensively at the world outside its borders and sees threats everywhere. The nation state has become increasingly insecure, is deeply opposed to the free movement of labour, and engaged in a war of civilizations against the Islamic world.

The world of nation states is not the world of liberal internationalism build around the global market. It is a Hobbesian world of anarchy in which power counts and is used ruthlessly.

Within the nation state the politics of governance has been concerned with managing the negative political reaction to economic reforms in favour of the free market. Within the nation state there is increasing regionalization happening that counters the unitary subsumption of culture and social relations under the totalitarian figure of the market orientated state.

Shoudl we not be thinking mulitplicity and difference?

Is Hardt and Negri's reduction here a re-introducing of Weber's instrumental rationality that is tied to increase in coherence, systematic order, calculability, control and systematic planning?

Maybe it doesn't matter that much, since they shift away from the unidimensionality of the Frankfurt's School's idea of a totally administered society. They suggest the best way to do this is to raid the toolbox of Deleuze and Guattari.

Empire: Foucault, disciplinary society & biopower

Hardt and Negri say that they have two main reasons for turning to Foucault to develop Hegel's concept of the police or public authority in the Philosophy of Right. As we have seen in a previous post public authority (police) is located within civil society and it mediates (regulates) the differing interests of producers and consumers, is concerned with education and poverty.

What Hardt and Negri are doing is rumaging through Foucault's conceptual tool box to deepen our understanding of the mode of governance exercised by public authority in civil society. The aim is to use the tools developed by Hegel and Foucault to help us understand the governance of the modern liberal capitalist society in modernity, and then apply them to the way internatonal relations are currently governed.

We have to get the tools from somewhere. So let us see what they reckon will be useful from Foucualt's toolbag.

Hardt and Negri say that the first reason for making the turn to Foucault's tool box is to pick up Foucault's concept of a disciplinary society. Hardt and Negri describe this as follows:

"Disciplinary society is that society in which social command is constructed through a diffuse network of dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and productive practices. Putting this society to work and ensuring obedience to its rule and its mechanisms of inclusion and/or exclusion are accomplished through disciplinary institutions (the prison, the factory, the asylum, the hospital, the university, the school, and so forth) that structure the social terrain and present logics adequate to the "reason" of discipline. Disciplinary power rules in effect by structuring the parameters and limits of thought and practice, sanctioning and prescribing normal and/or deviant behaviors."

The second reason for turning to Foucault to develop Hegel's cconcept of the police is Foucault's concept of biopower. Hardt and Negri say:

'Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it. Power can achieve an effective command over the entire life of the population only when it becomes an integral, vital function that every individual embraces and reactivates of his or her own accord. As Foucault says, "Life has now become . . . an object of power."'

Does biopower achieve an effective command over the entire life of the whole population?

Biopower is described by James Marshall as a:

"...form of power that is exercised on the body and it carries a specifically anatomical and biological aspect. It is exercised over members of a population so that their sexuality and individuality are constituted in certain ways that are connected with issues of national policy, including the machinery of production. In this way populations can be adjusted in accordance with economic processes."

"So that populations can be adjusted in accordance with economic processes?" What could that mean in a liberal society of free individuals?

An illustration would be the attempts by the neo-liberal state to do shape the conduct of populations so they act are more in accord with the processes of free market and are weaned of the welfare state. James Marshall says that Foucault meant it in the sense of a diciplinary society: as

"... technologies of domination [that] act essentially on the body, and classify and objectify individuals. They were developed in disciplinary blocks such as the prison, the hospital, and the school. In so far as these objective classifications are adopted and accepted by individuals so their selves are also constituted."

James Marshall says that the other technology of biopower is the technologies of the self :

"...in technologies of the self there is the belief, now common in western culture, that it is possible to reveal the truth about one's self. By telling the truth about one's sexuality, where the "deepest" truth is embedded in the discourse and discursive practices of sexuality, individuals become objects of knowledge both to themselves and to others. But telling the truth is both therapeutic and also controlling. Eventually, according to Foucault, we learn how to do these things to ourselves."

Foucault argued that the conjoint effects of these two technologies of domination and self give rise to a mode of governance, or governmentality as the art of government exercise by public authority.

Governmentality refers to the way a public authority in civil society exercises the art of shaping, creating and directing the "diffuse network of dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and productive practices" for the public good or interest. James Marshall says that governmentality:

"...is a form of activity which attempts or aims at the conduct of persons; it is the attempt to shape, to guide, or to affect not only the conduct of people but, also, the attempt to constitute people in such ways that they can be governed. In Foucault's work this activity of governance could cover the relations of self to self, self to others, relations between institutions and social communities, and the exercise of political sovereignty."

Foucault broadens public authority beyond civil society to include the state as the political sovereignty in a nation state.

It is not clear whether Hardt and Negri follow him in this. I suspect that they do, since they want to use these concepts to map the mode of governance exercised by empire. However, we need to bear in mind that no nation-state rules the globe. So political sovereignty exercised by empire is going to be along the lines of governmentality.

Empire: Hegel, public authority & civil society

In section two of chapter I Hardt and Negri now make the turn to Foucault in order to conceptualize the formation of empire. They start from the police. They say:

"The "police" appears as an administration heading the state, together with the judiciary, the army, and the exchequer. True. Yet in fact, it embraces everything else. Turquet says so: "It branches out into all of the people's conditions, everything they do or undertake. Its field comprises the judiciary, finance, and the army." The police includes everything."

The police. That definition of Turguet's is a bit terse and misleading. We need to spell it out to understand what is going on here. This is the purpose of this post.

We are in a better position to understand what Hardt and Negri are getting by turrning to Hegel. The police is a key Hegelian concept in his Philosophy of Right. In para 230ff Hegel defines the police as an external authority between civil society and state; an authority which represents the morality of the community, but does so in the sense of controller and controlled.

In para 236 Hegel initially describes this public authority as a regulatory authority that diminishes the danger of upheavals arising from the clashing of individual interests for the sake of the public good. Hegel says:

"The differing interests of producers and consumers may come into collision with each other; and although a fair balance between them on the whole may be brought about automatically, still their adjustment also requires a control which stands above both and is consciously undertaken. The right to the exercise of such control in a single case (e.g. in the fixing of the prices of the commonest necessaries of life) depends on the fact that, by being publicly exposed for sale, goods in absolutely universal daily demand are offered not so much to an individual as such but rather to a universal purchaser, the public; and thus both the defence of the public’s right not to be defrauded, and also the management of goods inspection, may lie, as a common concern, with a public authority."

However, the public care and direction exercised by public authority is far broader than that a regulator in a self-organizing market. In para 239 Hegel says that public authority is also concerned with education

"In its character as a universal family, civil society has the right and duty of superintending and influencing education, inasmuch as education bears upon the child’s capacity to become a member of society. Society’s right here is paramount over the arbitrary and contingent preferences of parents, particularly in cases where education is to be completed not by the parents but by others. To the same end, society must provide public educational facilities so far as is practicable."

Hegel the broadens the care and concern of public authority to poverty in civil society in para. 241:

"Not only caprice, however, but also contingencies, physical conditions, and factors grounded in external circumstances (see § 200) may reduce men to poverty. The poor still have the needs common to civil society, and yet since society has withdrawn from them the natural means of acquisition (see § 217) and broken the bond of the family — in the wider sense of the clan (see § 181) — their poverty leaves them more or less deprived of all the advantages of society, of the opportunity of acquiring skill or education of any kind, as well as of the administration of justice, the public health services, and often even of the consolations of religion, and so forth. The public authority takes the place of the family where the poor are concerned in respect not only of their immediate want but also of laziness of disposition, malignity, and the other vices which arise out of their plight and their sense of wrong."

The public authority has a very wide brief.

Are there limits to the concerns and power of public authority? Hegel says yes. In para:

"While the public authority must also undertake the higher directive function of providing for the interests which lead beyond the borders of its society [see § 246 where the reference is to overseas markets], its primary purpose is to actualise and maintain the universal contained within the particularity of civil society, and its control takes the form of an external system and organisation for the protection and security of particular ends and interests en masse, inasmuch as these interests subsist only in this universal."

So we can see the attraction of the police as public authority for Hardt and Negri. It is a very useful category as it involves right, governance of material production and the subjectivity of individuals. Hegeel's idea of police as public authority gives us way of looking at the machinery of governance of civil human conduct within society.

Hardt and Negri make this point in their convoluted way. They say:

"From the juridical perspective we have been able to glimpse some of the elements of the ideal genesis of Empire, but from that perspective alone it would be difficult if not impossible to understand how the imperial machine is actually set in motion. Juridical concepts and juridical systems always refer to something other than themselves. Through the evolution and exercise of right, they point toward the material condition that defines their purchase on social reality. Our analysis must now descend to the level of that materiality and investigate there the material transformation of the paradigm of rule. We need to discover the means and forces of the production of social reality along with the subjectivities that animate it. "

So they turn to Foucault's conception of biopower to do this. Biopower is technology of governance exercised by public authority.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Empire: Ch1.#11- Universal Values

In finishing the third and last section of Chapter one Hardt and Negri say that they find themselves confronted with a classic problematic of political philosophy: the decline and fall of Empire. They spell this out along the following lines:

"Empire is emerging today as the center that supports the globalization of productive networks and casts its widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within its world order----and yet at the same time it deploys a powerful police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves who threaten its order. The power of Empire appears to be subordinated to the fluctuations of local power dynamics and to the shifting, partial juridical orderings that attempt, but never fully succeed, to lead back to a state of normalcy in the name of the "exceptionality" of the administrative procedures."

I guess you can see this in Iraq. The local crisis in Iraq affects many areas of life – security, economy, domestic politics and inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations in Europe and the Middle East. It is a global crisis in the form of a clash of civilizations; but a clash of civilizations in which there is an enormous clash within the Muslim world between those who want to reform, and secularise, and those whose power is threatened, or who want to take power in the name of fundamentalism. It is global in the sense that likely to have serious consequences for everyone on earth.

Hardt and Negri's way of thinking is classical in that it reaches back to the Roman Empire:

"These characteristics, however, were precisely those that defined ancient Rome in its decadence and that tormented so many of its Enlightenment admirers.... Should we conceive this as an Empire of decadence, then, in the terms Montesquieu and Gibbon described? Or is it more properly understood in classical terms as an Empire of corruption? Here we should understand corruption first of all not only in moral terms but also in juridical and political terms, because according to Montesquieu and Gibbon, when the different forms of government are not firmly established in the republic, the cycle of corruption is ineluctably set in motion and the community is torn apart... Second, we should understand corruption also in metaphysical terms: where the entity and essence, effectiveness and value, do not find common satisfaction, there develops not generation but corruption...These are some of the fundamental axes of Empire that we will return to later at length."

My my. This frames the issue from the perspective of classical republican philosophy. Aristotelian political philosophy adopted the "standpoint of the citizen-ruler and it sought to provide the moral perspectives and the linguistic resources that could generate prudential insight and sharpen skills required for political deliberation .... Aristotelian political philosophy defined its own function in practical political terms. Its task was not to provide a body of truths that would perhaps render the prudential insight and deliberative skills of the citizen-ruler superfluous, but rather to offer resources for sharpening that insight and making those skills more effective. "

Presumably the gesture to republicianism as a rejection of classical liberalism that defined itself with the imperatives of the rhetoric of pure theory, adopted the rhetorical posture of an absolutely detached spectator regarding a field of audience-independent "political" facts, and deduced deduced from indubitable first principles universal truths about the essence of human political association.

anwering questions

This article looks to be useful to our discussion. In discussing the pro-American foreign policy of the Howard Government in Australia Chris Reus-Smit, the head of the department of international relations at the Australian National University, touches on some of the concerns of Empire. Chris says that:

"It is increasingly clear, however, that the US is not a world hegemon....today's world is unconducive to hegemony, even for a state with America's military and economic resources....The US still has the ability to thrust issues on to the international agenda and to sponsor the creation of new international regimes."

Chris argue this case along the following lines:

"But just as other states must respond to its initiatives, US policy makers have to devote ever greater amounts of energy and resources to combating initiatives sponsored by other actors, such as the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Protocol.

Added to all of this is the simple fact that world politics is no longer a game of states, even if they remain centrally important. In contrast to the postwar period, the club of states is now embedded in a web of world politics populated by politically adroit non-state actors, international organisations and internet information citizens."

So what sort of sovereignty do we now have in the complex global order? Ther is a gesture to this:

"The time has come for Australian policy makers, concerned academics and members of the community to reframe the way in which we think about contemporary world politics and US power. We must ask ourselves what constitutes order and security in the contemporary world. We must address in a sober fashion the nature and limits of US power. We must reflect on what the US can and cannot do to foster genuine international order and security... Only when we have answered these questions should we turn to the question of how our special alliance relationship with Washington can be used to foster a more constructive US approach to the multiple challenges of contemporary world order."

There are no answers to the questions raised. For me the importance of Hardt and Negri's Empire is that this text has a go at answering the above questions. However, some think that the book is close to trash. Others recoil from the difficult theoretical prose. Others think differently. Others struggle with the text, like me. Others are thinking about reading it. Others grapple with the idea of empire as a dynamic, fluid network, instead of power structured as an architecture of pyramidal hierarchy. Some are starting to use the ideas.

Empire: Ch.1#10

I've been busy down in the cellar churning out political material whilst everyone has been sleeping soundly.
sigh.

What I keep noticing is the unphilosophical nature of politics and the exclusion from politics of philosophical questions concerning politics. There is the substantive exclusion from political debate and decision-making the key issues concerning our ways of life. As Alasdair MacIintyre comments this is the case even though "the activities of government are such that they are not in their effects neutral between ways of life, but undermine some and promote others. "

Oh well, let us come back to the Hardt and Negri text. Here is someone else looking at the text.

In the Universal Values section we find Hardt and Negri exploring the connection between the police actions and universal values. They ask:

"Should we assume that since this new right of intervention functions primarily toward the goal of resolving urgent human problems, its legitimacy is therefore founded on universal values? Should we read this movement as a process that, on the basis of the fluctuating elements of the historical framework, sets in motion a constitutive machine driven by universal forces of justice and peace? Are we thus in a situation very close to the traditional definition of Empire, the one promulgated in the ancient Roman-Christian imaginary?"

They add that imperialism is no longer possible today since no nation state, not even the United States, is capable of acting as a sovereign power to rule over the global order.

We could say yes to these questions and quickly move on. However, Hardt nad Negri say:

"It would be going too far to respond affirmatively to these questions at this early stage in our investigation. The definition of the developing imperial power as a science of the police that is founded on a practice of just war to address continually arising emergencies is probably correct but still completely insufficient. As we have seen, the phenomenological determinations of the new global order exist in a profoundly fluctuating situation that could also be characterized correctly in terms of crisis and war. How can we reconcile the legitimation of this order through prevention and policing with the fact that crisis and war themselves demonstrate the very questionable genesis and legitimacy of this concept of justice? As we have already noted, these techniques and others like them indicate that what we are witnessing is a process of the material constitution of the new planetary order, the consolidation of its administrative machine, and the production of new hierarchies of command over global space."

That is a good signpost. A new juridical apparatus is in formation with the new global order. That is why we need to keep an open mind here and adopt the stance of exploring what is going on. As Hardt and Negri say we are are participants in this development and so our citizenship, just like our ethical responsibility, is situated within these newly global order.

In this article in Global Agenda (courtesy of H.U.H.) we find that Hardt and Negri reject the view that we should think of the new global order in terms of the hegemony of the US. They say:

"It is becoming increasingly clear that a unilateral or “monarchical” arrangement of the global order – centred on the military, political and economic dictation of the United States – is undesirable and unsustainable. "

police action+universal values

Hardt and Negri write that through the transformation of supranational law, the imperial process of constitution tends to penetrate and reconfigure the domestic law of the nation-states. They then describe this transformation of supranational law. They say:

"Perhaps the most significant symptom of this transformation is the development of the so-called right of intervention. This is commonly conceived as the right or duty of the dominant subjects of the world order to intervene in the territories of other subjects in the interest of preventing or resolving humanitarian problems, guaranteeing accords, and imposing peace. The right of intervention figured prominently among the panoply of instruments accorded the United Nations by its Charter for maintaining international order, but the contemporary reconfiguration of this right represents a qualitative leap. No longer, as under the old international ordering, do individual sovereign states or the supranational (U.N.) power intervene only to ensure or impose the application of voluntarily engaged international accords. Now supranational subjects that are legitimated not by right but by consensus intervene in the name of any type of emergency and superior ethical principles. What stands behind this intervention is not just a permanent state of emergency and exception, but a permanent state of emergency and exception justified by the appeal to essential values of justice. In other words, the right of the police is legitimated by universal values."

This refers to the intervention into Iraq by the UK, the US, Australia etc. We can say that was an emergency situation; an exception. The UN was shunted aside. The late justification for the intervention was the universal values of freedom and democracy. So we have state of emergency and exception justified by the appeal to the values of justice.

But is it a permanent state of emergency and exception?

Empire: Chapter1#9

We now shift to the third part of Chapter One. That chapter is titled World order, whilst its third part is called Universal values. Hardt and Negri start it by asking a good question:

"We might well ask at this point, however, should we still use the juridical term "right" in this context? How can we call right (and specifically imperial right) a series of techniques that, founded on a state of permanent exception and the power of the police, reduces right and law to a question of pure effectiveness?"

It is a good question. It tackles the debate between realists (national interest) and Kantian idealists (world democracy) and it enables us to hold the twin tendencies of the US--acting in terms of its global interests and universal values.

Empire: Ch1#8

Hardt and Negri finish the The Model of Imperial Authority section of Chapter One to considering the global order in relation to the idea of a global police force.

As we have seen this section was preceded by considering the function of exception as understood by Carl Schmitt as imperial right. In some ways
this is a useful move to make. A large part of Australia's foreign interventions have been to restore order in East Timor and the Solomon Islands. The situation in both countries bordered on crisis. Australia effectively acted to the crisis of failed states by intervening with a policing operation that acted to disarm the destablizers.

Can we say the same about the US in Iraq? Was that an exceptional situation? Or is Schmitt's idea of the exception being lost in this reworking?

Hardt and Negri say:

"In order to take control of and dominate such a completely fluid situation, it is necessary to grant the intervening authority (1) the capacity to define, every time in an exceptional way, the demands of intervention; and (2) the capacity to set in motion the forces and instruments that in various ways can be applied to the diversity and the plurality of the arrangements in crisis. Here, therefore, is born, in the name of the exceptionality of the intervention, a form of right that is really a right of the police. The formation of a new right is inscribed in the deployment of prevention, repression, and rhetorical force aimed at the reconstruction of social equilibrium: all this is proper to the activity of the police. We can thus recognize the initial and implicit source of imperial right in terms of police action and the capacity of the police to create and maintain order. The legitimacy of the imperial ordering supports the exercise of police power, while at the same time the activity of global police force demonstrates the real effectiveness of the imperial ordering. The juridical power to rule over the exception and the capacity to deploy police force are thus two initial coordinates that define the imperial model of authority."

In his Political Theology Schmitt says "Sovereign is he who decides the exception.' The phrase refers back to the classical Roman institution of dictatorship as a way to deal with an emergency that severely threatened the Roman republic. It was a mechanism that preserved a constitutional order in a time of dire crisis (ie., a temporary exceptional moment). The Roman dictator was appointed in a time of dire emergency (a foreign invasion or rebellion). He was given unlimited powers and could act unrestrained by norm or law. These powers were limited as the dictator could not go beyond the specific task or suspend the regular order.

With Hardt and Negri the exceptional moment becomes the exceptionality of the intervention. The exceptionality of the intervention makes sense of the way the US intervened in Iraq: eg., the unilateralism, the sidelining of the United Nations, and the pre-emptive strike.

Is this a case of the legitimacy of the imperial ordering supporting the exercise of police power, while at the same time the activity of global police force demonstrates the real effectiveness of the imperial ordering?

It seemed to me that legitimacy was not granted. The legitamcy of the US action was called into question not matter how brutal Saddam Hussein's regime.

Empire: Ch.1#7

Hardt and Negri link the the new supranational juridical order to Carl Schmitt's idea of the exception. They say that this order involves:

"....hegemony over juridical practices, such as procedure, prevention, and address. Normativity, sanction, and repression follow from these and are formed within the procedural developments. The reason for the relative (but effective) coincidence of the new functioning of domestic law and supranational law derives first of all from the fact that they operate on the same terrain, namely, the terrain of crisis. As Carl Schmitt has taught us, however, crisis on the terrain of the application of law should focus our attention on the "exception" operative in the moment of its production....supranational law [is] defined by...exceptionality. "

For Schmitt the exceptional situation is is that which calls for the emergence of an all-powerful sovereign who must rescue a constitutional order from a particular political crisis. Schmitt had in mind the besieged Weimer Republic in the 1920s; it was threatened by right wing and Communist rebellion and shaken up by an overwhelming economic crisis. The all powerful sovereign is the temporary dictator who is given emergency powers.

So what happens when Hardt and Negri take this idea of the exception and apply it to the international area?

Could Iraq under Saddam Hussein be seen as a particular political crisis that justifies the emergence of an all powerful sovereign, namely the US? What is installedin Iraq is a temporary dictatorship, with sovereignty due to be handed back to the Iraqi's on June 30th. Can theUS be seen as a dictator of the world order who has emeregency powers to deal with an exceptional situation?

Empire: Ch1.#6

Hardt and Negri say that there has been a paradigm shift in the way we understand empire. They say this shift:

"....is defined, at least initially, by the recognition that only an established power, overdetermined with respect to and relatively autonomous from the sovereign nation-states, is capable of functioning as the center of the new world order, exercising over it an effective regulation and, when necessary, coercion.

It follows that, as Kelsen wanted, but only as a paradoxical effect of his utopia, a sort of juridical positivism also dominates the formation of a new juridical ordering. The capacity to form a system is, in effect, presupposed by the real process of its formation. Moreover, the process of formation, and the subjects that act in it, are attracted in advance toward the positively defined vortex of the center, and this attraction becomes irresistible, not only in the name of the capacity of the center to exercise force, but also in the name of the formal power, which resides in the center, to frame and systematize the totality. "

They add that the ancient notions of Empire help us articulate better the nature of this world order in formation. As Thucydides, Livy, and Tacitus all teach us (along with Machiavelli commenting on their work), Empire is formed not on the basis of force itself but on the basis of the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace.

They go on to say that the ancient model gives us a first approximation, but we need to go well beyond it to articulate the terms of the global model of authority operating today. They add:

"Juridical positivism and natural right theories, contractualism and institutional realism, formalism and systematism can each describe some aspect of it. Juridical positivism can emphasize the necessity for a strong power to exist at the center of the normative process; natural right theories can highlight the values of peace and equilibrium that the imperial process offers; contractualism can foreground the formation of consensus; realism can bring to light the formative processes of the institutions adequate to the new dimensions of consensus and authority; and formalism can give logical support to what systematism justifies and organizes functionally, emphasizing the totalizing character of the process."

It's an assemblage of different bits and pieces.

Deleuze: machines

I the last post I briefly mentioned that Hardt and Negri's conception of empire as machine linked back to Delueze and Guattari. I left it at that.

I had in mind Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus where the terminology of machines, connections and production is deployed. I read these texts several years ago and found them a hard going indeed. But I do remember some core concepts---most notably machines--as these were notably anti-organic. They distinquished 'mechanism'--a closed machine with a specific purpose such as the clock mechanism of the early modernists -------from 'machine', which was composed of its connections.

Machinic becoming: it kind of caught my fancy. I understood it to be used to describe not the production of something by someone--but production for the sake of production. So it had no organizing centre and it was in a constant state of becoming.

Empire: Ch1#5

The brief remarks at the end of the previous post were about thinking of Empire as imperial right in positive terms. With these remarks Hardt and Negri moved from The Constitution of Empire section of Chapter 1 of Empire to The Model of Imperial Authority section.

So how should we think of Empire positively? Hardt and Negri say that:

"The new paradigm is both system and hierarchy, centralized construction of norms and far-reaching production of legitimacy, spread out over world space. It is configured ab initio as a dynamic and flexible systemic structure that is articulated horizontally.... Some call this situation "governance without government" to indicate the structural logic, at times imperceptible but always and increasingly effective, that sweeps all actors within the order of the whole. The systemic totality has a dominant position in the global order, breaking resolutely with every previous dialectic and developing an integration of actors that seems linear and spontaneous. At the same time, however, the effectiveness of the consensus under a supreme authority of the ordering appears ever more clearly. All conflicts, all crises, and all dissensions effectively push forward the process of integration and by the same measure call for more central authority. Peace, equilibrium, and the cessation of conflict are the values toward which everything is directed."

However, it is not clear that all processes work towards integration. Why not resistance or disintegration as well? Why not a conflict of civilizations. Why not a conflict between different regions---say between the US and Japan---or between different kinds of capitalism? After the Asian Financial crisis it is not obvious that "all conflicts, all crises, and all dissensions effectively push forward the process of integration and by the same measure call for more central authority."
Should not conflict be built into the category of Empire?

Hardt and Negri go on to think of this 'governance without government' in machine terms, rather than the world spirit conception of Hegel. They say:

"The development of the global system (and of imperial right in the first place) seems to be the development of a machine that imposes procedures of continual contractualization that lead to systemic equilibria-a machine that creates a continuous call for authority. The machine seems to predetermine the exercise of authority and action across the entire social space. Every movement is fixed and can seek its own designated place only within the system itself, in the hierarchical relationship accorded to it. This preconstituted movement defines the reality of the process of the imperial constitutionalization of world order-the new paradigm."

What we have is a conception of world order as a unique mode of economic, political and cultural organization of governance without government. Why think in terms of the development of a machine?

Is this the influence of Deleuze and Guattari?

Hegel, Hardt & Negri

I will try and read two texts together: Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Hardt and Negri's Empire.

Why? As I mentioned in yesterday's post I think that Empire works within the broad philosophical tradition of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

Here is Hegel. The quote is para. 333 and it is on international law:

"The fundamental proposition of international law (i.e. the universal law which ought to be absolutely valid between states, as distinguished from the particular content of positive treaties) is that treaties, as the ground of obligations between states, ought to be kept. But since the sovereignty of a state is the principle of its relations to others, states are to that extent in a state of nature in relation to each other. Their rights are actualised only in their particular wills and not in a universal will with constitutional powers over them. This universal proviso of international law therefore does not go beyond an ought-to-be, and what really happens is that international relations in accordance with treaty alternate with the severance of these relations."

We then have the additional remark to this paragraph which introduces Kant's idea for perpetual peace and League of Nations into the discussion.

"There is no Praetor to judge between states; at best there may be an arbitrator or a mediator, and even he exercises his functions contingently only, i.e. in dependence on the particular wills of the disputants. Kant had an idea for securing 'perpetual peace' by a League of Nations to adjust every dispute. It was to be a power recognised by each individual state, and was to arbitrate in all cases of dissension in order to make it impossible for disputants to resort to war in order to settle them. This idea presupposes an accord between states; this would rest on moral or religious or other grounds and considerations, but in any case would always depend ultimately on a particular sovereign will and for that reason would remain infected with contingency."

That is how the United Nations is seen by the US and Israel for instance: a particular sovereign will infected with contingency. So how are conflicts of interest between nation-states resolved? Hegel draws the realist conclusion. By war (para 334):

"It follows that if states disagree and their particular wills cannot be harmonised, the matter can only be settled by war."

Can the particular wills of nation-states be harmionized in any other way? Hegel says that the substantial welfare of the state is its welfare as a particular state in its specific interest and situation Consequently,

"....its aim in relation to other states and its principle for justifying wars and treaties is not a universal thought (the thought of philanthropy) but only its actually injured or threatened welfare as something specific and peculiar to itself."

Hegel then introduces the category of recognition into the mix:

"The fact that states reciprocally recognise each other as states remains, even in war — the state of affairs when rights disappear and force and chance hold sway — a bond wherein each counts to the rest as something absolute. Hence in war, war itself is characterised as something which ought to pass away. It implies therefore the proviso of, the jus gentium — that the possibility of peace be retained (and so, for example, that envoys must be respected), and, in general, that war be not waged against domestic institutions, against the peace of family and private life, or against persons in their private capacity."

He then introduces another category, that of custom:
"...the relations between states (e.g. in war-time, reciprocal agreements about taking prisoners; in peace-time, concessions of rights to subjects of other states for the purpose of private trade and intercourse, &c.) depend principally upon the customs of nations, custom being the inner universality of behaviour maintained in all circumstances."

Hegel then begins to make his shift to world spirit or culture.

What appears to have dropped away is the category of right. Nation-states do not appear to relate to one another on the basis of right. It is self-interest, recognition and custom. The category of right, which figured so strongly within the nation-state, does little work in the international areana.

It is this lack that Hardt and Negri address. The juridical concept of Empire, they say, needs to be developed because of the shift in postmodernity. Towards the end of chapter 1.1 they describe this shift. They say that today:

"...the enemy, just like the war itself, comes to be at once banalized (reduced to an object of routine police repression) and absolutized (as the Enemy, an absolute threat to the ethical order). The Gulf War [1991] gave us perhaps the first fully articulated example of this new epistemology of the concept."

So we need to move into thinking of this category of Empire in positive and not negative terms.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Empire: A genealogy of right

The category of right is what Hardt and Negri are talking about in Empire. Their approach to this juridical concept for international relations or world order sits quite comfortably with in the tradition of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

Here is Hegel on international law in para 330 of the Philosophy of Right:

"International law springs from the relations between autonomous states. It is for this reason that what is absolute in it retains the form of an ought-to-be, since its actuality depends on different wills each of which is sovereign."

Then we have the addition where Hegel spells out, and develops, the cryptic remark. He says that:

"States are not private persons but completely autonomous totalities in themselves, and so the relation between them differs from a moral relation and a relation involving private rights. Attempts have often been made to regard the state as a person with the rights of persons and as a moral entity. But the position with private persons is that they are under the jurisdiction of a court which gives effect to what is right in principle. Now a relation between states ought also to be right in principle, but in mundane affairs a principle ought also to have power. Now since there is no power in existence which decides in face of the state what is right in principle and actualises this decision, it follows that so far as international relations are concerned we can never get beyond an 'ought'. The relation between states is a relation between autonomous entities which make mutual stipulations but which at the same time are superior to these stipulations. "

So we live in the world of ought because in the 1930s there is no international power that decides what is right for nation-states and is able to actualize this decision. The situation is the same in 2004, despite the existence of various international bodies. We live in ought.

Does this apply to the IMF or the WTO?

If we come back to Hardt and Negri, they say that the point of departure for their study of Empire is a:

"...new notion of right, or rather, a new inscription of authority and a new design of the production of norms and legal instruments of coercion that guarantee contracts and resolve conflicts."

Good. They are going to develop some new categories to deal with a new situation. How will they do this? They go on to say that they:

"...accord special attention to the juridical figures of the constitution of Empire....because they provide a good index of the processes of imperial constitution. New juridical figures reveal a first view of the tendency toward the centralized and unitary regulation of both the world market and global power relations, with all the difficulties presented by such a project."

They make a Hegelian-Marxist move by connecting the juridical catgories to the process of global power and order, They say that:

"Juridical transformations effectively point toward changes in the material constitution of world power and order. The transition we are witnessing today from traditional international law, which was defined by contracts and treaties, to the definition and constitution of a new sovereign, supranational world power (and thus to an imperial notion of right), however incomplete, gives us a framework in which to read the totalizing social processes of Empire. In effect, the juridical transformation functions as a symptom of the modifications of the material biopolitical constitution of our societies. These changes regard not only international law and international relations but also the internal power relations of each country."

They then give this approach to the juridical concept of Empire a twist by looking at the genealogy of the concept to give us some preliminary terms for our investigation.

This genealogy gives us a:

"...juridical concept involves two fundamental tendencies: first, the notion of a right that is affirmed in the construction of a new order that envelops the entire space of what it considers civilization, a boundless, universal space; and second, a notion of right that encompasses all time within its ethical foundation. Empire exhausts historical time, suspends history, and summons the past and future within its own ethical order. "

They then trace these two tendencies and argue that in early modernity both separated and develop independently. There emerged in modern European political thought a conception of international right; the developed utopias of "perpetual peace." Their account states:

"In the ...case [ie., the conception of international right] the order that the Roman Empire had promised was sought, long after its fall, through a treaty mechanism that would construct an international order among sovereign states by operating analogously to the contractual mechanisms that guaranteed order within the nation-state and its civil society. Thinkers from Grotius to Puffendorf theorized this process in formal terms."

And in the second case, the idea of perpetual peace:

"...continually reappeared throughout modern Europe, from Bernadin de Saint Pierre to Immanuel Kant. This idea was presented as an ideal of reason, a "light" that had to criticize and also unite right and ethicality, a presupposed transcendental of the juridical system and ideal schema of reason and ethics."

They conclude their genealogy of the juridical concept of world order with the following:

"The fundamental alternative between these two notions ran throughout all of European modernity, including the two great ideologies that defined its mature phase: the liberal ideology that rests on the peaceful concert of juridical forces and its supersession in the market; and the socialist ideology that focuses on international unity through the organization of struggles and the supersession of right."

The socialist one barely exists anymore. Marxism has been consigned to the historical trash can. So what we have left is the idea of perpetual peace produced by the global market. That was the tacit assumption of the 1980s and 1990s.

Hardt and Negri conclude their genealogy by saying that the two different developments of the notion of right, which persisted side by side through modernity, are tending towards being united and presented as a single category. Their argument is that in postmodernity the notion of right should be understood again in terms of the concept of Empire.

a destitute time

This post expresses very clearly why I left the academy for the political life.

Basically I could not stand the academic mode of life any more. The scholarly mode of life was dead. I was dead. My future was a slide into nothingness. Job security could not be obtained in philosophy: in a declining job market it just a was a life of part-time contracts, casual teaching and relentless deskilling. You reach a time when you realize that you have to get out

Like Lars, I found the relationships of the academic system vile, and I thought that academic careerism was evil. It pretty much destroyed you as a human being. It made you savage other people by turn on them with bitter hostility. The academic system was self-destructive as it increasingly turned to deskilled casual labour.

For a while I was thankful that I had a job after gaining a PhD, but I kept looking for an exit strategy from academia---mine was to take the valuable skills and training I had gained from a decade of academic life, and re-skill (on the job) so that I could work as a philosopher in the political life.

I read a lot of Marcus Aurelius (here and here to keep me sane.

That was several years ago. I've never looked back.

Just the other day Iwent back to my old university as a representative from Canberra for a seminar on the future of higher education in Australia. God! It was even more deathly than I remembered. The staff were older, fatter, more dishrevelled and bitter. More physically crippled.

I was sympathetrc to their plight. They had been overwhelmed by the violent reforms of the neo-liberal state. They had been beaten down by the violent reformers in Canberra. They'd given up trying to tear the academic being into the open from what was overwhelming and destroying them. They were living on borrowed time. They knew it. It was just so many years until the superannuation kicked in. They would go through the routines. They would hang in there.

Okay, so the old academics were stuck in their academic ways. You cannot hold that against them. It happens to the best of us. They were trying to hang onto scholarly values and academic traditons that were considered to be important and have been trashed by the neo-liberals.

But the academics were even more arrogant than I remembered. They theoretically knew more about Canberra than I tacitly did. I knew nothing, even though I had worked there for many a year and experienced it's energy, being and destructiveness from the inside. The academics knew everything. So they were not going to be open to anything different. I shrugged. They lived on hope that all would be right when the enlightened social democrats who had seen the error of their neo-liberal ways were returned to power (the ALP.) I shrugged after a debate turned into a 'I'm right you are wrong standoff.'

At that point no longer cared. I was just glad to be out of that world. I could leave after the forum and go and talk to the doctors about health.

Now that is another story.