As I read and slowly work my way through Hardt and Negri's Empire I keep thinking of the way that philosophy is devalued in favour of literary criticism. It is not the negative narratives of the tragic philosophers that are rejected. It is philosophy. I keep on thinking that political philosophy, as a way of thinking and living is in need of legitimation.
If philosophy reflects on a form of life grown old, and does so as a mode of historical knowing, then what is it concerned with?
So let me introduce an interesting figure into the discussion--Leo Strauss who has crept into the discussion in the comment box.
This is Strauss opening a lecture course at the University of Chicago on Plato in the mid-1960s:
"What is political philosophy? A very simple reflection suffices to explain what political philosophy means. All political action is concerned with either preservation or change. When it is concerned with change it is concerned with change for the better. When it is concerned with preservation, it is concerned with avoiding something worse. Therefore all political action presupposes opinions of better or worse. But you cannot have an opinion of better or worse without having an opinion of good and bad. When you see that you follow an opinion, you are by this very fact driven to try to find knowledge, to replace opinion by knowledge.Therefore all politicial action points by itself toward knowledge of the good. Now the complete political good we call the good society and therefore all political action points to the question of the good society."
"Today there are quite a few people who a e doubtful whether one can speak of the good society because that would imply that there is a common good; and for some reason they think there couldn't be a common good. But quite a few of these people speak, for example, of the great society, which is another form of the good society---only one doesn't know why great society is preferrable to good society. At least it has never been explained to us. Others speak of the open society, which is also a form of the good society-----and again we are not told why the open society is a better term than the good society. Be this as it may, one can reject only verbally the quest for a good society. And this is the concern of political philosophy."
Of course, Strauss did not think that philosophy was a mode of historical knowing. He remained faithful to the classical conception of philosophy as a quest for the eternal order. This conception presupposed an eternal and unchanging order within which history takes place, and which is not affected in any way by history. Hence he stands in opposition to the historical turn taken Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche.
One of the subthemes running through Hardt and Negri's Empire is the style of the book, which is written from within the tradition of literary tradition. This was signified in the passages quoted in this post with its link to Eric Auerbach's Mimesis.
So let me quote a passage from Auerbach's classic text of literary criticism:
"Basically, the way in which we view human life and society is the same whether we are concerned with things of the past or things of the present. A change in our manner of viewing history will of necessity soon be transferred to our manner of viewing current conditions. When people realize that epochs and societies are not to be judged in terms of a pattern concept of what is desirable absolutely speaking but rather in every case in terms of their own premises; when people reckon among such premises not only natural factors like climate and soil but also the intellectual and historical factors; when, in other words, they come to develop a sense of historical dynamics, of the incomparability of historical phenomena and of their constant inner mobility; when they come to appreciate the vital unity of individual epochs, so that each epoch appears as a whole whose character is reflected in each of its manifestations; when, finally, they accept the conviction that the meaning of events cannot be grasped in abstract and general forms of cognition and that the material needed to understand it must not be sought exclusively in the upper strata of society and in major political events but also in art, economy, material and intellectual culture, in the depths of the workaday world and its men and women, because it is only there that one can grasp what is unique, what is animated by inner forces, and what, in both a more concrete and a more profound sense, is universally valid: then it is to be expected that those insights will also be transferred to the present and that, in consequence, the present too will be seen as incomparable and unique, as animated by inner forces and in a constant state of development; in other words, as a piece of history whose everyday depths and total inner structure lay claim to our interest both in their origins and in the direction taken by their development." (pp.443-444).
"...from his Turkish exile [in the early 1940s], Auerbach saw the downfall of Europe, and Germany in particular... he affirms the recuperative and redemptive human project for which, in its patient philological unfolding, his book is the emblem.... he understands that like a novelist, the scholar must reconstruct the history of his own time as part of a personal commitment to his field. Yet Auerbach specifically forswears the linear narrative style."
Hardt and Negri make another point in their methodological reflections that wind up the subsection they entitle 'The Ontological Drama of the Res Gestae; within the Alternatives within Empire section.
They say:
"This is where the first methodological approach has to pass the baton to the second, the constructive and ethico-political approach. Here we must delve into the ontological substrate of the concrete alternatives continually pushed forward by the res gestae, the subjective forces acting in the historical context. What appears here is not a new rationality but a new scenario of different rational acts-a horizon of activities, resistances, wills, and desires that refuse the hegemonic order, propose lines of flight, and forge alternative constitutive itineraries. This real substrate, open to critique, revised by the ethico-political approach, represents the real ontological referent of philosophy, or really the field proper to a philosophy of liberation. This approach breaks methodologically with every philosophy of history insofar as it refuses any deterministic conception of historical development and any "rational" celebration of the result. It demonstrates, on the contrary, how the historical event resides in potentiality. .... 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."
"Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering."
The shades of night are falling on modernity and philosophy reflects on the movement of the ideal and the real in this form to understand the world forming.That new world is what Hardt and Negri call Empire.
After dismissing the narrative of the tragic philosophers Hardt & Negri start their narrative by saying what their position is not. They say:
"This is when the ontological drama begins, when the curtain goes up on a scene in which the development of Empire becomes its own critique and its process of construction becomes the process of its overturning. This drama is ontological in the sense that here, in these processes, being is produced and reproduced...but we should insist right from the outset that this is not simply another variant of dialectical Enlightenment. We are not proposing the umpteenth version of the inevitable passage through purgatory (here in the guise of the new imperial machine) in order to offer a glimmer of hope for radiant futures. We are not repeating the schema of an ideal teleology that justifies any passage in the name of a promised end."
What then is Hardt and Negri's position?
"On the contrary, our reasoning here is based on two methodological approaches that are intended to be nondialectical and absolutely immanent: the first is critical and deconstructive, aiming to subvert the hegemonic languages and social structures and thereby reveal an alternative ontological basis that resides in the creative and productive practices of the multitude; the second is constructive and ethico-political, seeking to lead the processes of the production of subjectivity toward the constitution of an effective social, political alternative, a new constituent power... Our critical approach addresses the need for a real ideological and material deconstruction of the imperial order. "
Can put dialectics to one side then? Not really. Generally those continental philosophers who say they are dumping dialectics are only dumping a particular version of dialectics (eg., the 1930's French understanding of Hegel's dialectics) but they continue to think dialectically not analytically. Derrida is a good example. Deconstruction is a critical reworking of Hegel dialectics that emphasises the middle term (difference).
Hardt & Negri are doing something similar here with their deconstruction of hegemonic languages and social structures, resistance and new forms of subjectivity and political alternatives. Note that they even are willing to talk in terms of contradiction:
"The critical approach is thus intended to bring to light the contradictions, cycles, and crises of the process because in each of these moments the imagined necessity of the historical development can open toward alternative possibilities. In other words, the deconstruction of the historia rerum gestarum, of the spectral reign of globalized capitalism, reveals the possibility of alternative social organizations. This is perhaps as far as we can go with the methodological scaffolding of a critical and materialist deconstructionism-but this is already an enormous contribution."
Let us say there is a dialectical tradition in philosophy with lots of family disagreement about what dialectics is and does. There is no need to go into this since we can stay with deconstruction.
What do Hardt and Negri understand by deconstruction?
From what I can make we have is a mode of thinking that recognizes that the historian is not so much a collector of facts as a collector and relater of signifiers; that is to say, he organizes them with the purpose of establishing positive meaning in the form of a narrative. The background to this is indicated by the gesture to the literary criticism of Auerbach in this post.
This text by Edward Said is helpful, as it spells out the methodological background of this form of literary criticism:
"That is the main methodological point for Vico as well as for Auerbach. In order to be able to understand a humanistic text, one must try to do so as if one is the author of that text, living the author's reality, undergoing the kind of life experiences intrinsic to his or her life, and so forth, all by that combination of erudition and sympathy that is the hallmark of philological hermeneutics. Thus the line between actual events and the modifications of one's own reflective mind is blurred in Vico,.... But this perhaps tragic shortcoming of human knowledge and history is one of the unresolved contradictions pertaining to humanism itself, in which the role of thought in reconstructing the past can neither be excluded nor squared with what is "real."
" The "representation" of reality is taken by Auerbach to mean an active dramatic presentation of how each author actually realizes, brings characters to life, and clarifies his or her own world..... the second half of Mimesis painstakingly traces the growth of historicism, a multiperspectival, dynamic, and holistic way of representing history and reality."
If Hardt and Negri say that they insist on "the tragic character of modernity" but reject "the 'tragic' philosophers of Europe, from Schopenhauer to Heidegger," what then? What is their narrative of the underside of modernity? Remember, they say that we "must cleanse ourselves of any misplaced nostalgia for the belle époque of that modernity."By that they mean good riddance to the nation-state.
Personally, I'm inclined to defend the nation state. It is the institution we citizens have to protect ourselves against those economic flows that have the effect of placing limits on democracy and squeezing the welfare state.
For instance, under the proposed Free Trade Agreement with the US, Australia is obligated to modify the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme(PBS) scheme to help out the US drug companies to obtain a higher price for their drugs. Peter Dahros says:
"The text of the Agreement is unbalanced and most of the measures increase the pricing power of US drug companies operating in Australia. It is inconceivable, based on past practice, that they will not make use of that new pricing power.How much will this cost? American consumers, insurers and health programs pay two to three times as much for many important drugs as their Australian counterparts. Because most of the measures in the FTA apply to new drugs rather than existing ones, and because legislation will need to be enacted, regulations changed and new procedures put in place, there will be a substantial time-lag between the signing of the FTA and its full effect on prices. The full effect of the FTA on the pharmaceutical market is therefore unlikely to be felt for about five years.
By that time, however, it is plausible that the gap between US and Australian drug prices could be cut in half. We estimate, very conservatively, that Australia's PBS will have to pay at least one third more for its drugs with the FTA than without it. If the likely FTA effects are applied to 2003 figures, the extra cost to of the PBS to the government last year would have been around $1.5 billion for the same drugs at the same levels of use and with no increase in the health benefit to Australian patients. Similar pressures would be felt by other buyers of prescription pharmaceuticals, particularly hospitals."
So it is important to defend the good things that we citizens have built instead of simply talking in terms of misplaced nostalgia for the nation-state.
In the next section of Empire Hardt & Negri address the legacy of modernity that we have inherited. They say:
"The legacy of modernity is a legacy of fratricidal wars, devastating "development," cruel "civilization," and previously unimagined violence. Erich Auerbach once wrote that tragedy is the only genre that can properly claim realism in Western literature, and perhaps this is true precisely because of the tragedy Western modernity has imposed on the world. Concentration camps, nuclear weapons, genocidal wars, slavery, apartheid: it is not difficult to enumerate the various scenes of the tragedy."
So far so good. We have common ground. Hardt and Negri then go on to say:
"By insisting on the tragic character of modernity, however, we certainly do not mean to follow the "tragic" philosophers of Europe, from Schopenhauer to Heidegger, who turn these real destructions into metaphysical narratives about the negativity of being, as if these actual tragedies were merely an illusion, or rather as if they were our ultimate destiny! "
However, a metaphysical narrative need not be an illusion. It can led to a disclosure of technological mode of being, which treats ecosystems as resources to be manipulated, as Heidegger showed.
Still we have a legacy that we have inherited from modernity to deal with. It is a narrative about the underside or the negative of modernity. This narrative is called the "black armband" view of history by Australian conservatives. They say it is a declinist view of history that highlights all the negatives and none of the positives.
Hardt & Negri go on to say:
"We cannot be satisfied, however, with that political condemnation of modern power that relies on the historia rerum gestarum, the objective history we have inherited. We need to consider also the power of the res gestae, the power of the multitude to make history that continues and is reconfigured today within Empire. It is a question of transforming a necessity imposed on the multitude-a necessity that was to a certain extent solicited by the multitude itself throughout modernity as a line of flight from localized misery and exploitation- into a condition of possibility of liberation, a new possibility on this new terrain of humanity."
In populism the working class is replaced by the "multitude" or the people and so the concept of political "activist" would change. Populism in Australia (eg. Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) has articulated the misery of the regional working poor due to the reforms in favour of free market economics. This populism has been associated with a defence of the nation state against global economic flows. It has also advocated more democracy in liberal parliamentary politics to give the regional working poor a political voice.
In Australia that populist political voice was incorporated by the conservative Howard Government during the mid to late 1990s.
Are Hardt & Negri giving populism an international twist in Empire?
In this article John Quiggin questions the regional integration thesis of the Australia Free Trade Agreement with the US. He says that:
"In general, an integration agreement involves the adoption of common, or at least compatible, economic policies on a wide range of issues, including intellectual property, public ownership of infrastructure, and competition policy. Ultimately, integration is likely to extend the provision and financing of health care and education.However, 'integration' is a misleading term in the context of a bilateral agreement between Australia and the United States. Given the relative size of the two countries, and the fact that the United States has adopted a general strategy of seeking bilateral agreements on trade and other issues on a 'pattern bargaining' model, it is clear that any agreement will involve Australia adopting American institutions and not vice versa.
This does not represent a difficulty for advocates of an FTA such as Austa. Austa publications indicate a strongly-held belief that the economic and social institutions of the United States are superior to those of Australia, and that we will therefore benefit from an agreement which binds us to replace our existing institutions with those of the United States."
I would suggest that Australia's Free Trade Agreement with the US offers us a way to evaluate Hardt & Negri's conception of Empire. This is an economic document that goes beyond the liberalization of trade, as it addresses culture, medicine, the integration of the two economies and regional relationships in the Asia Pacific region.
So it is about shaping an economy and society, the conduct of a population, resistance to empire and the capacity of the nation state.
Hardt and Negri continue with their criticism of a left localism as a form of resistance to globalization. They say:
"This Leftist strategy of resistance to globalization and defense of locality is also damaging because in many cases what appear as local identities are not autonomous or self-determining but actually feed into and support the development of the capitalist imperial machine. The globalization or deterritorialization operated by the imperial machine is not in fact opposed to localization or reterritorialization, but rather sets in play mobile and modulating circuits of differentiation and identification. The strategy of local resistance misidentifies and thus masks the enemy. We are by no means opposed to the globalization of relationships as such-in fact, as we said, the strongest forces of Leftist internationalism have effectively led this process. The enemy, rather, is a specific regime of global relations that we call Empire."
"More important, this strategy of defending the local is damaging because it obscures and even negates the real alternatives and the potentials for liberation that exist within Empire. We should be done once and for all with the search for an outside, a standpoint that imagines a purity for our politics. It is better both theoretically and practically to enter the terrain of Empire and confront its homogenizing and heterogenizing flows in all their complexity, grounding our analysis in the power of the global multitude."
Hardt & Negri continue with their very conventional criticism of a left localism that is based on an ecological understanding of place. They say:
"What needs to be addressed, instead, is precisely the production of locality, that is, the social machines that create and recreate the identities and differences that are understood as the local...The differences of locality are neither preexisting nor natural but rather effects of a regime of production. Globality similarly should not be understood in terms of cultural, political, or economic homogenization. Globalization, like localization, should be understood instead as a regime of the production of identity and difference, or really of homogenization and heterogenization."
A left localism of place can accept that it is not 'outside' to the flows of globalization and that what is a local place--a region--is shaped by the effects of a regime of production. That is certainly the common understanding of the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia and the impact this regime of production of irrigated agriculture has had on the river and its habitat.
Hardt and Negri go to say that:
"The better framework, then, to designate the distinction between the global and the local might refer to different networks of flows and obstacles in which the local moment or perspective gives priority to the reterritorializing barriers or boundaries and the global moment privileges the mobility of deterritorializing flows. It is false, in any case, to claim that we can (re)establish local identities that are in some sense outside and protected against the global flows of capital and Empire."
Hardt & Negri argue against the localism of the left:
"We maintain, however, that today this localist position....is both false and damaging. It is false first of all because the problem is poorly posed. In many characterizations the problem rests on a false dichotomy between the global and the local, assuming that the global entails homogenization and undifferentiated identity whereas the local preserves heterogeneity and difference. Often implicit in such arguments is the assumption that the differences of the local are in some sense natural, or at least that their origin remains beyond question. Local differences preexist the present scene and must be defended or protected against the intrusion of globalization. It should come as no surprise, given such assumptions, that many defenses of the local adopt the terminology of traditional ecology or even identify this "local" political project with the defense of nature and biodiversity. This view can easily devolve into a kind of primordialism that fixes and romanticizes social relations and identities."
Yet an ecological localism of place does not need to work with the natural or an origin that remains beyond question. An ecological localism of place can work with a constructed understanding of place that has been shaped by the way the landscape has been changed by irrigated agriculture, economic reforms, and an opening out to the global market.
That localism or regionalism is what underpins a federal polity since the states within a ferderal political structure are based on different kinds of regionalism. That federalism then fosters a deliberative democracy in which there is an ongoing be debate (deliberation) about public decisions.
That conception of democracy is worthy of defence in the face of older conceptions, such as those that emphasize the aggregration of preferences or voting and representation. Deliberative democracy highlights the capacity to participate in decision making, substantive democratic control and critical reflection and changing judgements, non-coercive deliberation that involves humor, emotion, storytelling and political gossip.
Haedt & Negri says that:
"Despite recognizing all this, we insist on asserting that the construction of Empire is a step forward in order to do away with any nostalgia for the power structures that preceded it and refuse any political strategy that involves returning to that old arrangement, such as trying to resurrect the nation-state to protect against global capital. We claim that Empire is better in the same way that Marx insists that capitalism is better than the forms of society and modes of production that came before it."
They go on to say that this position is swimming against the current of left nationalism. This places Hardt & Negri at odds with the position of philosophy.com on globalization which defends place.
Hardt & Negri go on to say that:
"In the long decades of the current crisis of the communist, socialist, and liberal Left that has followed the 1960s, a large portion of critical thought, both in the dominant countries of capitalist development and in the subordinated ones, has sought to recompose sites of resistance that are founded on the identities of social subjects or national and regional groups, often grounding political analysis on the localization of struggles. Such arguments are sometimes constructed in terms of "place-based" movements or politics, in which the boundaries of place (conceived either as identity or as territory) are posed against the undifferentiated and homogeneous space of global networks... At other times such political arguments draw on the long tradition of Leftist nationalism in which (in the best cases) the nation is conceived as the primary mechanism of def ense against the domination of foreign and/or global capital...Today the operative syllogism at the heart of the various forms of "local" Leftist strategy seems to be entirely reactive: If capitalist domination is becoming ever more global, then our resistances to it must defend the local and construct barriers to capital's accelerating flows. From this perspective, the real globalization of capital and the constitution of Empire must be considered signs of dispossession and defeat."
Hardt & Negri's observation that a large portion of critical thought... in the dominant countries of capitalist development... has sought to recompose sites of resistance that are founded on the identities of social subjects or national and regional groups is true. And these resistances are often grounded on political analysis on the localization of struggles that are constructed in in terms of "place-based" movements.
See here for an Australian example. And a lot of this resistance is reactive, as it mourns the passing of the old forms of life and the destruction of cultural and heritage.
This kind of resistance does acknowledge that capitalist domination is becoming ever more global and it holds that our resistances to it must defend the local and construct barriers to capital's accelerating flows.
But for good reason. Why should we allow the cultural heritage of a place to be destroyed by development? Places are where we live. So we want these places to express our embodied mode of life.
Hence we will resist our places becoming just a space or location for capital flows as much as we can. To that extent we, as embodied beings, stand against the progress of global capital. The flows of international captial are indifferent to the character of place based on lived bodily existence. Only location or space exists.
Hardt & Negri now turn to section 3 of chapter I that they have called alternatives to Empire. I presume thsi means that they are thinking in terms of resistance to the power of Empire.
They say:
"Flirting with Hegel, one could say that the construction of Empire is good in itself but not for itself.....Saying that Empire is good in itself, however, does not mean that it is good for itself. Although Empire may have played a role in putting an end to colonialism and imperialism, it nonetheless constructs its own relationships of power based on exploitation that are in many respects more brutal than those it destroyed. The end of the dialectic of modernity has not resulted in the end of the dialectic of exploitation. Today nearly all of humanity is to some degree absorbed within or subordinated to the networks of capitalist exploitation. We see now an ever more extreme separation of a small minority that controls enormous wealth from multitudes that live in poverty at the limit of powerlessness. The geographical and racial lines of oppression and exploitation that were established during the era of colonialism and imperialism have in many respects not declined but instead increased exponentially."
Many who were middle class in the 1970s and 1980s and comfortably off are now struggling. Especially those who live in the regions of the nation state. Income inequality is growing not lessening whilst the welfare state is being steadily privatised (education and health).
In his review of Hardt and Negri's Empire by Bashir Abu-Manneh interprets their conception of Empire as follows:
"The United States does not accept what senior British diplomat Robert Cooper today calls postmodern or cooperative imperialism: “a framework in which each has a share in the government, in which no single country dominates and in which the governing principles are not ethnic but legal.”28 This project, which includes the International Criminal Court and other institutions for mutual state interference, sounds very much like Hardt and Negri’s juridical Empire."
A review of Hardt and Negri's Empire by Bashir Abu-Manneh. He says that the crucial or defining issue:
"....of the debate surrounding Empire is whether capitalism has now entered into a “post-imperialist” stage, as Hardt and Negri argue, or whether it has consolidated a new phase of imperialism."
The issue is stated clearly. What I will do is indicate the way that Bashir Abu-Manneh argues. He acknowledges that capital was universalized for the first time in history during the 1990s. He states his position clearly:
'In reality, the new world order is substantially different from the one depicted in Empire. Imperialism has indeed persisted. And American empire is the real goal of globalization.This has been clearly demonstrated in Peter Gowan’s The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance. The new world order, he argues, is in essence about the U.S. drive to dominate the world economy unchallenged, to “go global” in order “to entrench the United States as the power that will control the major economic and political outcomes across the globe in the twenty-first century.” Globalization and neoliberalism are U.S. strategies for global dominance, allowing the United States to shape both “the internal and external environments of states in directions which will induce them to continue to accept U.S. political and economic dominance.”'
The first is Hardt & Negri's acceptance of the United States discourse during and after the Gulf War that it is managing international justice in the name of global right, and not as a function of its own national motives. Bashir Abu-Manneh says:
"To accept and uncritically replicate this hegemonic U.S. discourse of policing the world, of rights and “just war,” is to fall into the trap of projecting domestic criminal law onto the behavior of states. .... Because the Gulf War couldn’t really be justified in liberal or democratic terms, a moral discourse of right and wrong had to be imported into international relations. International politics, national interests, or even capital reproduction strategies are substituted by a humanitarian discourse, which Hardt and Negri endorse."
Bashir Abu-Manneh concludes that empire is not centreless. It's subject is a hegemonic US. He says the "central U.S. objective has remained a constant since at least as far back as the First World War: global domination." he says that the real challenge for the United States in the 1990s had been finding new ways to legitimize this proposition. The third world and Eastern Europe have had to bear the brunt of this process, as inter-imperialist tensions were projected outwards.
Bashir says that the international Kantian framework, in which each has a share in the government, in which no single country dominates and in which the governing principles are not ethnic but legal, that is favoured by the European Union "stands in sharp contradiction with the United States’ strategy to attain unchallenged supremacy over the world." The United States continues to interpret this international liberalism as a direct threat to its own constitution and national interest since it involves subjecting U.S. domestic law to international constraints.
I'm not going to evaluate Bashir Abu-Manneh response to Hardt & Negri's. I will leave it as an issue that has been placed on the table.
This response to Pax Americana as empire by Benjamin Barber is interesting. A discusion of the book can be found here.
In his review of the Fear's Empire Terence Banks says:
"The American Empire attempts to assert the sovereignty of the center by pursuing a policy of unilateral military action. The justification for this policy is not humanitarian, or defensive, but preventive. Preventive war is the essence of Pax Americana, an instinctive conservative response to the sense of vulnerability and debilitation in the face of stateless, non-governmental predators like Al Qaeda."
'Exceptionalism remains the justification for America’s freedom to strike pre-emptively at any potentially hostile state, a right denied to any other sovereign power...the image of American exceptionalism continues to be projected outward to the wider world. It is a self-image of virtuous Americans, unbaggaged by the histories of the barbarian lands across the seas...Barber’s argument [is] that out of isolationism grew domination. Isolationism was a product of a sense of national virtue, and similarly more recent American foreign policy has approached the outside world with this same sense of virtue intact: The Cold War was a battle against an “Evil Empire” just as present U.S. policy is directed against the “Axis of Evil,” and Bush reminds us that the most serious threat to the “civilized world” are the “evildoers,” those terrorist cells that lurk in the dark beyond the talons of “Fears Empire.”'
Behind the doctrine of preventive war sits an interpretation of Thomas Hobbes, which suggests that the remedy for an anxious world of anarchy and fear is power. The solution is for a powerful America to stamp order upon a world of chaos and conflict.
However, the idealist conservatives, endeavour to project American power hegemonically, in a sovereign way, assume that we still lived in the nineteenth century rather than the 21st century. Their's is a false conception of empire because a sovereign and powerful United States is just not in a position to prevent American jobs from going offshore; firm from leaving America; nor is it able to govern the flows of capital around the world or their uses; nor is it able to use its sovereign military forces to govern the flow of crime and terrorism around the world.
Banks says that Barber’s argument is clear:
"These moralizing myths [of exceptionalism] may persuade a perplexed electorate to embark upon a “righteous war against evil,” but it does not sustain a serious political argument about long-term global prosperity and security. His alternative is to reject the moral fig leaf that unburdens both Isolationism and Imperialism from responsibility and also to reject the techno-military straightjacket that puts a strain on the national budget. Instead, America should forgo its futile quest for independence and institutionalize its interactions with the world community through cooperative organizations governed by international law."
One of the way ways that empire works can be discerned in this article abouth dollar standard by Niall Ferguson. He says:
"As in the 1960s, it is not difficult to make the case that this system is highly beneficial to the US. Over the past decade or so, the American current account deficit with the rest of the world for goods, services and loans has grown dramatically. Add together the deficits of the past 12 years and you arrive at a total external debt of $2.9 trillion."
"First, it has allowed US business to invest substantially (notably in information technology) without requiring Americans to reduce their consumption.... The second payoff, however, has taken the form of tax cuts rather than private sector investment. The dramatic shift in the finances of the federal government from surplus to deficit since 2000 - a deterioration unprecedented in peacetime, according to the IMF - has been substantially funded from abroad."
"The Asian central banks' motivation for doing so is simple: to prevent their own currencies from appreciating relative to the dollar - because a weak dollar would hurt their own exports to the mighty American market. Were it not for these interventions, the dollar would certainly have depreciated relative to the Asian currencies, as it has against the euro. But the Asian authorities are willing to spend whatever it takes of their own currency to keep the dollar exchange rate steady."
This is a decentralized conception of empire.
Ferguson goes on to suggest that the dollar standard has a limited historical life since no monetary system lasts forever. It could start with Asians and Europeans selling their goods somewhere other than America. And they may come to recognise that the emergence of the euro as an alternative reserve currency to the dollar creates a chance to fundamentally shift the centre of gravity of the international economy. If the Europeans seize their chance, Americans could face the end of half a century of dollar domination.
Hence empire is something other than American domination-- Pax Americana.
This article explores something that has always puzzled me---American conservatism. After acknowledging the fuzziness about what American conservatism is they say:
"But stand back and compare Ronald Reagan's very American brand of conservatism with its counterparts around the world, and you can identify a clear mainstream. There has been, to put it bluntly, nothing like it anywhere else.American conservatives have been exceptional in two ways: in the ideas that they espouse and the movement they have created. Mr. Reagan typified both. The best way to think about the ideas he preached....is as a reformation.
Mr. Reagan...combined renewal with heresy. The established faith that Mr. Reagan's generation of American conservatives reinterpreted was classical conservatism (the conservatism whose most eloquent prophet remains Edmund Burke), and the heresy they introduced was classical liberalism (the creed of the Enlightenment and John Stuart Mill).
Traditional conservatism was based on six principles: a suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; unashamed patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; a pessimistic, backward-looking pragmatism; and elitism. This was the creed that Burke shaped into a philosophy in the 18th century--and that most famous conservatives, from Prince Metternich to Winston Churchill, understood in their bones. Mr. Reagan's conservatism exaggerated the first three of Burke's principles and contradicted the last three."
It is very American.That is its strength:
"The fundamental fact about American conservatism is not just that it is conservatism but that it is "American." Reaganism has survived in so much better shape than Thatcherism because it went with the grain of American culture, tapping into many of the deepest sentiments in American life: religiosity, capitalism, patriotism, individualism, optimism."
Is this Reagan conservatism still the conservatism of the idea labs, such as the American Enterprise Institute and The Weekly Standard?
I'm going to be on the road for a few days so I will leave a chunk of text for people to chew on. If you are like me you will be finding their conception of empire to be very elusive. All we know is what it is not.
The section of the text of biopolitical production we are considering now leaves intervention behind and shifts into a new section called royal perogatives. Hardt and Negri outline what they mean by this. They say:
"What were traditionally called the royal prerogatives of sovereignty seem in effect to be repeated and even substantially renewed in the construction of Empire. If we were to remain within the conceptual framework of classic domestic and international law, we might be tempted to say that a supranational quasi- state is being formed. That does not seem to us, however, an accurate characterization of the situation. When the royal prerogatives of modern sovereignty reappear in Empire, they take on a completely different form. For example, the sovereign function of deploying military forces was carried out by the modern nation-states and is now conducted by Empire, but, as we have seen, the justification for such deployments now rests on a state of permanent exception, and the deployments themselves take the form of police actions."
"Our claim, rather, is that we are dealing here with a special kind of sovereignty-a discontinuous form of sovereignty that should be considered liminal or marginal insofar as it acts "in the final instance," a sovereignty that locates its only point of reference in the definitive absoluteness of the power that it can exercise. Empire thus appears in the form of a very high tech machine: it is virtual, built to control the marginal event, and organized to dominate and when necessary intervene in the breakdowns of the system (in line with the most advanced technologies of robotic production). The virtuality and discontinuity of imperial sovereignty, however, do not minimize the effectiveness of its force; on the contrary, those very characteristics serve to reinforce its apparatus, demonstrating its effectiveness in the contemporary historical context and its legitimate force to resolve world problems in the final instance."
"We are now in the position to address the question whether, on the basis of these new biopolitical premises, the figure and the life of Empire can today be grasped in terms of a juridical model. We have already seen that this juridical model cannot be constituted by the existing structures of international law, even when understood in terms of the most advanced developments of the United Nations and the other great international organizations. Their elaborations of an international order could at the most be recognized as a process of transition toward the new imperial power. The constitution of Empire is being formed neither on the basis of any contractual or treaty-based mechanism nor through any federative source. The source of imperial normativity is born of a new machine, a new economic-industrial-communicative machine-in short, a globalized biopolitical machine. It thus seems clear that we must look at something other than what has up until now constituted the bases of international order, something that does not rely on the form of right that, in the most diverse traditions, was grounded in the modern system of sovereign nation-states."
"The impossibility, however, of grasping the genesis of Empire and its virtual figure with any of the old instruments of juridical theory, which were deployed in the realist, institutionalist, positivist, or natural right frameworks, should not force us to accept a cynical framework of pure force or some such Machiavellian position. In the genesis of Empire there is indeed a rationality at work that can be recognized not so much in terms of the juridical tradition but more clearly in the often hidden history of industrial management and the political uses of technology...This is a rationality that situates us at the heart of biopolitics and biopolitical technologies."
Hardt and Negri draw a link between the prevention and repression involved in intervention.They say:
"The relationship between prevention and repression is particularly clear in the case of intervention in ethnic conflicts. The conflicts among ethnic groups and the consequent reenforcement of new and/or resurrected ethnic identities effectively disrupt the old aggregations based on national political lines. These conflicts make the fabric of global relations more fluid and, by affirming new identities and new localities, present a more malleable material for control. In such cases repression can be articulated through preventive action that constructs new relationships (which will eventually be consolidated in peace but only after new wars) and new territorial and political formations that are functional (or rather more functional, better adaptable) to the constitution of Empire.<33> A second example of repression prepared through preventive action is the campaigns against corporative business groups or "mafias," particularly those involved in the drug trade. The actual repression of these groups may not be as important as criminalizing their activities and managing social alarm at their very existence in order to facilitate their control. Even though controlling "ethnic terrorists" and "drug mafias" may represent the center of the wide spectrum of police control on the part of the imperial power, this activity is nonetheless normal, that is, systemic. The "just war" is effectively supported by the "moral police," just as the validity of imperial right and its legitimate functioning is supported by the necessary and continuous exercise of police power."
hard and Negri say:
"This kind of continual intervention, then, which is both moral and military, is really the logical form of the exercise of force that follows from a paradigm of legitimation based on a state of permanent exception and police action. Interventions are always exceptional even though they arise continually; they take the form of police actions because they are aimed at maintaining an internal order. In this way intervention is an effective mechanism that through police deployments contributes directly to the construction of the moral, normative, and institutional order of Empire."
There was an article in last Friday's edition of the Australian Financial Review (subscription required) that touches upon our theme of empire. Written by Stephen Bell, it addresses the role played by the Reserve Bank in Australia. Bell says:
'For years now globalists and neoliberals have been putting out the message that "globalization" and the need for "national competitiveness" meant governments have little policy discretion. Budgetary policy, taxation, welfare and even microeconomic policy are said to be constrained by a "golden straitjacket." Governments are supposed to win over fickle, footloose investors and defer to herd-like financial markets that can punish nations overnight for straying from the path of economic virtue.'
Bell says that we have been conned. He says that the wide varietion in tax, welfare and microeconomic policy regimes around the world is strong evidence that governments still have a good deal of policy discretion --if they choose to use it. Many states don't so choose.
Bell says that the Australian Reserve Bank has carved out a distinctive policy approach that challenges the neoliberal thesis about policy convergence. The policy path meant that the Reserve Bank has had to fight to become independent of government control during the 1980s; to pursue its multiple goal statutory charter of low inflation and full employment in the 1990s in the face of the neoliberal preference for low inflation-only objectives; and to avoid the hawkish crunching inflation through a harsh recession favoured by the othodox international monetary authorities.
Hence there is room to move.
But let us not get too carried away with thsi independence. The Reserve Bank still used unemployment and labor insecurity as disciplinary instruments to crack then contain inflation.
I had a long long meeting with some heavies from Canberra yesterday about energyand environment policy. After work I went had a drink at my local pub--the Kings Head-- with a friend, we got talking about Australian conservatism after some political jokes about Foucault, sovereignty and cutting off the king's head.
I used to understand conservatism as a critique of the Enlightenment and the abstract notion of human rights (Burke and all that) and an assault on instrumental rationality. That is the traditional sense of conservatism.
We discussed the way that conservatism in Australia has changed. It used to be that traditional variety, but that rarely exists. It has changed, thanks to neo-liberalism and its uncompromising commitment to globalisation and the free market. This new conservatism now defends the Enlightenment.
Are we still talking about conservatism? Or is this a conservative liberalism? My judgement was that neo-liberalism, with its uncompromising commitment to globalisation and the free market, is a form of liberalism. However, that economic liberalism is often coupled with a social conservatism that protests the ABC showing lesbian mothers on Play School. Hence we have a blurring of the boundaries.
However, John Gray thinks the conservative leopard has changed its spots. He says:
"With the disappearance of traditional conservatism, political and intellectual boundaries have become rather blurred, and it would be a mistake to imagine that neoconservative ideas are found only among people who think of themselves as being on the right. On the contrary, they have been taken up by a number of old-left thinkers as part of a rancorous campaign against postmodernism. It seems a sort of moral panic has swept through sections of the left, finding expression in a pervasive nostalgia for the unquestioning belief in Enlightenment values they imagine existed some time in the past."
"Richard Wolin's new inquisitorial tirade appears to belong in this category. In The Seduction of Unreason, he insists that the catastrophes of the 20th century were the result of malicious intellectual attacks on the Enlightenment and the pervasive mood of doubt that ensued from them. The clear implication is that if only we had stuck to the truths of the Enlightenment, the worst horrors of the past century could have been avoided."
"One problem with this thesis is that the worst regimes of the 20th century were shaped - largely or in part - by Enlightenment ideas. The Soviet Union was not dreamt up in a Russian monastery, nor Maoist China in a Taoist hermitage. They were genuine attempts to implement ideas drawn from the heart of the European Enlightenment. The crimes these regimes committed were not inspired by the writings of Joseph de Maistre or Friedrich Nietzsche - two names that recur time and again in Wolin's roll call of intellectual infamy. They were embodiments - distorted in many ways, no doubt, but still authentic - of an Enlightenment political theory that Karl Marx had developed using the works of other Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith and Hegel. The simple fact - which Wolin somehow manages to avoid mentioning in the course of his catalogue of 20th-century intellectual villainy - is that the largest mass murders of the 20th century were done by regimes committed to Enlightenment ideas of progress."
"Wolin passes over the Enlightenment roots of 20th-century totalitarianism in silence, and this is partly because if he had taken the trouble to examine it, he would have soon discovered that the Enlightenment was never the spotlessly liberal movement he nostalgically imagines. Many, if not most, Enlightenment thinkers were anti-liberals, and a good number were out-and-out racists. But these facts are really irrelevant to Wolin's purpose. His aim is not intellectual but nakedly political - to prosecute the postmodern left by representing its chief thinkers as lineal descendants of fascism and Nazism."
As Gray observes, academic junk like this has less to do with intellectual history and more to do with academic shots fired in the unending culture wars.
So I will stay with the traditional understanding of conservatism.
Under the section entitled Interventions in chapter One Hardt and Negri connect empire to global civil society.
They make the connection in terms of moral instruments:
"In the previous section we referred to both the structural means of intervention that involve the deployments of monetary mechanisms and financial maneuvers over the transnational field of interdependent productive regimes and interventions in the field of communication and their effects on the legitimation of the system. Here we want to investigate the new forms of intervention that involve the exercise of physical force on the part of the imperial machine over its global territories....The arsenal of legitimate force for imperial intervention is indeed already vast, and should include not only military intervention but also other forms such as moral intervention and juridical intervention. In fact, the Empire's powers of intervention might be best understood as beginning not directly with its weapons of lethal force but rather with its moral instruments."
"What we are calling moral intervention is practiced today by a variety of bodies, including the news media and religious organizations, but the most important may be some of the so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which, precisely because they are not run directly by governments, are assumed to act on the basis of ethical or moral imperatives. The term refers to a wide variety of groups, but we are referring here principally to the global, regional, and local organizations that are dedicated to reliefwork and the protection of human rights, such as Amnesty International, Oxfam, and Médecins sans Frontières. Such humanitarian NGOs are in effect (even if this runs counter to the intentions of the participants) some of the most powerful pacific weapons of the new world order-the charitable campaigns and the mendicant orders of Empire. These NGOs conduct "just wars" without arms, without violence, without borders. Like the Dominicans in the late medieval period and the Jesuits at the dawn of modernity, these groups strive to identify universal needs and defend human rights."
Hardt and Negri go on to say:
".....In effect, this [moral] intervention prefigures the state of exception from below, and does so without borders, armed with some of the most effective means of communication and oriented toward the symbolic production of the Enemy. These NGOs are completely immersed in the biopolitical context of the constitution of Empire; they anticipate the power of its pacifying and productive intervention of justice. It should thus come as no surprise that honest juridical theorists of the old international school (such as Richard Falk) should be drawn in by the fascination of these NGOs.The NGOs' demonstration of the new order as a peaceful biopolitical context seems to have blinded these theorists to the brutal effects that moral intervention produces as a prefiguration of world order."
The idea of American Empire has taken on a new resonance and a sense of legitimacy among ordinary people concerned about peace and justice in our world after 9/11. US security was seen to be threatened from outside. Many say resist the Empire and reject its distorted concept of peace and security.
In Empire Hardt and Negri turn to a new section called intervention. They say that the new framework of legitimacy provided by the communications industries includes new forms and new articulations of the exercise of legitimate force. During its formation, the new power must demonstrate the effectiveness of its force at the same time that the bases of its legitimation are being constructed.
Another mouthful that is difficult to digest. I interpret the reference to the communications industries to be CNN and Fox Television. The former made then news when it started its 24 hours news service in the sense that reality became the news as reported on CNN----eg., during the first Gulf War. Fox Television legitimated the second Gulf War with its embedded journalists and US patriotism.
What then is the new framework of legitimacy in formation that is provided by these communications industries? We need to remember that empire in the text by Hardt and Negri does not mean the US as a hegemonic power.
I have no idea. America introducing the beacon of democracy into the US? The old idea of a global village? That we are fighting a global war? The need for a for a strong Empire to police an unruly world?
From the periphery of Empire in Australia what comes across the Washington neo-conservatives rhetoric of legitimation. They use the Empire-word freely and they insist that the United States is the world’s most benevolent nation and that it should, and does, use its imperial power robustly to expand freedom across the globe.
Is the legitimation the worldwide war on terror, involving open and covert military operations, new security legislation and efforts to block the financing of terrorism?
Inside the nation state the media (eg., Murdoch's The Australian) constructs the “war on terrorism” in terms of the creation of an ideology of fear, threat and repression, which constructs enemies (Muslims with links to overseas organizations) and promotes violence against them. Is this the new mode of legitimation?
Hardt and Negri continue to develop the importance of the communication corporations:
"If communication is one of the hegemonic sectors of production and acts over the entire biopolitical field, then we must consider communication and the biopolitical context coexistent. This takes us well beyond the old terrain as Jürgen Habermas described it, for example. In fact, when Habermas developed the concept of communicative action, demonstrating so powerfully its productive form and the ontological consequences deriving from that, he still relied on a standpoint outside these effects of globalization, a standpoint of life and truth that could oppose the informational colonization of being. The imperial machine, however, demonstrates that this external standpoint no longer exists."
"On the contrary, communicative production and the construction of imperial legitimation march hand in hand and can no longer be separated. The machine is self-validating, autopoietic-that is, systemic. It constructs social fabrics that evacuate or render ineffective any contradiction; it creates situations in which, before coercively neutralizing difference, seem to absorb it in an insignificant play of self-generating and self-regulating equilibria."
They conclude this section by saying that contrary to the way many postmodernist accounts would have it, however, the imperial machine, far from eliminating master narratives, actually produces and reproduces them (ideological master narratives in particular) in order to validate and celebrate its own power. In this coincidence of production through language, the linguistic production of reality, and the language of self-validation resides a fundamental key to understanding the effectiveness, validity, and legitimation of imperial right.