"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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Empire: literary criticism
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June 28, 2004
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).
Edward Said says that Mimesis is an attempt to rescue sense and meanings from the fragments of modernity. Said goes on to say that:
"...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."
Like Auerbach 's history of the representation of reality in Western literature Hardt and Negri's representation of empire explicitly reject a rigid scheme, a relentless sequential movement, or fixed concepts as instruments of study. The linear narrative style still favoured by many Australian historians has gone.
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Having gone back and read your comment regarding what H&N are up to potentially up to might have something to do with Barthes and I entirely agree.
The apparent linearity of our discourse as recorded in the html 'trace' is somewhat deceiving considering the extent to which our posts have crisscrossed and our particular trajectory through the textual dropping has not been parallel.
I think, as the dust settles that we are pretty much in agreement about what Hardt and Negri are up to, but that we have a slightly different (perhaps only affective?) take on the nature of the immanence that they appeal to. Perhaps I am reading Empire as a theological work where you seem to view it as primarily theoretical?
I vaguely recall that "immanence" has a somewhat specific meaning in the context of the Frankfurt school - something like "formal" as opposed to "ideological"? But I think not so redolent of the religious overtones of incarnation (mystical unity of theory and praxis)? On the face of it - you interpretation seems more plausible.
I've been resisting the temptation to read more than a page or two ahead at any moment, and I am looking forward to seeing whether my "religious" reading is at all sustainable.