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July 27, 2004
Hardt & Negri close out chapter one by asking a question:
"How can we construct an apparatus for bringing together the subject (the multitude) and the object (cosmopolitical liberation) within postmodernity? Clearly one cannot achieve this... even simply by following the indications offered by the Marx-Engels manifesto."
So they turn to Machievelli:
"In the cold placidness of postmodernity, what Marx and Engels saw as the co-presence of the productive subject and the process of liberation is utterly inconceivable. And yet, from our postmodern perspective the terms of the Machiavellian manifesto seem to acquire a new contemporaneity. Straining the analogy with Machiavelli a little, we could pose the problem in this way: How can productive labor dispersed in various networks find a center? How can the material and immaterial production of the brains and bodies of the many construct a common sense and direction, or rather, how can the endeavor to bridge the distance between the formation of the multitude as subject and the constitution of a democratic political apparatus find its prince?"
They say that any postmodern liberation must be achieved within this world, on the plane of immanence, with no possibility of any utopian outside.
They then add that the form in which the political should be expressed as subjectivity today is not at all clear.
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