In theory, the liberal democratic state operated under two basic principles. The first of these was separation of powers. Legislative and executive action would be held to a standard of legality by the action of unelected and therefore presumably independent judges. The second principle is that certain invasions of individual personal liberty are forbidden, and that the judges will provide a remedy against those who commit such invasions.
It is It has been obvious for some time that these principles are in jeopardy. The suspension of the rule of law, the emergence of a permanent state of exception, abuses of authority, and the generalized condition of restriction of freedom in Western societies since 9/11 have become part of what is normal. Our world of liberal democracy is becoming a world constituted by the new anti-terrorism laws in the United States, Great Britain, and the European Union; the placing of certain groups of individuals outside the law (terrorists, enemy combatants, suspect airline passengers); the creation of exceptional procedures of containment, detention, and interrogation by government agencies; an ongoing and intensified regime of police surveillance inside Western societies, and ongoing American state of a global war against terror.
Hence the critique (based on the work of Schmitt, Agamben, and Hardt and Negri) of the so-called democratic state—from the United States to Europe to Australia —and of the transformation of liberal systems of constitutional governance into police, military, and security orders. The various lines of critique inform us that the state of exception in the making is in fact a new norm, a state of permanence.The state of exception created by emergency laws and other extra-constitutional decisions and actions in Western societies is indeed a permanent condition.
Jean-Claude Paye, in his Global War on Liberty, argues that:
the rule of law becomes increasingly formal, not only because its content, the protection of private life and the defense of individual and publicliberties, turns out to be very limited, but also by the practical possibility offered to the executive power to free itself completely from the last safeguards of legal order.... The strengthening of the executive relative to the other powers makes possible the general and permanent suspension of the law. It is the instrument for setting up a state of exception.
In Empire Hardt and Negri argue for a revamped Marxism in that they talk in terms of the transcendence of modern sovereignty…by the immanence of capital flows and their insistence on capitalist power as the major focus for resistance and political action. We can see this imperial corrosion of the state in the constraints placed on sovereignty in neo-liberal economic restructuring with the opening to international capital flows during the 1980s.This globalisation-induced upheaval is furthered witeh restructuring of industrial relations and the shift away from centralized bargaining to individual contracts.
But we have, contra Negri and Hardt, a reassertion of sovereignty vis-a-vis the refugee and the terrorist, rather than their thesis of the dissolution of sovereignty. This reassertion, which is associated with the demonisation of the Other, the Stranger, and their incarceration and punishment for simply being non-citizens, is part of the general apparatus of governmentality and biopower intrinsic to modern sovereignty.
Now this reassertion of sovereignty is associated with promises to provide Australians with a sense of security and 'home', appeals to the nation. So what do Hardt nad Negri say about the nation?
They say that:
The nation is a kind of ideological shortcut that attempts to free the concepts of sovereignty and modernity from the antagonism and crisis that define them. National sovereignty suspends the conflictual origins of modernity (when they are not definitively destroyed), and it closes the alternative paths within modernity that had refused to concede their powers to state authority. (p.95)
The process of constructing the nation, which renewed the concept of sovereignty and gave it a new definition, quickly became in each and every historical context an ideological nightmare. The crisis of modernity, which is the contradictory co-presence of the multitude and a power that wants to reduce it to the rule of one----that is, the co-presence of a new productive set of free subjectivities and a disciplinary power that wants to exploit i----is not finally pacified or resolved by the concept of nation, any more than it was by the concept of sovereignty or state. The nation can only mask the crisis ideologically, displace it, and defer its power. (p. 97)
I've found another online text of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's popular and influential Empire (Harvard, 2000). The digital text that I'd initially found, and was using nearly two years, has disappeared into the void. In the meantime I've bought the book. This makes it much easier to read and work through the text. I was at a distinct disadvantage before.
If you recall, Empire is a particular expression of an interpretation of the process of globalization, which held that the increasing integration of economies and markets collapses national borders and lead to the extinction of national sovereignty. "Globalisation" and the "new world order" would usher in a planetary "rule of law" through multilateral institutions such as the U.N., WTO, and other means of harmonisation and international governance. Neo-liberal globalisation does tend to deconstruct the boundaries of the nation-state to further the processes of the world market.
I found Hardt and Negri's account of a new global apparatus of rule---Empire--- suggestive. Hardt and Negri capture the juridical and political contours of this new imperium without borders, and their text explores the decay or the hollowing out of the idea, and formation of, sovereignty in modernity. Part 2 of Empire is entitled 'Passages of Sovereignty' with the first section (2.1, p. 69) called 'Two Europes, Two Modernities. In this section Hardt and Negri argue that:
Modern sovereignty is a European concept in the sense that it developed primarily in Europe in coordination with the evolution of modernity itself. The concept functioned as the cornerstone of the construction of Eurocentrism. Although modern sovereignty emanated from Europe, however, it was born and developed in large part through Europe's relationship with its outside, and particularly through its colonial project and the resistance of the colonizedModern sovereignty emerged, then, as the concept of European reaction and European domination both within and outside its borders. They are two coextensive and complementary faces of one development: rule within Europe and European rule over the world.. (p.70)
its birth in the humanist Renaissance.This was revolutionary in that the old fedual order was toppled, the process destroys the relations with the past and a new mode of world and life is instituted;
the second moment of modernity is crisis: the Reformation was constructed to wage war against the new forces, establish an overarching power to dominate them and re-establsih ideologies of command and authority;
the third moment is the partial and temporary resolution of this crisis in the formation of the modern state as a locus of sovereignty. This unfolded in the centuries of the Enlightenment and crowns the transcendental principle as the apex of European modernity.
What this account highlights is that modernity is not a singular process but is profoundly split: between 'a radical revolutionary process' and an ordering 'counter-revolution' that 'sought to dominate and expropriate the force of the emerging movements and dynamics'.
What is this transcendent principle? Well it's not God. What they do is trace on path to the crisis of modernity that leads to the development of the modern sovereign state. Another pathway is the one to the nation, which presupposes the path to the state.
Hardt and Negri say that the transcendent principle can be found in the political machinery created in modernity:
The center of the problem of modernity was thus demonstrated in political philosophy, and here was where the new form of mediation found its most adequate response to the revolutionary forms of immanence: a transcendent political apparatus. (p.83)
Hobbes and Rousseau really only repeat the paradox that Jean Bodin had already defined conceptually in the second half of the sixteenth century. Sovereignty can properly be said to exist only in monarchy, because only one can be sovereign. If two or three or many were to rule, there would be no sovereignty, because the sovereign cannot be subject to the rule of others.. Democratic, plural, or popular political forms might be declared, but modern sovereignty really has only one political figure: a single transcendent power. (p.85)
But we knew that already. So what is new? Their view that sovereignty becomes a poltical machine that rules across the entire society whose workings bring the multitude into an ordered totality though the general economy of administrative discipline (Weber) that runs through, and delves deeply into society; with these disciplinary processes or political machinery (Foucault) reconfiguring themselves as apparatuses that shape the reproduction of the population.
Modern sovereignty is not simply an abstract locus of juridical authority that forms the basis for Westphalian international law and order amongst nation states. It is a complex disciplinary and ontological machinery of enormous depth and force which functions to harness and control the possibility of freedom within capitalist modernity.The realization of modern sovereignty is the birth of biopower is their argument of this sketch.
This account holds that sovereignty, as it was imagined within modernity and tied to the bounded territorial authority of the nation-state, is in decline; and there emerges a new - supranational and deterritorialising - or imperial form of sovereignty. Though this new form of sovereignty is still repressive and disabling it also forms the terrain of a new mode of critical and revolutionary action - the terrain of 'Empire' and the revolution of the 'multitude'. Hence Hardt and Negri talk in terms of the revolution after modernity, the formation of new subjectivities, desires and antagonisms to domination. A new season opens:
As modernity declines, a new season is opened, and here we find again that dramatic antithesis that was at the origins and basis of modernity…The synthesis between the development of productive forces and relations of domination seems once again precarious and improbable. The desires of the multitude and its antagonism to every form of domination drive it to divest itself once again of the processes of legitimation that support the sovereign power…Is this the coming of a new human power? (p. 90)
I mentioned in the previous post that Hardt and Negri had argued that the form of globalisation they sketched in Empire requires us to think of new forms of democracy that can expand rule by the people to the transnational level.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2005) re-imagines the proletariat as a heterogeneous web of workers, migrants, social movements, and non-governmental organisations - "potentially ... all the diverse figures of social production", "the living alternative that grows within Empire."
The basic idea is as follows. The multitude is not " the people," but rather many peoples acting in networked concert. Because of its plurality, its "innumerable internal differences", the multitude contains the genus of true democracy. At the same time, the multitude's ability to communicate and collaborate - often through the very capitalist networks that oppress it - allows it to produce a common body of knowledge and ideas ("the common") that can serve as a platform for democratic resistance to Empire.
The second basic idea is the mode of political organisation embraced by the multitude. In place of "centralised forms of revolutionary dictatorship and command," the multitude organises resistance to globalisation through networks, which substitute "collaborative relationships" for hierarchical authority. Revolution from below is by a movement that can marry the spontaneity of anarchy with the power of mass resistance. Woodstock meets the Internet.
Is that not Seattle's 1999 moment for radical global civil society in the march against MacDonalds and the World Bank? The many seemingly different and independent struggles throughout the world are actually linked because as capital becomes more and more widespread, the struggles are objectively anti-capitalist.
Duke University literary professor Michael Hardt and Italian radical Antonio Negri's exuberant Empire (2000) described and analyzed the ways in which the global order has changed. Out goes national sovereignty, in comes supranational governance, controlled by a network of economic (IMF), political (the United Nations), and military (American) interests, whose biopower affects all of the Earth's billions.
Empire recast Marx's bourgeoisie as a placeless, faceless network of transnational corporations, international organisations, and the nation-states that benefit from them. In contrast to the old system of imperialism, real power, they argued, was now located in the transnational network of global capitalism. Though this network sometimes relied on states to accomplish its goals, it - not states - was the chief driver of change.
The Twin Towers symbolised everything Empire discussed. From the earth-encompassing power of finance capital, to internet capitalism's connection and compression of space and time, and to the cosmopolitan nature of the workers there, the towers were the epitome of everything Empire loved and hated about the world today.
This form of globalisation, Hardt and Negri argued, requires us to think of new forms of democracy that can expand rule by the people to the transnational level.
My initial response to Empire was two fold. Firstly, the flows of globalisation also worked to strengthen the position of the dominant states, perhaps changing the form of imperialism but not its effects-- I was thinking of the war on terrorism. Now I'm not so sure, as I begin to appreciate the way the security system is a network that uses various nation states.
Secondly, I couild not accept that religion and nationalism could be easily consigned to the historical dustbin that weas much beloved by international Marxists, and the neo liberal lovers of the revolutionary power of global capital. It struck me that religion and nationalism were actually strengthened by the effects of the libertarian flows of desire and capital (globalization) throughout the later 1990s and the early 21st century. Srtrengthened in a backlash sense.
This article in Asia Times is interesting, as it uses Hardt and Negri to make some judgements about the Iraqi resistance to the Americans in Iraq. The text used is their Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire and the discussion of counterinsurgencies.
In that text Hardt and Negri point out how:
"guerrilla forces cannot survive without the support of the population and a superior knowledge of the social and physical terrain" [and] "success [for the dominant military power] does not require attacking the enemy directly but destroying the environment, physical and social, that supports it. Take away the water and the fish will die."
Pepe Escobar says yes. What is called "collateral damage" is taking away the water from the fish. Escobar goes onto say that the "fish" are always able to turn the tables:
" ...as the rebellious groups develop more complex, distributed network structures. As the enemy becomes increasingly dispersed, unlocalizable, and unknowable, the support environment becomes increasingly large and indiscriminate....With Fallujah, the guerrilla strategy has changed. No more occupying a territory that could be organized as a safe haven (the city of Fallujah, for instance). The guerrillas are now network-centered. The Americans in Iraq are now confronting a network enemy."
"The network tends to transform every boundary into a threshold. Networks are in this sense essentially elusive, ephemeral, perpetually in flight ... And, even more frighteningly, the network can appear anywhere at any time."
The Americans have a big problem, do they not?
This Looks promising. A critical forum on Hardt & Negri's Empire at Acme, an E-journal of Critical Geographies. The editorial says that Empire should be able to cast some light on the post 9/11 world, since, as Hardt and Negri say, empire is materializing before our very eyes, whilst empire is concerned to name, narrate and explain this materialization of empire.
However, the tone is critical.
In his article, 'The Perverse Perseverance of Sovereignty' Anthony Burke says that the account of sovereignty given by Hardt and Negri in Empire is flawed.
Hardt and Negri's position is that modern sovereignty is not just an abstract locus of juridical authority, which forms the basis for Westphalian international law and order. It is also a complex disciplinary and ontological machinery of enormous depth and force whose ultimate aim is to harness and control the possibility of freedom within capitalist post-modernity.
It is an account I have much sympathy with.
Burke finds two flaws with their account. The first is that in:
"...the hope of foreseeing a renewed conflict between the revolutionary and repressive possibilities of modernity they assert a radical, irreversible passage from modernity to Empire...We can hardly mock their desire or fail to share their hope – but to do so is not always to share their optimism. I worry that projecting the emergence of the multitude as a new historical phenomenon – in teleological terms - may be to downplay the very real challenges in forming it into being and generating truly revolutionary potential from its disparate (and divided) sites and spaces of struggle."
But Burke leaves this standing, as he moves onto the second flaw in Hardt and Negri's account which is the one that he is more interested in. The second flaw Burke says:
"...is the wanton act of theoretical (and analytical) closure they perform amid this hope....modern sovereignty, in all its repression and horror, is passing away; and the critical paradigms that grappled with it so gamely are now at best passé and at worst complicit with the new hybrid flexible formations of capitalist Empire. This occurs because the world market 'tends to deconstruct the boundaries of the nation-state' and with them the stable orders and hierarchies of modern sovereignty."
Hardt and Negri see a world of 'minor and internal conflicts'. since the 'history of imperialist, inter-imperialist and anti-imperialist wars is over'. Now there are only civil wars, police actions, a 'proliferation of minor and indefinite crisis.
Is Iraq just a civil war or police action? Surely it is also about a global power securing a bigger foothold in the Middle East.
Instead of the melting away of sovereignty in Australia in postrmodernity we have the reassertion of sovereignty with economic globalisation. A conservative/neo-liberal government has harsh policies towards asylum seekers, such as mandatory detention, restrictions to legal process, and military operations to repel boats. This discourse is all about protecting our boders, the Australian state deciiding who comes into the country, and the state providing Australians with a sense of security and 'home'.
Two things are happening at once: the Australian stateis colluding in the collude in the construction of Empire, whilst it continue to insist on the ontological primacy of the state and its monopoly on the legitimate use of force as a pre-emptive strike.
Hardt & Negri end chapter one by making the turn to the materialist teleology of Spinoza, who proclaimed at the dawn of modernity that the prophet produces its own people. They say that along with Spinoza:
" ...we should recognize prophetic desire as irresistible, and all the more powerful the more it becomes identified with the multitude. It is not at all clear that this prophetic function can effectively address our political needs and sustain a potential manifesto of the postmodern revolution against Empire, but certain analogies and paradoxical coincidences do seem striking. For example, whereas Machiavelli proposes that the project of constructing a new society from below requires "arms" and "money" and insists that we must look for them outside, Spinoza responds: Don't we already posses them? Don't the necessary weapons reside precisely within the creative and prophetic power of the multitude? Perhaps we, too, locating ourselves within the revolutionary desire of postmodernity, can in turn respond: Don't we already possess "arms" and "money"? The kind of money that Machiavelli insists is necessary may in fact reside in the productivity of the multitude, the immediate actor of biopolitical production and reproduction. The kind of arms in question may be contained in the potential of the multitude to sabotage and destroy with its own productive force the parasitical order of postmodern command."
And, on this romantic note, so ends chapter one.
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."
"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 then add that the form in which the political should be expressed as subjectivity today is not at all clear.
As chapter one comes to an end Hardt & Negri make a brief turn to Althusser, Machiavelli and the political manifesto. They say:
"...the manifestos of Machiavelli and Marx-Engels define the political as the movement of the multitude and they define the goal as the self-production of the subject. Here we have a materialist teleology."
Hardt & Negri argument is that empire as a form of globalization is a process powered from below. Empire is the sovereign power that governs the present-day world and it is the political form of capitalist globalisation. the so-called ‘right of intervention’ as stemming from ‘a permanent state of emergency and exception justified by the appeal to essential values of justice.
The transformation of the paradigm of rule is also looked at interms of ‘the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another’ (p.xiii). In this context, 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’ (p.23-24)). In this framework, H&N see the contemporary form of Empire as consubstantial to the existence of a dipole (which they call the ‘imperial two-headed eagle’): on the one hand ‘a juridical structure and a constituted power, constructed by the machine of biopolitical command’ (p.60), and on the other hand ‘the plural multitude of productive, creative subjectivities of globalization that have learned to sail on this enormous sea’ (p.60). This dipole today cannot exist without any one of the two terms; in other words: ‘the deterritorializing power of the multitude is the productive force that sustains Empire’ (p.61).
That is the loose and general framework of Empire.
Hardt and Negri say that once you adopt their perspective of the double headed eagle, then:
"....we can return to the juridical framework we investigated earlier and recognize the reasons for the real deficit that plagues the transition from international public law to the new public law of Empire, that is, the new conception of right that defines Empire. In other words, the frustration and the continual instability suffered by imperial right as it attempts to destroy the old values that served as reference points for international public law (the nation-states, the international order of Westphalia, the United Nations, and so forth) along with the so-called turbulence that accompanies this process are all symptoms of a properly ontological lack. As it constructs its supranational figure, power seems to be deprived of any real ground beneath it, or rather, it is lacking the motor that propels its movement. The rule of the biopolitical imperial context should thus be seen in the first instance as an empty machine, a spectacular machine, a parasitical machine. "
What is going on here? Benevolent hegemony by the US as stated dby the Washington neo-conservatives? Or is there something more? Remember that Empire a decentred and deterritorialising apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers for Hardt & Negri. Theres is a radicalised version of current understandings of "globalisation."
Consequently, they refuse "traditional" Marxist understandings of U.S. imperialism and operates with a "postmodernised global economy," Hardt and Negri reject the neocon position that the U.S. can act as a centre for an imperialist project.
Hardt & Negri say that the way the decentred and deterritorialising apparatus of rule operates has a lot to do with the multitude:
"A new sense of being is imposed on the constitution of Empire by the creative movement of the multitude, or really it is continually present in this process as an alternative paradigm. It is internal to Empire and pushes forward its constitution, not as a negative that constructs a positive or any such dialectical resolution. Rather it acts as an absolutely positive force that pushes the dominating power toward an abstract and empty unification, to which it appears as the distinct alternative."
Hardt and Negri play around with the metaphor of the eagle with two heads to give an adequate initial representation of the contemporary form of Empire. They say the two heads are turned outward, each attacking the other. It is an important passage becaue they use the metaphor to link empire as judicial structure to the multiitude.
"The first head of the imperial eagle is a juridical structure and a constituted power, constructed by the machine of biopolitical command. The juridical process and the imperial machine are always subject to contradictions and crises. Order and peace-the eminent values that Empire proposes-can never be achieved but are nonetheless continually reproposed. The juridical process of the constitution of Empire lives this constant crisis that is considered (at least by the most attentive theoreticians) the price of its own development. There is, however, always a surplus. Empire's continual extension and constant pressure to adhere ever more closely to the complexity and depth of the biopolitical realm force the imperial machine when it seems to resolve one conflict continually to open others."
"...is the plural multitude of productive, creative subjectivities of globalization that have learned to sail on this enormous sea. They are in perpetual motion and they form constellations of singularities and events that impose continual global reconfigurations on the system. This perpetual motion can be geographical, but it can refer also to modulations of form and processes of mixture and hybridization....Just as Empire in the spectacle of its force continually determines systemic recompositions, so too new figures of resistance are composed through the sequences of the events of struggle....New figures of struggle and new subjectivities are produced in the conjuncture of events, in the universal nomadism, in the general mixture and miscegenation of individuals and populations, and in the technological metamorphoses of the imperial biopolitical machine."
They say that from one perspective Empire stands clearly over the multitude and subjects it to the rule of its overarching machine, as a new Leviathan. However, from the perspective of social productivity and creativity, from what we have been calling the ontological perspective, the hierarchy is reversed. The multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude
The site hosting Hardt & Negri's Empire has been down so I will turn back to Leo Strauss. What initially attracted me to him was his critique of positivist social (political) science.
From memory Strauss argued that positivist science had divorced itself from philosophy, celebrated the fact/value distinction, presupposed the detached observer, and was divorced from "pre-scientific' understanding--common sense or the civic opinion of political life. It failed to look at political life from the perspective and experiences of the citizen or the statesman engaged in civic debate.
Positivist social science was attacked instransigently to make room for philosophy to leave its secluded academic haven, enter the marketplace and engage in political debate. Philosophy as a way of life helps others by doing what is possible to ameliorate their conditions; to defend good opinions, prudential judgements and sound practices; and to challenge misguided opinions and bad theory that undermine democracy as a good regime.
Is this a naive attempt to return to the ancient Greek polis that has little relevance to contemporay liberal democracy? Or is it an attempt to contest the strong current of "the abolition of the political" that still flows through our cultural life; an attempt to defend the political---a serious conflict and confrontation over the nature of the good life for Strauss?
Does it act as a mitigated scepticism towards the liberalism that is nurtured and practised by our political regime?
If Marx's old revolutionary mole has died, what then? How does the multitude's serpentine struggles work?
Hardt & Negri say:
"It is certainly true that the serpentine struggles we are witnessing today do not provide any clear revolutionary tactics, or maybe they are completely incomprehensible from the point of view of tactics. Faced as we are with a series of intense subversive social movements that attack the highest levels of imperial organization, however, it may be no longer useful to insist on the old distinction between strategy and tactics. In the constitution of Empire there is no longer an "outside" to power and thus no longer weak links- if by weak link we mean an external point where the articulations of global power are vulnerable...the construction of Empire, and the globalization of economic and cultural relationships, means that the virtual center of Empire can be attacked from any point. The tactical preoccupations of the old revolutionary school are thus completely irretrievable; the only strategy available to the struggles is that of a constituent counterpower that emerges from within Empire."
So how does imperial power see these serpentine struggles? Hardt and Negri say:
"Imperial power whispers the names of the struggles in order to charm them into passivity, to construct a mystified image of them, but most important to discover which processes of globalization are possible and which are not. In this contradictory and paradoxical way the imperial processes of globalization assume these events, recognizing them as both limits and opportunities to recalibrate Empire's own instruments. The processes of globalization would not exist or would come to a halt if they were not continually both frustrated and driven by these explosions of the multitude that touch immediately on the highest levels of imperial power."
However, that is where they finish the section called The Mole and the Snake to move onto the section entitled the Two-Headed Eagle
Hardt & Negri say that though recognizing a common enemy and inventing a common language of struggles are certainly important political tasks, it is not onethat they are concerned with. They say that Marx's language has seen its day:
"Marx tried to understand the continuity of the cycle of proletarian struggles that were emerging in nineteenth-century Europe in terms of a mole and its subterranean tunnels. Marx's mole would surface in times of open class conflict and then retreat underground again-not to hibernate passively but to burrow its tunnels, moving along with the times, pushing forward with history so that when the time was right (1830, 1848, 1870), it would spring to the surface again. "Well grubbed old mole." Well, we suspect that Marx's old mole has finally died."
They say that simply by focusing their own powers, concentrating their energies in a tense and compact coil, these serpentine struggles strike directly at the highest articulations of imperial order. Empire presents a superficial world, the virtual center of which can be accessed immediately from any point across the surface.
In the section called 'Refrains of the "Internationale"' Hardt & Negri turn political as open up their internationalist position for consideration they do so by looking back at the tradition of Marxist Internationalism in the early twentieth century. This was a political tradition that was deeply anti-nationalist and very critical of the nation state. The nation state was the enemy and nationalism was a virus.
Hardt & Negri begin by describing this tradition.They say
"There was a time, not so long ago, when internationalism was a key component of proletarian struggles and progressive politics in general. "The proletariat has no country," or better, "the country of the proletariat is the entire world." The "Internationale" was the hymn of revolutionaries, the song of utopian futures. We should note that the utopia expressed in these slogans is in fact not really internationalist, if by internationalist we understand a kind of consensus among the various national identities that preserves their differences but negotiates some limited agreement. Rather, proletarian internationalism was antinationalist, and hence supranational and global. Workers of the world unite!-not on the basis of national identities but directly through common needs and desires, without regard to borders and boundaries."
"Internationalism was the will of an active mass subject that recognized that the nation-states were key agents of capitalist exploitation and that the multitude was continually drafted to fight their senseless wars-in short, that the nation- state was a political form whose contradictions could not be subsumed and sublimated but only destroyed. International solidarity was really a project for the destruction of the nation-state and the construction of a new global community. This proletarian program stood behind the often ambiguous tactical definitions that socialist and communist parties produced during the century of their hegemony over the proletariat....If the nation-state was a central link in the chain of domination and thus had to be destroyed, then the national proletariat had as a primary task destroying itself insofar as it was defined by the nation and thus bringing international solidarity out of the prison in which it had been trapped. "
It's cosmopolitanism hit the rocks of the national identity of the proleteriat in the twentieth century. This cosmopolitanism expressed an awareness that we lived in nation states that were side by side. However, there was also an awareness, and the acceptance, that the social democratic, welfare state provided protection from the harshness of a boom and bust capitalism that was increasingly becoming global.
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?
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.
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."
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.
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."
"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."
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."
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."
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.
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."
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."
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."
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.