Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2000 15:01:57 +0100 (BST)
From: Jon Beasley-Murray <Jonathan.Beasley-Murray-AT-man.ac.uk>
Subject: AUT: Empire


In case anyone is interested, here's a review I just wrote of Hardt and
Negri's _Empire_.  I've only just (re)joined the list, so haven't seen any
earlier discussion there may have been about the book.  Nonetheless...

Take care

Jon

Jon Beasley-Murray
Spanish and Portuguese
University of Manchester
jon.beasley-murray-AT-man.ac.uk

-----

Jon Beasley-Murray
University of Manchester
jon.beasley-murray-AT-man.ac.uk

"Lenin in America"

A favored slogan for the Left in times of difficulty and crisis (and
contemporary globalization is generally regarded as a prime cause of
difficulty and crisis for the Left) is one attributed to Antonio Gramsci,
urging "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will."  This formula
is particularly dear to cultural studies.  Though not much of a slogan,
not something to be shouted from behind the barricades, it serves to
compensate for a lack of barricades--for cultural studies is (as Fredric
Jameson has commented) the attempt to outline a radical politics in the
absence of a radical political movement.  The thought here, of course, is
that the rule of capital may seem secure, workers' movements weak, and
liberation a distant prospect, but history may still hold a surprise or
two in store.  Things may look bad, but hope springs eternal.  The Left
has been through crises before, indeed the history of the Left may be a
litany of defeats, but this too may pass.

With their outstanding new book, Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
turn this sentiment on its head, exposing its platitudinousness.  Offered
as comfort, optimism of the will entails simply putting one's faith in
destiny.  Pessimism of the intellect, on the other hand, condemns in
advance the project of revolutionary analysis as an exercise in bad
faith.  Indeed, Negri argues elsewhere that this is the formula for
anti-politics, for quietism dressed up as radicality.  This is cultural
studies.  "Poor Gramsci," Hardt and Negri comment, "given the gift of
being considered the founder of a strange notion of hegemony that leaves
no place for a Marxian politics. . . .  We have to defend ourselves
against such generous gifts!" (451).

The publication of Empire is perhaps best compared to the publication of
Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith's translation of Gramsci's Prison
Notebooksin 1971.  Though Gramsci was known in Anglophone circles before
the 1970s--Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn's classic articles on English
history in the New Left Review relied heavily on Gramsci's theory of the
State--Hoare and Nowell Smith's translation led to the adoption of key
concepts from an Italian tradition of political and cultural theory, and
prompted a sea-change within British cultural studies.  Empireopens the
floodgates for another invigoration of political and cultural theory and
(I predict) will result in a rush to read particularly Negri's earlier
work.  Negri's books have hitherto been hard to find and swift to go out
of print.  This will now change.

Though Empireis against everything that Gramsci has come to represent, it
is not against Gramsci per se.  Above all, Hardt and Negri share Gramsci's
fascination with America, and his concern with political
organization.  But whereas Gramsci's concept of the "war of
position" within civil society was taken up by the Italian communist party
(through the mediation of its long-time leader, Palmiro Togliatti) as
justification for its reformist version of Eurocommunism, Negri comes from
the workerist and autonomist tradition that throughout the 1960s and 70s
was bitterly opposed to the communist party and its affiliated
unions.  Here Americanism and a dissatisfaction with the Left's
traditional structures come together.  Empireis full of praise for the
undisciplined U.S. proletariat: "Against the common wisdom that the
U.S. proletariat is weak because of its low party and union representation
with respect to Europe and elsewhere, perhaps we should see it as strong
for precisely those reasons" (269).

Hardt and Negri's book is distinguished by their faith in causes others
consider to be lost.  Or rather, they contend that it is in revolutionary
struggles' apparent defeats that the seeds of future victory are
sown.  Their slogan is optimism of the intellect, pessimism of the
will.  All the conditions are ripe, they claim, for liberation.  Yet it is
not destiny that will realize this liberation, rather the concerted
efforts of the multitude--and the multitude may strike precisely where it
is least expected, and with most effectiveness where the forces of
repression appear to be strongest.

The argument that justifies this series of perhaps surprising claims
derives in large part from the workerist position, articulated by Mario
Tronti in his classic articles "Lenin in England" and "The Strategy of
Refusal," that, seen from the standpoint of the working class, "the
capitalist class, from its birth, is in fact subordinate to the working
class" ("The Strategy of Refusal," Working Class Autonomy and the
Crisis[London: Red Notes, 1979], 10).  (Incidentally, it would be nice to
think that Empirewill also prompt interest in other Italian workerist
theorists such as Tronti, many of whose most important texts remains
untranslated.  This is unlikely, however, not least because Negri and
Hardt have by now overlaid these influences with a reading of mostly
French postmodern theorists, primarily Gilles Deleuze, Flix Guattari, and
Michel Foucault.)  Tronti's claim--and that of the workerist tendency in
general--is that the weakness of most analyses of capitalism is that they
focus on capital.  Indeed, Karl Marx's Capitalitself, beginning as it does
with the commodity form and the transition from simple to capitalist
commodity circulation, only encourages the notion that capital is master
of its own destiny, harnessing labor power to its own ends.  For Tronti,
however, the working class is the subject of history not simply in its
potential to liberate itself from capital, but also within capitalism
too.  Capital is essentially conservative, but is continually forced to
react against (or to forestall) working class antagonism, which thus
drives the system and forces capitalism's continuing modernization.

Hence--and this is Empire's key moment--any capitalist innovation should
be understood as a response to a demand made from below, by the
proletariat, if not on the terms that the proletariat itself would
choose.  The Left's frequently expressed desire to turn back capitalist
development is in fact, then, also a desire to go against the demands of
the proletariat.  Modernization (or, now, postmodernization) is always
positive, not simply because any new stage achieved by capital implies an
improvement in the position of the working class, but also because it sets
the scene for still further liberation.  The Left's so-called defeats are
in fact victories because they are instances in which the proletariat has
forced capital to act against its own better judgement.  Moreover, with
each defeat the proletariat emerges stronger as each restructuring forced
upon capital entails class recomposition: capital expands its power only
to recognize an expanded antagonistic political subject.  From the
professional worker who forced the recognition of trades unions and party
apparatuses, to the mass worker who forced the concession that was the
welfare state, to the contemporary post-industrial "social worker" whose
paradigm is found in the affective and communicational labor of the
service industries, and whose whose activity spreads across the whole
field of production and reproduction.  The history from below of
successive class recompositions is a history of gathering strength and
potential.  The social worker most resembles the inchoate, insurgent, and
expansive multitude that is visible whenever the modern system of
sovereignty finds itself in crisis.

The conclusion that Hardt and Negri draw, and this is the main point of
their book, is that contemporary globalization (which they term Empire),
though it certainly introduces new forms of capitalist command and
exploitation, is heartily to be welcomed because it is capital's latest
concession to the force of insurgent subjectivity.  Though as always
(until now) this concession has been provided on capital's own terms, it
contains the seeds of another globalization, the counter-Empire of global
communism.  There should be no nostalgia for the decline of the
traditional working class.  The political subjectivity that emerges within
this phase of history is the most expansive and most fundamental political
subject of all: the multitude is about to come into its own.

This is an astonishingly productive argument, and Hardt and Negri put it
to work in an immense historical sweep that runs from the Roman Empire to
the present day, across a vast geographical swathe from Europe to the
U.S. to the former Soviet Union to all corners of the colonial and
postcolonial world, and in a range of disciplines from philosophy to
juridical theory to economics.  Optimism of the intellect indeed!  What
makes their approach so productive, and what gives it its power, is that
it constitutes a new theory of history, concerned (following Deleuze and
Guattari) to disentangle the plane of immanence from the plane of
transcendence and (following Marx) to map this distinction onto an
opposition between a revolutionary, productive subjectivity on the one
hand and an always reactive (super)structure of command on the other; this
is the sense in which the book lives up to Slavoj Zizek's description of
it as "nothing less than a rewriting of The Communist Manifestofor our
time."  Whereas postmodernism has been taken to entail a distrust of grand
narratives, we have here unabashed postmodernists resuscitating history
from its own disrepute in the name of the grandest of all-encompassing
narratives.

In Empire, claim Hardt and Negri, the most dramatic historical
transformation is that capitalist command is now also immanent to (and has
really subsumed) society; but its hold on production is also now
absolutely arbitrary.  Hence the ferocity of the interventions we have
seen in Iraq and Kosovo--"the pure exercise of command, without any
proportionate or adequate reference to the world of life" (391).  But this
also means that the conditions are set for the multitude's autonomous
self-valorization.  The collapse of the relation between base and
superstructure means both the end of their distinction and the end of
their connection, and so the possibility of the production of value beyond
measure.

It would be impossible to detail all the components of Empire's
argumentation.  Central planks, however, include Hardt and Negri's
differentiation of Empire (immanent, mobile, and hybrid) from imperialism
(composed of a network of transcendent nation-states, fixed boundaries,
and clear demarcations); their rewriting of the history of modernity,
isolating both a revolutionary strain initiated by Renaissance humanism
(and associated with Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Marx) and a conservative
reaction (associated with Hobbes, Kant, and Hegel); their praise of the
expansiveness of the U.S. constitution compared to the rotting aristocracy
of Eurocentrism; their use of the Foucauldian concept of biopower; their
redescription of late capitalism in terms of immaterial labor; or their
contrast between constituent and constituted power.

Likewise, it would be futile to cover the myriad of questions and problems
that the book raises.  Inevitably, at every turn Hardt and Negri set
themselves up for criticisms and objections.  There is much that would
require further elaboration and specification.  Are not Descartes and
Rousseau, Bhabha and Said (each dispatched in a paragraph or two) treated
somewhat casually?  Can the Second World War be so simply described as "a
civil war [between state and multitude] cloaked in the guise of conflicts
among sovereign states" (110)?  Does the U.S. really always "have to
answer the call" for intervention in regional conflicts (181)--what about
Israel or Sierra Leone?  Is their description of the "multitude of the
poor" (157) not a return to the discredited vulgar Marxist immiseration
thesis in its image of proletarian destitution?  Why do they wish to hold
on the concept of value (rather than wealth) beyond measure?  But such
objections would be missing the point--in part because the point is
precisely that in their grand and confident manner, Hardt and Negri have
set the stage for a series of potential explorations that could follow up
on each and every one of these queries.  In this they share something with
Fredric Jameson (a constant presence here) who, even or especially when he
sets himself up for criticism, is always instructive and
thought-provoking.

Indeed, it is worth remarking upon the book's tone.  Empireis littered
with exclamation marks and with the various indicators of absolute
self-belief ("in fact" or "actually" this, "really" the other), not to
mention the most brutal of put-downs (Amnesty International and Oxfam, for
instance, described as "mendicant orders of Empire" [36]).  Hardt and
Negri write in the declarative mood.  If Marxism is in part a style, an
attitude expressed discursively, Empire is fully within the tradition set
by Marx's grim wit, clarity, and verve.  This book ends with an
affirmation of "the irrepressible lightness and joy of being
communist" (413), and one senses that Hardt and Negri had some
considerable joy in writing it.

At times, however, I wonder about this obvious enthusiasm.  I find it
particularly hard to share Hardt and Negri's Americanism or to empathize
with the points at which their enthusiasm is infused with a form of
religious mysticism.  First, then, this Americanism is certainly in line
with the continental traditions within which they are working.  Italian
workerists often praised the U.S. working class for its radicality in
excess of any formal union or party structures and pointed to, for
instance, the Seattle strikes of 1919 as of more global importance than
the similar unrest in Italy or Germany at the same time.  French writers
such as Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault were also drawn to the sense of
freedom they found in U.S. literature and counter-culture.  But an awful
amount of selectivity is needed to sustain this argument.  The feeling
that this Americanism is cherry-picking is reinforced not only by the
numerous qualifications Hardt and Negri are forced to concede (concerning
the genocide of Native Americans and the role of slavery, for
instance) but also by the fact that the emphasis upon America appears to
sit badly with their insistence elsewhere on the revolutionary potential
also of European modernity.  Is not here historical argument becoming
confused with (aesthetic or cultural) sentiment?

Second, it is not clear what is achieved by a statement that "the poor is
god on earth" (157), by naming the Wobblies "the great Augustinian project
of modern times" (207), by pointing to the multitude's "secular
Pentecost" (362), or by the suggestion that the model for communist
militancy is Saint Francis of Assisi (413).  In part this is no doubt
again a matter of tone or taste, another aesthetic choice or enthusiasm I
simply do not share.  But there is more to it than that.  Recourse to
religious vocabulary paradoxically gives the appearance of substance to
Hardt and Negri's account of militancy or of the proletariat, and so
occludes the fact that this is a very abstract history; there is little in
the way of the concrete, or of thick description of the conditions of
proletarian existence.  It may be inevitable that such an ambitious survey
should be history in outline, especially in that its novelty and strength
lies in the formal aspect of Hardt and Negri's analysis--the opposition
between immanence and transcendence, or constituent and constituted power,
for instance.  Yet it is when the opportunity arises to give some flesh to
the subjectivity that the book outlines that Hardt and Negri turn to
church history.  Cultural studies may go too far in its itemization and
celebration of the actual everyday practices of ordinary men and women,
yet it is odd that here the multitude should appear so shorn of what we
would recognize as culture.

The problem with this formalism--carried off with such a tone of verve and
confidence that substitutes for the solidity of specifics and thick
description--is that the overal argument loses its historical moorings
somewhat.  This is, again, the book's power: Hardt and Negri's basic
outline is so astonishingly generative across such a broad historical
range that it will inspire many projects to flesh out its
implications.  Yet on the basis of Empirealone it would be hard to
determine the precise historiography of Empire.  For we are always in
transition (or undergoing a passage) towards Empire, history's new telos
(or rather, perhaps pre-history's telos), as was capitalism itself for
another generation of Marxist historians.  Indeed, the passage to Empire
comes at times to sound like much the same trope as the rise of the
bourgeoisie: just as in any given historical period at any spot in the
globe an earlier generation inevitably found the bourgeoisie to be rising,
so Hardt and Negri are always coming across key moments in the passage to
Empire.

Thus, to take but a selection of the indicators of Empire's arrival: "the
concept of Empire" haunts Europe from the end of the Roman Empire (374),
and is incarnated in one way or another by Caesar, Genghis Khan,
Tamerlane, and Napoleon (373); the Renaissance constitutes "the
revolutionary discovery of the plane of immanence" (70); the crisis of
European modernity "has continuously pushed toward Empire" (4); the
Enlightenment witnesses "the internal crisis of the concept of
Empire" (370); the U.S. constitution's expansive tendency is the
"hinge" that links republicanism to Empire; class struggle in the
Progressive Era prompted the transition to Empire (174); the nuclear bomb
is the clearest evidence of passage to Empire (345); the U.N. is a
"hinge" in the genealogy of Empire (4);  the imperial constitution is
still "coming" (315); while, as the book's opening statement has it, now
"Empire is materializing before our very eyes" (xi).  Empire may, of
course, take its time materializing.  And the past 500 (and more) years
may be chock full of signs of the passages towards Empire.  But with a
history of such a long dure, how then can be sure we are anywhere near
this process's culmination?  Plenty of features of modernity are still
with us.  It may take some time to "push through Empire to come out the
other side" (206).

Hardt and Negri may well agree; theirs is a pessimism of the will if not
of reason.  But it requires plenty of optimism to sustain the claim that
it will be possible to come out the other side of Empire, for it is this
that grounds the entire historical and analytical project.  Otherwise,
reading history for symptoms of passage is comparable to looking for
interminable signs of End Times that never arrive; each sign becomes
equivalent to, and as meaningless as, any other. 

But above all, Empire offers a new way of viewing the present, and clears
the log-jam of the increasingly unproductive debates that set an allegedly
beneficial welfare state against the impersonal forces of
globalization.  Against interminable analyses of consumption, Hardt and
Negri return us to the terrain of production invigorated and
inspired.  Among all the signs of crisis, they see potential and
possibility, inviting us to consider the multitude that, they claim, will
"determine when and how the possible becomes real" (411).



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