From: "Chris Wright" <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
Subject: AUT: Re: Fwd: [multitudes_infos] Critique d'Empireau vitriol par Alexander Bard - Also J20 Inauguration Flyer
Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2001 23:13:29 -0600


Part Two of my response to Sean on voting, the Greens, etc.

I think this makes a good part two because, even though Sean may not agree
with everything here, I think a lot of what was not being said, but which
underlay that critique of my flyer, can be found here in this critique of
Empire by Negri/Hardt.  If I am egregiously wrong, so be it.  I would write
a critique of this piece anyway because I think it sucks ass, so to speak.
But it sucks in a way that resonates with the
Foucault/Deleuze/Guattari/Negri retreat in the face of capital and the
defeat of the 1960's and 70's, and the continuing reaction, which may only
now be facing a direct series of counterattacks.  Not to mention the
spurious resurrection of Spinoza and Nietzsche as alternatives to Hegel and
Marx.

> pretty interesting empire critique/review.
> -Sean

>>Betreff: Critique of Negri's and Hardt's 'Empire'...
>>
>(...)
>>>
>>>  > Hmm, I just re-read parts of "Empire" and even though I still think
it offers some new angles to important concepts I'm even more irritated
by the rather silly last chapters of the book.  Anyway, I'm not as negative
>>towards them as you, Alexander.  Maybe because we're picking up on
different things in the text.
>>>
>>>  Let me summarize my three main objections against 'Empire':
>>>
>>>  1. Hardt and Negri again and again state that they are Spinozists and
as  such against any sort of transcendentals. They insist they have totally
>>>  bought Deleuze's program of a plane of immanence and a Spinozist
>>>  univocalism. Fine. So far so good. Now, this is of course what they
say.  But what do they then DO? Well, the big problem is that they of course
create three NEW massive transcendentals to take the place of the old ones
(God, Satan and Utopia) and thereby become total hypocrites and therefore
>>>  dangerously metaphysical in their approach. Hardt and Negri are not
>>>  Deleuzians, they are vulgar pop Deleuzians. Which is why eventually
Manuel De Landa's new book on Deleuze and Physics (soon out on Althone Press
in the UK) is a far superior and more important book for the Deleuzians of
the
>>>  world than 'Empire'.  The "new" trinity Hardt & Negri create is one of
The Multitude
(replacing God), Capital (replacing Satan) and The Revolution (replacing
Utopia).
Of course they never explain what The Multitude or Capital or The Revolution
>>>  are, since these are basically the mystical essences of metaphysical
>>>  spirits. The psychoethnology, the economics and the communication
theory required to do so are areas they either do not comprehend or choose
to
>>avoid as not to disturb the little utopian worldview they have created for
>>>  themselves.
>>>
>>>  Please note I am not denying the existences of a multitude, of capital
or of any revolutions, I just prefer to take them down from Heaven or up
from
>>Hell and in a true Foucauldian spirit give them the immanent stuctures
they
>>>  deserve, which is also a way of disarming these concepts and would
>>therefore serve Hardt & Negri extremely bad; as with Deleuze, Spinoza
without
>>>  Nietzsche always ends up a vulgar Spinoza.
Where to begin?  Can someone tell me what this means?  I am just getting
into Spinoza after 10 years of not having read him, so I am rather fuzzy.
It seems this person wants a definition of capital, multitude and
revolution.  Aside from the fact that I consider the idea of multitude to be
a throwback to the Enlightenment (but hey, so is Spinoza), the idea hinges
upon a series of extremely dubious formulations.  So I don;t think the
problem is Negri's treatment of 'the multitude', but the very idea itself.
I will have to go back over Empire again to get at this in more depth, but I
disagree with Negri's espousal of our having reached a point of pure
immediacy.  This flight from mediation takes us back to empiricism and the
idea that reality is unmediated perception or the crude materialism of
Feuerbach.  but more on this later.

The more serious immediate problem comes from the heralding of Foucault as
having anything to do with revolution or anything other than ideology.
Foucault certainly has a point in attacking the 'Marxism' of the French CP
and its hangers on, for this certainly seems to be what he is understanding
as Marxism.  however, in return for taking the multiplicity of power
seriously and to some extent correctly drawing focus from the state,
Foucault also gives up on the idea of revolution.  Power-over, exploitation,
oppression, become omni-present and ultimately illusive.  There is no way to
escape, so we go from revolution to perpetual resistance with no hope of
winning because there is nothing to be won.  Not only is this the ultimate
in pessimism, it destroys the subjective element of reality.  Far from a
post-structuralism, Foucault reinscribes structures, reifies them, and
thereby helps solidify the fragmentation of life.  Very funny how Nietsche's
misreading of Hegel, his criticism that Hegel destroyed the Subject, should
lead to a structuralism that itself destroys subjective acivity.  Hence,
this desire to give revolution, capital and 'the multitude' their "proper
immanent structures" is to reify, fetishize, our fragmentation and the power
of structures over activity.  we shall see where this leads.
>>>
>>>  The critique I would voice against Hardt & Negri as a thinker of a new
>>>  informationalist paradigm rather than, as them, a thinker of a
>  >> proto-Hegelian "in-itself-developed" postmodernity (boy, am I tired of
the concept of postmodernity???) within an old capitalist paradigm is that
>>Hardt and Negri are conservative Marxists of the classic capitalist school
who REFUSE to, or who are INCAPABLE of seeing that capitalism is being
>>replaced by attentionalism. That THE RULES OF THE GAME have fundamentally
CHANGED, not only the visible signs of the game itself.
Now this is novel.  Attentionalism?  New informationalist paradigm?  Wow, am
I sick of the word paradigm.  Talk about a concept with problems.  Ever
since Kuhn put the idea out there, the paradigmatic approach has been full
of problems.  Somehow there is a shift and everything is suddenly different.
The old logics no longer apply.  Really, now.  Did I see the end or factory
production?  Even computers get built in factories.  Ask the women in
Malaysia and Taiwan who make motherboards.  Most of the planet is still
engaged in industrial production.  But even were that not so, the idea the
computers and the movement of information have rendered value production
obsolete and rendered labor immaterial misses the point.  first, it
misunderstands the problem of materiality in Marx, taking Marx for a crude
materialist.  Practical-critical activity, social activity, has always
included the production of ideas and information.  So what?  How does that
stop it from being exploitation?  How does it stop the production of
commodities?  How does it stop them from having a value created by
labour-power, by human creativity?  It doesn't.  Neither does Negri
understand Marx's value theory.  Negri sees it as a quantification, much
like orthodox 'Marxist economics', which is to say, incorrectly.  For Marx,
it represented a social relation of people, mediated by things.  Commodities
are our creation, but they come to dominate us.  Marx had no interest in
trying to find out exactly what portion of this or that was constant vs.
variable capital.  Many people confuse the critique of political economy
with political economy.  Marx wanted to show the hidden social relations
underlying the 'value form', 'money form', 'commodity form', etc.  Marx
wanted to show how those categories mystified and represented mystified
social relations.  So, one can hardly start a critique of Marx from people
who don't understand him.  Nor do I see, and more than capital letters will
be required as proof, how we have magically surpassed the fetishized world
of capital.  Rather, i think we will see below that this writer makes a
fetish of certain aspects of capital in ways neither new nor novel nor
revolutionary.

Second, the Hegel bashing is pretty funny, especially from people who don't
understand Hegel (Deleuze just wants to fuck Hegel in the ass or eye socket
or some such thing, as he is so elegantly quoted in the preface of one of
his books.)  But all we get is this one obscure reference.  Maybe we can get
more illumination on that later.

>>>  But then their capitalist power structure is strictly a bipolar one,
>>Capital and Politics, whereas I have always argued that any lasting power
>>structure MUST be tripolar to achieve stability to last over an entire
information technology paradigm. In other words, Marxist academicians are
the very
>>last people to acknowledge that a capitalist society DEMANDS three centers
of power: Capital, Politics AND Academia (just like a feudal society
required The Monarch, The Aristocracy AND The Church).
Isn't this tripolarity just bad psuedo-Hegelian trinitarianism?  Capital's
bipolarity centers around the separation of doing from the ownership of the
done.  Not 'Capital and Politics'.  I did not even think Negri espoused
something that obscure.  i don;t even think this is a reading of Negri at
this point.  But tripolarity is absurdly reductive.  Perfect for someone
grasping reality through Spinoza cum Nietzsche, i suppose.  The polarity
caused by the separation of doing and done does not require a third leg.
Rather, it shatters the world by separating activity from existence, doing
from being.  There are those who do, but they neither own nor control what
they do, someone else does.  The result is the enthronement of things over
actions, dead labor over living, objects over subjects, objects into
subjects and subjectivity objectified.  The world may be bi-polar, but like
any bi-polar disorder, it shatters the world into a million fragments and
tries to paste the cracked pieces back together and call it reality.

And why academia, anyway?  This seems totally arbitrary.  Why not
scientists?  Why not clergy (oops, sorry, forgot about that paradigm shift,
clergy don't carry weight anymore)?  Why not the media?  at least the media
might have made some sense.  But academics?  that sounds like the comment of
an academic engaging in self-flagellation.  I'd rather they just stick to a
strap for that rather than using words.  It would at least save us the eye
strain.
>>>  But that would require Hardt & Negri to acknowledge that they
themselves are part of an old and retiring power structure. Remember my
prophecy:
>>Marxists are and will be the very last Capitalists... Where would Marxists
be
>>without the demon of Capital, well, they would be like Christians without
Satan, right? Please recall that Hardt's and Negri's book is packaged as a
luxury item from Harvard University Press. It's simply a very posh book to
have on bourgeois coffee tables. Now read at edge.net gatherings
everywhere...
Now we have a prophet in our midst?  Hail Moses!  Hail Jesus!  Hail
Muhammad!  Hail the Bard!  Or rather the Pied Piper?  Marxists without
capital would be happy communists in a world without classes.  Christians
without Satan would then have to deny God.  Marxists without capital can go
take a well-deserved sauna and join the other folks for some free food and
free humanity.  we'd be chillin' on the beach, fishing in the morning, do
art during the day and critiquing at night, without ever being reduced to
fisherman, artists or critics.  however, since capital has not yet given up
the ghost...  I mean seriously though, where exactly has capital, as a
social relation, disappeared to?  In this period of the greatest domination
of the world by capital ever, especially in the form of money, how absurd
can it be to talk like this?  I suppose Microsoft is just 'attnetionalism'?
Rather, maybe some people suffer from attnetion deficit syndrome?

at the same time, Negri and Hardt probably do deserve a poke for the book.
Then again, Deleuze and Guattari books will be sitting on the same tables.
Of course, since they were merely published by the Univeristy of Minnesota
Press, they couldn't be nearly as fitting for the Whine and Cheese Leftists,
eh?  People in glass houses and all that.
>>>
>>>  2. The qualities of The Multitude (rather than the Proletariat) that
Hardt and Negri describe are almost identical to the qualities of the
netocracy described by me and Söderqvist in 'The Netocrats'. Interestingly,
Hardt
>>and Negri are therefore speaking the voice of the NEW UPPER CLASS of an
>>>  informational world and not the voice of the under class. This is
because their class analysis is rooted in Marx of the 1840s and does not
preoccupy itself with the world of today, which Hardt & Negri find
"mysterious"
and hard to understand again, (they have not comprehended the consequences
of a proper paradigm shift in which also the worldview ITSELF changes, not
only the symbols of the worldview, informationalism is far more radical than
>>just the tired old idea of a proto-Hegelian "in-itself-developed"
postmodernity).
Well, that speaks poorly for that book if their notion of the netocracy
jibes with the multitude.  Other than that, this is just a rehash of the
last paragraph.

>>>
>>>  Just take a look at the political program Hardt & Negri propose at the
end of the book: A citizen's wage and free movement across borders. Well,
>>that's exactly what Clinton, Blair and most of the worl'd entreprenuerial
>>>  capitalists fight for as well. At the end of the day, there's no
>>revolution in Hardt's and Negri's book. Rather, it's a book full of noisy
air.
What happened to the struggle against copyright and patent monopolies?
Against firewalls and Internet monopoly standards? Against Internet
censorship
and server oligopolies? Against the stupidification within mass media
>>>  (television is the new opium of the masses)? Against the
commercialization
>>>  of health care? And, why not, PRO a net gnosticism? 'Empire' is also a
>>book that constantly talks about VISIONS, but has hardly any of them
itself...
Indeed, their political program is lacking in many ways, but it isn't really
a program, is it?  Maybe political programs have ceased to be useful?  Maybe
cyber-rights, with a nod to health care thrown in, don;t matter that much
compared to destroying the the current set of human relations and replacing
them?  Maybe the techno-fetishists should go back to Alvin Toffler.  This
kind of stuff already begins to accept that a new set of power relations has
won, whether we call it a new 'informational ruling class' or a new
reorganization of labor as the 'social worker'. This is a politics which
already assumes that exploitation and oppression have won.  If this is a
vision, it is a bleak one.  but what else can one garner from Foucault and
Nietzsche?

>>>  What could have been a great book for a a New Left ends up the same old
>>>  babble of the Old Left we have all grown tired of by now. Even the
>>>  revisionist Attac movement is far more radical than 'Empire'. The lack
of a coherent structuralist communication and information theory is the
book's biggest fault, beginning with the complete failure to see the growth
of
a consumtariat as a new under class (what happened to the Deleuzian
concept of the production of desire?), which has some tragic consequences.
If
Hardt & Negri had seen this happening, they would not have demanded a
general
>>>  citizen's wage (which will basically go down the drain into cable
>>television viewing fees...). Demanding even more bread and spectacle when
Power is
>>>  giving away as much bread and spectacle as it possibly can to keep the
>>>  masses in check, is NOT a revolutionary agenda. It never was!
Once again, the structuralist call and more babble names: consumtariat?  And
all this with no explanation of the relation of the 'upper calss' and the
'under class'.  And as for spectacle, I saw the K-World site (co-sponsored
by Volvo! and The Chalmers Group, a few sections of Swedish capital who
would love for people to believe they no longer represent the real ruling
class) with these two sitting reading their book together.  They have
already set themslves up to be spectacles.
>  >>

>>>  3. This is where Zizek falls into the same romanticist trap as Hardt &
>>>  Negri. These guys can't just help themselves falling in love with the
idea of The Revolution. This time around they have all bought Alain Badiou's
>>>  proto-Leninist almost-Derridean concept of The Event (or as I would
prefer to call it: The Event of Mystery), which is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from
The  Event created by Deleuze & Guattari in the brilliant 'A Thousand
>>Plateaus'.  Deleuze's and Guattari's event is an immanent one, a
bifurcation in a
>>>  complex of infinite sources. But Badiou's Event, which attracts Zizek
and Hardt & Negri alike, is nothing but a traditional romantic
TRANSCENDENTAL.
Ok, I have to agree that Hardt, Negri and Zizek have a deadly and stupid
fascination with Leninism.  And the appeal comes not just from Alain Badiou,
but from Lukacs' lesser works (his recently discovered and published In
Defense of history and Class Consciousness, which Zizek wrote the afterword
to, and "Lenin: A study...")   But what else can we expect from
structuralists who want to act in the world?  If you want structuralism, if
you want a world where structures, not human practical-critical activity,
makes it all go, then you have to posit an Event outside of reality, a holy
bolt (usually the party.)  Zizek, Negri and hardt simply try to be
consistent activists, not arm chair intellectuals.
>>>
>>>  The problem here is that neither Zizek nor Hardt & Negri are very well
>>>  versed in information theory. Beacuse if they were, they would perhaps
>>have seen that Revolutions in their metaphysical sense, are strictly
immanent phenomena that belong in a certain time and age, namely in the
passing
>>from a feudal society to a capitalist society where the spread of
information accelerates through new information technologies (from The
French
>>Revolution in 1789 to the Iranian Revolution in 1978, "the velvet
revolutions" of
>>1989  where hardly revolutions at all, just pretended collapses that were
rather reformations of power structures) when THE UPPER CLASS loses its
ability to read and please THE UNDER CLASS enough to avoid the breakdown of
>>>  communication necessary for a complete breakdown of the social order The revolution.
So the problem is we have an upper class parasite and a lower class that is
quiescent as long as the upper class can read and pleasure it sufficiently
well.  No relation between exploiter and exploited.  No sense of how the
'underclass' relates to the 'upper class'.  No idea that the labor of the
'underclass' is the source of the existence, of all the power of the 'upper
class'.  No sense of how the 'underclass' reaches out and understands its
enemy in an 'upper class'.  No sense that the issue at hand is the totality
of human relations and the negation of the current inhuman relations (and
Spinoza understood negativity: Omnis determinatio est negatio!)  Just a
teleology with an information fetish, a new kind of crass technologism
reflecting nothing so much as post-Marx Marxism and Marx's worst moments
made even more banal.  No sense of struggle (the revolutions are break downs
in the upper class' abilities, not a reflection of the power of the
underclass.)  This is what we read up to here for.  the same tired, recycled
ideology.
>>>
>>>  Consequence: Zizek and Hardt & Negri are hoplessly nostalgic romantics
who dream back to a day and age when The Revolution was still possible and
a good in itself. They really ought to know better by now. The Revolution
is neither desirable nor possible in an informational society (actually it
>>>  became impossible in the very same moment when daily mass media
arrived).  Actually, it has been shown to largely be a fraud. "Revolutions",
if
they appear at all these days, are the inventions of new technologies like
>>>  Napster. Street fighting like that in Seattle and Prague are not
>>>  revolutionary or even pre-revolutionary at all. They are just part of
the general consumtarian media theater (or active lobbying efforts of
separate interest groups). And that's it!
Thank you for finally coming out and saying that it is all over.  The hope
of revolution is dead.  At least these are honest politicians!  We cannot
transcend power-over, domination, oppression.  Knowledge, information, has
made it impossible.  And new technologies like Napster represent the real
revolution.  Again, human social relations disappear out the window.  Human
subjectivity goes out the window.  Our scream of refusal, of anger, of
negation, of power, goes out the window, to be replaced by... Napster.  This
is 'interesting'?  This is inhuman bullshit.

>>>Which doesn't have to be all that bad, I LIKE Attac!!!.
Great, he likes consumer groups.  What is ATTAC?  Here is their philosophy
from their web page: "The philosophy of laissez-faire and the free market,
which tends to dominate the international exchange scene, has nothing fatal
or inevitable about it. It is possible to impose greater transparency over
the movement of capital, over the realities of tax havens. It is possible to
impose international regulation, a greater social control over this money,
the right by ordinary people to intervene in the financial sphere. In 1972,
James Tobin, the winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, advanced the idea
of the moderate taxation on all speculative transactions on the foreign
exchange markets, in order to permit governments to find margins of
autonomous control over economic policy."
Great, the conclusion is taxing internation financial transactions.  Back to
a kindler, gentler capital.  This whole philosophical tirade against Negri
amounts to supporting water-thin Keynesianism.  Beautiful!
>>>
>>>  Hopefully 'The Netocrats' will be out in English this spring. Or, even
>>>  better so, maybe somebody else could come along with something more
>>>  interesting than Hardt's & Negri's 'Empire'. Pleeeze!!! This said, if
>>there was a Spinozist Leftist party, I'd join in a second. My critique is
one
of "they could have done much better", not one of "they have done
everything wrong". I share the good intentions. But a new communist
manifesto -
this is not!!! OK?
>>>
>>>  Meanwhile: Spinoza is OK, sweet guy, but KEEP READING Nietzsche!
>>>  So, who's going to Essen? They promise Toni Negri will participate,
from prison, on a widescreen video. Spectacles, always these spectacles...
>>>
>>>  Cheers
>>>  /Alexander Bard
Well, we agree its no new Communist Manifesto.  But retreading Spinoza
through Nietzsche leads to something rather worse than Negri, it seems.  If
this is the New Left, then it is New Left-overs from capital's ideological
freezer.  And if all this seems rather hostile and unkind, it is because
this Spinozist stuff not only mis-reads Spinoza, it returns us back to the
Enlightenment.  it is regression.  It is the glorification of fragmentation,
of fetishization, of defeat, of the impossibility of self-determination and
liberation, of any concept of freedom.  Maybe no one else thinks it is
important, but I think it is high time to go on the offensive against this
structuralist (whether Spinoza, Nietzsche, the fascist Heidegger, Foucault,
the Stalinists Althusser and Poulantzas), anti-human, anti-revolutionary
garbage.  It is no better than Leninism (or its parent, Lasalleanism.)
Maybe it is time to settle accounts with Negri and the neo-Spinozist junk.

On the other hand, i apologize for moments where I inadequately take up the
philosophical points.  In lieu of that, I am going to cheat and use some
comments a comrade of mine from News and Letters sent me regarding an
exchange on Spinoza and Hegel from a year back on this list:
"Well, there is Spinoza, then there is Negri on Spinoza, and
Deleuze/Guattari
on Spinoza--all quite different things. The effort to escape from the
Hegelian inheritance of Marx through a turn to Spinoza has a long history,
going back to Plekhanov. Spinoza remains attractive for many who still feel
affinity with a sort of traditional vulgar materialist aversion to the
notion
of Subject, but wish for a more sophisticated defense of it than provided by
old Marxist-Leninism.

For any Hegelian-Marxist, Spinoza remains one of the most eminent saints in
our philosophic calendar. "Omnis determinatio est negatio"--truly one of the
most splendid philosophic conceptions ever to grace the philosophic
imagination. Nevertheless, despite his splended achievement, Spinoza's
concept of Substance, as Hegel put it, "lacks the principle of personality."
The absence of any notion of subjective self-movement defines the great
divide between Spinoza and Hegel, and explains Marx's explicit support for
the latter at the expense of the former.

By the way, the use/critique of the phrase "totalizing dialectic" is quite
confused in this exchange. First, what can possibly be more "totalizing"
than
Spinoza's concept of Substance? It is stated that "with a totalizing
dialectic there can be no separation, the dialectic can only, through
contradiction, dissolve itself to reappear once more in a new form." Remove
the word "contradiction" and every word here adequately defines a
Spinozistic
position. There is no "outside" or "separation" from Substance in Spinoza;
OMNIS determinatio est negatio. So if one is worried about making room for
"externality" freed from philosophic first principles, Spinoza isn't going
to
help you. Second, far from denying the possibility of "externality," Hegel's
philosophic system defines Nature as nothing other than externality. Third,
what Hegelian Marxist ever viewed the dialectic as "really a
cosmology"???!!!--certainly not Lukacs, who denied the applicability of
dialectics to the natural world, nor Adorno, or Benjamin, nor hardly anyone,
except, perhaps with a stretch, Ernst Bloch. Fourth, anyone who can show me
"the anti-dialectical Marx" gets a free dinner at the Signature Room at my
expense. (Note from Chris: this invitation may still apply, but Peter did
not expect such a wide audience.  However, if you can prove it, he still
might be interested.  Heh.  He'll kill me for this.)

"Dialectics is the consistent sense of non-identity (as Adorno puts it)."
Well, not quite--Adorno was smart enough to know that any principle of
non-identity presumes that of identity. What Adorno really meant is that
"dialectics" needs to be divested of the sense of any POSITIVE outcome
immanent in the negation of the negation. Which inevitably led him, as
Dunayevskaya put it in her 1974 speech to the Hegel Society of America, "to
the substitution of permanent critique for permanent revolution
itself"--here
rephrased as "criticism as never-ended questioning" in place of the presence
of negative critique in an embodied subject reaching for actual revolution.
Here we can see how a rejection of Hegelian dialectics in favor of a
Spinozistic position does dovetail, in a way, with the rejection of the
concept of revolutionary Subject among some post-Marx Marxists. Just as, in
Spinoza, there is no "outside" to Substance, since we are its very
extension,
so for many autonomist Marxists there is no need to conceptualize a
revolutionary subject any longer since we are all, simply by virtue of
"struggling" (and who that is alive does not struggle?) already "exist" as
"revolutionary." Not that we need hang that on poor Spinoza: Like Hegel, he
suffers a lot from the "uses" to which he has been put."

Peter
____________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________
Anyway, to finish, I took this up because i think the conclusions and
reasoning here-in relate to Sean's earlier critique of my anti-inauguration
flyer.  i hope some of the connections are as clear to others as they were
to me, and I hope I am not trying Sean's good nature by seeing a connection.
At the same time, i would not want to attribute the totality of this view to
Sean, but simply some of the move towards Negri, Spinoza and Deleuze.  There
seems to be a common theme there.

Cheers,
Chris

p.s. I brought the flame-proof jammies back out for this one.



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