From: "Harald Beyer-Arnesen" <haraldba-AT-online.no>
Subject: AUT: The "Multitude" and Rights
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 02:36:24 +0200



----- Original Message -----
From: "Lowe Laclau" <lowelaclau-AT-hotmail.com>
To: <aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
Sent: Friday, August 20, 2004 2:24 PM
Subject: RE: AUT: RE: teleology


<< OK. But my point earlier was that this very concept
becomes challenged by them. This given notion of "rights".
They DO challenge it. They do challenge the relationship
rights hold with representation. >>

One problem being that each time they try to bring it
from the "philosophical" level to one of concrete proposals,
it tends to come out as this:

"If universal principles of justice and human rights are
to be be enacted at a global level, they will have to be
grounded in powerfull and autonmous institutions. One
logical proposal, then, would be to extend the project of
of the International Criminal Court we desribed earlier,
giving it global juridiction and enforcement powers,
perhaps tied to the United Nations."

        From the chapter "Global Demands for Democracy"
        under the subtitle: "Reforms of Rights and Justice."
        page 297 in "Multitude"


Their most concrete proposal for a global democracy they
address under the subtitle "Reforms of Representation" are
globalized versions of the U.S. constitution and the
European Union.

And they explicitly express after having adressed these
various "proposals" ( on page 306) that: "All the various reform
proposals we enumerated in the previous section are good
and useful ideas, ... "

[ Of course. they end the book with more radical tones,
resorting to more poetical language:  "We recognize, however,
that there is a unbridgable gap that separates the
desire for democracy, the production of the common,
and the rebellious behaviors that express them from
the global system of sovereignty. After this long season
of violence and contradictions, global civil war,
corruption of imperial bipower, and infinite toil of the
biopoltical multitudes, the extraordinary accumulations
of grievances and reform proposals must at some point
be transformed by a strong event, a radical insurrectional
demand. We can already recognize that today time is
split between a present already dead and a future that
is already living -- and the yawning abyss between them
is becoming enormous. In time an envent will thrust us
like an arrow into that living future. This will be the real
poltical act of love." ]


They address the question of justice, rights and
law on a more theoretical level on the pages 202-208
inder the subtitle "Beyond private and public," a part
which I at least find interesting, if obscure. There
they among other things write: "The best example of
contemporary legal theory based on singularity and
commonality is that we know of is the 'postsystems
theory'  school, which articulates the legal systems.
in higly technical terminology, as a transparant and
democratic self-organizing network of plural
subsytems, each of which organizes the norms of
numerous private (or or, really singular) regimes,
which through their communication produces common
norms. This is molecular conception of the law and
the production of norms that is based, in our terms,
on a constant, free,  and open interaction among
sigularities, which through their commuication
produces common norms. [footnote 125] The  notion
of singularity rights might be understood better
as an expression of the ethical notion of perfomativity
we discussed earlier [ in relation to Judith Butler and
queer theory. My comment]: they are produced by
the common, in social communication, and in turn they
produce the common." ]

The reader will have to guess what this might
translate into in practice. The main reference is to
a Günther Teubner. Maybe some of the German-
speaking subsribers to aut-op-sy would know more
what this "postsystems" school of law is all about.

However this is the keyword in the book is "the common"
(not "commons") coupled with the magic word, "singularities"
and in this section on law, the old concept of "general
interest" is replaced, by that of "the common interest".

I will not try to communicate the rest here. Better that
people read it themselves.

Harald











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