From: "Lowe Laclau" <lowelaclau-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: AUT: RE: The "Multitude" and Rights
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2004 14:01:46 -0400




>whatever the 



>answer given to the first: does this 'moving 

>through' oblige us (or Negri) to cast its 

>ostensibly more progressive aspects in the form of 

>a destiny, freedom and telos?  I really don't 

>think it does.  But this is what N&H do. 




Well I agree, it doesn't oblige anyone at all, except to the extent that people inact these ideas and concepts. But I don't think that H&N see themselves as obliging anyone of anything. They're attempting to provide an ontology and phenomenology of struggle. In that sense these concepts are proposals for how one could see their roles in the struggle. Thus one can take or leave them, like any concept. Telos far more than the others seems to me to be the most empowering --in the Spinozan sense that there are affects that either diminish or augment ones strengths. One one sees 'ends' is extremely important. But Negri is not the first to resituate the importance of "telos" for our times. He essentially inherits it and makes it more materialist from the "postmodernist" writings of France.  


 

>But whose role is it to specify the appropriate 

>reforms for capitalism?  There's a lot to be said 

>here, but I'll just say this: panic merchandising 

>invariably produces cretinisation and is geared 

>toward recruiting among the middle class terrified 

>of falling ever further than they already have 

>into "chaos."  N&H's (in particular Hardt's) 

>'Empire or Barbarism' formulations are a repeat of 

>the 'Socialism or Barbarism' schtick.  The point 

>is certainly not that there isn't any urgency. The 

>point is that there always has been urgency. It's 

>only one-tenthm or probably less, of the world's 

>population that forms the audience for such 

>panics, as a form of suasion. For that one-tenth 

>the production of the panic closes the distance 

>between the problem (what the problem is) and its 

>ostensible solutions, and stops people from 

>thinking about whether these are in fact solutions 

>to the problem at hand.  So, before I'm persuaded 

>that it'll all turn to shit unless we have global 

>citizenship, I need to be persuaded that global 

>citizenship is not in fact a more diffuse and 

>extensive shithole to find oneself in. 




:) Quite funny. Well, I think that the concept they produce of the common is meant precisely to answer this question of whose role is "responsible". Its precisely all of ours, no? They can make a thousand and one ideas and sell them off in books. Yet its precisely how people like you respond to them that creates the common. Just as if people on the streets here ignore whats being said downtown about the future of the EU, then those people in those buildings are who create the "common" of the European future, yet the people who ignored them are no less responsible. So one question --and this is as well the question of global citizenship-- is how to make the production of common more inline with, more "representative" of the production of the/a multitude? More representative of the singularities, all of those who fall through the cracks at the local and the global level? Clearly even in many countries of the North, the common is still dictated by a small minority of private capital and this should NOT be the case. Issues like ownership of media and large corporate mergers aren't simply affairs of individual countries, its definitively transnational. This requires real and deep structural changes that simply won't happen anywhere without moving away from what we have today. Hence H's call for Empire over Barbarism. I see what you're critiquing here, and maybe there are better ways for H to achieve what he wants without what you're calling panic merchandising. Perhaps it should be critiqued... but one should say what would be the better or a better action. 

This leads to a second question, which is how to make the common truely global? Or better, how to forge a truely global front that prevents global private capital from creating all of these political externalities once fights are waged in singular regions or countries. I for one do can't see Germany's dilemma as being one of just Germany. Its global labors dilemma. The situation in Venezuela, in Haiti. These are all of the America's labor (political) problems. The strength of private capital to terrorize and reake (sp?) havok on these populations can only be stopped if instead of worrying about a global state, labor cooperation becomes truely international. A state need not arise if the functions of the state are appropriated. If one reads Mille Plateau closely there are very interesting anthropological, archeological readings that suggest that State hegemony at a global level need not never have arised. Yet it does through the contingency of the moment of capital. Its capital that needs the state. How did movements, populations ward off the emergence of the state? These questions are always posed in the abstract, but the purpose is to show that there is no necessity, there never has been any infiniteness to the State like the German romantics liked to play up. 


> 

>My sense is that N&H imagine this is necessary for 

>some kind of verification of the dramaturgy of the 

>_Communist Manifesto_ -- and at last, we are 

>forced to face, etc, etc.  Global recomposition of 

>the working class brought about by universal 

>"inclusion," etc.  That may well be the tendency 

>of capitalism, and it may not be. Only Archimedes 

>could say for sure; and I like my sci fi with the 

>fi made explicit.  But I certainly do not see 

>myself -- or anyone else I would count as radical, 

>which includes treating others in something other 

>than a mercenary ideological fashion -- as playing 

>the role of cheering that on, as either or both 

>freedom or destiny. 




Why call them cheerleaders? Surely their work isn't about cheering anything on. Freedom is nothing to be cheered about because it is not a State! What is freedom to them? Why would one cheer on something that exists only in its action, its continual achievement? Is there ever any time for cheering? I simply don't see anything in Nergi's work that would give me the impression that thats what he's about at all. Similarly, can one cheer on destiny when destiny has no end? Has no state? When Negri for example defines communism as "transition" in Marx mas alla de Marx, is that not because no philosopher can give what only the common can create? A common future cant be dictated by one man Marx or Negri. Thus it is always STILL a question of command or cooperation, no? If one so fears a Global State then it is not as if you can't do anyth!ng about it. Its not yesterdays power that dictates the movement towards empire, its todays and its all of out interaction with it that determines these relations no? By reifying these concepts in a way that does not include the incorporation of immanence which regardless of how much one dislikes or likes the term, is crucial to understanding them, one misses out entirely the revolutionary aspect of his arguments. 


>Two questions, then: do you think that the 

>unemployed are excluded?  Do you think those who 

>are interned in Australia's camps are excluded? 




No, in other works Negri and camp are quite specific that unemployment and camps are part and parcell of the inclusion (or I prefer a la D&G "capture") of the Nation-State. At the global level one is talking of a different thing. You can also use the vocabulary of guaranteed or unguaranteed populations, where those who aren't guaranteed are the ones precisely existing outside of Keynesian system of reproduction, or those who despite social-states are barely existing. At the global level though global citizenry is first and foremost a call of civil societal actors, its done by the multitude. Empire can only be considered secondarily. I may be wrong about this, someone else can chime in if they like. But it makes sense to me. Issues like migration policy or controls on national work issues are entirely controls of the nation-state and serve only the purpose of upholding the current structure. So "global citizenry" calls are done in opposition to the State, not as secondary phenomena mediated by Empire. If Empire comes to play a role at all it is secondary no? What you're referring to would be examples again of state (private capital) sovereignty and not at all what H&N are talking about when they use the term. There are perhaps other writers who speak about it in the global State sense, but I don't know them. 

>On a hypothetical global state: forget for a 


>moment how nation-states function within an 

>international complex. Rather, think about how 

>nation-states function internally, and are 

>increasingly doing so: the difference between 

>active and passive forms of citizenship; the 

>creation of zones of extra-legality; and so on. 


 

Yes, I see what you're saying but I'd challenge that vision in and of itself because the form of state evolves with the needs the capital. There is no way to tell in advance what types of future crises will strike capital, thus no way of telling how it will recompose itself, or how the multitude would do so. I would think that the purpose of a communism would be to compose the world in a way that state-function did not find a place in the world any longer. 

 

Lowe



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