Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2004 23:41:05 -0700 (PDT)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: re: AUT: the "multitude" and rights


I'd just like to say I've finally got round to reading Empire (not Multitude yet though) and I think Angela/sometimes and Benjamin Rosensweig are spot-on in their analysis.  There's a lot of reformism in there and a very repressive collectivism I think.  Though of course I can't add much to what I said before (mostly in my debate with Lowe about Crisso and Odoteo), because it turns out my memory of what they said was better than I'd assumed.
 
For instance, they take "production" to be first of all equivalent with systematised labour and thus with capitalism, and secondly to be inherently and by definition collective.  Production is absolutely central to their whole project, so these assumptions (the first implicit, the second explicit) are very significant.
 
Secondly, their critique of Deleuze and Guattari is based on a false claim that their view of positive transformative forces is firstly undefined and secondly tends towards mysticism.  This is based solely on Guattari's final book, Chaosmosis.  As an assessment of D&G's entire edifice it's totally untrue.  Their theory of desire is quite precise.  This is important because H&N take on large swathes of D&G's analysis, and Foucault's also, but replace "desire" with "production".  Hence the problems.
 
Keep in mind:
1) that you have to be productive to qualify as a citizen, and this is the basis for their claim for global citizenship.
2) that the future "common" world is to be based on production which is inherently common.
 
Of course, production is supposed to be broader than just work, but it seems to be identified MAINLY with work (which has colonised all of social life, e.g. as affective labour), and secondarily with non-work activities which are nevertheless productive FOR THE SYSTEM (e.g. housework).  So basically, their political analysis is a kind of productivism/Stakhanovism, a cult of work which represses desiring-production beneath social-production.
 
The reason for the commonality of production is never made clear.  H&N never discuss why creative activities, which otherwise have the centripetal tendencies ascribed to them by D&G and Foucault, end up coming together in commonality in D&G's approach.  I suspect, therefore, that some "hegemonic" agent would have to play a repressive role in order to unify the resistances into counter-Empire.  And since production is to remain common, this would turn into a new State.
 
Thus, the multitude never escapes its repressive overcoding as a totality or a single entity.  It never becomes multiplicity, and it thus, by a trick of grammar, has projected onto its definition the desire of D&G to subsume diverse resistances into a single project, almost Leninist-fashion.
 
The relationship between multitude and empire is defined in contradictory ways throughout Empire.  One moment the multitude is immanent to Empire, the next it is its other; one moment Empire is an apparatus of capture which overcodes the multitude, the next Empire produces the multitude as an element within itself.  At stake in such matters is the problem of what is to be kept and what is to be overthrown of the present.  Or, what is to be negated and what is to be affirmed in a project of counter-Empire.  An indicative vagueness.
 
But what worries me most is H&N's failure to escape the moral accountancy of bourgeois thought and its socialist tailers - the assumption that the right to an income (to consume, to exist) should be dependent on one's engaging in productive activity, as defined by the social totality.  This is something their very affirmation of "global citizenship" takes as its ethical premise.  Moral accountancy is the nodal-point of the capitalist-statist repression of desiring-production beneath social production, and, however far H&N stretch the boundaries of social production, this gesture of repression remains unchallenged and, indeed, foundational to their own conception.

		
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