Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2001 21:31:54 -0100
From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: What is Empire about? - part 1 Multitude
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--Boundary_(ID_/rS8Ql42jZX/j1AevDAiUg)
Steve,
Thanks, this is Great! I will work on it.
HB
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hugh
**multitude, subjectivity, production, measure, appropriation etc., it should be easy to summarize in one or two thousand words.**.
Let''s start at the top of the list - with Multitude and work through the list from the top.
They define the multitude in the time of 'empire' in terms that point towards how the 'multitude' can become "a political subject in the context of the 'empire". Of course this needs to be understood through the marxist gauze as being 'the' political subject. For a leftist the true political subject is not the ruler or the submissive but those who resist. Indeed on reading 4.3 it becomes clear that the 'mulitude' is another reference to the 'proletarian subject'. The multitude becomes in fact the opressed subject referred to as formed in the modern and postmodern eras through.... 'The formation of exploited and subjugated producers can be read more clearly in the hostory of 20 C revolutions...." The argument s that the great political struggles of the 20thC - are what caused the conditions of citizinship of the multitude to be born, spread and conditioned. Each political defeat of the 20th C helped enable the construction of a new poltical subjectivity. The conception of the multitude should be reviewed through the theories of the Autonomia movements of the 70s and 80s, for N&H place the multitude as belonging squarely within a notion of production that will given the oppurtunity produce 'autonomously and reproduce the entire world of life' - this in itself is reference back towards the usually misquoted ideals of Engels and Marx. The go on to suggest that the multitude is a singularity, formed through production, cast within a reality defined through cooperation, a linguisitic community(especially for you Eric) and developed by hybridisation....This does not however seem a good enough set of reasons to define the multitude as the political subject for the postmodern era. It feels far to utopian and fuzzy to enable me to see the violence necessary to reconstruct the postmodern economy into something more post-human (given that the human has been so disgusting...).
However ironically enough it is later in section 4.3 Endless Paths - that things actually become interesting - At various times in Empire they discuss the issue of migration - they never talk about the numbers of migrants so just to produce the singularity that this encounter constitutes - according to reliable numbers close to 40 million people migrate from one state to another every year - this is probably the greatest migratration, the greatest nomadic upsuge in human history... In the referred to section ..."The constitution of the multitude appears as a spatial move,ment that constitutes the multitude in a limitless place...." Capital has always argued that commodities are endlessly mobile and that as a result in theory labour is mobile as well. It has of course endlessly attempted to deny the affect that this produces - namely that the nomadic and migratory subject immediately re-produces the nation-state-local community as inoperative. N&H argue, and they ae not alone in this, that 'the kinds of ovements of individuals, groups and populations we find today in Empire cannot be subjugated to the laws of capitalist accumaltion....' The migration of the multitude produces new social spaces and new residences... In actual fact I believe that it precisely this which the anti-humanist theorists - Lyotard, Deleuze and so on are grasping for...The multitude circulates, through this circulation from one point in space to another to reapproproiates that space, a space which is always social before it is a geography, and 'constitutes itself as an active subject...' Finally, before I re-read the above... Remember the current postmodern economy - could it exist without the great migratory flows of the multitude - the great flux of the producers? Imagine US industry without the Mexican migrant labour? (In Dallas two weeks ago I saw Migrant labour re-producing the industrial spaces of the Dallas-Fort-Worth-Metroplis). The European Softwarer Industry without US or Asian labour? Where would the great information design sectors be without the 'illegal labour of the great masses...mobilised towards the horizons of wealth and freedom...' There is a moment when N&H seem to propose that the act of migration is a positive reaction to the reactionary constraints placed on the mulitude
But if the above begins to define and produce the synthesis of the mulitude as a variant of the proleatrian subject - does anyone imagine that its anything but an exstension of this subject? - then the real question becomes - how to define and understand how the multitude is definable as a poiisitve political power? (this is covered from 398 onwards). How can we recognise a politcal tendency that is not simply spontaneous but also a constituent of change.
The evidence they suggest is in the controls and restrictions that are placed on the migratory paths - the Empire and its satilites must control and restrict the movements of populations... consequently the Empire must encourage the forces of nationalisn and fundementalism to ensure that the movement of popoulations is restricted... These neo-colonial acts, that can be traced back to Auschwitz, not the Auschwitz of the Jewish Holocaust but the actual one consisting of Gypsies, Jews and Communists. The Empire aims to divide and isolate - boats, patrols and stronger borders - but it needs the norders to be porous, capital needs the labour....
How then can this nascent political subject 'multitude' become a subject in action? The only rational response is the same as always - the action of the multitude becomes political primarily when it begins to confront the forces of empire directly. Recognise and engage the actions of empire...
But note the most important statement relating to this proposed new subject - 'The task for the multitude, howvere, although it is clear at a conceptual level remains rather abstract. What specific and concrete practices will animate this political project?...." N&H are not suggesting that the multitude is quiescent but rather that the growth in social and political demands has only just begun. I rather like this actually... 'global citizenship...' and 'the social wage'
Nice
regards
sdv
hbone wrote:
Steve,Thanks. A detailed reply deserves a detailed response. I'll try. Steve wrote:
All reading is intertextual... and considering that the text refuses to be 'standalone' I am mystified by the below statements.
** 1) I'm familiar with the intertextual approach set forth by various writers, and "refusal" , as in refusal of work, refusal to believe what the authority, (the State, the Boss, the Politicians, the Media) wants you to beleve) is a use of the term I was not familiar with, but think I understand. 2) Which statements are mysterious?**
If as you state below you wish to make a reading that revolves around the 'Empie' text alone
** The text alone contains the names of dozens of authors who have written many books. H&N use this method to present, illuminate, justify, their own ideas, the ideas that they decided to publish. Sometimes they quote directly from a reference, sometimes not. I don't think they suggested reading of referenced works is a pre-requisite to undrstanding Empire.**
agreed but a certain understanding and sympathy is essential...
- an intellectual method I think I disapprove of because of the impossibility of the practice - then I suggest you open up with a close textual reading of Section 4.3 'The multitude against the empire'. Or alternatively perhaps section 3.4 'Postmodernization, or the informatisation of production'. However given that the latter is very much written against the grain of Lyotard's anti-historical approach, and I've used this and other related sections of the text continuously for the past year, I think the former is more useful as it presumes to state what they regard as a 'revolutionary subject'.
**O.K I'll re-read 4.3.including these items that I noted in a previous post:
page 416 - Mass migrations have become necessary for production.
- What we need to grasp is how the multitude is organized and
redefined as a positive political power.
page 417 - Imperial capital does indeed attack the movements of the multitude
with a tireless determination: it patrols the seas and the borders; within each country it
divides and segregates; and in the world of labor it reinforces the cleavages and borderlines of race, gender, language, culture, and so forth. Even then, however, it must be careful not to restrict the productivity of the multitude too much because Empire too
depends on this power.
page 418 - What specific and concrete practices will animate this political
project? We cannot say at this point. What we can see nonetheless is a
first element of a political demand: "global citizenship".
page 419 - Empire too depends on this power.
- In modernity, reality was not conceivable except as measure, and measure in turn was not conceivable except as a (real or formal) a priori that corralled being within a transcendent order
421 - a social wage and a guaranteed income for all.
422 - Knowledge has to become linguistic action and philosophy has to become a real "reappropriation of knowledge" In other words knowledge and communication have to constitute life through struggle.
424 - the right to reappropriate.
425 - the earthly city must demonstrate its power as an apparatus of the
mythology of the multitude. being-knowing-having power.
428 - a society in which the basis of power is defined by the expression of
the needs of all.
**And perhaps we should attempt a mutual understanding of "multitude", "production", "subjectivities", "measure", "appropriation", and "re-appropriation".**
If you don't want to write a summary or synthesis of the text then how do you want to advance?
**After we explain our understanding of the most troublesome terms, we can summarize, with a chance of being understood.**
Some initial thoughts below:
Consider the contents of the book - it is in four parts: Part 1 'The political constitution of the present, Part 2 Passages of soveriegnty, an inter-mezzo Counter-Empire, part three passages of production, part 4 the decline and fall of empire.
Actually the 'Empire'; text fits within the range of leftwing texts that discuss the current postmodern economy as being something with positive elements, but it does not have the statistical evidence to support itself,
**.Agreed**
Including most startling of all a new (maxist/hegalian) revolutionary subject... Perhaps equally interesting but without any actual supporting evidence is the notion of 'empire' itself - it is emphasized that the notion is not a metaphor but a political concept which demands 'a political approach' (xiv). The supporting evidence seems thin because you would assume that the nation-state was in some sense in retreat whereas the actual evidence suggests that this is not the case. Think of the problems the Kyoto agreement has with the Nation-states non-cooperative USA, the G8 conference with the meeting of the poor countries in Zanzibar... It is true that there is a vast lack of boundries for postmodern capitalism(xiv) however whilst capital has no territorial boundries what evidence is there that globalisation is threatening to suspend history? It does not re-create 'the end of history' but rather so they argue creates new forms of resistence...
**Agree in general, but we need to explore "new forms of resistance" - what is truly new is often difficult to recognize.**
The initial three key points and rules of empire are: 1. Empire posits a regime that encompasses the spatial totality, actually the entire civilised world (leaves out Afghanistan I would imagine) but no boundries limit its scope.
**Afghanistan, like other warring countries doesn't fit now, but perhaps will in the future.**
2. The concept presents itself not as an empire that originates from conquest, but rather as an order that suspends history (and proposes to be eternal, where does this piece of 'end of history' get justified from?).
**You may not agree with my theory that "History" doesn't exist.. What does exist is narratives of past events recorded in books and other artifacts. Persons who lived the events or read the narratives can, if memory serves, recall them. So history, at that poin exists in living brain/bodies. Incidentally, I like the "Empire's" emphasis on "minds and bodies", and that idea should help disabuse us of 19th century philosophy which treats "History" as a mysterious, transcendent, non-human force, like the traditional panoply of gods and mystics that most post-modern thinkers consider fictitious. Of course the gods and mystics are real to religious persons. As real to them as living authors, TV and the Internet are for non-believers.**
Empire as a concept then is post-hegelian and by default anti-Kantian and very much against the sublime. 3. Empire operates at all points in the social register from the very highest down to the lowest points in the social world. As such it aims to rebuild human nature into its own requirements.
**To argue about Hegel and Kant I would have to read them, but if living authors have something to say to us, and use words of H&K to explain what they are trying to tell us, why not. I didn't know they were against the sublime.**
Is this a reasonable starting point....Hugh? Is this what you want?
**Yes, its reasonable. After we post statements on our understanding of what the authors' mean by multitude, subjectivity, production, measure, appropriation etc., it should be easy to summarize in one or two thousand words.**.
thanks,
Hugh
--Boundary_(ID_/rS8Ql42jZX/j1AevDAiUg)
HTML VERSION:
--Boundary_(ID_/rS8Ql42jZX/j1AevDAiUg)--Steve,Thanks, this is Great! I will work on it.HB~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Hugh**multitude, subjectivity, production, measure, appropriation etc., it should be easy to summarize in one or two thousand words.**.
Let''s start at the top of the list - with Multitude and work through the list from the top.
They define the multitude in the time of 'empire' in terms that point towards how the 'multitude' can become "a political subject in the context of the 'empire". Of course this needs to be understood through the marxist gauze as being 'the' political subject. For a leftist the true political subject is not the ruler or the submissive but those who resist. Indeed on reading 4.3 it becomes clear that the 'mulitude' is another reference to the 'proletarian subject'. The multitude becomes in fact the opressed subject referred to as formed in the modern and postmodern eras through.... 'The formation of exploited and subjugated producers can be read more clearly in the hostory of 20 C revolutions...." The argument s that the great political struggles of the 20thC - are what caused the conditions of citizinship of the multitude to be born, spread and conditioned. Each political defeat of the 20th C helped enable the construction of a new poltical subjectivity. The conception of the multitude should be reviewed through the theories of the Autonomia movements of the 70s and 80s, for N&H place the multitude as belonging squarely within a notion of production that will given the oppurtunity produce 'autonomously and reproduce the entire world of life' - this in itself is reference back towards the usually misquoted ideals of Engels and Marx. The go on to suggest that the multitude is a singularity, formed through production, cast within a reality defined through cooperation, a linguisitic community(especially for you Eric) and developed by hybridisation....This does not however seem a good enough set of reasons to define the multitude as the political subject for the postmodern era. It feels far to utopian and fuzzy to enable me to see the violence necessary to reconstruct the postmodern economy into something more post-human (given that the human has been so disgusting...).
However ironically enough it is later in section 4.3 Endless Paths - that things actually become interesting - At various times in Empire they discuss the issue of migration - they never talk about the numbers of migrants so just to produce the singularity that this encounter constitutes - according to reliable numbers close to 40 million people migrate from one state to another every year - this is probably the greatest migratration, the greatest nomadic upsuge in human history... In the referred to section ..."The constitution of the multitude appears as a spatial move,ment that constitutes the multitude in a limitless place...." Capital has always argued that commodities are endlessly mobile and that as a result in theory labour is mobile as well. It has of course endlessly attempted to deny the affect that this produces - namely that the nomadic and migratory subject immediately re-produces the nation-state-local community as inoperative. N&H argue, and they ae not alone in this, that 'the kinds of ovements of individuals, groups and populations we find today in Empire cannot be subjugated to the laws of capitalist accumaltion....' The migration of the multitude produces new social spaces and new residences... In actual fact I believe that it precisely this which the anti-humanist theorists - Lyotard, Deleuze and so on are grasping for...The multitude circulates, through this circulation from one point in space to another to reapproproiates that space, a space which is always social before it is a geography, and 'constitutes itself as an active subject...' Finally, before I re-read the above... Remember the current postmodern economy - could it exist without the great migratory flows of the multitude - the great flux of the producers? Imagine US industry without the Mexican migrant labour? (In Dallas two weeks ago I saw Migrant labour re-producing the industrial spaces of the Dallas-Fort-Worth-Metroplis). The European Softwarer Industry without US or Asian labour? Where would the great information design sectors be without the 'illegal labour of the great masses...mobilised towards the horizons of wealth and freedom...' There is a moment when N&H seem to propose that the act of migration is a positive reaction to the reactionary constraints placed on the mulitude ----
But if the above begins to define and produce the synthesis of the mulitude as a variant of the proleatrian subject - does anyone imagine that its anything but an exstension of this subject? - then the real question becomes - how to define and understand how the multitude is definable as a poiisitve political power? (this is covered from 398 onwards). How can we recognise a politcal tendency that is not simply spontaneous but also a constituent of change.
The evidence they suggest is in the controls and restrictions that are placed on the migratory paths - the Empire and its satilites must control and restrict the movements of populations... consequently the Empire must encourage the forces of nationalisn and fundementalism to ensure that the movement of popoulations is restricted... These neo-colonial acts, that can be traced back to Auschwitz, not the Auschwitz of the Jewish Holocaust but the actual one consisting of Gypsies, Jews and Communists. The Empire aims to divide and isolate - boats, patrols and stronger borders - but it needs the norders to be porous, capital needs the labour....
How then can this nascent political subject 'multitude' become a subject in action? The only rational response is the same as always - the action of the multitude becomes political primarily when it begins to confront the forces of empire directly. Recognise and engage the actions of empire...
But note the most important statement relating to this proposed new subject - 'The task for the multitude, howvere, although it is clear at a conceptual level remains rather abstract. What specific and concrete practices will animate this political project?...." N&H are not suggesting that the multitude is quiescent but rather that the growth in social and political demands has only just begun. I rather like this actually... 'global citizenship...' and 'the social wage'
Nice
regards
sdv
hbone wrote:
Steve,Thanks. A detailed reply deserves a detailed response. I'll try. Steve wrote:All reading is intertextual... and considering that the text refuses to be 'standalone' I am mystified by the below statements.
** 1) I'm familiar with the intertextual approach set forth by various writers, and "refusal" , as in refusal of work, refusal to believe what the authority, (the State, the Boss, the Politicians, the Media) wants you to beleve) is a use of the term I was not familiar with, but think I understand. 2) Which statements are mysterious?**
If as you state below you wish to make a reading that revolves around the 'Empie' text alone
** The text alone contains the names of dozens of authors who have written many books. H&N use this method to present, illuminate, justify, their own ideas, the ideas that they decided to publish. Sometimes they quote directly from a reference, sometimes not. I don't think they suggested reading of referenced works is a pre-requisite to undrstanding Empire.**
agreed but a certain understanding and sympathy is essential...- an intellectual method I think I disapprove of because of the impossibility of the practice - then I suggest you open up with a close textual reading of Section 4.3 'The multitude against the empire'. Or alternatively perhaps section 3.4 'Postmodernization, or the informatisation of production'. However given that the latter is very much written against the grain of Lyotard's anti-historical approach, and I've used this and other related sections of the text continuously for the past year, I think the former is more useful as it presumes to state what they regard as a 'revolutionary subject'.
**O.K I'll re-read 4.3.including these items that I noted in a previous post:
page 416 - Mass migrations have become necessary for production.
- What we need to grasp is how the multitude is organized and
redefined as a positive political power.
page 417 - Imperial capital does indeed attack the movements of the multitude
with a tireless determination: it patrols the seas and the borders; within each country it
divides and segregates; and in the world of labor it reinforces the cleavages and borderlines of race, gender, language, culture, and so forth. Even then, however, it must be careful not to restrict the productivity of the multitude too much because Empire too
depends on this power.
page 418 - What specific and concrete practices will animate this political
project? We cannot say at this point. What we can see nonetheless is a
first element of a political demand: "global citizenship".
page 419 - Empire too depends on this power.
- In modernity, reality was not conceivable except as measure, and measure in turn was not conceivable except as a (real or formal) a priori that corralled being within a transcendent order
421 - a social wage and a guaranteed income for all.
422 - Knowledge has to become linguistic action and philosophy has to become a real "reappropriation of knowledge" In other words knowledge and communication have to constitute life through struggle.
424 - the right to reappropriate.
425 - the earthly city must demonstrate its power as an apparatus of the
mythology of the multitude. being-knowing-having power.428 - a society in which the basis of power is defined by the expression of
the needs of all.**And perhaps we should attempt a mutual understanding of "multitude", "production", "subjectivities", "measure", "appropriation", and "re-appropriation".**
If you don't want to write a summary or synthesis of the text then how do you want to advance?
**After we explain our understanding of the most troublesome terms, we can summarize, with a chance of being understood.**
Some initial thoughts below:
Consider the contents of the book - it is in four parts: Part 1 'The political constitution of the present, Part 2 Passages of soveriegnty, an inter-mezzo Counter-Empire, part three passages of production, part 4 the decline and fall of empire.
Actually the 'Empire'; text fits within the range of leftwing texts that discuss the current postmodern economy as being something with positive elements, but it does not have the statistical evidence to support itself,
**.Agreed**
Including most startling of all a new (maxist/hegalian) revolutionary subject... Perhaps equally interesting but without any actual supporting evidence is the notion of 'empire' itself - it is emphasized that the notion is not a metaphor but a political concept which demands 'a political approach' (xiv). The supporting evidence seems thin because you would assume that the nation-state was in some sense in retreat whereas the actual evidence suggests that this is not the case. Think of the problems the Kyoto agreement has with the Nation-states non-cooperative USA, the G8 conference with the meeting of the poor countries in Zanzibar... It is true that there is a vast lack of boundries for postmodern capitalism(xiv) however whilst capital has no territorial boundries what evidence is there that globalisation is threatening to suspend history? It does not re-create 'the end of history' but rather so they argue creates new forms of resistence...
**Agree in general, but we need to explore "new forms of resistance" - what is truly new is often difficult to recognize.**
The initial three key points and rules of empire are: 1. Empire posits a regime that encompasses the spatial totality, actually the entire civilised world (leaves out Afghanistan I would imagine) but no boundries limit its scope.
**Afghanistan, like other warring countries doesn't fit now, but perhaps will in the future.**
2. The concept presents itself not as an empire that originates from conquest, but rather as an order that suspends history (and proposes to be eternal, where does this piece of 'end of history' get justified from?).
**You may not agree with my theory that "History" doesn't exist.. What does exist is narratives of past events recorded in books and other artifacts. Persons who lived the events or read the narratives can, if memory serves, recall them. So history, at that poin exists in living brain/bodies. Incidentally, I like the "Empire's" emphasis on "minds and bodies", and that idea should help disabuse us of 19th century philosophy which treats "History" as a mysterious, transcendent, non-human force, like the traditional panoply of gods and mystics that most post-modern thinkers consider fictitious. Of course the gods and mystics are real to religious persons. As real to them as living authors, TV and the Internet are for non-believers.**
Empire as a concept then is post-hegelian and by default anti-Kantian and very much against the sublime. 3. Empire operates at all points in the social register from the very highest down to the lowest points in the social world. As such it aims to rebuild human nature into its own requirements.
**To argue about Hegel and Kant I would have to read them, but if living authors have something to say to us, and use words of H&K to explain what they are trying to tell us, why not. I didn't know they were against the sublime.**
Is this a reasonable starting point....Hugh? Is this what you want?
**Yes, its reasonable. After we post statements on our understanding of what the authors' mean by multitude, subjectivity, production, measure, appropriation etc., it should be easy to summarize in one or two thousand words.**.
thanks,
Hugh
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