May 13, 2008
What Happened to Negri and Hardt?
Posted by larvalsubjects under Deleuze, Information, Marx, Politics, PotentialAdam has an interesting post up asking what happened to Negri and Hardt.
Now on the home stretch of exam prep, I am going back through Empire and find myself wanting to reread it “for real” sometime soon, now that I’ve finally read many more of the works they’re referencing. I have long thought that the supposed “disproof” of their theses by the events after 9/11 was a little too easy, and reviewing the opening sections on the new configuration of sovereignty, I’m much more inclined to argue that they were describing a transition that is real and that the Bush administration is continuing. Indeed, their analyses of the politics of fear, of the new ambiguous status of war, of the use of the blanket term “terrorism,” etc., etc., all seem to directly anticipate the post-9/11 climate, to be more plausible now than they were then.
Read the rest here. Voyou follows up:
Adam asks, “what happened to Hardt and Negri?” An interesting question; the current lack of interest in them is rather surprising, given that Empire was and is pretty much entirely correct. I was reminded of this by a post on ads without products, in which:
When it gets to the stuff that lies outside of the so-called “information economy” - when it comes to the relatively minor items like a roof over your head or food on the table or a stable income, I’ll be damned if I can see how non-market social-sharing systems are going to help a whole lot.
Now this is right and, as the post and comments emphasize, open source is no threat to capitalism. But the important point of Hardt and Negri’s analysis of immaterial labor is to look at this the other way round; it’s not that open source will provide us with food and housing, but that the things that deprive us of food and housing are increasingly overlapping with issues of control over information. The science of biofuels and genetically modified corn are immaterial components in the current very material food shortages; likewise, new forms of finance capital are the immaterial specificities of the sub-prime mortgage crisis that is kicking people out of their homes. On international politics, Empire remains accurate, too; indeed, the discussion of the role of nuclear weapons in making all wars in Empire interminable could have been written to describe the choice between Hilary “Bomb Iran” Clinton and Barack “Bomb Pakistan” Obama.
The quote from ads without products strikes me as particularly stupid, as the discussion about immaterial labor was never about how suddenly immaterial labor is going to solve all of our problems or that material labor has ceased to be important or critical. Rather, in good Marxist fashion, Negri and Hardt look for those sites within our social and historical situation where change and resistance might be possible. Not only is the control of information one of the ways in which we are controlled today, but with technologies such as the internet, we also have new means of organizing that cross national boundaries and are very difficult to control through traditional statist means.
I basically got pushed back into rereading Negri and Hardt for an article that was requested from me on Deleuze (those requesting the article were very specific as to what they wanted, asking for a discussion of Autonomia and Negri and Hardt as well). The experience has been surprising. The first time I read Negri and Hardt years ago, I found myself neither wildly impressed nor dismissive. Their work just sort of slid of my back. This time around I’ve found myself deeply impacted by their work. Indeed, it seems to me that they’re more relevant and accurate than ever. Perhaps something has changed in me, perhaps something in the world situation. I don’t know. I’d be curious to know what happened to them as well.
The critiques I have heard– 9/11, criticisms of immaterial labor, etc –strike me as either missing the argument or missing the manner in which Marxist cultural analysis is deployed, i.e., through an analysis of dominant tendencies within a historical situation. Marx could have been pilloried for example the same reasons that Negri and Hardt are pilloried about immaterial labor: by critics pointing out the underveloped nature of capitalism and factory labor during his time. Nor do I see it as an either/or. There’s nothing about discussing the central role of immaterial labor that diminishes or excludes material labor and its importance. Moreover, it seems to me that the failure of the war in Iraq and the growing collapse of the American economy lend some credence to what Negri and Hardt argue about the demise of the nation state (again these are processes, not all or nothing observations). While the Iraq war looked like a return to imperial models, what it in fact shows is the last desperate and dying gasp of the imperial model, or the inability of even the most powerful military state to unilaterally impose its will in a global world. The only critique I’ve heard that somewhat hits the mark is that their proposals at the end of Empire are rather vague and undefined. Voyou argues that Negri and Hardt are too overtly political and this is why they’ve been rejected, but I don’t see this as they offer very little in the way of a concrete program. Of course, in the Marxist tradition, the role of the social theorist isn’t to propose what changes are to be made or to provide a model of the state, but to immanently locate those tendencies from whence change might emerge. Moreover, others in the Autonomia school such as Virno deal with these issues more explicitly.
At any rate, I’d be very interested in hearing what others think. What, if anything, happened to Negri and Hardt?
May 13, 2008 at 8:23 pm
It’s probably worth noting that ads without products was talking about “open source” tech utopians, not Marxist debates about immaterial labor.
I guess there’s two ways of reading “what happened to Hardt and Negri?” One would be Adam’s question, about the fortunes of Hardt and Negri’s work in the academy; the other would be what happend to Hardt and Negri themselves. The latter question might be related to the first, as I have to say a lot of what I’ve heard from Hardt and Negri of late has seemed kind of dull (such as Negri’s call for a “New New Deal,” which seems like it could come from a New Labour policy paper). There’s also, perhaps, the fact that Empire and Multitude were very close to a particular form of political organization, the anti-globalization movement, that does seem to have met its limits very quickly.
Nate’s recent post on post-operaisti might also be relevant.
May 13, 2008 at 9:20 pm
I wonder if the anti-globalism movement is the only organizational possibility here. With all due respect to Nate– and I do respect the hell out of him, pardon the pun –I confess that I found the discussion over at Nate’s site on immaterial production extremely irritating and a bit obtuse (I’ll have to go back and read the article it was based on). As Marx often pointed out, we can find elements of capitalism in all social formations. What’s important is that point where a qualitative transformation takes place in a system. It seems to me that the same points should be made about immaterial production and biopower. While it’s absolutely the case that we find immaterial production and biopower in other social formations, the real question is whether or not its predominance today is something new.
As for the criticism of the term “immaterial production” itself. In the first paragraph of Nate’s post a passage is quoted to the effect of how Marx, in fact, deals with these sorts of issues and has a much broader conception of production, and that Negri and Hardt reproduce a number of oppositions that Marx is keen to overcome. It seems to me that this is precisely the point. What is important here is the context of Marxism itself and how it has often been received and deployed by Marxist. That is, there is a good deal of vulgar Marxist theory that is highly dismissive of the cultural and has a very narrow and limited conception of production and what counts as production. Part of the value of the term “immaterial production” is that it helps to bring these issues to the forefront again. Of course, this doesn’t undermine the possibility that perhaps they do so in a very problematic way; however, this strategy does strike me as far more constructive than what we find in something like say Harvey’s critique of postmodernism, where he seems rather dismissive of cultural production and the role that it plays.
May 13, 2008 at 10:17 pm
I definitely agree with you that N&H’s Empire sounds much more relevant today, but somehow I still doubt about (although I am very sympathetic with the concept) “Multitude”, the “becoming” revolutionary subjectivity or the unified collective that does not suppress the difference. One can still observe that the main struggles are being handled by unified and non-different (in the sense of ethnicity, nation, religion etc.) groups in the world and I can’t see how the Multitude is becoming in practice. Still, the united non-difference is much more vocal, which is not unexpected. I witness this much easily in the US as a foreigner, do you know how easy to gather with a person who speaks and understands the same language? By language, I do not just mean the mother tongue but much more importantly the cultural codes.
Also Zizek’s main critique does still stand there. It describes N&H’s (and/or Marx’s) communist society as a fantasy of a capitalist’s, who wants to clean up all the obstacles (such as workers’ struggle) to exploit without problems. Hence, their strategic proposals such as resistance to war are problematic and not very satisfying to me.
May 13, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Tolga, I think you’re on mark with a good deal of what you say here. Have you read Virno’s Grammar of the Multitude? I think Negri and Hardt are a bit too optimistic about the concept of the multitudes. Virno does a far better job capturing the ambivalence of the multitudes, or the manner in which they can move in both very reactionary directions and revolutionary directions. I don’t think Zizek’s critique is either here or there. Let’s focus on the potentials in our situation, not imagine some post-capitalistic society (Marx too was highly critical of utopian socialism). Anyway, you can find Virno’s book online here:
http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcmultitude3.htm
May 16, 2008 at 6:03 am
Negri and Hardt are alive and kicking in ‘designland’. I’m afraid I’m late to their project and, as yet, have not read ‘Empire’. However, I stumbled upon ‘Multitude’ teaching on a ‘non-linear’ production module at Goldsmiths— the book was coupled with Elaine Scarry’s ‘The Body in Pain’. Equally, I know ‘Empire’ has already become a design-interaction classic; subsumed into the cannon, whispered about and traded alongside other booty like: ‘Thousand Plateaus’ and ‘Relational Aesthetics’!
‘Multitude’ has rekindled my interest in assemblages, I’m currently reading it alongside Serres and Haraway, trying to formulate alternative modes of organization, the similarity between ‘affinities’ and ‘the common’. Going beyond the Mob and the Crowed. Swarms and packs all contain the same species, what’s the collective noun for a mixed-species group? Should there even be one?
Sorry this is slightly off the discussion, just reporting back from the borders.
May 20, 2008 at 6:47 am
I wonder if my own frustrations about Empire and Multitude connect with anyone else’s. In general, I’m frustrated that the (perpetual, everywhere) moments of constitution—of Empire, of a potentially revolutionary Multitude, of a new form of humanity, etc—are missing from the texts. This might be a naïve point, but for all of H&N’s talk of the phenomena of Empire vampiring off of the Multitude, the moments which would initiate, maintain, or challenge this relation seem absent from the texts. Which means, for me, rather than Emp and Mult being too political, they aren’t political enough. These are notes I sent to a professor this summer.
As far as the constitution of Empire:
In both books, the authors work a strong distinction between constituent and constituted power, without saying much about the moment or process that connects these. Empire is (already) undemocratically constituted power that organizes and thrives off (still) constituent power via a regime of biopolitical control… but the authors act as if constituent power just lets this violence happen. Yes, they eschew a story of origins, but they also fall short of the analytical acumen and political potential of Machiavelli, Spinoza and Marx (who all do origin stories right, by leaving them as open tasks), because H&N lack an account of the alienation/transfer of creativity/potesta/potential/etc from constituent to constituted power (or of the organization of the former into the latter) that makes Empire possible. Obviously, the two moments of power (-uent/-ed) aren’t completely separate…but at times H&N make them out to be, and there’s no good story, as far as I can tell, that adequately explains both their connection and the (revolutionary) possibility of their disconnect. That would be the site of politics.
As far as the constitution of a revolutionary subject:
At times, despite their aversion to any form of closing Multitude’s openness, it looks as if H&N are awaiting or gesturing to a (perpetual?) moment of founding in the form of realizing “The product of the creative imagination of the multitude that configures its own constitution” (406). They write: “Certainly, there must be a moment when reappropriation and self-organization reach a threshold and configure a real event. This is when the political is really affirmed… The only event we are still awaiting is the construction, or rather insurgence, of a powerful organization” (Emp 414). Fine. But a fuller story of the relationship between constituent and constituted power in Empire might give some content to the act of constitution that could take the Multitude beyond Empire.
I know they don’t mean to give political blueprints. But I want some more analytical/theoretical clarity and/or some political substance for organizing solidarities of constituent power. And this means, in addition to saying something more about the active relationship between constituent and constituted power, saying something about how the Multitude can remain multitude (in all its potential) through its liberation? How can constituent power be conceptually opposed to its constitution neatly enough to imagine the liberation of the former from the latter while preserving the former’s specificity? In Multitude, H&N identify their project as breaking the ties that link imperial sovereign authority to the consent of the subordinated (Mult 91). Doesn’t breaking the ties change (dissolve? abolish?) the agent of that break? How does constituent power remain the same—i.e. qua constituent, in all its possibility, creativity, resistance—once freed from its constitution? Like Marx, H&N talk about this liberation as reconfiguring the liberated subject: “producing anew the human” (217). But they don’t seem to take seriously Marx’s idea (nicely worked by Laclau in Emancipations) that the revolutionary agent that actualizes potentiality is overcome in that actualization. What is constituent power separate from, or liberated from, its constitution? Once liberated from the constraints of the actual, how constituent power remain potential without actualizing itself in a new constitution?
So: more on moments of constitution; it is this that translates the experience of exploitation to revolutionary consciousness and action. And this relation of experience, consciousness and action is where the politics is.
May 20, 2008 at 6:54 am
I should have clarified above that I mean constitution and alienation to be intimately connected. -mw
June 6, 2008 at 10:59 pm
LS — Sorry to have missed out on these discussions for so long!
As an opening aside, I must say that I was very pleased to see you pulling no punches with respect to very decent bloggers CR and Nate. They’re interesting thinkers and swell bloggers, but directness is very refreshing.
On the one hand, it is surely a mistake to identify Hardt and Negri with the anti-globalization movement. Properly understood, a revolutionary multitude is precisely global; the brief anti-NAFTA, anti-GATT alliance between isolationists and radicals was unstable from the get-go, and not a good idea.
However, my primary response to their books has to do with the actually unambitious task they set for themselves by collating the work of various theorists. I believe there is nothing in Empire that you cannot get out of brief reflection on the connections between Marx and Foucault, combined with the various other extremely current theorists to whom Hardt and Negri turn. The way they use the “empire” is mainly a de-nationalized version of the decades-old Marxist concept of “neo-imperialism,” and their notion of the “multitude” just restates (in utopian terms of reconciliation) a debate between individualism and solidarity that the Left has been navigating since at least the time of the Romantics.
Instead, I would describe our renewed interest in Hardt and Negri in terms of an analogy. When I was in high school, I watched the film Gandhi, greatly enjoyed it, and wrote a paper on him (as, I’m sure, do many high school students). Recently, since I was teaching one of Gandhi’s books this quarter, I re-watched the film and found myself frequently on the verge of tears, even though I had not cried when I first watched it. It is not that I had a cold or insensitive response to the film in high school, but rather that the current political situation has taken on such a terrifying, intimidating character that we have become acutely sensitive to, and almost sentimental towards, anything that affirms its opposition to the status quo.
Finally, as I have said before with respect to Zizek, the desire for salvation through power always reads as a little pathetic. H&N’s “powerful organization” is too much like Zizek’s Leninist vanguard, the hothouse product of a thinly imagined revolutionary filmscape.
June 10, 2008 at 8:13 am
Where Hardt and Negri really that correct? With their adjuration of a diffuse multitude they placed themselves in a difficult position I guess - because who really believes all this multitude could carry something revolutionary in itself? Hardt and Negri concept is somehow anti-revolutionary because it delivers the responisbility to a virtually all-embracing multitude. And it’s single individuals are working, watching tv, going out and are living a unsophisticated life. It’s no accident that everything revolutionary the last years came from Mexico, South America and Asia… not from the western countries. By now, we pretty much are in the winning team - and thats the problem.
June 10, 2008 at 8:06 pm
I have similar suspicions about Negri and Hardt’s concept of the multitudes and networked power, though I’d express them somewhat differently. I think Negri and Hardt are right to argue that the new dominance of immaterial labor produces profound social change. Just as the shift from agrarian labor to the factor led to deep transformations in social relations and forms of subjectivity, the ubiquity of information, the new social relations formed through communications technologies, the continual construction of new affects and knowledges all have the effect of disintigrating prior social relations and creating new forms of subjectivity.
I believe that Negri and Hardt are undoubtedly right in claiming that change is taking place through these mechanisms. The question is why is this change political rather than merely sociological? I think this is a serious problem with their conception of networked agency. Sure, we can conceive a number of different independent agents producing net aggregate effects through their action in a way that presupposes no centralization or overall plan. Yet I fail to see what specifically is political in such a model. Thus, while I’m willing to agree that something like the multitude exists, I have a more difficult time seeing the multitude as a political subject rather than simply a sociological process. Moreover, it is difficult to see why this multitude should inherently trend towards the emancipatory. It seems to me that it could just as easily trend in highly reactionary directions. Negri and Hardt (as well as Virno)concede that the multitude is at best ambivalent, presenting us with a theoretical possibility for emancipation rather than intrinsically and teleologically tending towards emancipation. Yet in doing so, they also seem to imply, contrary to their other claims, that some form of sovereignity is required in the form of a more centralized political subject such as the party or the movement, etc.