Dear List,
I enjoyed Brian's posting on the "multitudes" list conundrum and it
reminded me of a short sketch I wrote recently for a conference devoted
largely to questions of Maori cultural activism in New Zealand. I'm
afraid this doesn't really address new tech. issues, but it does touch
on issues of collective identity that may have some indirect relevance
to the list, so I'll take the liberty of posting it. This is a short
introductory bit to a longer talk in which I examine & critique some
specific projects. I've also cut out the footnotes for the sake of
brevity...
Best wishes,
GrantWolfowitz and Negri in the Best of All Possible Worlds
The concept of “Empire” has emerged at the center of American political
debates during the last year, due in large part to the conduct of the
United States following the events of September 11 (e.g., the
abrogation of international weapons and environmental treaties, the
undermining of UN authority, and the doctrine of “preemptive” war). The
9.11 attacks were used to justify and consolidate a re-articulation of
US foreign policy that had been incubating in conservative circles for
at least a decade and which was first advanced by Paul Wolfowitz,
current deputy secretary of defense. In 1991, while working for Bush 41
(vs. Bush 43), Wolfowitz wrote a paper describing what he termed a “New
World Order,” in which the US, no longer facing the threat of another
superpower state, could afford to pursue it’s national self-interest
unimpeded by the stifling constraints of consultation, reciprocity and
consensus formation required by Cold-War era institutions like NATO,
the UN, and global arms treaties. In this view the primary goal of
American foreign policy is no longer to secure allies against the USSR,
but simply to prevent the emergence of a rival nation capable of
challenging our preeminent military status. Apparatchik historians have
been quick to corroborate Wolfowitz’s gleeful Realpolitik. In his
recent book Empire, Paul Johnson argues that America, far from viewing
the dismal history of past imperial ambitions as a warning, should
forge ahead to claim its own Empire because our nation is “uniquely
endowed [on can almost hear the absent phrase, “by God”] to exercise
this kind of global authority,” due to our command of technology and of
the commercially dominant English language. Anyone who has observed
George Bush speaking publicly could be forgiven for doubting the second
claim, but the US does have instant messaging and TIVO which Johnson
believes will insulate us from the tragic mistakes of our European
predecessors.
Wolfowitz’s Panglossian optimism finds a curious parallel in the second
main axis of Empire Discourse over the last few years; Toni Negri and
Michael Hardt’s book Empire, which has been as wildly popular in
college seminar rooms and coffee shops as the Wolfowitz doctrine was in
conservative think tanks and the Bush White House. Hardt has spoken of
his desire to apply the theoretical lessons of Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault and Giles Deleuze to current political struggles, while
Negri’s primary influence is the 1970s autonomia movement in Italy. It
would be churlish to be too critical of a book on global capitalism
that has garnered such a wide and enthusiastic audience. However, the
analysis of capitalism presented in Empire reflects some unresolved
tensions within poststructuralism itself. How, for example, do we
reconcile the unrelenting skepticism of the poststructuralist tradition
towards any collective form of political identity (“the Maori people,”
for example, or “La Raza,”) with the tactical demands of contemporary
activism? Rather than take this interaction as an opportunity to
complicate existing theoretical paradigms Hardt and Negri simply
re-conceptualize current political reality to match the presuppositions
of theory.
Their analysis is centered on three interrelated propositions. The
first proposition concerns the changing role of the state. During the
twentieth century the liberal democratic state has functioned as a key
locus for organized political resistance to capital. Despite it’s often
compromised status, the state has been at least potentially available
to the articulation of a collective public good over and above the
privatized self-interest of the corporate sector, through legislative
and judicial action. For Hardt and Negri the act of representing a
collective political will, far from being a necessary step in
organizing resistance to dominant class interests, simply constitutes
another form of oppression. Pointing to the negative consquences of
post-colonial nation building in Cuba, Vietnam and Algeria they reject
“any political strategy that implies that the nation state can provide
any legitimate resistance to global capital.” In their analysis the
state’s only function is negative: to contain desire and objectify
difference on the basis of a monolithic collective identity (the
nation, the people, etc.). This rejection of the state coincides with
Hardt and Negri’s insistence that political and economic power is no
longer centralized in specific countries or institutions, but is
instead dispersed through a rhizomatic network of corporations, NGOs,
banks and governments, no one of which is wholly determinant (“there is
no single institution, country, or place that is becoming the command
center of Empire”). But this either implies too much (effectively
ignoring the ongoing economic and political domination of a handful of
countries and central banks and the increasing consolidation of major
corporations, not to mention the unilateral military policies of
post-9.11 America) or too little (who would deny that there is a
complex reciprocity among key state players, banks and corporate boards
at the global level?).
Hardt and Negri’s third proposition concerns the status of the working
class, or rather, it’s nonexistence, since they argue that the
working-class, understood as an agent of collective political struggle
and transformation, is irrelevant. It has been replaced, instead, by an
inchoate army of laborers (the leaderless “multitudes”) scattered
across the globe, whose most radical political option is “nomadic”
migration to the metropolitan centers of the developed world to serve
as low-waged labor. They [the multitudes] are to be allowed a political
role, but only so long as their resistance remains resolutely
“fragmented” and “dispersed,” for fear that they might otherwise form a
dangerously fascistic sense of solidarity. It’s worth considering the
historical associations of Hardt and Negri’s chosen term, which first
emerged in a Christian Evangelical tradition that assumed that
non-western peoples had no legitimate foundation for social and
spiritual cohesion. As recently as the 1957 Fidei Donum the Vatican was
still speaking openly of Africa’s “heathen multitudes”. The multitudes,
however, are only vaguely defined in Hardt and Negri’s book. Instead,
the primary fulcrum of politic change is assigned to “intellectual,
immaterial and communicative labor power," meaning, designers,
managers, technicians, media workers, etc. This analysis will be
familiar to anyone with a cursory knowledge of recent sociology, as
it’s been advanced in one form or another for at least three decades
(from André Gorz’s Farewell to the Working Class to Daniel Bell’s The
Coming of Postindustrial Society to Robert Reich’s discussion of the
“symbolic analyst” class in The Work of Nations). Moreover, the
interdependence of industrial labor and a technical-mangerial cadre has
been a feature of capitalism for at least a century (evident in steel
and automobile production in the US by the early 1900s). Hardt and
Negri simply update the old St. Simonian concept of an emancipatory
avant-garde, centered in the arts and sciences. While it is no doubt
quite flattering to the average software designer or university
professor to find himself suddenly placed at the levers of history,
there are obviously reasons to remain somewhat skeptical of this
analysis. For example, despite their cavalier dismissal of the
agricultural working class, farm labor continues to be the primary form
of survival for some 80% of the world’s population, and a key site for
current union organizing and political struggles over land reform.
Hardt and Negri argue that the only appropriate mode of resistance to
this newly subtle and dispersed mode of capitalism is sporadic,
disorganized and essentially individual. There is no need to challenge
the institutions of political and economic power with collective forms
of resistance or to build political alliances across national
boundaries because power has thoughtfully reconfigured itself to be
decentralized. Thus, we must meet the rhizomatic forces of capital with
the Deleuzean “flows” of migration and unplanned and local gestures.
Rather than challenge the depressing limitations on public speech and
action imposed by the triumphant juggernaut of post-Cold war capitalism
we should simply accept them as constituting the new horizon of
possibility for political action. Note, that it is not simply a
question of working on multiple fronts for Hardt and Negri (both local
and individual as well as more collective modes of resistance). Rather,
it is the prohibition of any political action that depends on the
experience of collective struggle; these actions can only ever lead
down the slippery slope towards the gulag of totalitarian nationalism.
Hardt and Negri would leave no civic or institutional insulation
whatsoever between the mobile and predatory forces of global corporate
capital and the poor and working class, to whom even the solace of a
“communicable solidarity” (to use Hardt/Negri’s term) is denied. Their
analysis operates through a kind of negative teleology in which all
possible outcomes of the cultural and political logic of modernity are
anticipated in the specific experience of the Euro-American Nation
State. There is no point in trying to organize trade unions in China or
work towards a more egalitarian government in Nicaragua because “we’ve”
already been down that road.
Despite their obvious differences, the visions of Empire articulated by
Wolfowitz and Hardt & Negri, are based on a common suspicion of
collective resistance, and a strong commitment to individualism.
Wolfowitz’s individualism is of the classic bourgeois variety, while
Hardt and Negri’s is the ontologically retrofitted individualism of the
Deleuzean monad. Hardt and Negri can only view collective political
struggles around class, race or ethnicity as the benighted hangover of
some embarassing Hegelian binge. These same forms of identification are
disdained by Wolfowitz because the only solidarity allowed in the New
World Order is that enjoyed by the leaders of global capital and their
client states. Where, one may wonder, does this leave Maori tribal
activists seeking indigenous self-determination or native Hawaiians of
the Aloha Aina Party as they pursue soverignity rights? The very
concept of soverignity, of a Hawaiian or Maori “people,” is anathema to
Hardt and Negri. Soverignity is the “poisoned gift” of colonial Europe
that native peoples must exchange for the ontological emancipation
promised by migration and exile. What I find especially problematic is
the lack of nuance in Hardt and Negri’s analysis; the implication that
the “natives” of the developing world can’t be trusted with the white
magic of nationality and “communicable solidarity” for fear that they
will be lured to the dark side of fascism and ethnic cleansing. I think
it would behove European and American intellectuals to be slightly less
confident about their predictive abilities, and somewhat less
prescriptive when it comes to political and cultural struggles in the
non-western world. Further, I believe there is much to be learned about
the ethical, aesthetic and cultural implications of collectivity from
the experience of other cultures. These experiences reveal an engagment
with collective identity that is more nuanced and complex than Hardt
and Negri allow.
--
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]