More From This User
Related Docuements
‘Now Everything Must Be Reinvented’:
Negri and Revolution
The Philosophy of a Antonio Negri
From harrynjane
"Proletariat or Multitude? A Postanarchist Critique of
Empire
"Jason Adams
Introduction: A Proletarian Ideology of Progress and Productivity?
Though it is not clearly articulated as such, underlying the argument of Hardt and Negri's much-acclaimed book,
Empire
there is a fundamental singularity/universality nexus that is typically deployed as the basis for theemerging counter-Empire of the multitude as well as for the postmodern sovereignty of world order and theinformatized production of postmodern capitalism; this is then juxtaposed to the particularity/universality nexusthat had been deployed by the new social movements and left-wing nationalisms of the late twentieth century aswell as the modern sovereignty and industrial production systems which they are depicted as having beenactively refusing.As used here,
universality
refers to that which affects, describes or defines both each and all throughout allspatiotemporalities and thus has the potential of either becoming a space of identity or a space of difference,
particularity
refers to that which can be considered as an example or a category of a universality and whichalways becomes recuperated into the space of identity and
singularity
refers to that which is not generalizable or definable under any form of identity but which can interlink with universality so long as it is understood as auniversality of difference. Thus, with the shift to the 21
st
century, the singularity/universality nexus becomes thechannel through which movements seek to move beyond the various forms of philosophical reductionism whichhave been arisen since the 1960s, including gender-reductionism, race-reductionism, and national-reductionism;these newer reductionisms then, are understood as the embrace of a resurgent particularity/universality nexusoutside of the class universal, which is ostensibly understood as a universality of difference rather than of identity.Yet, while breaking down these new reductionisms is indeed a necessary development in the shift towards aworld based upon the singularity/universality nexus, I would argue that in this particular form of moving"beyond", the authors actually seek to move
back
to a time in which Marxist ideology ruled the vast majority of social movements, when it was still generally believed that economics was the fundamental driving force of world order. The way in which they accomplish this, it seems, is through an often rather imperceptible slippage between the nonlinear, existentialist and subsistentialist concept of the multitude and the linear, progressivist and productivist concept of the proletariat; as a result, the authors reinforce yet another version of the very particularity/universality nexus they claim to oppose as the concept of the proletariat finally comes tooverdetermine the concept of the multitude. Thus, against both the new social movement and proletarianconceptions of particularity/universality, I propose instead a singularity/universality which might undermine alloverarching ideologies, categorical reductionisms and other dominations in order to really begin to movetowards a more anti-authoritarian, singularist and intersubjective mode of being-against as an unambiguousextension of the concept of the multitude as understood through the works of autonomists such as GeorgeKatsiaficas, Paolo Virno and Giorgio Agamben, the nonlinear, non-progressivist conception of history put forth by Walter Benjamin and the living praxis of the old IWW and the antiglobalization and antiwar movements of today. Such a mode would not accept any conception of history which seeks to discover or articulate any
particular
driving force of world order nor which seeks to enforce an ideology of progress and productivity butwould instead allow for the probability that there are a multitude of
singular
causes of the continuing shift toEmpire, that history does not necessarily proceed in a "forward" direction and that production is not necessarilythe primary means of exploitation or resistance in all places at all times.
The Universalities, Particularities and Singularities of Being-Against
According to the authors, there are two primary modes in which the shift to Empire must be understoodtoday; the first is that of the transformation of sovereignty from an imperialist form to a more complete imperialform, and the second is the transformation of production from an centralized industrial form to a decentralizedinformational form. Thus, whereas the imperialist sovereignty of the 20
th
century had been based on the striatedEuropean framework of a centrally dominant power extending its exploitative power directly, the Empire of the21
st
century is one based on a smooth American framework in which an open network coopts local elites under a"single logic of rule", thus leading to a constitutive, biopolitical form of governance without government.Similarly, whereas the industrial production of the 20
th
century had been based on a Fordist framework of mass production, strong unions, and a "family wage", the informational production of the 21
st
century is based on adecidedly post-Fordist mode which relies on just-in-time production of goods in the newly-industrialized regionsand a service based economy in the formerly-industrialized regions, all of which is overdetermined by thecentrality of information technology. What is conceptually interesting about this division between sovereignty
1
and production is that it is primarily within the former context that the concept of the multitude is invoked, whileit is primarily within the latter context that we witness the resurrection of the proletariat. In other words, in thisformulation, the multitude takes on a decidedly "political" hue while the proletariat takes on a decidedly"economic" one. Though the argument put forth is that in the shift to Empire the two can no longer be separated,it seems to me that there is more of a tendency towards such a separation than the authors might be willing toadmit; as they themselves state, "the realm of production is where social inequalities are clearly revealed andmoreover, where the most effective resistances and alternatives to the power of Empire arise".
This focus on productivity as the primary site of resistance seems to me to be a result of their determination to save Marxismas an overarching ideology
, a determination which increasingly brings them into conflict not only with the"counter-Empire" as it is emerging today in practice, but also with their fellow autonomists ranging from GeorgeKatsiaficas to Giorgio Agamben, who, while learning from Marx and applying his ideas where it is relevant, donot feel any compulsion whatever to continually refer back to him as though he spoke only in universal truths.Indeed, the most glaring contradiction of this book results from retaining an overly ideological attachment toMarx and his productivist and progressivist biases; this is demonstrated very clearly when the authors offer ashallow, almost obligatory critique of Marx's Eurocentrism, only to quickly return to his problematic argumentthat despite the bloody and unjust history of colonialism it can also be seen as a positive development since it hassupposedly carried with it a utopian thread that at least potentially allows for the constitution of a revolutionaryuniversal proletariat. As the self proclaimed libertarian Edward Said has argued in regard to this aspect of Marx'sthought, "in article after article he returned with increasing conviction to the idea that even in destroying Asia,Britain was making possible there a social revolution" - precisely the same argument is to be found in Hardt and Negri's agreement that "Empire is better in the same way that Marx insists that capitalism is better than the formsof society and modes of production that came before it. Marx's view is grounded on a healthy and lucid disgustfor the parochial and rigid hierarchies that preceded capitalist society". The conclusion at which they arrive fromhere is that in the face of Empire, the multitude must not try to resurrect the particularist bases that served themovements of the 20
th
century, but instead should construct a global counter-Empire based on the productiveforces of the new proletariat to "take us through and beyond" its limits, thus bringing about a "newcartography…through the resistances, struggles and desires of the multitude". What seems so odd here is thecompletely unsubstantiated assertion that
all
forms of locality are and always have been "backwards", particularist, hierarchical and homogenizing; the Marxist version of the ideology of progress and productivity isin this sense not so far off from the capitalist modernization theory that has been challenged by scholars rangingfrom
dependencia
theorists to ecofeminists and postcolonialists. Indeed, nationalism is but one of many forms of locality being embraced today by social movements today and is actually amongst the least popular; far morecommon are the local village autonomy and subsistence movements for community self-determination, outlined by ecofeminists such as Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies and by other critical social scientists such as AmoryStarr and Jason Adams. Such movements usually display a great amount of respect for horizontal decision-making forms as well all kinds of diversity in addition to a willingness to connect with other such movements on both regional and global scales; Hardt and Negri deny not only these elements but also the related works of radical anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins and Pierre Clastres, which have demonstrated quite clearly thatin most parts of the world, precapitalist and prestate social formations were actually far less hierarchical andunequal than what most people struggle to survive under today.Thus, it seems that it is the redeployment of a Marxist ideology of progress and productivity that ultimatelyleads them to the argument that with the rise of globalization, the dream of the universal proletariat has become possible as never before. It is specifically for the purpose of the realization of this dream that thesingularity/universality nexus is put forth by the authors, and is described as a means to move past the philosophical reductionisms of the new social movements which have "become extremely limited themselves because just like the perspectives they oppose, they perpetuate narrow understandings of the economic and thecultural. Most important, they fail to recognize the profound economic power of the cultural movements, or really the indistinguishability of economic and cultural phenomena". This supposed rejection of particularity/universality by the authors is ultimately disingenuous because, as George Katsiaficas has argued, itis deployed for ideological reasons having to do primarily with the author's commitments to Marxism,specifically to the idea that economics is to be understood as
the
fundamental driving force of Empire - a movewhich leads to a return, rather than a rejection, of particularity/universality. As a student of Herbert Marcuse,Katsiaficas recognizes in Negri's more recent theorizations the cooptation of those concepts that his teacher andothers of his time had put forth that a "new working class" had emerged amongst immaterial laborers (i.e.,housewives, students, technological workers and intellectuals) and that the industrial working class was nolonger central to the course of social change due to the rise of a post-Fordist economy; this for instance isdemonstrated in Marcuse's statement in 1969 that "no matter how great the distance between the middle-classrevolt of the metropoles and the life-and-death struggle of the wretched of the earth - common to them is thedepth of the Refusal. It makes them reject the rules of the game that is rigged against them, the ancient strategy
2
of patience and persuasion, the reliance on the Good Will in the Establishment, its false and immoral comforts,its cruel affluence". Noting the limitations of both perspectives, he pushes further than either Marcuse or Negri,arguing that by continually referring back to Marx and to the economic "base", these theorists miss the fullcomplexity of contemporary autonomous movements, which at their best attain a "universal species level" that isirreducible to any particularity. Such a concept allows then, for the deployment of a differentsingularity/universality nexus which then becomes capable of deconstructing reductionism and domination andthe subjectivities which reinforce them and to move instead towards a more anti-authoritarian, intersubjectiveand open-ended space in which to consider the changing shape of world order. In this sense, Katsiaficas' critiquecan be seen to some extent as the return of pre-Marxist utopian socialist thought, articulated most clearly byCharles Fourier and an extension of the old Situationist graffito "the liberation of humanity is all or nothing".Since such thinkers were usually summarily dismissed by Marx and Engels and later by their orthodox followersfor seeking not "to emancipate a particular class, but all humanity at once" despite the lack of an agent such asthe proletariat to carry such action out, Hardt and Negri would no doubt be rather hesitant as well in this regard.Yet such a concept seems to be quite compatible with that of the multitude, at least in the sense that the term isused at certain points in the authors' argument; it does not however, coincide with the concept of the new proletariat as it is generally used, precisely the reason that Marx and Engels rejected the thought of Fourier andthe orthodox Marxists rejected the Situationists. For while the term multitude is usually used in a very open-ended sense as "constellations of singularities" it seems that the concept of the proletariat has to really bestretched in order to maintain the term's historical relationship to the ideology of progress and productivity,which means that it is probably more accurately described as "constellations of particularities". Indeed, as stated by Hardt and Negri,'proletariat' is the general concept that defines all of those whose labor is exploited by capital, the entirecooperating multitude. The industrial working class represented only a partial moment in the history of the proletariat and its revolutions, in the period when capital was able to reduce value to measure. In that period itseemed as if only the labor of waged workers was productive, and therefore all the other segments of labor appeared as merely reproductive or even unproductive. In the biopolitical context of Empire, however, the production of capital converges ever more with the production and reproduction of social life itself; it thus becomes ever more difficult to maintain the distinctions among productive, reproductive and unproductive labor.Yet if we return to some of the original sources of the concept of the multitude, even as it has been used inother threads of the autonomist Marxist tradition no less, we will find a definition that contrasts markedly withthat deployed by Hardt and Negri for the new proletariat, especially in its rejection of the closed identity of thesovereign One as opposed the open difference of the singular Many. Paolo Virno, for instance, lays out a shortgenealogy of the concept of the multitude in the collection Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics
, which begins with its first prominent appearance in the 17
th
century philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Here he says, it isused in a negative sense to refer generally to the Many that inhabit the imagined state of nature, those caught upin a violent, chaotic war of all against all; this being, of course, based on a racist (mis)understanding of the"underdeveloped" indigenous cultures of the New World. From here, Virno moves on to the liberal notion inwhich the multitude becomes the "private" half of the public/private distinction as a means of silencing thecacophony of dissenting voices that emerge in that context while simultaneously making such dissent external tothe "legitimate" public sphere of politics. As telling as both of these examples are, in terms of articulating thecontrast between the multitude and that of the new proletariat the most interesting aspect is revealed in Virno'srecounting of the democratic-socialist use of the concept, in which he states, "on the one hand, the collectivity of 'producers' (the ultimate incarnation of the People) comes to be identified with the State, be it with Reagan or with Honecker, and on the other, the multitude is confined to the corral of 'individual' experiences". If it is thecase that Virno considers a productivist ontology to be opposed to his more open-ended conceptualization of themultitude, then this would seem to contrast greatly with the way in which it is used by Hardt and Negri, which is precisely in the sense of "production and reproduction of social life itself" - because even if this does ostensiblyinclude productive, reproductive and unproductive labor it is still labor nonetheless therefore productivist inorientation. Thus we can see that both in its origin as the disordered, primitive Many which both Marx andHobbes and in its contemporary incarnation as the disordered, postmodern Many, the authors seek to move both back toward the One of the proletariat even while rejecting such moves by others. It seems then, that themultitude is not seriously but only cynically invoked by Hardt and Negri as a synonym of the proletariat,especially since New World gatherer-hunters were hardly productive in Hardt and Negri's sense of the term (inthe sense that they lived primarily off the abundance provided by nature) and further, since fellow autonomistssuch as Katsiaficas and Virno have dismissed this type of ontology as the
ultimate
form of totalizing identity -indeed, as the latter puts it, as "neither 'producers' nor 'citizens', the modern
virtuosi
attain at last the rank of multitude" - an attainment that is decidely minoritarian in its commitments and thus radically opposed to theimposition of any overarching identity.
3
of 00
Jason Adams - A Post Anarchist Critique of Empire
298 Reads
Info and Rating
| Category: | |
| Rating: | |
| Upload Date: | 10/21/2009 |
| Copyright: | Attribution Non-commercial |
| Tags: |
Leave a Comment