Empire, Multitude, and the Fight Club

Michèle Meditz and Ulrich Hamenstädt

I see all this potential. And I see it squandered.

Goddamn it, an entire generation pumping gas.
Waiting tables. [. . .] Advertising has us chasing cars and
clothes.
Working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.
[. . .] Our great depression is our lives. [. . .]”.
Tyler Durden’s speech at the Fight Club (FC 01:07:23)

Introduction

The rise of globalization has brought forth a number of theories seeking to explain
the changing circumstances. Back in the year 2000, Antonio Negri and Michael
Hardt published their bestselling book Empire, and it was soon called the bible of the
worldwide anti-globalization movement. Empire1 is the label the authors give the
neoliberal economic system, which dominates the global order. Counter movements
to the portrayed Empire gained broad media attention after protests such as those
against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999 and more recently
the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. But there is no single, global movement
against the system Hard and Negri call Empire, but rather diverse supporters with a
range of ideological orientations and various communities organizing against local
and global consequences of neoliberal policies.
This chapter looks at the critique of modern neoliberal lifestyle as described and
portrayed in the book Empire and the movie Fight Club, establishing similarities and
differences between them. One of the key questions raised here is if there are

1
Empire written in italic is referring to the book Empire by Hardt and Negri. Empire theory or
Empire as the theoretical concept is not in italic.

M. Meditz (*) · U. Hamenstädt

Institute for Political Science, University of Muenster, Muenster, Germany
e-mail: ulrich.hamenstaedt@uni-muenster.de

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 235

U. Hamenstädt (ed.), The Interplay Between Political Theory and Movies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90731-4_15
236 M. Meditz and U. Hamenstädt

possible alternative lifestyles outside or within the system. While the Empire book
avoids an answer to this question, the movie Fight Club focuses on how the narrator
is reflecting on his life but is unable to establish a new lifestyle that does not harm
himself and other people. It is the aim of this chapter to establish a basis to (re-)read
the Empire book. The movie Fight Club will be used as a door opener for introduc-
ing some key ideas of Hardt and Negri’s Empire. However, since both—the Empire
book and the movie—can be considered “frame stories” which begin with an ending
point, it helps to first get a broad overview over the book and the movie before
entering specific parts. Even though the book is not always easy to read, not least
because of the theoretical prerequisites and style of writing, there are many interest-
ing ideas for international relations (IR) that make Empire a “modern classic” and the
movie Fight Club can help to illustrate some key topics from the book. Therefore,
this chapter is structured as follows: Firstly, a short overview is given on Hardt and
Negri’s Empire theory. After summarizing the plot of the movie Fight Club, the
movie is discussed against the background of the Empire theory. Therefore, this
chapter interprets the main themes from the movie and illustrates the manifestation
of the Empire within the storyline. After discussing the issues of identity and
communicative isolation, the essay reflects on certain scenes dealing with consump-
tion and violence. Consumption and violence represent central themes of David
Fincher’s movie and emblematize potential pitfalls of forms of protest and counter
movements against the Empire. Finally, a brief outlook is given to show how Hardt
and Negri’s book can enrich political actions by looking at current social
movements.

The Empire and the Multitude

Hardt and Negri analyze the globalized world, searching for common ground in an
attempt to tackle the cultural, political, and economic transformation of the contempo-
rary world. They argue that the Empire has emerged in a blend of technology,
economics, and globalization, and it can be understood as a structure of social political
forces. The counterforce to the Empire is the multitude. The multitude is the plurality of
people and their visions of the good life and the anti-moment to the homogenous
movement within the Empire. The multiplicity of individuals in society (the multitude)
is permanently forcing themselves into a corset of rules, written and unwritten,
believing that there is no alternative. This social objectivity is according to Hardt and
Negri forming the Empire—an Empire of rules for the multitude of people who negate
their subjectivity. Therefore, the book Empire invokes the issue of “subjects” that has
been lost due to the myriad of unredeemed promises of modern neoliberalism.
The theoretical framework of Empire is rooted in the work of Deleuze and Guattari
(1972/2004, 1980/1993) and notably in Michel Foucault’s idea of so-called biopolitics
(Foltin 2002; Weber 2005, 125). Following this term, Hardt and Negri distinguish
between the notions of control and discipline. Control is the direct form of power over
people, while discipline is a form of trained self-control that the subject experiences
Empire, Multitude, and the Fight Club 237

through socialization. However, the central moment in Foucault thinking Hardt and
Negri see in the analysis of the transition from pre-modern to modern times during
which modern discipline has replaced pre-modern sovereignty. The body of the
sovereign, which was the body of power during the classical age, became the people
themselves. This means that in modern times, the nation, as the new body of the
sovereign, has had to find ways to regulate and govern itself (Foucault 2009, 2010).
This “bio political regulation” of the subject is one of the key aspects of what Hardt and
Negri call the Empire. The materialized and institutionalized forms of control over the
physical body of the subject are the starting point for the analysis. In the first chapter,
Hardt and Negri discuss the legal form of the global disciplinary regime. In the second
part, they discuss the social historical terms and conditions of our society since
medieval times. In the third part, they look at the development of social forms of
production since the eighteenth century. The intermezzo and the fourth part of the book
discusses the idea of the multitude. The multitude is not only the opposite of the
Empire; it is its constructor at the same time.
One conclusion from the Empire theory can be that if the multitude is strong
enough to create the Empire, it is also strong enough to overcome it. In other words,
if we can get up every morning and have the power to accept everything going
wrong in the world, we also have the power to change those things. The possibility
for that lies in the multitude, but Hardt and Negri also warn against creating another
form of Empire.

Fight Club

The movie Fight Club starts with an odyssey through the brain. After backing out of
neurons and brain cells, the viewer finds himself emerging from the skin of the
protagonist as he looks down on a gun barrel stuck in his mouth. The movie not only
starts with a hint toward violence; the movie starts with the end. The starting point is
where everything comes together, the weapons, the bombs, the revolution
(FC 00:03:04), in short, the destruction of the financial capital centers. The story
starts with the end, to be told from the beginning. The nameless protagonist and
narrator, played by Edward Norton, works as a traveling product recall specialist for
a car company. He is single and lives in a big apartment; he is a de-located,
postmodern everyman, flexible and modern in his lifestyle (Brown and Fleming
2011). Tormented by sleep disorders, he attends various self-help groups in an
attempt to relieve his insomnia. His experience of other people’s agony not only
helps him sleep, he gets addicted to it. This changes when he meets Marla Singer,
another fake attendee, in one of the group meetings. “Marla, the big tourist. Her lie
reflected my lie. And suddenly, I felt nothing. I couldn’t cry. So once again, I
couldn’t sleep” (FC 00:11:41). The film is a single story told from the perspective
of the narrator, so the audience never knows more than the main character allows
them (Drexler 2010, 144). Marla Singer is the hint for the audience that the story is
told by an untrue narrator and can be therefore be interpreted as a point of truth
238 M. Meditz and U. Hamenstädt

(Palladino and Young 2003, 201): “Suddenly I realize that all of this, the gun, the
bombs, the revolution, has got something to do with a girl named Marla Singer”
(FC 00:02:54).
The protagonist’s life changes when he associates himself with Tylor Durden.
After his luggage is confiscated at the airport and his apartment blows up, he moves
into a rundown and unoccupied house with him. Together they create a men-only
group for bare knuckle fighting—the Fight Club. Membership quickly increases
since a series of established rules—the first two being “you do not talk about fight
club”—are consistently broken. Tylor Durden’s philosophy about the detriments of
consumerism, society, and authority figures evolves into the so-called Project May-
hem and quickly turns into acts of vandalism and destruction. Members of the Fight
Club are recruited for the Project Mayhem to live and work in the house and leave all
individuality at the doorstep. There are new rules in the house, and the first one is that
no questions will be asked: “Sir, the first rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask
questions, sir” (FC 01:28:56). The violence gets out of control and seems to become a
purpose in its own right; the Fight Clubs are no longer about self-independence and
freeing the members from experience of pressure at work and as consumers. The
Fight Clubs are more and more about pure destruction. After an intended car accident,
Tylor Durden disappears, and after the death of one of the members of Project
Mayhem, the narrator slowly starts to recognize that Tyler Durden was just an
imaginary creation and it was himself all along. The narrator also realizes that Project
Mayhem intends a bomb attack on the headquarters of finance and credit card firms.
“Out these windows, we will view the collapse of financial history. One step closer to
economic equilibrium” (FC 02:04:54). This is the start and the end of the movie.

Interpretation

The movie Fight Club has been the object of many research articles. The heteroge-
neous interpretations of the movie range from a feminist point of view (Lizardo 2007)
toward Christian analogies (Deacy 2002) or media framing (Palladino and Young
2003). In this interpretation of the movie, we will take certain theoretical aspects from
Hardt and Negri’s Empire book and look from this theoretical background at the
movie Fight Club to see what comparisons can be drawn. One of the key ideas in
Empire is the struggle of the individual for emancipation. This question is also a key
aspect of the movie Fight Club. The narrator in the movie tries to free himself from the
pressure of working life in modern capitalism, by inventing an alter ego and living his
world of schizophrenic disorder at night. But his alter ego is creating a new Empire
with Project Mayhem and destroys the plurality of the multitude. The fight of the
narrator at the end of the movie, against the new Empire—and this is what we would
like to suggest as an interpretation—is the battle Hardt and Negri are fighting
throughout their book. The authors of Empire stress the importance of the plurality
of the multitude and warn of the danger of creating a new Empire. Therefore, we
discuss certain aspects of the movie with Hardt and Negri words. By discussing the
Empire, Multitude, and the Fight Club 239

topics of identity and communicative isolation, this chapter points to essential man-
ifestations of the Empire in the storyline of Fight Club. After that it deals with the
issues of consumption and violence to show the individual struggle of Edward Norton
with his alter ego Tyler Durden and to illustrate the danger of generating a new
Empire with the so-called Project Mayhem. Because the Project Mayhem is a turning
point in the movie, thus we also have to have an outlook on current counter projects to
the Empire.

Identity

“It doesn’t have your name! Who are you? Cornelius? Rupert? Travis? Any of the
stupid names you give each night?” (FC 00:18:17). Marla Singer asks after receiving
the narrator’s phone number, but she never gets an answer, neither do the spectators
(Ta 2006, 272). The protagonist of the movie has a changing identity in the self-help
groups: his alter ego Tyler Durden who comes out at night calls him Jim and Jack’s
broken heart, while he calls himself IKEA boy. An interpretation is that the narrator
can be understood as a reflection of the postmodern identities of the spectators. In the
cinema scene of the movie, the narrator explains to the audience how Tyler Durden is
cutting obscene pictures into the film reel (FC 00:31:50). At the same time, the
movie Fight Club itself is permeated with very short occurrences that do not belong
to the movie. The frontier between the cinema audience shown within the movie and
the audience that is actually watching Fight Club is drenched. The boundary
between internal and external is deconstructed in the movie. This method is also
one of the mechanisms of our capitalist economy: “What Marx explained most
clearly is that capital constantly operates through a reconfiguration of the boundaries
of the inside and the outside” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 221). The “. . .fixed boundaries
and hierarchical procedures. . .” (ibid, 246) between places and non-places of action
(ibid, 232) and between audience and movie are destroyed. The start of the movie
does not give a hint about time or place of the movie, and with time lapses, it
becomes hard for the spectator to locate himself while watching the movie. The
audience is no longer only “outside” of the movie; there is no outside or a no place
anymore, to use the term of Hardt and Negri:
The multitude has internalized the lack of place and fixed time; it is mobile and flexible, and
it conceives the future only as a totality of possibilities that branch out in every direction. The
coming imperial universe, blind and meaning, is filled by the multifarious totality of the
production of the subject. (ibid, 380)

The relevance of identity and (missing) subjectivity is crucial throughout the

movie. In one scene, Bob, one of the members of Project Mayhem, dies, and his dead
body is brought to the house. Seeing the corpse lying on the table, the narrator breaks
one of the rules of Project Mayhem, where members do not have a name, and
announces: “This is a man and he has a name” (FC 01:42:41). The narrator only talks
about his personal background once, when he talks about his father and how he is
240 M. Meditz and U. Hamenstädt

traveling from town to town and setting up new families: “Fucker’s setting up
franchises!” (FC 00:38:15). And this is exactly what the protagonist is doing,
when he is traveling around the country to set up new Fight Clubs.
The most important change therefore takes place inside humanity, since with the end of
modernity also ends the community, outside cooperation, and outside the critical and
contradictory relationship that each person finds in a non-place, in the world and the
multitude. This is where the idea of Empire reappears, not as a territory not in the
determinate dimension of its time and space, and from the standpoint of a people and its
history, but rather simply as the fabric of an ontological human dimension that tends to
become universal. (Hardt and Negri 2000, 384–385)

At this point of the movie, the narrator starts doing disturbing things. That is the
point where good and bad become united and are brought to an issue in a circulating
repetition throughout the movie: the ambition for the feeling of freedom on the one
hand and the institutionalization of Project Mayhem on the other hand. This circle of
ambition and the danger of new bondage is one of the key elements of the Empire:
Empire was conceived in the framework of naturalist theory of the forms of government;
and, even though it breaks the cyclical alternation of good and bad forms, it is not exempt
from the destiny of the corruption of the city and the civilization as a whole. (ibid, 371)

This circle, and the attempts of the protagonist in Fight Club to break through it, is
the recurring theme of the movie by showing the conflicts of the protagonist and the
course of the story.

Communicative Isolation

Hardt and Negri describe the importance of communication for the process of
production in the current capitalist system as follows:
This radical transformation of labour power and the incorporation of science, communica-
tion, and language into productive force have redefined the entire phenomenology of labour
and the entire world of horizon of production. (Hardt and Negri 2000, 364)

Communication and isolation are an apparent contradiction, yet in the beginning

of the movie Fight Club, we see how the overlap of these two dimensions leads to a
disorientation of the narrator, when he describes his workplace to the audience. For
him the entire world is named and defined by transnational corporations (TNCs). We
risk losing the context within our world, because “. . .the corporations [. . .] name
everything” (FC 00:04:05). The act of giving things a name is what makes it possible
to orientate ourselves in the world (Buttler 1997). However, the narrator sees the big
TNCs as the main actors in giving things names and therefore meaning. The idea of
the Fight Clubs can be understood as a counter-hegemonic practice that gives a voice
to unspoken thoughts and the unthinkable.
It was right in everyone’s face. Tyler and I just made it visible. It was on the tip of everyone's
tongue. Tyler and I just gave it a name. (FC 00:39:55)
Empire, Multitude, and the Fight Club 241

The moment of communicative isolation continues at the narrator’s workplace. In

the director’s comments, it is outlined that the dialogue between the narrator and his
boss only consists of meaningless words combined in sentences. “I need you out of
town this week to cover some red flags.—You want me to deprioritize my reports
until you advise of a status upgrade?” (FC 00:04:15). The director of the movie
points to the fact that this kind of talk might sound somehow familiar for many
people. With the words of Hardt and Negri, the scene might be described as follows:
Intelligence and affect (or really the brain coextensive with the body), just when they
become the primary productive powers, make production and life coincide across the terrain
on which they operate, because life is nothing other than the production and reproduction of
the set of bodies and brains. (Hardt and Negri 2000, 365)

It is not only the communication at the workplace, which is isolated and imper-
sonal, but also the conversation with other people. The protagonist communicates
with others during his travels in the same way. “Everywhere I travel, tiny life. [. . .]
The people I meet on each flight, they’re single-serving friends” (FC 00:19:00). The
logic of individualization and segmentation became manifold within the subject.
“The multitude must be unified or segmented into different unities; this is how the
multitude has to be corrupted” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 391). The movie Fight Club
can be understood as a description of this process of segmentation and the struggle
for plurality within the multitude. The self-help groups apparently juxtapose the
narrator’s isolation, but these meanings are just an expression of the institutionalized
and regulated search for meaning in life.
History and experience became the scene of a materialist and tautological refoundation of the
subject in a desperate attempt to find coherence in the crisis. (ibid, 378–379)

The expression of feelings like crying is subject to a choreography and part of a

regulated procedure. The establishment of self-help groups is itself an institution that
incorporates and reproduces the regulations of society and is at the same time what is
kept out of society by the discipline of the individual. Nor is this highly regulated
form of communication real speaking and listening. “When people think you’re
dying, they listen to you instead of... Instead of waiting for their turn to speak”
(FC 00:15:37). Silence attracts attention; the world turned upside down. This is how
“. . .imperial power extends a smoke screen across the world, and command over the
multitude is exercised in this putrid cloud, in the absence of light and truth” (Hardt
and Negri 2000, 389). These meetings are an institutionalized place through which
the Empire keeps the social order and the relationship toward the multitude stable.

Consumption or “The Things You Own End Up Owning You”

“Like so many others, I had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct”
(FC 00:04:35). “l’d flip through catalogues and wonder ‘What kind of dining set
defines me as a person?’ I had it all” (FC 00:05:06). Sitting on the toilet, the IKEA
catalogue in hand, phone clamped between the ear and shoulder, the narrator sets up
242 M. Meditz and U. Hamenstädt

his apartment via telephone. Even intimate places at home, the toilet, become a place
of consumption. Consumption already occupies most areas of private life in an
attempt to define personality. This attempt, however, is condemned to failure,
since there is an immanent contradiction between mass produced goods from a
catalogue and expression of personality. The search for a better life leads to a fetish
of permanent and frequent consumption: “We used to read pornography. Now it was
the Horchow collection” (FC 00:05:25). Hardt and Negri describe a connection
between the structure of production and the search for identity and meaning through
consumption.
The teleology of the multitude is theurgical; it consists in the possibility of directing
technologies and production towards its own joy and its own increase of power. (Hardt
and Negri 2000, 396)

Yet, these possibilities remain widely unused in the daily practices of our working
lives, as shown in the beginning of the movie Fight Club. The freedom of the
Multitude lies in “. . .the ontology of the multitude to express itself as activity and
consciousness” (ibid, 396). In this regard, there is a crucial differentiation in the
movie and the book Empire: while Hardt and Negri argue for the necessity of
re-acquirement of the mental and material world, the protagonist in Fight Club
chooses another way. He tries to get rid of all material things in order to find
freedom. “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything”
(FC 01:01:23). Hardt and Negri remind us that there is no place outside of the
Empire. Yet the narrator tries to leave his world behind when he loses his luggage at
the airport and blows up his apartment. “I had it all. I had a stereo that was very
decent. A wardrobe that was getting very respectable. I was close to being complete”
(FC 00:28:18). The conversation between the narrator and Tylor Durden continues
about the concept of identity. “What are we, then?—I dunno. Consumers.—Right.
We’re consumers.—We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession” (FC 00:28:48). The
accumulation of useless and worthless objects is reflected in this dialogue, which is
in fact an inner monologue. Tylor Durden proposes a counter-concept. “I say never
be complete. I say stop being perfect. I say let’s evolve. Let the chips fall where they
may” (FC 00:29:22). However, the concept of “evolving” is not just contradicting
the narrator’s development, but it is also against the capitalistic ideology itself. The
main criticisms of modern capitalist society are identical in the book Empire and the
movie Fight Club; the answers, however, are opposites. According to Hardt and
Negri, the multitude should not retreat from the field of production but rather use it
for itself.
When the multitude works, it produces autonomously and reproduces the entire world of life.
Producing and reproducing autonomously mean constructing a new ontological reality.
(Hardt and Negri 2000, 395)

The author’s proposition is that alternatives to the Empire have to be settled on a

global scale since the imperial sovereignty of the Empire can only be understood and
attacked on a global level (ibid: Intermezzo). It is precisely this global extent that the
narrator does not recognize, and thus he not only misses his goal of liberation but
instead creates a new Empire on a small scale focused on himself. “Sooner or later,
Empire, Multitude, and the Fight Club 243

we all became what Tyler wanted us to be” (FC 01:25:13). One interpretation can be
that Tyler Durden is the representation of the new form of Empire. He sees the Fight
Clubs not only as a moment of freedom but also as a structure for giving commands
and feeling the power of destruction. “Empire pretends to be the master of that world
because it can destroy it” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 388). Project Mayhem is the
institutionalization of this destructive power. The project becomes a realm of its
own. “Even if the political has become a realm outside of measure, value nonetheless
remains” (ibid, 356). Moreover, while Hardt and Negri see capitalism—a system
leaving the “realm outside of measure”—as a starting point for the multitude, Project
Mayhem cannot be a multitude seeing as it decreases the inner “value” as well as the
creativity of the subject.

Violence

Violence is one of the striking elements of the movie, and sometimes it is reduced to
this alone. But the movie focuses on two forms of violence: direct and indirect. The
direct violence is seen during fighting in the Clubs, and the indirect violence is
depicted by the agony of the protagonist, which he experiences in his everyday life.
“Everything’s far away. Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy” (FC 00:03:53). He
tries to cope with it by coming up with the Fight Clubs and turning indirect into
direct violence. “After fighting, everything else in life got the volume turned down”
(FC 00:37:36).
The discrepancy and the connection of direct and indirect violence are a central
element in the earlier writings of Antonio Negri. A lively debate about violence
initiated against the background of the terror of the Red Brigades in Italy in the 1970s.
To this day, the importance of the subject is also evident in the work of other
philosophers, such as Giorgio Agamben, who in addition to the French post-
structuralism also refer to Carl Schmitt’s ideas (Agamben 1998; Engelkamp 2018).
In the case of Antonio Negri, the reference to the political dimension of violence
emerges. In the Empire theory, two terms are central: control and (self-)discipline. In
the movie Fight Club, the (self-)discipline of the narrator allows him to operate at his
job and decide coldly and functionally about the value of human life. “I was a recall
coordinator. My job was to apply the formula” (FC 00:19:37). Hardt and Negri might
say that the narrator is corrupted because he is working against the interests of the
society (and therefore against his own) by maximizing the profits of a big corporation.
“Corruption is easily perceived because it appears immediately as a form of violence,
as an insult.” And they continue that corruption “. . .always consist in a production of
value, this lack of being appears as a wound, a death wish of the socius, a tripping
away of being from the world” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 390). A death wish is driving
the narrator shortly before he mentally collapses. “Every time the plane banked too
sharply on take-off or landing, I prayed for a crash or a mid-air collision. Anything”
(FC 00:20:39). The ambition and actions of the protagonist are a matter of breaking
away from the disciplinary force and gaining control over his subjectivity, over his
244 M. Meditz and U. Hamenstädt

own life. His way to reach this goal is through the experience of direct violence. That
happens in the Fight Clubs at the weekend but also in a self-inflicted car crash. “I’d
never been in a car accident. This must have been what all those people felt like before
I filed them as statistics in my reports” (FC 01:36:59). While the movie presents more
forms of direct violence, the Empire book focuses on the roots and existence of
violence. Hardt and Negri point out that the “. . .Empire still exists and commands.
We ourselves have amply described its functioning and highlighted its extreme
violence” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 359). The imperial power of Empire is for Hardt
and Negri mostly defined through negative capabilities. “The royal prerogatives of
imperial government, its monopoly over the bomb, money, and the communication
ether, are merely destructive capacities and thus power of negation” (ibid, 360). The
development of this negative power of the Empire and its transformation to the micro
level is one of the key aspects of the movie Fight Club. But this is the stage where
Hardt and Negri gave a warning earlier in their book, because “. . .these gestures risk
reinforcing imperial power rather than challenging” (ibid: 217). In summary, the
movie Fight Club can be understood as the struggle of an individual against the
Empire outlined by Hardt and Negri. But the movie also illustrates how this struggle
fails, leading to a new Empire reinforcing the old. So in conclusion, the book Empire
mustn’t be read as a manifesto for raising a new “strategic awareness” of the left but as
manifesto designed as a warning to avoid the pitfalls of the past. It should be
emphasized that it can help to follow Hardt and Negri’s ideas when starting with
the key idea of the multitude, which is found at the end of the book. However, one
might criticize Hardt and Negri in general due to a lack of clarity and structuring their
thoughts for a broad readership (Barkawi and Laffey 2002) which can lead to mis-
understandings and disputable conclusions.

Outlook: Pitfalls of the Multitude and Current Social

Movements

In 2012 the academic and filmmaker Cynthia Weber reflected on the Occupy Wall
Street (OWS) and the 99% movement in two articles on “openDemocracy.”2 Though
valuing the movements’ democratic merits on one hand, Weber highlights two main
points of criticism. First, she criticizes that “. . .these movements appeared to leave
unchallenged the underlying ideology upon which US democratic practice is
grounded—liberalism” (Weber September 2005, 17th). As such Weber’s main point
is the increasing limitation of the viewpoint of OWS and the US American 99% that
tend to accept “. . .global economic injustice so that global wealth can continue to flow
into the economically hegemonic US” (ibid). Second, the slogan “We are the 99%” also
creates a “. . .common enemy (the 1%)” (ibid). And moreover “We are the 99%” is thus

2
For a list of Cynthia Weber’s articles on “openDemocracy,” see URL https://www.
opendemocracy.net/author/cynthia-weber, last access 06.11.2017.
Empire, Multitude, and the Fight Club 245

a fictional concept that permits a unifying identification of a huge fragmented group of

protesters (Weber, openDemocracy, September 2005, 19th). What Weber points out
here is the parallel motion of social inclusion and exclusion, a paradox that Foucault
carves out in Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1977).
To sum up, Weber’s critique, as put forward in both of her articles, is primarily
targeted at the inability of participants from the Occupy Wall Street and the 99%
movements to engage in critical self-reflection with regard to their theoretical
foundations and ideological beliefs. Additionally, this has the potential of resulting
in a dichotomous world view—a kind of “us” against “them” mentality—which is
far from the movement’s roots and the dream of a powerful solidarity between
different people with different backgrounds. In her book on “International relations
theory” (2005), Cynthia Weber also criticizes Hardt and Negri for creating a
common enemy, which they name Empire. Weber argues that Hardt and Negri
restore the old antagonism between an oppressed majority and a ruling class. In
line with this, Weber sees in the “Empire myth” (Weber 2005, 125) a rearticulation
of the old friend-enemy antagonism. In this chapter, we argued that this is a
misinterpretation of the Empire book. Despite the fact that Cynthia Weber indicated
many important aspects of the Empire theory, she misses the point when she says
that Hardt and Negri wrote a “. . .‘manifesto’ that lent leftist ideology a coherence”
(Weber 2005, 124), and they did this “. . .by unifying Empire and the multitude into
proper, coherent agents” (Ibid, 126). We argue that Hardt and Negri warn us of
potential pitfalls of the empowerment of the multitude. By using the example of the
movie Fight Club, we showed that Hardt and Negri do not postulate an ultimate
struggle between the Empire and the multitude. First, there is no place outside the
Empire according to Hardt and Negri, and secondly, they highlight the dangers of
reinforcing the old Empire or creating a new one.
While Weber highlights in her critique of both Hardt and Negri and the OWS and
“99% movement” the friend-enemy antagonism that is constructed, one could also
utilize the Foucaultian notion of biopower (Lemke 2000) that highlights the existing
order “within individuals” (Weber 2005, 129). In accordance with this, the multitude
is a reference to a permanent creative struggle within the subject and the social
movements as well as the permanent need for (self-)reflection. Therefore, it is not
important how we define the Empire or the multitude but rather to focus on self-
reflection and analytically thinking about the world we live in. Thus one cannot
disregard the often unmentioned anarchistic roots of social movements. To that end
David Graeber (2012, 36) emphasizes this tendency with regard to the OWS and
“99% movement.” The problems within the movements, especially when they
gained exceeding popularity, such as an elusive outside enemy or a lack of targeted
focus on the problems the movements seek to address, are exactly what Hardt and
Negri are trying to avoid by focusing on a global perspective and the Foucaultian
notion of biopower. Therefore, Hardt and Negri want to avoid the creation of
antagonist structures, because a new or reinforced Empire would result from such
a struggle.
246 M. Meditz and U. Hamenstädt

Conclusion

Globalization does require us to think of new forms of democracy that can expand
the rule by the people to the transnational level. With their book Empire, Hard and
Negri try to coin a specific social objectivity we must face in an age that can be
named as neoliberal (post-)modernity. The alternative and the counter force to this
hegemonic project of the Empire is the multitude of people which Hardt and Negri
address in their books (see also Hardt and Negri 2005).
Current international movements like Occupy Wall Street or the 99% movement
are not only linked to Seattle back in 1999, but also to the Arab Spring in 2010 and
2011, or the protests in Spain after the financial crisis in 2008. Emerging network
structures are increasingly transferring movements to a digital level, which leads to
entirely new prospects for the globalization of these movements (Castells 2008).
These movements are rooted, sometimes subconsciously, in different ideas of social
resistance. Hardt and Negri’s Empire book became an important source of ideas for
these movements, and Hardt and Negri themselves refer to theoretical ideas of post-
structuralism, (neo)marxism, and even Anarchism (Bates 2012). This can make it a
difficult book to read and that is why in this chapter some central ideas of the Empire
theory are made accessible through a popular movie. It is important to let political
theory speak not only to those who evolve in these movements but also to those who
are merely dissatisfied with current developments to provide them with an opportu-
nity to reflect upon their feelings and take action accordingly. Using a popular movie
like Fight Club as a door opener for this process of reflection can shed light on
alternative ways of individual and social development. To summarize the findings of
this chapter, in Fight Club, on the one hand, the myth of happiness through labor and
consumption is criticized, and on the other hand, the danger of (re-)creating a new
Empire is demonstrated. To avoid the pitfalls of trying to implement the power of the
multitude and strengthen the Empire instead, Hardt and Negri gave a warning that
“. . .these gestures risk reinforcing imperial power rather than challenging it” (Hardt
and Negri 2000, 217). This risk exists for every progressive form of politics, which
tries to be a real alternative and break the status quo. Therefore, this chapter
emphasizes to read the book Empire as a manifesto designed as a warning to
avoid the pitfalls of the past rather than as a revolutionary strategy for the
political left.

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