Empire, Or Multitude Transnational Negri

Empire, or multitude Transnational Negri

John Kraniauskas

With the publication of Empire,* the oeuvre of the the authors offer us ʻnothing less than a rewriting Italian political philosopher and critic Antonio Negri of The Communist Manifesto for our timeʼ which – until recently an intellectual presence confined to ʻring[s] the death-bell not only for the complacent the margins of Anglo-American libertarian Marxist liberal advocates of the “end of history”, but also for thought – has been transported into what is fast pseudo-radical Cultural Studies which avoid the full becoming an established and influential domain of confrontation with todayʼs capitalismʼ. One effect of transnational cultural theory and criticism. Michael such praise, however, is that Empire is freighted with Hardtʼs mediating role, as translator of key texts by the difficult task of having to live up to itself, as its Negri and other radical Italian intellectuals (such as eulogists have portrayed it. Paulo Virno), and now as co-author of Empire itself, There is some truth in the words (become advertising) has been crucial over the years in helping to establish of these critics. On the one hand, Empire is indeed a and maintain his reputation. Published by Harvard grand work of synthesis, but a synthesis primarily of University Press, the book comes to us with the stamp the work of Negri himself. Over approximately thirty of approval of important contemporary critics – politi- years of writing, much of it spent in prison and exile, cal philosopher Étienne Balibar, subalternist historian Negri has creatively engaged with: transformations in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Marxist cultural critic Fredric the forms of capital accumulation, class recomposition Jameson, urban sociologist Saskia Sassen, Slovenian and working class ʻself-valorizationʼ; the writings of critic-at-large Slavoj Žižek and novelist Leslie Marmon Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Silko – whose words dazzle the potential reader from amongst others; and the political philosophy of Spinoza the bookʼs dust jacket. Empire is presented by them and Machiavelli, as well as subsequent theories and as ʻan amazing tour de forceʼ (Balibar), ʻirresistible, practices of revolution and state sovereignty. This has iconoclastic … [r]evolutionary, even visionaryʼ (Silko), been largely ignored in the Anglo-American academy. and ʻwith enormous intellectual depthʼ (Sassen). It is With Hardt, himself an insightful reader of contem- ʻone of the most brilliant, erudite, and yet incisively porary French philosophy and Italian political theory, political interpretations to date of the phenomenon Negri has now extended this conceptual labour into called “globalization”ʼ writes Chakrabarty; and more the heart of the globalized present characterized, they – ʻThe first great new theoretical synthesis of the new suggest, by an emerging postcolonial and post-impe- millenniumʼ, according to Jameson, ʻa comprehensive rialist ʻglobal form of sovereigntyʼ: Empire.1 On the new historical narrative, which is both a critique of a other hand, although no doubt written enthusiastically wide variety of contemporary theory and a prophetic and with a rather curious image of the political subject call for energies to comeʼ. Thus Empire arrives as (or ʻmilitantʼ) in mind, the work clearly is not, like a prepackaged intellectual event imprinted with its Marx and Engelsʼs Communist Manifesto, the founding status as both a galvanizing political document and a text of a political party, an organizational form with fundamental critical diagnosis of contemporary global which – at least in so far as it internalizes an image of capitalism. Few works of radical criticism have been the state into its practice – Negri has little sympathy. so well ʻplacedʼ in the intellectual market. For Žižek, Moreover, the transformations in the communicative,

* Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2000. xvii + 478 pp., £21.95 hb., 0 674 25121 0.

Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) 29 affective and knowledge bases of ʻimperialʼ capital to supplement an incomplete Marx to make good a and labour which Negri and Hardt outline, as well as perceived lack, either with regard to his discussion of the critical intentionality of their conceptualization labour or, as we shall see below, in his philosophical (as they transform Marx on value and Foucault on approach to the state. Rather, first, he restores his- power), brings the work into close contact with the torical relativity to ideas like ʻvalueʼ and ʻcoopera- concerns of contemporary cultural studies. The works tionʼ, transforming them internally so as to address of Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson and Gayatri Spivak the present – in this case, by extending the idea of immediately come to mind in this regard. Arguably, social labour (and social capital) beyond the bounds the work of translation involved in the co-authorship of Marxʼs critical horizon constituted by the factory of Empire precisely entails making Negri readable in system of machinofacture. In Negriʼs periodization this new milieu.2 this, now past, social organization of labour begins in 1848 and ends around 1968. Second, and here Negri Value and refusal reads the Marx of the Grundrisse against the Marx Negriʼs writing comes in large measure from the of Capital, he endows the historical subject of both particular experience of the Italian New Left, character- value and social cooperation – living labour – with a ized by both state and anti-statist political violence, founding ontological force. amidst a generalized crisis of political representation From this point of view, labour power is both that extended into the working class, the perceived heteronomous and autonomous, object and subject: it betrayals of the Italian Communist Party (the ʻhistori- is made (as labour), but it makes (as power). Together, cal compromiseʼ), and the mushrooming of a multitude political ontology bolstered by historical critique of radical social-movement-based political organiza- produce Negriʼs metaphysical re-vision of Marxism, tions. Some of these fed into quite powerful armed which goes so far as to suggest that the form of value groups such as the Red Brigades, whilst others created – as the ʻmaterial representationʼ of social coopera- the political movement with which, theoretically at tion, exploitation and the positivity of labour – is ʻthe least, Negri is most associated: Autonomia.3 As is well transcendental material of a determinate societyʼ, and known, in Italy the events of 1968 actually began in that as a critical concept it has ʻa higher ontological 1967, and lasted well into the 1970s. It was probably intensity than the simple mode of productionʼ. This the sustained character of the crisis, combined with is because in it the economic, the juridical and the political marginalization, that brought Negri and his ideological are all ʻgathered under the category of intellectual circle into more or less direct contact with the politicalʼ. Gramsciʼs attempts at thinking across, transformations in the labour process that were to be rather than between, base and superstructure in the analysed later, elsewhere, as post-Fordism, ʻflexible idea of ʻhegemonyʼ is probably influential here. Negri, accumulationʼ or ʻcultural economyʼ.4 The difference in however, refers to Marxʼs analysis of money in the the approach of Negri and his colleagues, however, is Grundrisse, where, in a context of financial crisis that it constitutes what might be considered a genuine ʻthe modern function of value is transformed into a materialist ʻpost-Marxismʼ, a working-through and function of commandʼ, that is, monetary policy. Since development of central critical concepts to be found the ʻstuffʼ of value is abstract labour, the critique of in Capital and the Grundrisse ʻbeyond Marxʼ, rather political economy becomes in Negri a ʻcritique of than an abandonment of their theoretical terrain. From labourʼ.7 this point of view, for example, the so-called ʻnomad- The work of Mario Tronti was crucial in con- ismʼ of contemporary social movements is intimately ceptualizing this double dimension of living labour as tied to the socialization of production as well as ʻlabourʼ and ʻpowerʼ, especially his reflections on the to contemporary reconfigurations and movements of ʻstrategy of refusalʼ. ʻThe working classʼ, he writes, (abstract) labour.5 ʻdoes what it is.ʼ8 In this sense, thinking about what In Negriʼs work, like that of Paulo Virno, Sergio is always the case, in the first instance, rather than Bologna, Franco Piperno, Maurizio Lazzarato and in the last – that is, the ontological primacy of living Michael Hardt, Marxʼs theory of value is interpreted labour – is central to Negriʼs thought. Even at its most as being immediately political.6 In this respect, he prophetic, he writes, historical materialism ʻruns the clearly belongs to that strand of Western Marxist risk of constituting a natural historyʼ of accumulation thought known as ʻpoliticalʼ (rather than ʻculturalʼ) rather than ʻshowing the movements of class struggle Marxism. But, unlike Nicos Poulantzas, for example, in [the] light of catastrophe and innovationʼ. This is or even Lenin and Gramsci, Negri does not attempt Negriʼs subjectivist (and ontologizing) criticism of

30 Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) the objectivist trend in the Marx of Capital.9 What linguistic heterogeneity of their world.13 Conceptu- Tronti calls ʻthe workersʼ articulationʼ is fundamental ally, Empire is such a travel-and-learning-book too: in providing such a view with a historical dimension. it navigates and explores a new world of value – that The working class ʻis, at one and the same time, the is, new social configurations of capital, labour and articulation of capital [as abstract labour] and its dis- power. And although the processes referred to by the solution [as class]ʼ. At one level this is obvious. But, idea of ʻrefusalʼ remain at work in the passages to the he goes on to write, ʻcapitalist power seeks to use the new imperial order as described by Hardt and Negri, workersʼ antagonistic will-to-struggle as a motor of its they have also been transformed and transnationalized. own development … exploitation is born, historically, (Refusal in Tronti, like the form of value in Marx, from the necessity of capital to escape from its de facto remains tied to factory machinofacture and the real subordination to the class [of] worker-producers.ʼ And subsumption of labour power to capital.) Even so, more: ʻit is the directly political thrust of the working politically and philosophically, in Empire the idea of class that necessitates economic development on the refusal still works conceptually to mark the power part of capital.ʼ He refers to this ʻpolitical thrustʼ as of living labour in valorization (the production of ʻrefusalʼ: ʻWhat are workers doing when they strug- value): gle against their employers? Arenʼt they, above all, Theories of the passages to and beyond imperialism saying “No” to the transformation of labour power that privilege the pure critique of the dynamics of into labour?ʼ The always-already-given potentiality for capital risk undervaluing the power of the real motor refusal is the living reminder that, in fact, the working that drives capitalist development from its deepest class, while not the ruling class, is most definitely core: the movements and struggles of the proletariat. the historically dominant one; it simultaneously ʻpro- … History has a logic only when subjectivity rules vokesʼ the bourgeoisie into existence as a class beyond it, only when (as Nietzsche says) the emergence of subjectivity reconfigures efficient causes in the competition and ʻprovidesʼ capital with its labouring development of history. The power of the proletariat subject. Capital, meanwhile, responds to refusal ʻwith consists precisely in this. continual technological “revolutions” in the organization of workʼ, that is, by generating ʻdevelopmentʼ The echoes of Tronti are evident here. For this reason, – because, for capital, less (class) is more (value).10 the imperial order itself is also a kind of socioeconomic This may be thought of as Trontiʼs version of the and juridico-political reaction formation, but one in romantic notion, associated with the young Lukács, which, according to Hardt and Negri, the recomposition of the proletariat as ʻthe identical subject-objectʼ of of value is ʻoutsideʼ or ʻbeyond measureʼ, and character- history. It is also, more clearly, his version of working- ized by the real subsumption of the social to capital. class ʻautonomyʼ. Finally, it is the place where, via Meanwhile, one way of beginning to think the power of Tronti, Negriʼs thought joins the tradition of ʻleft-wingʼ labour power in this new context has been through the communism.11 idea of ʻexodusʼ: ʻMobility and mass worker nomadism always express a refusal and a search for liberation.… Value and exodus Desertion and exodus are a powerful form of class The central topos of Empire is the idea of ʻpassageʼ. struggle within and against imperial postmodernityʼ, 14 Working at both geo-historical and theoretical levels, they write. it is an example of what Bakhtin calls a ʻchronotopeʼ, Empire, however, does not present us with a detailed embedding representations into crystallized spatio- account of the globalized imperial present. Rather, it temporal realities. In Empire these realities are what traces its pre-history, the multiple passages that have are conventionally known as ʻtransitionsʼ – to and from led to its formation, including the conceptual ones that modernity – that are fought over politico-historically have reflected critically on its making. Part One sets and/or negotiated conceptually. Although it is used in out the legal and bio-political coordinates of the new the book, in truth – at least for Negri – the idea of imperial order as it is ʻcalled into beingʼ, whilst Part passage replaces that of transition, which, because it Four, looking to its possible fall, sets out an anti-impe- narrativizes from the point of view of given or ideal rial politics grounded in the potentiality of the ʻmulti- state forms, he regards as a ʻbastardʼ concept.12 The tudeʼ – in their view, the political correlate of living most important chronotope for Bakhtin is what he labour. Parts Two and Three make up the main body calls ʻthe wayʼ, a figure mapping life as formation of the text and narrate the history of Empire in and out and associated with the path (or passage) of the hero of modernity in processes of political decolonization, of the Bildungsroman through the socio-cultural and economic recentring and globalized administration, at

Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) 31 the levels of sovereignty and production, respectively. world of globalized production and circulation is taken Of course, sovereignty and production continuously as given and its terrain politically re-described: first, move across each other, but, given that Empire is according to new logics of segmentarity, flows and primarily thought as being a ʻglobal form of sover- command; and, second, as ridden with the ever-present eigntyʼ, it is the political dimension of the analysis that potentialities of crises (or ʻcorruptionʼ).16 The limits of dominates – although, it should immediately be added, modern imperialism, for example, so important in Rosa in the form of a critique of sovereignty. Particularly Luxemburgʼs account of the necessity of an ʻoutsideʼ important here are Empireʼs strategies of ʻuniversal for the realization of capital, have been breached, such integrationʼ, the affirmation of cultural differences and that now capital has no limits or outsides except for their hierarchical administration. The form of value of those that have – always already – been internalized. Empire, and thus its existence as a globalized capital- Conceptualizations of trans-, multi- or international and-state formation, is not really discussed. capital are, in Empire, confined to the past. But there is Prolonged or detailed discussion of transforma- very little engagement with contemporary alternatives: tions in the transnational social organization of labour, world systems theory or reinvigorated dependency the world market, or the imperial accumulation of analyses, in which the globalized world is described capital is noticeably absent. This is because of the as a process of complex recentring – for example, simultaneous de-differentiation of the political and around a China–Japan East Asian axis – or for which the economic moments of exploitation, on the one the economic power of the USA is still thought to hand, and the dispersal and socialization of produc- be dominant. There is, however, a highly polemi- tion beyond the factory, on the other: ʻexploitation is cal affirmation of the centrality of US history and therefore the production of an armory of instruments sovereign politics: Empire is the historical realization for the control of the time of social cooperationʼ, of the US constitution beyond and through US neo- writes Negri elsewhere.15 In Empire, however, this is colonialism (both internal and external), emerging not reflected upon directly as a question of value but, out of Independence, expansive nation-formation (and rather, and this is the distinctive contribution of the the ideology of the frontier), slavery and Civil War, book (and, arguably, its major achievement), of value immigration and violent class conflict, and the Cold as it is transformed by bio-power. The juridical and War. Such arguments similarly displace and confine ideological ʻare gathered under the category of the alternative explanations, as well as the politics of politicalʼ but the economic loses its real and theoretical radical nationalist anti-imperialisms associated with specificity. The dominance of finance capital within a them, to the past as pre-imperial.17

32 Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) Changes in processes of production are, however, from the post-Fordist real subsumption of the social still present and narrativized under the idea of ʻpost- by capital.18 modernizationʼ, in which the social and cultural effects Virnoʼs political theory of exodus extends refusal of contemporary technologies on labour – informatiz- into ʻnew timesʼ as a line of ﬂight. It is an attempt to ation, networking, spectacle, communication – are develop ʻthe publicness of Intellect outside of Work, foregrounded. Essentially, they involve the techno- and in opposition to itʼ; that is, to recapture the intel- logical harnessing of the superstructure by the eco- lectual and communicative labour power appropriated nomic base, a ʻcultural turnʼ in production putting by capital and state in immaterialized abstract labour entertainment, the symbols and electronic syntax of and technocratic administration. computer systems, the speed of information highways, The subversion of capitalist relations of production social knowledges and affect to work. All this clearly henceforth develops only with the institution of a involves changes in the contents of value, the charac- non-State public sphere, a political community that teristics of labour power – now mainly intellectual, has as its hinge general intellect. communicative and affective – and the transnationalization of the parameters of social cooperation. The Rather than delinking production from relations of factory can no longer provide the model for thinking production and exploitation as it is transformed by about either exploitation or the subjective power of new knowledges, the media and communication, Virno labour power (and thus class politics). Two related and Lazzarato, like Negri, extend and reformulate concepts come to the fore here: ʻgeneral intellectʼ, a the idea of exploitation so as to take into account concept used by Marx to describe the social organiz- the socialization and transformation of labour power ation and use of knowledge in labour; and ʻimmate- (including symbolic manipulation, computerization rial labourʼ, which describes its communicative and and the creation of new human–machine hybrids), as cultural inputs. As Hardt and Negri note, these ideas well as the reconﬁguration – that is, the speeding up have, in the main, been developed by Italian critics – of production–consumption feedback loops, and the such as Paulo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato. However, relocation of the processes of valorization along new although fundamental to the new recompositions of lines of social cooperation. (According to Lazzarato, capital and labour, in their view, they lack embodi- immaterial labourʼs cycle of production operates ʻout- ment in the terrain of the bio-political. This criticism side in the society at large, at a territorial level that is extended to Virnoʼs notion of ʻexodusʼ, the self- we would call “the basin of immaterial labor”ʼ). In valorizing strategy of labour power which he derives particular, concrete labour is subjected to new forms

Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) 33 of digital abstraction, whilst the university becomes sovereign power of bio-political command (as value established as a key knowledge–capital interface in ʻlooksʼ to accumulation) and, on the other, to the the organization of ʻgeneral intellectʼ. In this context, constituent power of the multitude (as value looks to exodus consists in the creation of an alternative labour power). Third, underlining the importance for ʻproletarian public sphereʼ or, in Virnoʼs words, the the authors of the writing of Foucault and Deleuze ʻfoundation of a Republicʼ that takes its leave from and Guattari, the idea of affect brings the work into the state.19 the conceptual field of cultural studies. Exodus is thus a form of self-valorization con- In Hardt and Negriʼs account of the postmodern- stituted by ʻmass intellectualityʼ or the now ʻsocia- ization of production, the communicative and linguis- lizedʼ worker, characterized by Negri as ʻa bundle of tic dimension of immaterial labour is complemented by knowledge, power and love, the likes of which have affective labour. They insist that ʻ[t]he danger of the never been seen before. Science, the artificiality of discourse of general intellect is that it risks remaining knowledge, ethical deterritorialization and commu- entirely on the plane of thought, as if the new powers nism constitute the elements of an irreducible ontologi- of labor were only intellectual and not also corporeal.ʼ cal determination – that is, a decisively new, highly It remains ʻtoo pure, almost angelic.ʼ Affective labour, original, ontological breakʼ.20 Once again, the power in contrast, is labour in the ʻbodily modeʼ, a labour of of labour power. Indeed, Hardt and Negri also refer ʻhuman contact and interactionʼ. It includes not only to a ʻmachinic exodusʼ. And this picture is globalized the ʻcreation and manipulation of affectʼ by the enter- in Empire by the introduction of not only the trans- tainment industries but also the feminized care-work national flows of capital and structures of command provided in domestic labour and by welfare industries (ʻThe establishment of a global society of control and services (public and private). It is this kind of work that smooths over the striae of national boundaries ʻentirely immersed in the corporeal [and] the somaticʼ goes hand in hand with the realization of the world – affective labour – that meshes social reproduction market and the real subsumption of global society into the forces of material production. The growing under capitalʼ) but also the ʻmobile multitudeʼ (ʻMass importance of the service industries bares witness to migrations have become necessary for productionʼ). this transformation. Life as contact and interaction The pathways ʻforged, mappedʼ and ʻtravelledʼ by such becomes not only the object of production but also a labour are, moreover, in the view of Hardt and Negri, powerful productive resource (ʻlivingʼ labour power) full of the promises of autonomy: ʻ[a] new geography and source of value: is established by the multitude as the productive flows of bodies define new rivers and ports … their paths Intelligence and affect (or really the brain co- are what brings the “earthly city” out of the clouds extensive with the body), just when they become and confusion that Empire casts over it.ʼ21 In Empire the primary productive powers, make production and life coincide across the terrain on which they exodus becomes a transnational passage to ʻglobal citi- operate, because life is nothing other than the pro- zenshipʼ, the ʻright to a social wageʼ and the ʻright to duction and reproduction of the set of bodies and appropriationʼ – the three concrete political demands brains.… [L]ife is what infuses and dominates all made in the book. The first two are reformist, estab- production. In fact, the value of labor and produc- lishing, in their demand for recognition, the parameters tion is determined deep in the viscera of life. of a global participatory political arena within Empire; the third, however, transgresses imperial right in its The crossing of production and reproduction in affective demand for the autonomous pursuit of (and passage labour thus throws up life for ʻpostmodernʼ bio-politi- to) communism.22 cal command in ways that far exceed the disciplinary regimes described by Foucault. As was the case for Value and affect both Marx and Tronti, in Foucaultʼs account of the dis- The idea of ʻaffectʼ plays a decisive and multifaceted ciplinary regimes of bio-power, factory machinofacture role in Empire. First, it separates Negri and Hardtʼs also acts as a determining sociopolitical horizon; and, thoughts on immaterial labour from those of their as we have seen, production and command have been Italian colleagues. Second, as mentioned above, affect radically dispersed into what Deleuze and Guattari pulls value and living labour into the domain of have called a ʻsociety of controlʼ – a society of perma- the bio-political (pulls economics into politics). Here, nent education, of deskilling and reskilling, in which affect is Janus-faced, looking, on the one hand, to the social identity is emblematically given (and monitored)

34 Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) in the recording powers of the magnetic strip of both credit and identity cards. Labour is no longer buried in factories, but travels through the gleaming surfaces of what Marc Augé calls ʻnon-placesʼ.23 In this context of the ʻimmaterializationʼ of labour beyond the factory bio-power is, for Negri and Hardt, ʻanother name for the real subsumption of society under capital.ʼ ʻ[B]othʼ, they continue, ʻare synonymous with the globalized productive [and simultaneously reproductive, one might add, thinking of United Nations policy in the so-called developing countries] orderʼ. For globalization in Negriʼs view is both extensive and intensive: it extends capitalʼs domain transnationally through markets whilst absorbing, and thus transforming, the social. With affective labour, labour power and the production of value are radically dispersed and located in what the authors of Empire will also call a ʻnon- placeʼ beyond measure: ʻ[t]he sublime has become normalʼ.24 Like refusal, affect is an idea with a double dimension, both revealing the new all-pervasive powers of imperial capital and pointing to the founding and autonomous power of living labour in its political mode – what in Empire is referred to as ʻthe collective bio-political bodyʼ of the multitude. In this regard, affect becomes, after Spinoza, the ʻpower to actʼ. This is where, first, it Hardt and Negri continue, now reconnecting affect begins to turn away and against bio-political power back, via the powers of the multitude, to the power and, second, it becomes locked into the history of of living labour: those practices of sovereign power Hardt and Negri The passage from the virtual through the possible to trace in their work about the dawn of the modern the real is the fundamental act of creation. Living secular state. In extending value ʻbeyond measureʼ, labour is what constructs the passageway from the affect brings labour into contact with its own his- virtual to the real; it is the vehicle of possibility. torical potentiality and power as ontological ground, The echoes of Trontiʼs heterodox Marxism are still with what Deleuze and Guattari called ʻdesiring apparent here, rewritten according to Deleuze and productionʼ: 25 Guattariʼs neo-positivist ontology of becoming. In many ways Empire – and the lattersʼ A Thousand the vitality of the productive context, the expression of labor as desire, and its capacities to constitute the Plateaus, which Hardt and Negri explicitly take as a bio-political fabric of Empire from below. Beyond model – reads somewhat like a natural history, posit- measure refers to the new place in the non-place, ing the potenza of life in living labour against, for the place defined by the productive activity that is example, the spirit of negation. But this constitutes its autonomous from any external regime of measure. challenge. Affect ʻbeyond measureʼ thus presents the Beyond measure refers to a virtuality that invests power of the ʻnew proletariatʼ. The proletariat, they the entire bio-political fabric of imperial globalization. By the virtual we understand the set of pow- explain, in a definition that is, characteristically for ers to act (being, loving, transforming, creating) that Negri, centered on value-and-labour (rather than prop- reside in the multitude. erty-and-mode-of-production) ʻis the general concept

Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) 35 that defines all those whose labour is exploited by might add their version of fetishism here, suggesting capital, the entire cooperating multitude.ʼ At last, with that the power of Empire nevertheless ʻfalls back onʼ Empire, the ʻwide landscape of bio-political produc- the multitude to ʻmiraculateʼ them (that is, write their tion allows us to recognize the full generality of the juridico-political scripts) and ʻontologizeʼ itself by concept of proletariat.ʼ In the oneness-in-dispersal that appropriating and transforming the living constituent is Empire, the multitude and the new proletariat have power of the multitude into state constitution and become one; but one that is not one. The multitude bio-power.28 This is sovereignty. In the words of Hardt only exists as ʻsingularitiesʼ.26 and Negri: In his recent book Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza Little by little, as the administration develops, the and His Contemporaries (reviewed in RP 100) Warren relationship between society and power, between the Montag writes of a rhetorical strategy used by Spinoza multitude and the sovereign state, is inverted so that which he calls ʻthe operation of the siveʼ. Sive is the now power and the state produce society.29 Latin conjunction ʻorʼ and figures a critical strategy Reading from below? of ʻtranslation and displacementʼ. Spinoza used this operation most famously, Montag tells us, in the phrase Empire gravitates around the political and conceptual ʻDeus, sive Naturaʼ (God, or Nature). In this operation, core of ʻthe multitudeʼ. The stories of sovereignty that he ʻsimultaneously affirms and denies that it affirms are told, centred historically on political revolution and the radical abolition of transcendenceʼ.27 In other philosophically on the concepts of ʻtranscendenceʼ and words, he tells three stories at once: the story of God, ʻrepresentationʼ, are all stories of, on the one hand, the story of Nature and the story of God-as-Nature, or, the containment of ʻthe immanent forces of the desire the story of transcendence, the story of immanence and and cooperation of the multitudeʼ and, on the other, of the story of transcendence-as-immanence. This is what the transference of their powers. In Negri and Hardtʼs happens in Empire too. It tells the story of imperial view, modern sovereignty is a secular inflection, into sovereignty, the story of the multitude and the story a plane of immanence, of absolutist monarchy (trans- of imperial sovereignty-as-multitude. cendence within immanence), such that it is possible The ʻmultitudeʼ is both a political and a philo- to speak of monarchical, aristocratic and democratic sophical concept. Anti-sovereign and anti-dialectical, monarchy – hence their radical republicanism of the in Empire it is the ʻbody without organsʼ of politics. multitude, nourished by the work of Machiavelli and From this point of view, the relation between Empire Marx, but especially of Spinoza.30 and the social is one of fundamental incommensur- As in Negriʼs reading of Marxʼs theory of value ability. If the multitude exists ʻwithin Empire and (inspired by Tronti and Virno), so Hardt and Negriʼs against Empireʼ, there is, however, ʻalways a surplusʼ: reading of Foucaultʼs account of the dynamics of bio- ʻ[t]he first head of the imperial eagle is a juridi- power (inspired in part by Deleuze and Guattari) is cal structure and a constituted power, constructed theoretically inflected ʻfrom belowʼ. In large measure, by the machine of bio-political command.ʼ This is this is a result of the idea of affect: it transports the contemporary sovereign power. ʻThe other head of the power of living ʻimmaterialʼ labour into the heart of imperial eagle is the plural multitude of productive, bio-political command and management, and subjects creative subjectivities of globalization.… They are it to ʻworker articulationʼ, the powers of the multi- in perpetual motion and they form constellations of tude. Their evocations of the British and Southern singularities and events that impose continual global Asian historiographical traditions of ʻhistory from reconfigurations of the system.ʼ The multitude is not belowʼ and ʻsubalternismʼ thus make both political a negative power, they rather ʻnourish, and develop and conceptual sense. Such theoretical intentionality positively their own constituent projects; they work also characterizes cultural studies, which, from this toward the liberation of living laborʼ. As in Trontiʼs point of view, is characterized not just, pace Žižek, by ʻworkersʼ articulationʼ, the multitude is the histori- a postmodern concern for the media and the politics cally dominant political power, and Empire ʻa mere of cultural identity, but also by a radical critique of apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of both the mass mediatic transformation of cultural the multitude.ʼ Thus, characterized by an ʻontological forms (postmodernization in Jamesonʼs account) and lackʼ, the constituted power of Empire may be seen as a theory of ideology that reinstalls domination at the ʻa simple abstract trace of the constituent power of the heart of illumination. The ʻideology critiqueʼ of the multitude.ʼ The Deleuze and Guattari of Anti-Oedipus Frankfurt School and Althusser provides examples of

36 Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) such intellectual ʻre-subalternizationʼ.31 For Hardt and dispersed subjectivity is recuperated and re-made in Negri, however, critique ʻfrom belowʼ, as negation, a return to immanence of transcendence – that is, in remains prone to dialectical recuperation. The idea the resacrilization of the political. From this point of of the multitude thus also involves dispersal of nega- view, liberation theologyʼs ʻoption for the poorʼ, which tion into singularity and ʻno-placeʼ.32 Here, however, is also evoked, verges on melodramatic excess. (ʻThe it meets Empire as immeasurable value, the time of poor is god on earth. ... The poor itself is power.ʼ) networked command and dispersed abstract labour: Finally, apart from noting the redeployment of images ʻthe topography of power no longer has to do primarily from the Christian side of imperial reason (members with spatial relations but is inscribed, rather, in the of the Franciscan Order were some of the first to temporal displacements of subjectivities. Here we find arrive in the New World to save souls), a subalternist again the non-place of power.ʼ33 critique of Empire might highlight the temporality of Empire is a daring and polemical work, inviting its politics. What happens to all those whose labour is critical responses as it makes its ʻwayʼ through the subsumed to imperial capital but who have not been new world order. But, arguably, it is its founding postmodernized? As suggested above, the topography philosophico-political concept of the multitude that of contemporary imperial command, like the multi- constitutes its main weakness. A melancholic, rather tude, disperses value to the non-place of dialectically than a joyous, science might suggest that the logic irrecuperable time. This is the time of imperial politics, structured by the flows of transnational capital of refusal the multitude stages merely feeds impe- and living labour – the ʻnew barbariansʼ. According rial capital with new material; and that the surplus to Hardt and Negri, that takes the multitude beyond the measure of dispersed immeasurability is just ʻmore of the sameʼ. Being republican today, then, means first of all The multitude here might still be constitutive, but struggling within and constructing against Empire, only as what Ernesto Laclau and Judith Butler have on its hybrid, modulating terrains. And here we theorized as a ʻconstitutive outsideʼ, capitalʼs phan- should add, against all moralisms and all positions tasmatic double which is always located ʻinsideʼ, and of nostalgia, that this new imperial terrain provides greater possibilities for creation and liberation. The productive of, subjectivity.34 Historically, the idea of multitude, in its will to be-against and its desire for the multitude emerges with the rise of the bourgeoisie liberation, must push through Empire to come out at a moment of historical ʻmutationʼ, a process of the other side. generalized and violent dispossession and capitalist recomposition Marx refers to as ʻso-called primitive However, their description of the ʻhybrid constitutionʼ 35 accumulationʼ. This is the nightmarish terrain of of the emerging imperial order turns out to be only limitless, almost suicidal, bourgeois possibility – the a hybridized system of monarchic, aristocratic and war of all against all – where there are always more democratic functions that remains socially abstract potential capitalists, and more labour to abstract. For and temporally homogenous.36 In contrast, Manuel the conservative Hobbes, it was the bourgeois multi- Castellsʼs version of network capitalism is broken- tude that had to be managed and tamed. Riding on the backed, constituting a fundamentally disjunctive order back of refusal, Empire is this historical imaginaryʼs – a hybridized system combining the ʻtimeless timeʼ final realization. For their part, literary and cultural of the space of flows, and other, more ʻcrystallizedʼ, studies might note the images of vampires and saints times of the space of places.37 From this point of – specifically, St Francis of Assisi – that appear in view, politics is temporally hybridized according to Empireʼs pages: the first (as in Marxʼs Capital) as a the social relations of specific capital–state formations, sign of the miraculating powers of capital; and the producing the contemporary neo-liberal imperial state second as the figure of the future communist ʻmilitantʼ as a complex system of assemblages constituted across offered up by the text as it ends. Another exemplary spaces, times and singularities – mediated by self-rep- representative of proletarian struggle mentioned also resentation. Such a terrain, where the spaces of flows comes from the past: the International Workers of the are crisscrossed by spaces of places, also produces the World (IWW) militant. But at this point the multitude political times of resistance and liberation. To reduce threatens to become a sentimentalized, authoritarian a concern for other times to ʻnostalgiaʼ would thus other, allegorized and individuated as either heroic be to re-impose the narrative of development – that or charismatic. Sovereignty threatens to return here is, the abstract time of imperial capital – in the guise as decisionism. In Empireʼs more literary figurations, of revolution.

Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) 37 Notes ed. J. Fleming, Autonomedia/Pluto, New York and Lon- I would like to thank Alberto Moreiras, Peter Osborne and don, 1991 (1979). Carol Watts for their help in writing this article. 4. See Empire, p. xvi: ʻIn the imperial world the econo- mist, for example, needs a basic knowledge of cultural 1. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. xii. production to understand the economy, and likewise the 2. See Empire, p. 415, note 5, which, apart from Jameson cultural critic needs a basic knowledge of economic and Spivak, relates the work to that of Arjun Appa- process to understand culture.ʼ durai, Giovanni Arrighi, Arif Dirlik, David Harvey and 5. Empire, p. 213. British Communismʼs own response to Edward Said. It is noticeable that none of Negriʼs Ital- ʻpostmodernismʼ, ʻpost-Fordismʼ and ʻNew Timesʼ was ian or French colleagues is mentioned in this list. This to reassert orthodoxy rather than subject such discourses underlines the importance of the Left US academy as a to a more materialist ʻsymptomaticʼ reading. relay point for the transnationalization of theoretical pro- 6. See the articles by these authors in Paulo Virno and duction. The chapter on postmodernist and postcolonial Michael Hardt, eds, Radical Thought in Italy: A Po- theory, however, apart from bolstering the workʼs anti- tential Politics, trans. M. Boscagli et al., University of dialectical argument and containing an uncharacteristi- Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 1996. cally favourable reading of the work of Homi Bhabha, 7. Antonio Negri, ʻTwenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation is one of the most cursory of the book. of the Class Situation Todayʼ, in Saree Makdisi, Cesare 3. By 1967 Negri was, ironically, Professor of Doctrines Casarino and Rebecca E. Karl, eds, Marxism Beyond of the State at Padua University, where he had taught Marxism, Routledge, New York and London, 1996, p. philosophy of law since 1959 and been an active partici- 150, and Marx Beyond Marx, p. 25. This is the point of pant in local politics and journalism as a member of Derridaʼs reply to Negriʼs criticisms of Specters of Marx: the Italian Socialist Party. In 1963 he left the Socialist in Negriʼs demand that philosophical discourse take on Party and became involved in the local workersʼ move- a dimension of practicality, Negri, Derrida insists, re- ment on the margins of the Communist Party, running ontologizes a now spectralized ʻvalueʼ in both exploita- a Capital reading group with his wife Paola Meo and tion (the social organization of labour) on the one hand, Massimo Cacciari (now an important philosopher known and communism (constitutive resistance) on the other. for his writings on architecture and, until recently, mayor Negri, for his part, insists that his is ʻa new – post-decon- of Venice) amongst local petrochemical workers at the structive – ontologyʼ. See Antonio Negri, ʻThe Specterʼs Porto Marghera plant. That same year the journal Potere Smileʼ, and Jacques Derrida, ʻMarx & Sonsʼ, in Michael Operaio (Workersʼ Power) made its appearance. At ﬁrst Sprinker, ed., Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on a supplement of the local Socialist Party journal, it later Jacques Derridaʼs ʻSpecters of Marxʼ, Verso, London became the organ of the Porto Marghera plant workers. and New York, 1999, pp. 5–16, 213–69. By 1967 Negri was also contributing to a number of 8. Mario Tronti, ʻThe Strategy of Refusalʼ, trans. Red other journals such as the inﬂuential Quaderni Rossi, Notes, in Italy: Autonomia. Post-Political Politics, associated with an emerging ʻautonomousʼ workersʼ Semiotexte, vol. 3, no. 3, 1980, p. 29 (originally pub- movement and publishing the work of heterodox com- lished in Quaderni Rossi in 1965). Tronti was to remain munist theoreticians such as Mario Tronti. At the Uni- a member of the PCI. versity of Padua, meanwhile, he was at the centre of a 9. Negri, ʻTwenty Theses on Marxʼ, p. 151. group of radical intellectuals based at the Institute for 10. Tronti, ʻThe Strategy of Refusalʼ, pp. 29, 31, 32, 30. Political Sciences, including Sergio Bologna, Alisa del ʻIt is the workersʼ struggle that materially imposes Re and Maria Rosa Della Costa. After the ʻhot summerʼ reformism on capitalʼ, says Negri in ʻLabor in the Con- of 1969 a host of organizations to the left of the Com- stitutionʼ, written originally in 1964, but not published munist Party were formed, including Potere Operaio, until the mid-1970s. In this essay Negri develops the now not just a journal, Avantguardia Operaia and, most political side of the effects of refusal: ʻLabor, as a source famously perhaps, Lotta Continua. With the ʻhistorical of complete social production, becomes a source of the compromiseʼ between the Communist Party and Christ- State.… Not even right and law can escape its power.ʼ In ian Democrat Party of 1973, however, Potere Operaio Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labour of Dionysus: went into self-dissolution. The years that followed saw A Critique of State Form, University of Minnesota Press, the emergence of student and youth movements, such Minneapolis and London, 1994, p. 82. as the ʻMetropolitan Indiansʼ, criss-crossed in a host of 11. Lukácsʼs phrase continues as follows: ʻthe subject of alliances with working class groups, which began to turn action; the “we” of the genesis: namely the proletari- their back on the ʻsixty-eightersʼ. Many former political atʼ, Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, militants, meanwhile, gravitated towards urban guerrilla trans. R. Livingstone, Merlin Press, London, 1971, p. organizations. But the movement known as ʻAutono- 149. Tronti then, and Negri subsequently, hold strong miaʼ also emerged, working amongst the unemployed anti-socialist positions – which the latter regards funda- and young migrant workers ʻrefusingʼ to work. For the mentally as the planned administration of capitalism historical and political background, see Paul Ginsborg, (and labour). A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 12. Antonio Negri, ʻConstituent Republicʼ, in Virno and 1943–1988, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1990; and Robert Hardt, eds, Radical Thought in Italy, pp. 219–20. Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy 13. Mikhail Bakhtin, ʻForms of Time and of the Chronotope from 1968 to 1978, Verso, London, 1990. For Negriʼs in the Novelʼ, in The Dialogical Imagination, trans. C. personal background, see the translatorsʼ introductions Emerson and M. Holquist, University of Texas Press, to Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Austin, 1981, pp. 84–258. ʻGrundrisseʼ, trans. H. Cleaver, M. Ryan and M. Viano, 14. Empire, pp. 234–5, 212–13. On the ʻworker attack of

38 Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) the highest intensity directed against the disciplinary 23. Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 29–30, 292–3, 363–5. For regimes of capitalist laborʼ, at least in Europe and the bio-power, see Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge USA, see pp. 260–79. The authors point out that the (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1), trans. R. Hurley, Har- ʻattack was expressed, first of all, as a general refusal mondsworth, Penguin Books, 1998 (1976); and Gilles of work and specifically of factory work.… [T]he re- Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ʻPostscript on the Society of fusal of the disciplinary regime and the affirmation of Controlʼ, October 59, 1992. For ʻnon-placesʼ, see Marc the sphere of non-work became the defining features Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of of a new set of collective practices and a new form of Supermodernity, trans. J. Howe, Verso, London and New life.ʼ York, 1995. 15. Negri, ʻTwenty Theses on Marxʼ, p. 154. 24. Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 364–5; and Antonio Negri, 16. Since, as we shall see below, value and labour are ʻValue and Affectʼ, trans. M. Hardt, Boundary 2, vol. 26, defined under Empire according to the new logics of net- no. 2, 1999, pp. 83, 87. work communication, exploitation is also redefined as 25. ʻIt is at work everywhereʼ, Gilles Deleuze and Félix ʻthe expropriation of cooperation and the nullification of Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the meanings of linguistic production.ʼ From this point trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H.R. Lane, Viking, New of view, ʻ[a]ntagonisms to exploitation are articulated York, 1977 (1972), p. 1. across the global networks of production and determine 26. Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 30, 357, 402. crises on each and every node.ʼ ʻCrisis isʼ, according 27. Warren Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and to Hardt and Negri, ʻcoextensive with the postmodern His Contemporaries, Verso, London and New York, totality of capitalist production; it is proper to imperial 1999, p. 4. control.ʼ See Empire, p. 385 and, for ʻcorruptionʼ, p. 28. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 10–11. 201. 29. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 88. 17. Empire, pp. 44–6, 51–2, 105–9, 227–39, 283–4. On the 30. Antonio Negri, ʻReliqua Desiderantur: A Conjecture for rise of Japan and China, see Giovanni Arrighi, The Long a Definition of the Concept of Democracy in the Final Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Spinozaʼ, in Warren Montag and Ted Stolze, eds, The Our Times, Verso, London, 1994; and André Gunder New Spinoza, University of Minnesota Press, Minne- Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age, apolis and London, 1997, p. 222. See also his Insurgen- University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles cies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. M. and London, 1998. On the continuing strength of US Boscagli, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis capital, see Robert Brenner, ʻThe Economics of Global and London, 1999 (1992), and The Savage Anomaly: Turbulanceʼ, New Left Review 229, May–June 1998. The Power of Spinozaʼs Metaphysics and Politics, trans. David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and M. Hardt, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Jonathan Perratonʼs, Global Transformations: Politics, and Oxford, 1991 (1981). Empire is a condensation and Economics and Culture, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999, extension into globalized imperial sovereignty of Negriʼs provides a useful overview of many of the debates con- Insurgencies. For Negri, Machiavelliʼs republicanism is cerning globalization. part of a broader Renaissance tradition of revolutionary 18. Maurizio Lazzarato, ʻImmaterial Labourʼ, and Paulo (anti-humanist) humanism. Virno, ʻVirtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory 31. See my ʻGlobalization is Ordinary: The Transnationaliz- of Exodusʼ, in Virno and Hardt, eds, Radical Thought ation of Cultural Studiesʼ, Radical Philosophy 90, July/ in Italy, pp. 133–47, 189–210. See also the essays by August 1998, pp. 9–19. Marco Rivelli and Franco Piperno in the same volume, 32. In this regard, it has the same philosophical function as as well as Negriʼs reflection on ʻintellectual cooperationʼ Deleuze and Guattariʼs notion of ʻmultiplicityʼ, whose in the era of the ʻsocialized workerʼ in The Politics of invention, they insist, ʻmarked the end of dialecticsʼ. Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century, ʻThe notion of unity … appears only when there is a trans. J. Newell, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1989, pp. power takeover in the multiplicityʼ, they write. See 47–60, 75–101. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Pla- 19. Lazzarato, ʻImmaterial Labourʼ, p. 137; Virno, ʻVirtu- teaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, osity and Revolutionʼ, pp. 196–7; Hardt and Negri, Athlone Press, London, 1988 (1980), pp. 483, 8. The Empire, pp. 290–92. I have not been able to do justice anti-Hegelianism of the early philosophical writings of to the density and complexity of either Virnoʼs or Laz- Deleuze is highlighted in Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: zaratoʼs essays here. For an informative introduction to An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, University of London these debates, see Nick Dyer-Withfordʼs recent Cyber- Press, London, 1993. Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Tech- 33. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 319. nology Capitalism, University of Illinois Press, Urbana 34. See Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution and Chicago, 1999. Oskar Negt and Alexander Klugeʼs of Our Time, Verso, London, 1990; and Judith Butler, critical adaptation of Habermasʼs notion of the ʻpublic Bodies that Matter, Routledge, London and New York, sphereʼ has probably been influential for Virnoʼs concep- 1993. tion of exodus (Bob Marleyʼs song also comes to mind). 35. Negri, Insurgencies, p. 38. Negri describes Machiavelliʼs See Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis work as a political reflection on/of this mutation. of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. P. 36. Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 157, 218, 316–19. Labanyi et al., Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis 37. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Black- and London, 1993 (1972). well, Cambridge MA and Oxford, 1997. See Simon 20. Negri, The Politics of Subversion, p. 73. Bromley, ʻThe Space of Flows and Timeless Time: 21. Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 367, 332, 397–8. Manuel Castellsʼs The Information Ageʼ, Radical Phil- 22. Ibid., pp. 393–413. osophy 97, Sept/Oct 1999, pp. 6–17.

Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) 39