Malcolm Bull’s
review of Empire, ‘You can’t build a new society with a
Re-reading both Bull’s review and my response it became apparent to me that the last year had rendered many strategies the left had proposed as a response to neo-liberal globalization, no longer viable; that moreover, the strategies that a section of the left had proposed not only were no longer viable in a ‘progressive’ form but were actually being implemented by governments across the globe, governments that no one could seriously consider progressive.[2] So, while Bull’s answer to the ravages of globalization was – against Hardt & Negri – that of ‘Big government,’[3] we find that ‘Big government’ is proving itself to be increasingly authoritarian, and it’s pretext is that this is for us. It is – we are told – for our freedom and our values[4] that now (now that the markets have failed us) we must be ever vigilant and that we must be prepared to attack ‘pre-emptively’ … Attack who, what? We must pre-empt attacks that we can only guess at; Hollywood becomes our collective imaginary.
Bull’s was another critique of Hardt & Negri from the left but without any obvious ‘axe to grind’. There was none of the frustrations displayed by the guardians of Marxist orthodoxy, nor was there any of the opportunism exemplified by those centre-left ‘intellectuals’ who hoped to turn Empire’s affirmation of a radical globalization into an acknowledgement of Blair’s ‘red’ credentials (thus tapping the ‘anti-globalization’ market). Malcolm Bull’s review of Empire did, however, follow many commentators in seeing Negri & Hardt’s project as an essentially liberal-inspired one that effectively broke with any residual links with Marx and communism. Bull went as far as to argue that it represented the other face of the same coin neo-liberalism, the ‘Washington Consensus’ of trade liberalisation, minimal State and prising open of national economies. There are only two options within globalization, contended Bull: the state writ large or… the status quo, totalitarianism or neo-liberalism.
My argument then as now was that the ‘or’ is not a choice between alternatives. What Bull reveals is critical thought’s inability to conceive the collective other than through the hypostasis of the individual in the market or in a totalitarian state of individual right. What I had argued from a purely theoretical angle was, not either/or but both at once: market and totalitarianism. Not the totalitarianism of the market, totalitarian control as immanent condition of market individualism: within the paradigm of control that we see emerging, the object of subjugation becomes the subject of that same process.[5] Looking back on this paper from the vantage point provided by the events of the last year, what I had found in Bull’s argument – flirting with Hegelese, we could call it the identity in difference of neo-liberalism and totalitarianism – looks to be our immediate future. For this reason I feel justified in going back to it today: to see that neo-liberalism was only able to turn easily into a creeping totalitarianism because the conditions of the latter are the same as those of the former. The hope is that by blocking off certain routes for a left politics, others may begin to be fought for. What follows is a substantially revised version of my ‘Reply to Bull’.
**************************************
Bull’s article was written less than a month after the 9/11 and only a few months after Genoa. Both of these events inform his piece. The crux of Bull’s argument is contained in this provocative statement: ‘Since the end of the Cold War, Neoliberalism has become so ideologically dominant that it is no longer clear whether the real Neoliberals are the leaders of the G8 or the people outside in the balaclavas and the overalls.’ In justification of such a statement Bull takes up a number of demands of the Tute bianche and Autonomia, and tries to align them with various right-wing neo-liberal statements made at various times over the last 30 years. I do not thing it is worth taking up the discussion of these individually. Suffice it to say that to what extent taking a slogan of the Tute bianche in the ‘90s and another by Milton Friedman from the ‘60s is able to show any deep ideological affinity between them, I think is questionable. I hope I will not be accused of being doctrinaire for quoting Lenin on this point, but I think he was on to something when he said ‘Every political slogan must be deduced from the totality of specific features of a definite political situation.’[6]
He begins positioning Negri & Hardt in a context that will mark his reading through to his conclusions: that of ‘libertarian neo-liberalism’. This is evident, for example, when Bull sets Negri & Hardt neatly alongside the advocates of ‘negative liberty’ and, therefore, in opposition to the demands for ‘positive liberty’. This recourse to the categories developed by that archliberal Isaiah Berlin should immediately render one suspicious and raises two important questions: is this distinction not so marked by the question of the variety of forms of government, i.e. minimal state as opposed to ‘big government’ in its relation to ‘civil society’, that it is entrapped by it? Does the fact that Bull sets this distinction to work from the beginning mean that his reading of Empire is indelibly marked by it? My answer will be that indeed it does and that this interpretive failure means that the core theoretical innovations of Hardt & (in particular) Negri’s work are missing from Bull’s account.
Let us begin by turning to the account Bull gives of Negri’s reading of Spinoza. Bull presents Negri’s turn to Spinoza as a way of ‘re-theorising autonomia’s strategy’ after the repression that struck at il Movimento in the ‘70s and ‘80s. But Bull gives no account of why in a cell in an Italian prison Negri should feel the urgent need to turn to Spinoza. This political decision is presented outside any determined conjuncture of economic and political transformations, other than that of the repression of the extra-parliamentary left. At the time, Negri was also working on a text called La costituzione del tempo,[7] in which he argued that what Marx had spoken of as the ‘real subsumption of society by capital’ had been realised. The question became, where is resistance to come from in a society that has been entirely subsumed by capital, i.e. where there is no exteriority for resistance to come from? The turn to Spinoza was dictated by this situation. In Negri’s account Spinoza provides an immanent ontology with no exteriority, in which practice becomes constitutive of the real (and in the context that we are concerned with here), of sovereignty itself; and where the multitude augments its potentia in the commonality of relations: the co-operating multitudes (to adopt Hardt & Negri’s terminology from Empire). Bull points out the distinction in Spinoza, which is missed in English translations that render both potentia (creative power) and potestas (sovereignty, authority) as ‘power’, but Bull’s reversal of the ontological primacy of potentia results – as we shall see – in closing any possible alternative to either the status quo or ‘big(ger) government’. Returning to Negri’s decision: it is real economic, political and social displacements that push Negri towards an engagement with Spinoza, displacements which he – and other Operaisti – had tracked in their writings of the 1960s and ‘70s in the shift from the mass worker to the social worker.
Spinoza maintains that there are no rights separate from power; to be precise, potestas is determined by the potentia of the multitude. The crucial point here – one that Bull fails to acknowledge – is that what Spinoza provides us with is a description of the essential materiality of politics in terms of the relation of forces, as well as a concentration on the creative role played by the masses in the constitution of sovereign power itself. With the rejection of rights separate from the power to act we have the removal of the individual as a meaningful political agent and the bringing to prominence of the collective dimension of power (potentia). To suggest, as Bull does, that this is the same as saying ‘might is right’ is either, to say nothing at all or, to misrepresent the problem. Within the context of Spinoza’s ontological and political prioritisation of the multitude (in which might is understood as the potentia of the multitude), such a statement is a simple tautology; but within the context of Bull’s reversal of the ontological order (where might is understood as potestas), it is the hypostasis of sovereignty. As Warren Montag points out in his excellent Bodies, Masses, Power, if one accepts Spinoza’s account, then: “There exists no system of rule, no matter how apparently absolute, that does not rest on an equilibrium of forces and the ruler who ignores this fact will not rule very long.” In this way any transcendent justification for sovereignty is removed by indicating the potentia of the multitude as the material condition of right. The argument also allows one to appropriate Spinoza for the left. Against Bull’s statement that ‘Spinoza’s theory licences tyranny as much as democracy, counter-revolution as well as revolution’, Hardt & Negri can claim that on the contrary, it is the immanence of power to the collectivity, to the multitude that prevents any sovereign power for ruling for long without, ultimately, the people’s consent.[8] The sovereign may, of course, be able to negotiate the balance of forces to stay in power, but this is an acknowledgment of both the dependence of potestas on potentia and, ultimately, of the precariousness of that rule.[9]
Bull confuses the discussion of the relation between potentia and potestas by showing how the distinction between the two forms of power are designed to break down the notion of civil society, while at the same time re-affirming the tripartite formula of state of nature, civil society, state. Once again engaging in the questionable practice of accosting Negri & Hardt to some odious characters so as to critique their position, Bull suggests that there is some sort of equivalence between Thatcher’s ‘There is no such thing as society’ and Negri’s attack on the notion of civil society. This is plainly absurd, for it is clear – as we will see below – that for Negri ‘civil society’ is the market, while for Thatcher the market is the only form social relations may take.[10] Negri’s attack on civil society is an attack on the market as a realm that believes itself to be exterior to the political and mediates between (equivalent) individuals but does not; Thatcher, on the other hand, is, in her infamous statement, referring to something that believes itself to be outside the economic but is nothing if not the market. By excising ‘civil society’ and maintaining the ‘state of nature’ to be a fable of modernity, Negri forces the tripartite formula to fall away; it is not at all clear that Thatcher’s attack has a similar effect. Thatcher’s object of critique is much closer to what we might call ‘community’.
Bull argues for a different reading of Spinoza, one that would somehow save the social from the devastation brought to it by the monstrous Spinoza-Thatcher war-machine.[11] He insists that the only way to understand ‘right’ is as ‘civil right’: natural right only becomes ‘more than a fiction’ when isolated men and women enter ‘into the commonwealth’, so that right only is if it is social, by which Bull understands the space of the always already constituted: ‘potestas creates potentia’. What is extraordinary about this argument (other than a suggestion of some form of theoretical consistency existing between Spinoza, Thatcher and Kissinger) is that it manages to re-institute the tripartite formula while appearing to disown it. For Bull dismisses the rather archaic notion of the ‘state of nature’ and re-enforces notions of the social and the political – but he does so by surreptitiously re-inserting it as a logical transition, mythical but effective. That is, individual men and woman do not start with any rights (silent: in the state of nature, that original solitude of the [pre-social] individual, rights are merely a fiction) but only gain them through association (silence: when they make the transition to ‘civil society’), and the results of such an association are guaranteed by established rules of legitimation (silence: the state). Which ultimately means that the State comes at the beginning, for otherwise who brings in the notion of ‘right’ at all? If first it is only an illusion and then in civil society it can only be if it is enforced, from where can it proceed if not from the State? But equally important to this whole argument is that of the right-less/powerless individual in the state of nature. Contra this, Negri: humanity is immediately collective, immediately social and therefore powerful, a power that comes to be recognised as right by the state but whose ontological consistency comes from elsewhere – the ontological potentia of the collective. There is no need to have recourse to the state of nature in order to affirm powerlessness and individuality prior to the collective, prior to power, and thus have power (potentia) emerge as if by magic from power (potestas) already constituted. Indeed Negri insists that it is powerlessness that is produced, it is not the characteristic of some pre-social natural state; it is created through an immanent exclusion. Paraphrasing Deleuze & Guattari, we could say that powerlessness comes from separating power from what it can do. The forms that this ‘exclusion’ takes change over time.[12] The strategy of contemporary exclusions, the contemporary production of powerlessness, is discussed in Empire as “the triple imperative of Empire” (Empire, p198-99). The first element is the “magnanimous, liberal face of Empire” (Empire, p198), where everyone is welcomed and included “within its boundaries, regardless of race, creed, color, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth”. By formally setting aside differences Empire seeks to neutralise much of the terrain of possible conflict. The second is the differential moment where differences – considered cultural and contingent rather than natural or biological and thus non-exclusionary – are championed as a “force of peaceful regional identification” (Empire, p199). Finally, there comes the “management and hierarchization of these differences within the general economy of command”. No longer divide and conquer then, “[m]ore often than not, the Empire does not create division but rather recognizes existing or potential differences, celebrates them, and manages them within a general economy of command” (Empire, p201). For Bull, powerlessness can only be a dialectically un-recuperated moment in the teleology that moves from barbarism to civilization. Otherwise he would have to recognise that it is indeed produced, and if it is produced, then one must start with sociality and power, not individuality and powerlessness.
Bull understands Negri’s account of potentia and potestas as the assertion of the state of nature over and against that of civil society, or rather that subsumes civil society. This is to radically misrepresent the argument. For on the contrary, Negri argues that the ‘state of nature debate’ is a mystification that serves to: present the isolated individual as precondition for a teleology ending in the State; as the condition that allows for the construction of civil society (which for Spinoza, Negri argues, meant the market, the ‘embarrassment of riches’ that was Dutch capitalism) to operate as a mediator between the egoistic individualism exemplified in the state of nature; and finally, that both would come to be subsumed and regulated by the State. The move is from barbarism to civilization, the effects of which we have seen played out in the long and vicious history of colonialism. Negri’s argument goes further. There has been a radical displacement of the terms that subverts each of them in turn and that subversion is not merely theoretical but emerges from the changes undergone by capitalism in reaction to class struggle.[13] Negri has shifted the very terrain on which the distinction operated, opening new theoretical and practical horizons. In the case of Empire, this real displacement leaves one with neither a hypostasis of the state of nature nor one of civil society. What we are left with rather, is simply the concrete relations in which an individual always already is, and the rights and laws created by their potentia. How potentia and potestas are related will be discussed later.
The
presupposition that drives Bull’s account is one that goes back to Antiquity,
is typical of transcendental philosophy and of modern political theory: the
subjection of difference to the one. Since
Plato philosophy has tried to account for, and ground multiplicity, difference,
thinking thereby to uncover an original order or logos that underwrites and
distributes plurality and would enable one to totalise, determine, organize,
know it. In political theory this has
always operated through a theorization of the multitude that subsumes it to a
principle of order, more often than not inscribed in an anthropology. Bull’s
argument betrays the presuppositions that further such a politics of
transcendence; that are blind to the possibility of organization occurring from
within immanence. His suggestion that only with co-operation do rights
emerge, and that such an association suggests the realm of civil society, is
one that re-inserts the multitude within the teleology that concludes in the
state. On the one hand Bull appears to conceive of civil society as a relatively
autonomous realm while on the other he re-inscribes it in the series of
logical? mythical? transitions, in which the state is always presupposed
(whether as end or beginning). The innovation effected by Hardt & Negri,
which takes it cue from the work of Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault, is to
engage in the extremely difficult task of thinking relations immanent to the
multitude, of organization within multiplicity, outside categories that
re-inscribe within it an extraneous principle (of order).[14]
Organization must be thought through as emerging within immanence, and it is to
this end that Negri adopts Spinoza’s notion of potentia as the
ontological foundation of potestas, and in a later text speaks of
constituent power, which is the ontological origin of – always present
and continuous with – all constituted power. It would be a mistake to
interpret these two concepts of power in either equivocal or analogical terms.
That is, there is no difference in nature between potentia and potestas,
or between constituent power and constituted power, otherwise
there would be no element of continuity, and constituted power would always
escape re-insertion into the immanent materiality of dis-/organization – truly
the end of history, entropy. Nor is it the case of a trace of similitude to an
original order that would simply serve to further a false development, an
infinite play of mirrors.
Bull’s reversal of the distinction, making potentia dependant on potestas, means that it is difficult to see a) how sovereignty would be constituted at all – that is, sovereignty would be both transcendence and naturalized,[15] and b) how people would be able to influence sovereignty in any significant way. In such a context, one would have to rely merely on the good will of the sovereign – in whatever form it takes – while having no material influence on its interventions. Following the time-honoured traditions of liberal thought, the subject is first isolated from relations with others, and is then constrained in practice, de facto and de jure, by the dictates of sovereignty.[16] One might argue that the subject would remain free in thought and speech. One must ask, however, whether by cutting the subject off so thoroughly from the collective, from practice, we are not left with the mere illusion of freedom. It should not be forgotten, for example, that it is without question on the (neo-)liberals’ watch that we have observed the progressive separation of the institutions of sovereignty from the multitude, a process dramatically illustrated by the G8 meeting in the Canadian Rockies and the WTO meeting in Qatar. Bull’s acknowledgement in the closing stages of his argument that 9/11 could mark a watershed in the transformation of US foreign policy is surely the recognition of the precarious balance of forces that have produced so much discontent and insecurity, and that have been duly registered:[17] there was Blair’s impassioned speech for the world-wide fight against poverty;[18] in order to help pacify their population there were the numerous pay-offs for regimes such as that in Pakistan, which had been an international pariah until the US required its help in bombing a pile of rubble to dust; the changes in domestic laws so that one’s own populations can be spied upon, jailed; the decision, in short, that our freedoms (principally to exploit) are best defended by the extension of war abroad and surveillance everywhere.[19] At least in practice the power of the multitude is acknowledged. One is forced to agree with Spinoza that politicians have been far better at understanding the political, with its complex balance of forces, than the philosophers. There is no doubt an optimism of the intellect in Empire, but Bull’s suggestion that there is a failure to comprehend the ‘reality of powerlessness’ is only true to the extent that isolated individuals in poverty are truly powerless. Is not this powerlessness multiplied ten-fold by the liberal presupposition that divides the multitude: that of the isolated individual as the fictive foundation of civil society? It is difficult to discover such a principle anywhere in Hardt & Negri, and without it, the presupposition for a Liberal – or Libertarian – reading of Empire is missing. To begin from the ‘reality of powerlessness’ is to start from a position in which power can only be conferred (from on high). Hardt & Negri aim to show that power, potentia, is already ours but it is so only in so far as we refuse to act alone.
Bull’s disingenuous claim that Negri’s ‘rediscovery of republican thought parallels that of Quentin Skinner in Britain, and the retrieval of Anti-Federalism by libertarians in the United States’ arguing further that Empire is somehow more Jeffersonian than Marxist, is paradigmatic of the misreading underway. Bull goes on to quote from Negri’s Insurgencies in a bid to support this claim concerning the new influences on Negri’s thought. However, in order to make this latter claim stick, Bull is obliged to ignore that in Insurgencies this tradition takes up only the first part of the analysis of constituent power (i.e. of the immanent character of the relation between the multitude and potentia), and that Negri moves on to present Marx and Lenin as the theorists who provide the fullest account of the constituent potentia of the multitude to date. Indeed, Negri points out that it was the shortcomings of the Jeffersonian account that resulted in the transformation of the libratory idea of the frontier to be overcome, into a hunger for appropriation and ultimately into imperialism. Indeed, Empire emphasises this failure of the republican tradition by arguing that the open frontier that lies at the heart of the American constitution forms the basis of the ‘constitutional’ structure of modern Empire, one that is always open to further spaces of accumulation. Had Bull not skated over in silence the discussion of Marx and Lenin in Insurgencies, he would have discovered a further deepening of the analysis of constituent power, beyond the republican tradition. There (and elsewhere in Negri’s work) he would have observed how the transformations of labour, of the time of co-operation, of the relation between multitude and potentia increasingly excises any transcendent conception of measure and furthers the Spinozist inspired ontology, by concentrating on the problematic of time beyond Marx.[20]
On this account, what becomes of politics? And what becomes of the relation between the multitude and the State once both the state of nature and civil society are done away with? It should first of all be evident that, if one retains the tri-partite formula of liberal teleology, any reading of Empire will inevitably miss the central point: that is, to think a politics of the multitude outside the pre-conceived schema of civil society and the State, i.e. outside a transcendental principle of order. What Negri finds in the thinking of potentia is the notion of a constitutive power that can operate outside any notion of constituted (sovereign) power, precisely because it is its precondition. Liberal theory itself recognises this constitutive process but renders it impotent in the theological schema of the state of war, state of commerce, and state of right. We may have had to wait for Hegel for this formula to attain its full theological heights but all the elements were in place long before. So, in the last chapter of Insurgencies, Negri argues that the point is not that of making the political ‘correspond’ to the social but rather of ‘inserting’ the production of the political into the creation of the social. Bull is only able to understand this by suggesting that Hardt & Negri understand the social in terms of the political, whereas these divisions of liberal thought have been radically displaced.[21]
The question remains, however, of the relation of this constituent power (i.e. the multitude as potentia) to constituted power (i.e. sovereignty, or potestas). For if constituent power is constitutive of sovereignty one must ask how constituted power can suppress, control, that which produces it. So what exactly is the relation between constitutive and constituted power? We have already seen that this relation can be neither equivocal not analogical. Negri argues that in modernity the State always returns to bring the constitutive process to an end. Put otherwise, in modernity, constitutive power becomes a peculiar power that is summoned only at particular moments in time to legitimise the constituted order in proscribed ways. Modern parliamentary democracy is a paradigmatic example of this. Every four or five years ‘the people’ are called to the polls to decide on the new government. This is at once the recognition of the power of ‘the people’ as the ultimate source of power, and at the same time the neutralisation of that potentia. Constituted power operates a horizontal representation of the multitude, and a vertical subsumption. Negri summarizes this effectively in ‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo’: “Measure subordinates the plurality of singular powers to a schema of organic mediations and distributes them in a hierarchy of functions. Modern representative democracy is a practice of measure and a glorification of the limit.” That is, constituent power is dissolved in representation, and projected into the ‘space of politics’. In effect, this is the becoming autonomous of politics, or its becoming spectacular. Negri goes on to argue that the neutralisation of the multitude in the predetermined space of politics requires the further operations of control of the multitude on what we can call the plane of biopolitical production. This operation of control takes the form of a ‘rationalization of time’.
The great precursors here are Marx and Foucault. The notion of a micro-physics of power, developed by Foucault, sees the diffuse distribution of a diagram of power, or control, that is deployed by social institutions throughout society. Foucault’s critique of the relation of civil society to the political, to the State, does not result in the negation of the State but it shows how the potestas of the State exists in all the interstices of society – as biopower – and operates just as much through the production of subjects, as it does by brute repression. The State becomes immanent in his conception of ‘governmentality’. The two spaces, civil society/State are so intermingled that the distinction no longer has any analytical consistency. Marx, on the other hand, de-mystifies the apparently smooth operations of the market that structure – and progressively subsume – the social, while at the same time revealing the material world of antagonistic forces that compose it and that do so increasingly as a collective multitude brought together in productive co-operation. Real subsumption marks both the realisation of the law of value, the form of the rationalisation of time of modernity, and the end of the dialectic (that recuperated a mythical, pre-social, ‘outside’). If capital subsumes the time of existence, it also returns time to us as collective substance. For everything has already been reduced to more or less congealed quantities of time (time = 0), expressed in hierarchical units of measure, subject to reversible relations of exchange. But once subsumption has effectively subsumed the whole of the social, measure can only measure itself: tautology. Time becomes substance.[22] Furthermore, “abstract, social and mobile labour-power […] subjectivises itself around its own concept of time, and a temporal constitution of its own” (See ‘Archaeology and Project: The Mass Worker and the Social Worker’ in Revolution Retrieved, p220). This subjective, antagonistic element serves to introduce differentiation into the apparent indifference of the dense, tautologically structured dynamic of real subsumption, i.e. where all is reduced to exchange, to congealed dead time, exchanging like with like – making time reversible, equal to zero. “The homologies can only be given because the context on which they operate is that of indifference. But if I deny, resist, denounce this fact and its indifference I am not – for this very reason – within indifference, on the contrary I am difference, real determination and practical determination” (Macchina tempo, p72). We are thus left with two elements in an antagonistic relation: on the one side capital/sovereignty, which attempts to reduce the time of co-operation to the zero time of the capitalist tautology of value and the formal equivalence of individuals, operating – that is – a subsumption of the social sphere by intervening in it directly – through a rationalization of time, of bodies – while emasculating it politically; and the multitude upon which it depends and which exists in the productive co-operation of its elements. There is no element that may operate a dialectical resolution here. Thus antagonism becomes ontologically fundamental. The conditions for a liberal solution simply no longer exist.
So, constituted power operates by operations of command, control, and subsumption – for, as a consequence of the ‘withering of civil society’[23] discussed above, potestas now aims to shape the multitude directly. Any pretence to mediation is lost. Potestas does indeed do its best to create potentia but it must do this in the face of the productive resistance of the multitude – folding over of potentia, i.e. appropriating it on its own plane. It supervenes upon immanence, aims to capture it, domesticate it for its own purposes, making the time of the multitude productive, locking it within a homogenized organization of exchange: time = 0. But the fundamental separation of thought and practice that the state watches over and perpetually reproduces, creating a transcendent realm of freedom of thought with a corresponding standardisation and repression of practice, what we might call the truth in practice of liberalism, cannot disguise the fact that its ontological consistency is derived entirely from, and is always undercut by the ontology of potentia, in which freedom is identified with the possibilities of the autonomous temporality of material co-operation and in the relations of the bodies of the multitude. Following Spinoza, Negri & Hardt demonstrate how spurious is a freedom restricted to the realms of speech and thought, i.e. a freedom utterly divorced from the practices of the multitude; a freedom severed from action, from time. And that any such attempt to separate power from what it can do is only the recognition of that crisis that perpetually excavates and disorganizes sovereignty.
But let us consider further this historical (re-)production of potentia. Although Marx’s notion of living labour, as the expression of multitude and power, allows for an ontological deepening of the notion of constitutive power around the problematic of an immanent and constitutive temporality,[24] we still require an account of the process by which this constitutive power can develop, progress, alter, i.e. how the concrete time of history introduces itself into potentia. Has not the separation between constitutive and constituted power become so radical that it is either a case of suppression of the one or of the other? Where is innovation to come from if determinate historical conjunctures always bring to an end, or capture the potentia of the multitude and lock it within pre-determined channels? Is not potentia forced to choose either to revolve in the indifference of its own abstract temporality, never able to grasp the materiality of history without being entrapped, captured by it; or being turned into the stone of the dead institutions of the established order, locked into the irreversible time = 0 of exchange relations? Negri argues in the final pages of Insurgencies, a history of the complex dynamic between constituent and constituted power, that rather than see the State as always being brought back in as a block on constitutive power as the history of modernity (retold in the earlier chapters of the book) has taught us, one should understand constituted power as being immanent to constitutive power. Moving away from ‘the crisis of the concept of constituent power’, a crisis made visible in its failure to ever achieve a sufficient consistency to block the re-constitution of sovereignty, towards ‘the concept of constituent power as crisis’. (Insurgencies, p319) That is, constituted power is to be organised in an open relation between origin and exercise of power. And it is to Marx (not Jefferson!) that Negri turns in order to find a way of thinking this effectively. I will quote this passage from ‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo’ at length:
“Marx established the distinction between constant capital and variable capital. The first is the ensemble of material and technical elements accumulated by production and conserved in its development; the second is the living labour that regenerates that which has been accumulated (existing as latent in accumulation) and makes of this the basis of a new valorisation. But this distinction does not only concern the capitalist mode of production. Rather, it concerns the materialist field in its entirety, that is to say, the world. Production constructs the world following a trace of which temporality is the substance. Dead labour, the finished time of creation, continues to accumulate on the ‘before’ of this process; the ‘after’ is represented by living labour, that is, by the kairòs of bodies that create truths through praxis. On the edge of being, living labour is thus the power of the world, of that which has already been (and that remains there in a constant manner), and that is now regenerated by that which will appear from the work of creative living labour. It is here that the metaphysics of materialism finds its basis as well as its centre: in recognising that the capitalist process has subsumed the world, turning it into a dead creature, and that on the contrary living labour is kairòs, the restless creator of the to-come. […] [L]iving labour takes the world in hand, transforming and innovating it radically in the common.” (Time for Revolution, ‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo’)
In this way, the multitude always operates within ever-shifting conditions that it both serves to constitute, and by which it is in turn shaped but which it is always able to re-connect with its own founding constitutive power, articulated by changing balances of forces. What better definition of the notion of constitutive power than that given of communism by Marx & Engels in The German ideology: ‘[Constituent power is] the real movement that abolishes the present state of things’?
We see clearly the results of Malcolm Bull’s reversal of potentia and potestas when he argues that ‘it is a case of sympathy rather than sovereignty, of justice rather than power’. Negri & Hardt refuse such an abstract notion of justice, preferring rather to see it only in the form directly expressed in the practices of the multitude; recognising that, either such a notion is produced materially by the concrete demands of the multitude, or it is nothing other than the expression of the potestas of sovereignty.[25] Malcolm Bull’s example, the US support for decolonisation, is instructive of his way of thinking. To suggest – as he does – that this was a case of sovereign justice rather than a) the active resistance of the peoples of the various colonial territories, along with b) a critical moment in the creation of US economic, political and military hegemony (that is, the appropriation of the constitutive power of the colonial subjects by potestas) is, I believe, to too readily buy the story of the US as the disinterested supporter of freedom.
Bull insists that ‘insofar as the problems of the powerless have been addressed in recent years, it is often through a dynamic that works in the opposite direction to the one Negri and Hardt suggest’. By which he means that it is global institutions that have been called upon to step in to resolve problems of famine, underdevelopment, etc. To what extent such ‘solutions’ have been successful – anything more than a plaster that in no way blocks the extension of those same problems – it is, I think, possible to have serious doubts. However, Bull’s positive proposal – some form of benign totalitarianism – is surely only a provocation; and the claim that one should somehow globalise American norms is at best an empty joke, if one considers that: America has the weakest labour laws in the western world (apart perhaps from those operative in the UK), its wealth is dependent upon exporting the costs of its debt to the rest of the world and sustaining some of the most repressive regimes in the middle-east so as to maintain cheap oil supplies, its democratic credentials are based on the choice between two identical ‘alternatives’ (when not decided by a judge) that vie with one another for who can pocket more wealth from multinationals, that feels itself entirely justified in bombing whoever it feels is a threat to its national security (always very flexibly interpreted), and that has vetoed more UN resolutions than any other country since the UN was founded. One is tempted to ask Bull, how do you globalise that? It appears to me that global totalitarianism is what is emerging and it isn’t pretty. Surely Bull’s proposal is merely ironic, a provocation, an amused suggestion that ‘if only the US were a little less hypocritical’ and it did what it said it wanted to do, things would be just fine. Irony has its place but if Bull is claiming that truly such a practice would be possible, and he suggests that truly it is possible through the good auspices of the US, then in this case it easily turns into a pleading before the master. Bull seems to be saying, if we believe in your total(-itarian) power will you do that which it is in your power to do? But were the US or any other organization of world capitalism to ‘create’ potentia, i.e. to allow the free development of peoples, of the multitude, outside any exploitative recuperation by capital, it truly would be creating its own gravediggers.
There are of course many problems with Empire, some of which Negri himself has acknowledged, not the least of which is the provision of an adequate account of the politics of the multitude in very different conditions around the globe. There is also a question about whether this diversity is itself allowed for in Empire, since the notion of the multitude must be premised on some fundamental sameness of material conditions. The question of combined and uneven development across the globe raises its head again. (I think that many of the objections in Arrighi’s article, in HM 10.3, are very apposite here.) However, the suggestion that ‘big government’ (WTO, G7, the UN Security Council, multinationals, NATO…?) is the solution, can only be maintained if one fails to see that it is the solution currently being deployed – surely this should give one pause... In the present, to call for some mythical contract can only be to cynically re-legitimise the status quo, or it is an example of impotent despair. It reminds me rather of Heidegger’s impotent cry of ‘only a God can save us’.
What I have endeavoured to show is how neo-liberalism very easily turns into totalitarianism, for its presuppositions are the same. Bull’s contribution is important, if for no other reason, than that it has reminded us of this. For it is surely naïve to believe that ‘big government’ – however big – will step in and regulate global financial markets to empower the poor, the destitute. Bull’s reversal of the ontological, the material priority of potentia over potestas, would leave us impotent – more of the same. Rather, it is another system that is needed. ‘Un altro mondo è possibile’ (Another world is possible) is the slogan on the placards at Porto Alegre, Florence and beyond. Perhaps the strategy of Autonomia, the strategy of exodus, is no less realistic than to call for the WTO, IMF and G8 to regulate the system for the benefit of the poor. Having tried the one, perhaps we should try the other.
Matteo Mandarini
[1] Not wishing to burden this account with personal anecdotes, suffice it to say that the principal reason for it not being published then was due to the LRB’s policy of not to publishing article length ripostes. Criticism is usually restricted to the limited space of the letters pages.
[2] Blair and Bush, Putin and Chirac, Berlusconi and Sharon – who would have thought consensus could be so easily reached between ex-social democrats and war criminals, (failed) Texas oil men and Gaullists, ex-KGB men and Western media magnates…? When, moreover, ‘advisers’ to centrist governments are able to openly publish articles with titles such as ‘Why we still need empires’ (Robert Cooper, The Observer, 7 April 2002), it is patent that categories through which we have grasped the world politically heretofore no longer engage it the same way.
[3] As Bull said in the concluding paragraphs of his review: ‘Te link between welfare and totalitarianism works both ways: social regulation and inclusion go together. If the US wants to make the world a safer place, it will eventually have to offer, or force other governments to provide, the population of the entire world the means to participate in global society’.
[4] The ‘our’ is fully inclusive, our values are absolute and should, must, be extended to include everyone under their protective embrace. There will no longer be an outside: the barbarians are not be kept at bay but hunted down, ‘dead or alive’, where ‘alive’ means confinement to a concentration camp in the no man’s land of Guantanamo Bay.
[5] As Arianna Bove and Erik Empson succinctly put it in their paper, ‘The Dark Side of the Multitude’, given at the ______ conference.
[6] Bull goes on to acknowledge that guilt by association is insufficient but it is a strategy that he repeats throughout his article.
[7] A translation of which is included in Time for Revolution by Antonio Negri (forthcoming from Continuum January/February 2003), which also contains the more recent ‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo’.
[8] Whether this ‘consent’ is active or passive is not of importance to the ontological aspect of the argument, although it is evidently important from the strictly political angle. Indeed, in response to this latter question, Spinoza also provides an analysis of why people will their own subjection through an analysis of affects/passions and action. Deleuze’s writings on Spinoza foreground this question, as does his work with Guattari (see Anti-Oedipus in particular).
[9] Some new and important questions do arise today: to what extent can such a ‘balance’ be over-determined by a single superpower? How is this ‘precariousness’ negotiated through increasingly effective process of subjectification? But these concern strategy and tactics; they do not alter the consistency of the ontological dependency of potestas on potentia but do affect the forms that that dependency may take.
[10] Arguably this is Marx’s
position also, commodity fetishism is not an upside down view of social
relations under capital; it is not a case of false perceptions, false
consciousness. People really do operate according to the strict rules dictated
by the commodification of relations. In many of his works, Negri takes up
Lukács’ notion of ‘second nature’ (derived from his reading of Hegel) to make
this point. Esther Leslie provides an absorbing overview of commodity fetishism
and ‘second nature’ in her book on Walter Benjamin (see Walter Benjamin:
Overpowering Conformism).
[11] Bull adds ‘Dr’ Kissinger to this unlikely pairing on the grounds that Spinoza is Kissinger’s favourite philosopher.
[12] For an account of these forms see ‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo’ in Time for Revolution.
[13] The fundamental premises of Operaismo continues to hold true for Hardt & Negri: class struggle is the motor of history; all innovation is in the hands of the working class. In fact, both Negri & Hardt insist that the concept of ‘the multitude’ is a class concept. How one can think the class composition of the multitude is, I believe, both difficult and important if the concept is to gain sufficient consistency to be analytically – as well as politically – useful.
[14] See Nathan Widder’s excellent account of the attempts to think difference outside any subjection to unity in Genealogies of Difference.
[15] That is, the reversal proposed by Bull removes the constitutive role of the multitude and means that sovereignty is ‘always already’ instituted (against which one could do worse than turn to Marx’s ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State’).
[16] As we have seen, in modern political theory these two steps involve: a) the fiction of the state of nature, and b) the claim that rights are handed down by the sovereign power.
[17] Hindsight is, of course, a great thing but surely Bull’s suggestion that, following 9/11, ‘without yet realising it, the world’s only superpower wants to achieve something that presupposes greater economic and social justice’ requires an astonishing level of naivety.
[18] Which must have warmed Malcolm Bull’s heart, briefly.
[19] We can all agree that, in order to avoid what can surely only otherwise be many decades of violence to come, we must fight the causes of poverty and exploitation. What should now be equally clear, however, is that we cannot expect the principal beneficiaries of exploitation to carry that fight.
[20] See the ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to Time for Revolution and the first essay in that book, ‘The Constitution of Time’, for more on the political ontology of time beyond Marx. His most recent sustained analysis of the political ontology of time – ‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo’ – can also be found in Time for Revolution.
[21] As we have, it is rather within Liberal political theory that one can see the political – or the state – as the immanent truth of the social. Whereas it should by now be apparent that what is at stake for Hardt & Negri is the social and the political being subsumed within ontology. Indeed, they become the principles of an ontological constructivism or ethics. In Empire, Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, understood here as collective, co-operative, productive relations by and through the multitude is adopted and serves the purpose of exploring these questions. No doubt Negri & Hardt’s account of such a politics, praxis or political ontology of the multitude is somewhat sketchy, and it is to the overcoming of this problem that Hardt & Negri are dedicating their next collaborative work.
[22] Negri discusses this move in ‘The Constitution of Time’ as follows: “1) in real subsumption all use-value is drawn into exchange-value; 2) but with that the external origin of the measure of time (based on the externality of use-value) recedes and measure is flattened onto the process itself; 3) if measure measures itself, it follows that the process of value concludes in that of command, in tautology and indifference” (Time for Revolution, ‘The Constitution of Time’). See also ‘Twenty Theses on Marx’ in Marxism Beyond Marxism, p149-80 and ‘Value and Affect’ Boundary 2, 26:2 summer.
[23] See Labor of Dionysus, Hardt & Negri.
[24] Time for Revolution by Antonio Negri, containing two long essays, ‘The Constitution of Time’ and ‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo’, is, thus far, the unsurpassed theoretical exploration of this question.
[25] This latter being all too often more closely linked to strategic decisions and demands of ‘big government’ (WTO, G7, NATO…), along with ‘big business’, than anything else.
[i] I would like to thank Jon Beasly-Murray for comments to an early draft of this ‘reply’, which saved me from some embarrassing errors, and especially to Eliot Albert for clarifying both my thinking and my writing.