Commonwealth: Some Initial Comments & Questions

Since the previous posts have been so thorough in their summary, advancement and critique of Hardt & Negri’s project in the first half of Commonwealth, I offer below a couple comments and questions that have continued to interest (and sometimes perplex) me in the reading of this text.

Comment #1: Commonwealth as anti-manifesto

I will argue that Commonwealth is ultimately a book of description. I have been struck by its peculiar genre: Commonwealth traffics in political theory, Continental philosophy, manifestoes and other radical tracts, race theory, feminist studies and the writings of the women’s movement, queer theory, and so on, and yet it is not reducible to any one of these categories. In fact, I would say that the focus on the commons at times conflates and folds distinct histories, movements, and philosophical projects that have real antagonisms with one another into a single mode (I’m still at pains to say what this mode actually is, but we might tentatively call it a “pop philosophy.”) While Commonwealth might set out to mobilize the multitude, I find that it ultimately operates as a description of the multitude. The tone, cadence, and style of Commonwealth suggests that Hardt & Negri seek an audience that extends beyond the academy, but I wonder who composes this popular audience and why the people who compose it need a 450-page description of social apparatuses, global flows, collectivities, and affects, that are supposedly immediately apparent and visible to all of us anyway? My main critique of the text (and I emphasize critique over an evasion of engagement and argument that seems to plague much of Commonwealth) is that the book, despite the authors’ best intentions, appropriates a history of radical writing into a form of writing that is far from, if not opposed to, the manifesto.

The manifesto, it seems to me, is a different kind of popular genre. The manifesto describes an intolerable situation, but it always moves beyond the plane of description to do something—to mobilize a collectivity, a space for thought, and/or a space for action through writing itself. In other words, with all of its focus on affects and bodies, Commonwealth fails (for me at least), to create affects that might be mobilized in the “struggle over common wealth.” My tentative thoughts on Commonwealth’s distance from the manifesto (and other forms of radical writing) emerge out of my recent reading of The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection. I don’t mean to set that text up against Commonwealth, especially since these projects share some obvious common-ground. However, I am struck by the difference in reading a text like The Coming Insurrection where each page contains an urgency and momentum that moves toward action, if not anarchy. The Coming Insurrection certainly has flaws, but it doesn’t seem to care. This is not to say that we should favor writing that heedlessly promotes action and/or violence over thought, but Hardt & Negri’s reliance on the descriptive mode suggests to me a real fear of what Rancière, in Hatred of Democracy, refers to as the anarchy of democratic life, which always undergirds democracy itself.

Comment #2: Commonwealth and minority struggles

Throughout my reading of Commonwealth, I have been largely struggling to understand how and why Hardt & Negri regularly evoke struggles and movements mobilized around questions related to race, gender, and sexuality. What, for example, is the precise function of evoking the Black Panthers as just “one example” at the end of 1.2, “Productive Bodies”? I wonder what it means to evoke black struggles in this way—the text moves repeatedly from large claims about the commons which we all share (“a democracy of the multitude is imaginable and possible only because we share and participate in the common”) to difference via minority struggles. At times, the desire to fold such struggles into a “common,” masks over very real differences between different positions, movements, and arguments. For example, I find it hard to reconcile Paul Gilroy’s advocacy in Against Race of a post-race politics with the Black Panthers’ affirmation of blackness in the ongoing struggle for Emancipation. But somehow these positions are folded together “in common” in the “Productive Bodies” chapter. While I appreciate H&N’s commitment to refusing critique for critique’s sake at the start of Commonwealth, I find it problematic when it becomes a way of, for example, flattening the differences between carefully articulated positions on the politics of race. In that chapter, H&N repeatedly insist that black radicalism does not invest bodies with “some essential, spiritual blackness” and yet they depend on and cite the work of Cedric Robinson, who insists throughout Black Marxism on the importance of retaining a metaphysics of blackness. [Note: I plan to add a few notes on H&N’s citation of the anti-social thesis in queer theory later this week.]

And finally, this might be a picky point, but I want to point out that there are times when H&N incorporate sources without evaluating their evidence. I think that this is also part of their commitment to refuse critique, but this particular kind of refusal often produces a kind of evasion and refusal to directly engage with others’ arguments and sources. For example, their treatment of the “epidermalization” of race in the twentieth century depends in large part on Paul Gilroy’s account in Against Race of how biotechnology in the twenty-first century is transforming the biopolitics of race into what Gilroy calls a “nanopolitics.” Gilroy’s discussion in this section is premised upon a serious misunderstanding of what genomics claims to know about phenotypic racial identity. This misunderstanding is further confused in H&N’s account (ie: “DNA testing” has nothing to do with “characterizations of racial difference” and “molecular corporeal traits” is a contradiction in terms). I’m not suggesting that H&N should be expected to be experts in genomics or biomedical history: I simply want to point out that at times their commitment to affirmation at all costs flies in the face of historical veracity.

Question #1: The Turn to the Social

What is at stake in the turn from economics, or traditional Marxist categories of analysis, in Commonwealth to the “social”? It also seems important that “culture” does not figure in the text.

Question #2: Critique

What does Commonwealth gain and/or sacrifice in refusing critique?

Commonwealth Part II

When should we move on to the second half of the book?

People can continue posting on the first half, but maybe we can agree to post on the second half in the next two or three weeks?

forces that break apart

[responding to trew levellers comment on my post (i don't know how to use the comment function)]

Yes, I would definitely agree to a determination of “common” as a “capacity to activate, create, and mobilize multiple forces that break apart [or break open] organizations.” I think this is a great formulation – for me the question then becomes how to give a consistency to such “breaks,” without thereby resolving them into forms of “organization.” I realize this strikes one as parodoxical (maybe even non-sensical) in the terms that have usually designated “politics” (it may be easier think of these breaks in art), but I think it is precisely the loose affiliations and tentative associations built around specific, concrete problems that compose such "breaks" and that a term like “micro-politics” suggests (a term I don’t think HN use); one gives up an ideal of THE revolution (always put off until another day) for real, multiple, practices and experimentations.
It’s the affirmation, by that I mean the actualization, of such breaks that I find missing from the book. I don’t think you can attempt to synthesize or represent such breaks – you have to create them.

Communism already exists. Communism does not yet exist.

This is also preliminary. A few thoughts for now to be developed later.

I’ll begin on an affirmative note. I appreciate the emphasis on the common as the terrain of struggle.

I was curious to see how the book has been received and found a review in the Wall Street Journal. It ends: “COMMONWEALTH is a dark, evil book, and it is troubling that it appears under the prestigious imprimatur of Harvard University Press. Countless millions were slaughtered by adherents of Karl Marx in the 20th century. God help us if the scourge returns in the 21st.” It is telling that confronted with this dark, evil book, the reviewer is especially concerned with “the prestigious imprimatur” that grants it legitimacy. In other words, if the book were merely common it would be of little concern, but the fact that it is granted prestige offends the guardians of culture whose livelihoods are structured around partitions in the common.

Like a number of pieces in mainstream papers and magazines since the economic crisis, the WSJ review begins by incredulously announcing that Marx is “back in fashion” much the way that we are told that Ayn Rand is once again having her day. If Marx is being read and written about more frequently post-bailout that is probably a good thing, but I don’t know what that has to do with fashion. Of course Marxism, as the critique of capitalism, never went away, but more interestingly what seems to be gaining traction yet again is the use of the word “communism” to refer not to something that has failed but a promise of a better way of life. (It is more interesting because more naive.) In other words, COMMONWEALTH can be seen as a contribution to what Badiou calls “the communist hypothesis.” For Badiou, this first takes a minimal, negative form—namely, that the logic of the division of labor, class division, exploitation, private property, etc. is not inevitable. As a hypothesis or idea of generic equality, it contains no program or recipe for politics. It merely marks a precondition or axiom of political thought.

H & N’s book is of course called COMMONWEALTH not “Communism.” There is an emphasis then on longue durée as well as an avoidance of the connotations that accrue around “Communism” as ideology, party, nation-state…; the “-ism” perhaps implying within the name itself the “corruptions” that attend a robust notion of the multitude organized around the common. The “poor” in place of the proletariat serves a similar function. It is an ordinary word with a long political history but also vague enough as to be flexible, heterogeneous and inclusive.

The posts by Wesamtgunstkerk and Trew Leveller both raise the question of how the figure of the multitude is or becomes political and this seems to be both the focus of the book and the question it never answers. The multitude designates a non-liberal form of pluralism, a democratic figure not defined by hegemony or consensus but the common as a constellation of singularities. But if the multitude always already exists not as a static entity but in a process of becoming, its political organization or its becoming-revolutionary obviously remains a potentiality that’s not-yet-actualized. Otherwise, no need for the book itself or that “training” that they tell us is necessary (a term MRK rightly flags that, at the very least, begs more explanation). This is a recurrent problem in Western Marxism usually framed in explicitly dialectical terms. To use the old familiar language, the multitude has to go from in-itself to for-itself, it has to become self-conscious. Granted the “self” or body of the multitude as revolutionary figure is not a unity and the desired consciousness is not a matter of knowledge but of event, but this process still remains to be thought—this passage, or crossing of threshold, which seems to necessitate an awareness or consciousness of the common as distilled from its corrupt forms. Of course, it cannot merely be thought, it must be produced or created, but it’s hard to escape the feeling in COMMONWEALTH that this production of the new proceeds from some moment of awareness, some inversion of perspective in which the poor, the monstrous and the excessive is grasped as productive, beautiful and common. But this inversion cannot be merely a reversal, it cannot take a form that power recognizes. It must be a genuine alternative. There is then a hesitation or oscillation: Resistance is immanent to power (i.e. there is no outside) and yet we must negotiate an alternative that escapes the double-bind of binary oppositions (we must get outside). Again this logic of the immanent break is very familiar to the history of dialectical thought in Western Marxism despite H & N’s insistence that they are somehow free of this logic. (I don’t mean this as a criticism except of their tendency to dismiss dialectical thought. I have never understood the implication that all dialectical thought is somehow in league with transcendence and party politics.) The logic of immanence demands that Revolution is simply subtraction and the term they use for subtracting the common is exodus, but again a new organization of the multitude has to come into being before this exodus will find its moment.

This leads me to what I find least compelling in Hardt and Negri’s project. To pick up on the thread raised by MRK, what I am most dubious of is the folding together of politics, ethics and ontology. As Wesamtgunstkerk suggests, politics itself may get lost here as it hovers ambiguously between this shift of perspective or recognition and the real revolutionary movement of bodies that is not thinkable as such but still to come in some future event (whatever the emphasis on the immanent power of the multitude in its current manifestation). And while I too have some solidarity for the vision of Spinozan love described so nicely by Trew Leveller, I am rather hesitant to embrace a politics grasped in terms of sickness and health in which exploitation and oppression are identified as merely blockages or corruptions of love. Generic equality is not a question of love nor can it be made into a program. It is a hypothesis that can be actualized in specific instances that rupture regimes of sense or divisions of bodies but do nothing to confirm the latent potentiality of Being.

commonwealth

In the last two sentences of the preface, “The Becoming-Prince of the Multitude” H&N state “we hope that our work points [in the direction of a Spinozist rewritting of Heidegger’s Being and Time],”

…overturning the phenomenology of nihilism and opening up the multitude’s process of productivity and creativity that can revolutionize our world and institute a shared commonwealth. We want not only to define an event but also to grasp the spark that will set the prairie ablaze.

As I read it, this passages announces the simultaneity of a philosophical and a political project. I’m first of all curious what makes the writers of Commonwealth (or anyone) so keen on uniting a political project and a philosophical project in one book. Isn’t the joy of both to be found in their intense specificity? On the philosophical side, one expects to encounter a sustained discussion of nihilism and the conditions of its overturning (how exactly would a Spinozist rewriting of Heidegger proceed? What sort of approach enables such a temporal folding in the history of philosophy? Russ’s explication of Spinoza’s use of the term multitude (its relation to love, ethics, the problem of causality) was so rich, but we don’t get anything like that in this book. We move so quickly through so much material that we lose the precision of clearly articulated philosophical problems that one finds in Negri’s earlier work or in many of the text from which they are drawing their argument. This is all fine - I certainly don’t think all writing should be philosophy - but why state the above “hope” when its not what really unfolds in the text?

As for second aspect, the more directly “political project” (which would “revolutionizing the world and institute a shared commonwealth”) we get very few concrete proposals and instead are offered a survey of various political projects culled from both from the history of revolutionary struggles and multiple contemporary movements. I realize that in some respects this is meant to force this often forgotten history into the foreground and even revitalize it, but there is so little attention to the disagreements or differences between these movements (which would raise difficult questions for us in relation to these histories). It becomes difficult to establish the concrete relation between these movements and the book we hold in our hands. How exactly is it plugged into those struggles (or even how could it be, which is probably a better question)? I guess what I’m asking is how we would describe the subjectivity produced by the text of Commonwealth itself?

I’m also very interested in how the term “critique” is used (and the ways its dismissed). For example, we are informed a “transcendental critique of power” in necessary. My understanding of this formulation is that the kind of “critique” H&N are after would seek not to establish the transcendental criteria of knowledge (Kant), but rather seek to transform (transgress) those conditions (this is how Foucualt defines “critique” and I think it would be very similar to Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism”), but where does such meticulous chipping away at the conditions of thought and action actually take place in Commonwealth? Dismissals of “corruption” and “evil” and “detrimental forms of the common” just seem too easy.

I found it particularly disturbing (and confusing) that H&N use “language” as an example of a domain that is “for the most part common.” Its only an example in the preface, but the logic of the claim made there is carried throughout most of the first part of the book (and on several levels).

First the claim:

Language, for example, like affects and gestures, is for the most part common, and indeed if language were made either private or public – that is if large portions of our words, phrases, or parts of speech were subject to private ownership or public authority – then language would lose its powers of expression, creativity, and communication. ix

This example seems so confused. There is no discussion here (or anywhere in the book) to what specific capacities or, more importantly, power relations a concept like language might actually refer. There’s little attempt to engage the discipline of linguistics (there is that moment where Noam Chomsky’s “invariable logical-linguistic structures” are briefly brought up in contrast to a possible “dynamic” framework for thinking the relation between language and the autonomy of bio-political subjectivity (58), but then they don’t really go anywhere with the argument). Language instead appears as a thing we don’t have to think about – its language, you know, language, “for the most part common,” of course! The recourse to Wittgenstein also appears so strange in this context – I know very little about his philosophy, but I highly doubt Wittgenstein’s theory of language gets us to a “transcendental critique of power.” Those who know more about this, please enlighten me.

But leaving aside the lack of interest in a theoretical discussion of language (which again would be fine, except its brought up as such a crucial example) there is also in this passage a complete blindness to all of the ways “large portions of our words, phrases, or parts of speech” actually are subject to private ownership (copyright laws, for instance), not to mention the extent to which one’s “powers of expression, creativity, and communication” are in fact highly regulated and subject to semiotic regimes that are anything but common.
H&N consistently evade a problem that I think has extremely important implications – namely, that communication as such, far from being a shared capacity, may be one of the dominant forms of control today. In the interview, “Control and Becoming” reprinted in the collection Negotiations, Deleuze makes useful distinction is made between “communication” and “creating” that I think highlights a key disagreement between Deleuze’s philosophy and Negri’s politics. In that interview, Negri wonders if communications technologies (the common?) provide the conditions for communism today. Negri concedes that “control of communications” is a major problem, but also wonders if, “on the other hand, any man, any minority, any singularity, is more than ever before potentially able to speak out and thereby recover a greater degree of freedom” (Negotiations, p 174 my italics). Deleuze’s response - which invokes Burrroughs and Foucault in defining “control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication” – highlights an crucial problem: its not the control of communication that is the major problem, but communication as such (language understood as communicative) is the very form control takes in our present situation. Deleuze rejects the notion that the realization of communism would be a seizure or reclaiming of the instruments of communication, and he equally rejects the notion that “speaking out” is necessarily emancipatory, proposing instead that, “we’ve got to hijack speech…create vacuoles of non-communication”.

To further the point. In A Thousand Plateaus, “November 20, 1923 – Postulates of Linguistics” Deleuze and Guattari reject the postulate “Language is Informational and Communicational” because such a postulate evades the social and political dimension of language. D&G use education as a prime example, they write, “The compulsory education machine does not communicate information; it imposes on the the child semiotic coordinates,” rejecting like H&N the “linguistic invariables” proposed by Chomsky, they claim, “the elementary unit of language – the statement – is the order word.” (76). What I understand by this formulation is that language does not communicate information, it enforces a power relation. That is, language is not so common afterall.

As noted above, the rejection of Chomsky’s “linguistic invariables” is important, but when H&N instead propose language as simply a “power of expression, creativity, and communication” it seems to me they miss an opportunity to elaborate on a crucial distinction – specifically between those elements within language that operate as “command” and those that resist control. In the same section of “Postulates of Linguistics”, D&G write “the opposition to be made is not between noise and information but between all the indisciplines at work in language, and the order-word as discipline or “grammaticallity” (79). Understanding language as a site of contestation (between indisciplines and the order word, between “minor uses” of language and language as a an instrument of control for the production of docile subjectivities for capital), neither presents language as “common,” nor posits language as an invariable system or structure; instead it draws attention to the conditions that opens up real resistances within language. I think an interesting comparison might be made between the concept of language proposed by H&N (which also seems to be tied to their notion of bio-politics) and the formulation Deleuze and Guattari’s provide in A Thousand Plateaus: “Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits” (TP, 76). Here language would be opposed to the forces of life and the question would be how different arrangements of language make possible the freeing of life. For Deleuze and Guattari, such arrangements are to be found in very specific instances: the “improper” uses of a major language by minority speakers (“which undermine it from all sides and impose on it a vast array of corruptions and variations” Dialogues, 43), the construction of revolutionary political statements, and also in certain instances of literary experimentation. (H&N use all sorts of quotations lifted from poets and writers (for instance, Calvino “I can’t wait until the syntax of the world comes undone”), but they don’t do anything with these explosive uses of language, they don’t seem to take them very seriously (the syntax of this book is hardly coming undone). Beyond language and literature, the avoidance of aesthetic questions also leads to all sorts of strange formulations regarding the multitude, as Luka pointed out in his point there are significant problems with invoking the figure of "beauty" to describe the multitude, later they say it is “an orchestra keeping the beat without a conductor” (173) (okay, but what sort of beat? what sort of rhythm does the multitude move to? a march? a swing?), and in the section on love, they write, “love composes singularities, like themes in a musical score, not in unity but as a network of social relations” (184) but isn’t there an important difference between the “score” or soundtrack of the capitalist “network of social relations” and the sounds of love or revolution?

Politics
H&N say that “the concept of the political itself” is what is at play in the debates over the concept of “multitude” as a figure of politics. I thought Nico’s attention to the way they formulate this as a possibility helped a lot, but I’m left wondering why there isn’t a more explicit discussion of this crucial difference between multitude as potential and multitude as a really existing politics. If I understand correctly, one of the main aims of the book is to show how various forms of social production usually relegated to the “non-political” are in fact shot through with political meaning and force; here one thinks of “politics before being” (Deleuze and Guattari); one understands life as such (the production of subjectivity) as a collective, political project of construction – a bio-politics (“economic capacities and acts are themselves immediately political” (174), etc. I think I understand how this affirmation of the always already political nature of social life demands a rethinking of politics and how it entails a rejection of notions of politics as existing in a separate sphere or as realized only in moments of constituting a sovereign form of power (a unification of the multitude, one over many, etc.). I am completely sympathetic to this rethinking of “politics,” and even enthusiastic about how such a rethinking could be said to take seriously the old feminist slogan that the “personal is political,” that our most private experiences and relations are necessarily political (and consequently how all sorts of molecular resistances and revolutions are possible at multiple levels). But where I get confused in this book, which repeatedly rejects “unification” as a figure of politics, is precisely in the sort of “synthesis” of multitudinous or molecular political projects I noted above. . It seems so contradictory to affirm at once a politics grounded in the singularity of multiple struggles along multiple axes AND to posit a commonality between those struggle. Moving from an ontological affirmation of multiplicity to the concept of the “common” just becomes too abstract. Sure there are and can be points of conjunction between these struggles, but those conjunctions are also intensely specific and have to be forged in response to really existing struggles and collective practices and experiments.

Finally, there is a lot of talk about “training our political instincts and habits” and assertions that the “social plane of immanence needs to be organized politically.” One of the most confusing moments comes in the “Intermezzo – a force to combat evil” when H&N say that love (qualified to such an extent that in the end I’m not really sure what they are taliking about) contributes to the “training or bildung of the multitude” (195). First of all, the invocation of the concept of bildung (education, culture, development) seems at odds with a political project of exodus. But more interesting, if its not the ultimately consolidating work of “culture,” what exactly is this “bildung”? The extensive discussion about what love and exodus are not, the “corruptions” of these virtues, etc. give us very little by way of concrete practices and strategies for forging alternative relationships (the orchid-wasp example not withstanding). I’m afraid such dismissals and vague celebrations of “alternative kinship networks” are too often and too easily turned into paralyzing dogmas. I don’t see much in terms of concrete criteria for constructing revolutionary bonds of affection and love (after-all anti-family ideology is not always and not necessarily liberating; just consider the some of the alternative kinship structures produced by sex-work) and finally, hasn’t the logic of capital always been to destroy tradition social bonds, however much it may attempt to reinforce them ideologically?

Role of the Intellectual
My last contention with the book revolves around the question of the role of intellectuals, and more broadly, the way “intellectual work” is figured in Commonwealth. As I already noted, “training” and “education” (bildung) emerge at several points as crucial elements in the political organization of multitude, and in part, I think these terms can suggest a rethinking of how we relate to concepts or philosophy. But when we come to the “role of the intellectual” I have a hard time seeing how the proposal is any better than what H&N reject and I'd be very curious to hear what other people thought of this section.

Hardt and Negri’s rejection of any form of vanguardism is well-known and it is repeated throughout the book, “There is no place for vanguards” they say. Its pretty surprising then, when in the same passage, they go on to describe intellectual work as “chart[ing] a new future”” (118). We are told that the intellectual “can only be a militant, engaged as a singularity among others, embarked on a project of co-research aimed at making the multitude,” but there is very little discussion of what specific practices this "charting" involves (how is this research organized, what forms of education and study are involved in it? How does it actively resists falling into either vanguardism, capture by research institutions, or various form of anti-intellectualism that can thrive in activist contexts?). It is abundantly clear that H&N want to distance themselves from a politics that would take a party form or rely on a vanguard (though in their response to Harvey they explicitly say, “we have nothing against taking state power”), but this still leaves so many questions undefined. Once again, its clear what is being rejected, but its not always clear what is being affirmed. When we do finally get a positive statement of the “role of the intellectual” in Commonwealth, I have a hard time seeing how it is an improvement. This is what they write,

The function of the intellectual today, though in many ways radically different, shares some aspects with the one developed in the context of the patristics in the first centuries of Christianity. That was in many repsects a revolutionary movement within and Empire that organized the poor against power and required not only a radical break with traditional knowledge and customs but also an invention of new systems of thought and practice, just as today we must find a way out of capitalist modernity to invent a new culture and new modes of life. Let’s call this, then, only half facetiously, a new patristics, in which the intellectual is charged with the task not only to denounce error and unmask illusions, and not only to incarnate the mechanisms of new practices of knowledge, but also, together with others in a process of co-research, to produce a new truth. (118)

There are several things to say about this passage. After rejecting vanguardism and proposing a notion of “co-research” (which I actually quite like) H&N introduce this idea of a “new patristics.” They unsurprisingly couch the statement as “only half facetious” (which like so many of their formulations is supposed to disarm any criticism one might make of the idea). But this strategy of equivocation is particularly disturbing in this passage because after denouncing repeatedly the “corruptions” of relations modeled on the family, they all of a sudden affirm what is undoubtedly one of the most paternalistic model of intellectual practice, one based on the early church fathers. (Patristics: Church fathers or pertaining to the writings of these.) Now, I realize that the organization of the very early christian church is probably not adequately described in this way, and that it could be a resource or even a model of an egalitarian form of community (which following Jesus of the Gospels could also imply the rejection of the family or, as many feminist historians of the early church have also been interested in retrieving, a radically anti-sexist form of association), but there is absolutely no discussion of exactly how this “new patristics” would be distinct from those forms of authority such a “model” historically lent itself to. It just comes at the end of the chapter without elaboration. Lacking this, how is “patristics” any better than a “party” (given both lent themselves to unbelievable “corruptions”, in the language of the authors)? And doesn’t such a move also imply that the multitude might be best thought of as “church” organized around the equal distribution of the common (the “body of christ”)? If this is what is being suggested (and its certainly a compelling idea) why is it not made more explicit?

As a figure of the intellectual, a “new patristics” is ambivalent at best, but what does this term implies as a practice of thought, of reading and interpretation. A “new patristics” that moves away from “critique” as the basis of intellectual work, toward “translating the practices and desires of the struggles into norms and institutions” hardly seems satisfying. Where exactly do we get the criteria used for this “translating” work? If a “new patristics” is “charged with the task” of nothing less than “to produce a new truth” wouldn’t some discussion be necessary regarding the specific methods of this task be called for here?

I agree that new practices of love and constructive projects of exodus are necessary, but I find little in this book that actually suggests what such alternative practices might look like or what criteria would accompany them. Instead I find a vague idea that might be summed up as a “good, non-corrupt, non-exclusionary, non-hierarchical” politics. Is that enough?

Love and Spinozan Politics

Here I attempt to establish, in brief, the terms of a Spinozan politics; my goal is not necessarily to impose this as the sole or true definition but rather to assist us in understanding what it means for Hardt and Negri to adopt Spinozan definition of “politics” and "love" as well as to open our discussion to competing determinations of politics.

For Spinoza, the multitude is not a form of politics, nor is it necessarily a politics at all. Multitude is foremost, for Spinoza as for Hardt and Negri, constitutive, becoming. Insofar as they draw from the Ethics as well as the Theologico-Political Treatise and the unfinished Political Treatise, the term "multitudo" appears (in some form) in the Ethics only once, in Part V, in the Scholium to Proposition XX. Here, in order to prove that "love towards God is the highest good which we can seek for under the guidance of reason," he explores how, "the mind's power over the emotions consists" in, among other things, "the number of causes [multitudine causarum] whereby those affectiones are fostered, which have regard to the common properties [communes proprietates] of things or to God." The multitude here, if we read it as consistent with the TPT and the PT, is foremost one of causes, not subjects. Love of God refers back to the first Books of the Ethics and invites us to think about ontology and composition and the primacy of such forces or fields in the consolidation or constitution of politics. This is Heidegger in reverse; ontology or being are not the question but the first foundation, and love directs us to this--and to the commonality, or common access, to shared affects and forces. Being is not revealed to us apophatically in the passivity of Angst; becoming is revealed to us in a love that, in turn, returns us not only to God/Nature but to the multitude of causes and to the common forces and properties which are ours in becoming.

Spinoza's love is a principle not unlike conatus; it is less an affect in an emotional sense than as a description of forces. It is in no way subjective nor should it be conflated with emotion without losing sight of its role as an affect (not a passion) in the Ethics. I'm not convinced there is anything human or subjective about love. At its best, Commonwealth asserts this, but the point gets lost in the ecumenical thrust of the first half of the book, where Hardt and Negri seem to respond to critics by creating and deploying "generous" strategic connections with any number of philosophical approaches, social movements, and excoriated theological concepts. At times this is compelling, at times less so, but ultimately what is obscured is the real challenge Spinozism has posed (and continues to pose) to thought and politics since the seventeenth century (to phenomenology, for instance, which is, from the standpoint of the Ethics, disdainful). Spinoza’s has never been an academic philosophy, and as Negri has articulated elsewhere (across the articles collected in Subversive Spinoza, in somewhat more satisfying terms), conflicting versions of modernity are at stake in recuperations of Spinozism since the seventeenth century. But I am in solidarity with Commonwealth insofar as Hardt and Negri continue to pose the multitude as constitutive power, as becoming, in Spinozan terms—terms which are not, as David Harvey suggests in Artforum, arcane or impenetrable, but rather which provide resources for remaking politics not only from below but from the ground up, ontologically. Hardt and Negri are innovative in affirming a continuity across Spinoza's work, investigating how multitude takes shape politically in the TPT, the PT and the Ethics.

A problem arises, however, in the assumption that one can translate multitude and love from the Ethics into political philosophy without explaining this move. Indeed, there is something of a problem in assuming that Spinoza is foremost a thinker of politics. He is decidedly and declaredly not--that is to say, he thinks about politics, but only through an conceptual and empirical edifice established in the Ethics. Spinoza enables us to approach and construct a no-less-immanent plane of politics, yes, but not without a crucial mediation (not a negation!), the terms of the Ethics: ethics. The multitude, in a truly Spinozistic sense as in the Ethics, does not begin as a politics but rather as an infinite array of bodies and affects. The project of the Ethics is to reveal an ethics without morality, to discover how bodies relate to one another on a fundamental plane of immanence, affecting one another and being affected. There is no good or bad politics, just as there is no "good" or "bad"; there is only the discovery of an ethical physics, an economy of happiness and sadness, of activity and passivity where different degrees of power or force lie in a body’s ability to increase its power of activity and decrease its potential for passivity. It is only from here Spinoza moves to articulate a more human ethics which takes this economy into account in terms of emotion and which extends through his later work to a radical recomposition of politics, exegesis, and religion. This is what strikes me as the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s approaches to politics and art, of Foucault’s interest in ethics and its fundamental relation to rethinking Marxism and politics, and to some of the most compelling political projects of the last 50 years. All of these approaches proceed from the assumption—really, the demonstration and proof, lest we forget the very form of the Ethics—that politics begins with an adequate understanding of causality and affect as well as of the terms and strategies of power. It begins as a diagnostic, as an ethics. Whether or not Spinoza strikes you as right is beside the point here; it is an ethics, for Spinoza, that gives shape to his understanding of power as well as politics. The multitude, for Spinoza, does not begin as a political body or as a general will but rather as an infinite reservoir of bodies (irreducible to human bodies) and affects. It is a collection of singularities and becomings, as Deleuze and Guattari frequently affirm, not an organization. These forces, insofar as they proceed from and participate in the same nature as human bodies, are forces we hold in common. This is what Spinoza’s Ethics enables us to think, the terms of our participation in a vast ontological “commons” which we do not merely inherit but rather create and transform insofar as we are, fundamentally, part of nature, a nature to which there is no outside. We proceed from here to understand, through the diagnostic method of the Ethics, how fundamentally active forces become passive and how this is at the same time a diagram of power. We proceed from here, in turn, to something we might call politics, to recognizing our capacity to create and manipulate forms (autonomously) as they are, immanent, and thus increase our power of activity.

Certainly, Spinoza is not the only resource for Hardt and Negri, nor is he the sole influence on such thinkers as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, etc. But his work, and how it has been read, does give us valuable insight into competing determinations of politics as well as to the successes and failures of a book like Commonwealth. Hardt and Negri begin Commonwealth (as well as their trilogy, in Empire) with the assumption that the multitude is a politics, or that it is a political form. I do not pretend to know or understand what “the political” is, but it is clear to me that the multitude is for Spinoza a concept of immanence that proceeds from his work in the Ethics. This does not seem to be the case for Hardt and Negri; the mediation of the Ethics is lost, for better or worse. Perhaps this is a conceptual trend which first takes shape as early as The Savage Anomaly, where Negri discovers a certain break between Books II and III of the Ethics on the grounds that Spinoza abandons an unsatisfying utopian or pantheistic ontology (the First Foundation, foremost a bourgeois ideology) for a more realistic and constitutive diagram of affects (the Second Foundation, the locus of the production of subjectivity). The multitude, it is assumed, begins from the assumptions made in Book III and beyond in the Ethics. Moreover, the love for God we reach by the end of the Ethics--and, at length, in Commonwealth--refers back only as far as the beginning of Book III, to a taxonomy of human affects and passions which found a politics that takes shape in terms of subjectivity and not necessarily in relation to the affects and forces which precede and compose subjectivity, the supposedly-ideological and -bourgeois understanding of God/Nature in Books I and II.

My contention here is not purely scholastic but rather practical, an attempt to understand how Hardt and Negri determine the multitude again in Commonwealth. I will post again as I continue to work through the book, and return to this topic soon...

Some Polemical Notes on the First Half of "Commonwealth"

Why Multitude Is Not A New Figure of Revolutionary Politics

The main wager of Hardt and Negri’s project can be found in the following statement: “that the multitude can be a revolutionary figure and indeed that it is the only figure today capable of revolution” (178). In the chapter where they make this striking claim (3.2), they also quite usefully list the arguments of their main critics – a veritable list of who’s who in contemporary political thought – who have all expressed doubts about the sufficiency of the multitude as the figure of a new revolutionary politics. The critics’ arguments, according to Hardt and Negri, fall into three groups:

1. “Multitude” might describe the immanent multiplicity of the social field, but this in itself is not yet enough to allow us to think politics, since politics always consists of an intervention within the field of social immanence – not in order to create a unity, to unify the social field, as Hardt and Negri simplify, but in order to create a new political body as a homogenous multiplicity capable of making decisions and organizing actions that are irreducible to the logic of social reproduction. (Macherey, Laclau)

2. “Multitude” is a fundamentally ambiguous term (as Spinoza already knew). Lacking any internal political criteria that would be proper to it, it stands for an essentially non-political immanence, which can either be a terrain of political emancipation or the very form of global exploitation and domination. (Virno, Balibar)

3. “Multitude” as a political figure is a petty-bourgeois, reactionary form; it is the very form in which capital today organizes the social in order to better exploit it. (Zizek, Badiou)

The statements are presented as three different directions of criticism, but it quickly becomes clear how they can be read together as a single argumentative line: Multitude is an essentially ambiguous term, from which nothing definitive about politics can be deduced (Virno, Balibar). However, whenever one is faced with an essentially ambiguous entity, it is safe to suppose that this ambiguity will be turned to the advantage of whatever at that moment represents the collection of hegemonic forces; i.e. in capitalism, where capital represents the hegemonic ensemble of forces, the ambiguity of the multitude will always be turned towards capitalist goals (Zizek, Badiou). Consequently, it becomes necessary to imagine the possibility of an autonomous political force that would be capable of turning the potentiality present in the multitude towards a non-capitalist goal (Macherey, Laclau). In other words, one has to become capable of conceptualizing a break and not a continuous line between the immanent social multiplicity and political organization. The possibility of politics rests on the possibility of constructing a consistent discontinuity with respect to the world of social relations and the logic of social (re)production. In fact, politics is nothing but an organization of such a break, in which the multiple elements of social immanence are transformed and recomposed on a radically different plane of immanence – that of politics. Politics, always a bit of a tautology, becomes a way of organizing a discontinuous (conflicting, even antagonistic) relation (i.e. a relation of non-relation) between two kinds of immanence – that of the social multitude and that of political organization itself. I personally find this the minimal requirement for any thinking of politics, a basic distinction that allows one to investigate the present as well as the history of emancipatory political struggles (Marxist or not). To put it crudely, if such an initial distinction is missing – i.e. if one does not differentiate between the multiplicity of social immanence, on the one hand, and politics, on the other – where, then, does the necessity to theorize something like a figure of politics, a figure of revolution, and a form of organization even come from?

The Novelty of Biopolitics?

Hardt and Negri (although their book is nothing but a search for a new form of politics) deny precisely such discontinuity between social immanence and political subjectivation. Any analogy between an economically productive social multiplicity and a multitude capable of making political decisions is, for them, “much more than an analogy … because the same capacities that are set in play, which are necessary for the one, are also sufficient for the other.” (174) The realm of social (re)production, say Hardt and Negri, provides the set of tools and habits, which enable political, i.e. collective, decision making.

If we leave aside the strange description of political decisions as resting on preexisting tools and habits – for, isn’t the whole point of a collective political decision to create a need for new tools and to wrest us from our habitual slumber? – we have to immediately add that Hardt and Negri can posit a continuity between the productive social multiplicity and politics because in their opinion the nature of social production itself has been radically transformed in recent decades. With the rise of new forms of social productivity (affective, immaterial labor, direct production of subjectivity, biopolitics, etc.) the very necessity for some kind of dialectic (Hegelian or not) between social multiplicity and political form seems to have collapsed and each of the two terms is now to be found immediately articulated in the other.

Here, Hardt and Negri are victims of their own kind of (disavowed) vanguardism: since this latter cannot find an expression in the form of an autonomous political subject, it is transposed onto the terrain of social (re)production. In order to describe the necessity for a new form of revolutionary organization, having denied politics any autonomy, they need to posit radical novelty at the level of social (re)production itself. The elusiveness of their description of postmodern capitalism, this new regime of total biological, social, and subjective (re)production, consists in the fact that it is actually made to perform a double task: on the one hand, it is supposed to simply describe a stage in the historical development of forces and relations of production, but on the other hand, it is also supposed to stand – in itself – for a radically new political demand. Behind this a very old specter of historical determinism (capital producing its own gravediggers, etc.), which has constantly troubled Marxism, arises. This is the only way one can explain the strange trait of Hardt and Negri’s prose, where it is the very technical and “expert” descriptions of economists that get directly poeticized as though they were already the language of a new political consciousness.

I would, on the contrary, contend that there is nothing particularly new in immaterial or affective labor, in the direct production of subjectivity, biopolitics, etc. One, for example, only has to read Fredrick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, the Bible of Fordism, to see that production of subjectivity, a total reorganization of affect and knowledge, a new regulated regime of collective life, is at work already at the very heart of industrial production. In this I would agree with David Harvey: there is no capitalism without this entire realm of immateriality and it is rather questionable to locate the novelty of our situation precisely in this dimension. The immaterial has always been hegemonic in capitalism.

Hardt and Negri’s discussion of “productive bodies” (chapter 1.2) seems relevant here. Why would so much revolve on a phenomenology of bodies in a period in which immaterial production is hegemonic? I have a feeling that here Hardt and Negri attempt to provide a kind of “materialist” basis for their discussion of the multitude (of the poor) and immaterial production (and biopolitics). Speaking of bodies, however, is not enough to make one a materialist, and it is striking how here the very problem which I have above identified as that of the (dis)continuity between social immanence and politics repeats on the terrain of the corporeal itself. To put it rather schematically, the logic goes something like this: bodies exist in the multiple immanence of their social productivity, but in order to become capable of positing new (political) relationships, the consistency of this immanence has to be interrupted. In order to do this, Hardt and Negri introduce phenomenology and the question of alterity. “In Merleau-Ponty being-inside the concrete reality of bodies implies an even more fundamental relation to alterity, being among others, in the peceptive modalities and the linguistic forms of being. And the experience of alterity is always traversed by a project to construct the common.” (30) This is a bewildering passage. Hardt and Negri attempt to square the circle – or in this case immanentize alterity – managing along the way to make an already mild thinker such as Merleau-Ponty even less radical than he actually is!! For, a proposition of alterity exists in order to think the breaking up of corporeal immanence and can hardly be reduced to “being among others” and to a communicational coexistence of bodies. How can something like a radical experience (a fundamental experience!) of alterity be traversed by project to construct a common? Unable to develop an idea of politics (of the common) out of the (ultimately mute) multiple immanence of productive bodies, Hardt and Negri require the theological gesture of a “fundamental relation of alterity,” only to in turn negate this negation itself by a kind of metaphysical hocus-pocus of an even more fundamental transversality of the common that is somehow always mysteriously at work in the very flesh of the world.

How Hardt and Negri Fail To Respond To Their Critics

But to return to the question of their critics. What is Hardt and Negri’s response to them? Well, strictly speaking, it doesn’t happen. In another curious move, the criticism, which, as we saw, aims at the relationship between social multiplicities and political subjectivation, is displaced onto a terrain of state of nature versus political sovereignty. As if the criticism of Macherey, Virno, Zizek and others can be reduced to a Hobbesian positing of the necessity of sovereignty over the multiplicity of the state of nature. So, the social constructivism of Judith Butler is brought in to explain how there is no state of nature, how nature is always already produced, already a discursive formation, that the multitude is always also a product of biopolitical production, etc. This is all very fine, but it in no way actually responds to the criticisms themselves. No doubt all of their critics would agree with Hardt and Negri that there is no such thing as a state of nature, that nature is always already socially and historically constructed, produced by a count or whatever; but their point is in any case something different: namely, that no principle of politics, no figure of revolution can be deduced even from such a constructivist insight… something Hardt and Negri completely avoid addressing. (In place of a response one gets a slightly obscene fable about the wasp and the orchid).

Perplexed by Altermodernity

Finally, I want to discuss the second part of the book, “Modernity (and the Landscape of Altermodernity),” separately, with the idea that it will lead back to a discussion of the figure of multitude.

Modernity is said to contain everything from processes of capitalist modernization, colonialism, its corresponding liberal and proprietary republican ideology, Marx, Lenin, Mao, to actually-existing-socialism, and contemporary neoliberal capitalist globalization, while anti-modernity contains indigenous struggles against colonization, certain modern republican ideals, Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Mao, but also National Socialism and the Ku-Klux-Klan. This distinction creates obvious tensions in which certain conceptual possibilities emerge but that also threaten to render the terms of modernity and anti-modernity completely vague and abstract – How can Marx be on both sides, modern and anti-modern at the same time? Isn’t this a contradiction? Yes, Hardt and Negri say, it is a contradiction, but as such it is “a healthy contradiction, one that enriches his thought.” (89) But what does that mean? How does this specific contradiction (between historical evolutionism and a rather more complex thinking of history, which does away with universal laws of historical development) enrich Marx’s thought? Even if we leave aside that “enrichment through contradiction” is a dialectical gesture par excellence, something that Hardt and Negri decidedly oppose, it would be most instructive to learn what profits could be made if we understood this tension in Marx. However, nothing comes of it. A whole discussion – which would undoubtedly necessitate a complication of the two terms of modernity and anti-modernity – is missing.

Instead, there is a jump onto the terrain of antimodern resistance and to a discussion of Jose Carlos Mariategui’s analyses of the Andean indigenous communities. But it does not take long before we stumble upon what seems like another contradiction: “Mariategui certainly recognizes the theocratic and despotic elements of traditional Inca society, but he also finds in it a solid rooting in the common that serves as a basis for resistance.” (89) Obviously, what offers itself to thought in the form of a contradiction here is the opposition within the same society between a theocratic and authoritarian organization, on the one hand, and a (proto-)communist organization, on the other. One would imagine that this would be of extreme importance for a line of thought that seeks to define the liberating and revolutionary potential of the common. Namely, how to think a politics based on a notion of the common without smuggling in at the same time the authoritarian, theocratic, and despotic regimes in which the common has usually been exercised. But again – nothing.

Instead of handling the contradictions to the benefit of our intellectual enrichment, Hardt and Negri decide to solve the tensions by introducing further binary oppositions. So, for example, the contradiction between the fact that “anti-modernity” names emancipatory struggle and the fact that National Socialism is also a force of anti-modernity is solved by a distinction between a liberatory anti-modernity and a reactionary anti-modernity. The latter, which now includes the Nazi project, Ku Klux Klan, and “the deliriums of world domination of U.S. neoconservatives” (Should we make some further distinction between these? Eh.), is reactionary because it seeks to “break the relationship at the heart of modernity and free the dominator from dealing with the subordinated. …[T]hey seek to break the relationship of modernity and put an end to struggle at its core by liberating the sovereign. The so-called autonomy of the political proposed by these theories is really the autonomy of rulers from the ruled, freedom from the challenges and resistance of the subjugated. This dream is an illusion, of course, because rulers can never survive without the subordinated, just as Prospero cannot do without his Caliban and, ultimately, as the capitalist can never be free of those pesky workers.” (100) But it is, of course, questionable to what extent this description actually conveys the specificity of these reactionary phenomena. National Socialism, for example, sought not to break with but rather to integrate and mobilize “those pesky workers” and to realize a project of national unification on racial premises, for the purposes of which a new internal enemy had to be found and eradicated: the Jews, who were not at all cast by Nazi ideology in the role of the Caliban or of the ruled, but rather in the role of the cosmopolitan, uprooted, behind-the-scenes rulers of the world; in other words, it is not simply that the German rulers sought to break from any relationship to their ruled, Germany as a whole sought, in an altermodernism of sorts, to break (of course, by using the most modern of means), from the project of modernity as a whole.

Such subtleties are lost on Commonwealth, where the opposition between modernity and anti-modernity, which has generated all these questions, is quickly dropped (the reason: using binary oppositions gets one stuck in binary oppositions) and the term of “altermodernity” is adopted (following “altermodialiste”), attempting to describe “how liberation movements can achieve autonomy and break free of the power relation of modernity.” (102)

It is rather amusing to observe that at the point where one finds a typical dialectical (triadic) movement – modernity-antimodernity-altermodernity (explicitly modeled on Fanon’s three stages in the evolution of “the colonized intellectual”) – this is not recognized as such: “Altermodernity thus involves not only insertion in the long history of antimodern struggles but also rupture with any fixed dialectic between modern sovereignty and antimodern resistance.” (106) Only because the dialectic for Hardt and Negri for some reason means thinking in binary oppositions, can their Caliban, through a negation of negation, escape non-dialectically. The point is, however, the following: because this dialectical triadic thinking is not aware of itself, it is also incapable of addressing the third term it produces at the same level at which the first opposition was initially developed. In the discussion of altermodernity, the ground of discussion suddenly shifts and we move from a debate about the basic “power relation of modernity,” which was at the center of modernity-antimodernity debate, to a discussion of what looks a lot like identity politics (104-7), while the relationship between the two levels remains obscure, or rather, is the very thing the figure of the multitude covers over. In their discussion of Bolivia (107-112), for example, the new situation is described as consisting of a relationship between two levels: between struggle organized along the axis of class and struggle organized along racial, ethnic, and cultural axes. But this (new?) relation is then immediately subsumed under a (beautiful!) patchwork-form of the multitude itself.

I started my post with a discussion of the insufficiency of the figure of the multitude, and this now brings me back to what for me is a central and unbridgeable difficulty in Hardt and Negri’s idea of politics. The unfortunate description of the multitude in terms of beauty (112) – i.e. multitude as a spontaneous agreement of singularity and commonality, freedom and necessity, of the socio-cultural identity and political principle – points to the fact that no matter how hard Hardt and Negri attempt to describe the multitude as a matter of rupture and constitution, as being of a fundamentally excessive nature with respect to any statist or economic regime, it nevertheless remains a figure of harmonization and accord. Seeking to overcome the truly constitutive division between man’s social and man’s political existence, the multitude offers an all too easy image of peace, a state of calm that parades under the mask of constant becoming and hides under the placative fetish of the encounter. With multitude, one gets a distinct feeling, everything somehow works out, everything is possible (and, consequently, of course, nothing really is). The image of multitude-politics presented in Commonwealth is that of constant and smooth productivity, of an ultimately reconciliatory social plenitude – it might, finally, not be an image of politics at all.