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?