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.