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?