Reading Hardt and Negri

* Book: The Empire's New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri.

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See also: Debating Empire.

Context

From the reading notes of Michel Bauwens, 2006:

- a book of critiques on Hardt and Negri's book: Empire

Post-1968 radical theory took as its target the Marxism of the Frankfurt School, which posited a dominant ideology to explain why the masses do not rise up against their oppressors They suffer from a 'false consciousness' and mistake oppression for freedom.

Much of the post-1968 work took as is goal to disprove this notion by examining local acts of resistance that illustrate how the masses have not swallowed the dominant ideology, at least not completely.

A totalizing account of oppression and resistance became suspect in academic circles. and attention focused on micropolitics.

Laclau's Critique

According to Negri, "the primary event of modernity is the affirmation of 'this' world, the discovery of a plane of immanence. It started with the affirmation of Duns Scotus of the 'singularity of being', i.e. the human was no longer seen as a mix of immanence and transcendence; this was followed by Nicholas de Cusa, Pico de Mirandella, Bovillus, Bacon, and Occam, to culminate with Spinoza.

But this potential modernity was sidelined by a 'reaction', which after the Thirty Years War, re-introduced transcendence as 'sovereignty'.

Laclau disputes this genealogy, and sees it starting before, with the Carolingian Renaissance and Scotus Erigena. This theological debate is centred around 'evil', which is denied a independent existence by the immanentists; they see it as part of development , with an underlying rationality.

Laclau also does not believe in the spontaneous emergence of unity among the immanent multitudes.

He writes:

- "For Negri and Hardt, the unity of the multitude results from the spontaneous aggregation of a plurality of actions that do not need to be articulated themselves. These struggles do not link horizontally, but each one leaps vertically , and directly to the virtual center of Empire. Laclau insists on the necessary moment of articulation, as vitally important".

For Laclau, resistance is not automatic, it is a complex social construction dependent on external conditions and on subjective transformations.

Laclau then points to some unresolved contradictions in Empire:

   - 1) It is based on a theory of the multitude, which at the same time, remains to be written (presumable now done in the 2nd book ?0
   - 2) Multitude is constitutive of Empire  yet also constituted by it ?
   - 3) The multitude is an illimited possibility, yet also has limits

Ruth Buchanan

For Negri, Empire is

   - 1) a new legal imperialism
   - 2) it is decentered and deterritorialising, and it surpasses national sovereignty
   - 3) it is a totality both geographically and in terms of 'all human activity' and 'fully realized' as a world market. It is inclusive and has no outside.
   - 4) it operates in a smooth space that follows a postmodern logic. It thrives on difference.

The critique of this is twofold.

- One, that Negri does not see how globalization can be an expression of national sovereignty, rather than its transcendence. - Two, that he 'naturalizes' the market, thereby reinforcing its hold , and denying the constitutive role of global institutions such as the World Bank.

In a discussion of the new trends in the 'World Bank Development Report', they show the bank sees the global market as depending on the legal frameworks of the nation-states, which thus retain a pre-eminent role.