The Empire's new clothes

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 29, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 337-367

  Brennan, Timothy ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

^b Humanities Institute

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33644595277     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/374030     Document Type: Review

References (68)

1. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari, ed. Buttigieg, 5 vols. (New York, 1992-), 1:211.
2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), p. 66; hereafter abbreviated E.
3. But widely praised - by the cultural Left no less than by Time and Charlie Rose. See the coverage, for example, in Time, 23 July 2001.
4. For example, see the special issue "Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity," edited by Mike Featherston, Theory, Culture, and Society 7 (June 1990);
5. Culture, Globalization, and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony King (Binghamton, N.Y., 1991);
6. David Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World (New York, 1998);
7. and David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford, Calif. 1995).
8. This is a standard view in conservative international relations circles, but also (and more surprisingly) in left social studies. Benjamin Lee, for example, inexplicably considers the United States (as opposed to China) a weak-state society. See Benjamin Lee, "Critical Internationalism," Public Culture 7 (Spring 1995): 581.
9. But does he not, then, concur with Deleuze and Guattari's formulation on the Urstaat in Anti-Oedipus?: "It is beneath the blows of private property, then of commodity production, that the State witnesses its decline." Capitalism is here cast as a savior: it saves us from the excesses of (in Deleuze and Guattari's words) the fearful "Asiatic" state (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane [Minneapolis, 1983], pp. 218, 217).
10. For a fuller discussion of council communism and related interwar tendencies, see Paul Mattick, Anti-Bolshevik Communism (London, 1978), esp. pp. 83-85.
11. The new Italian "critique of the state form" is impossible to characterize otherwise than as anarchist, in spite of the authors' resistance to this appellation. Negri's The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, 1989)
12. for example, is wed to anarchism's millenarian fervor; Paolo Virno finds himself at home in its apocalyptic registers. It is, however, especially the kindred spirit Giorgio Agamben - not strictly "new Italian" in my sense here - who articulates the ontological loathing for government that characterizes all new Italian thought: a virtual "polisophobia." In Agamben's retelling of the work of Carl Schmitt - and Homo Saceris basically Schmitt 's Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy'written in a different style - he attacks the "democratico-revolutionary tradition" by showing its inability to escape the exception that governs all law. Thus Schmitt 's original critique of Weimar liberalism is enlisted as evidence of the original sin of governments of all types (Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen [Stanford, Calif, 1998], p. 40).
13. The constellation, as I am using it here, roughly coincides with the contributors to Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Hardt (Minneapolis, 1996).
14. Agamben, however (who plays a large role in this anthology), is not "new Italian" on the terms I have laid out here because he does not trace his formation to the autonomia movements. Nevertheless, both Negri and Agamben base their political assessments on the idea that the exception is the rule and that "bare life" is not only in politics but coincident with the political realm, a realm of the "productive bios." Hardt and Negri spell out their differences with Agamben in E, pp. 366, 421.
15. Hardt, "Introduction: Laboratory Italy," Radical Thoughtin Italy, p. 1.
16. For political background, see Mark Gilbert, "Italy's Third Fall," Journal of Modern Italian Studies 2, no. 2 (1997): 221-31;
17. Alexander Stille, "Italy: The Convulsions of Normalcy," New York Review of Books, 6 June 1996, pp. 42-46;
18. Rudi Ghedini, "After the Fall of Bologna: The Decline of Italy's Red City," Le Monde Diplomatique (Sept. 2000).
19. The contemporary Italian situation is well presented in Vittorio Bufacchi and Simon Burgess, Italy since 1989: Events and Interpretations (New York, 1998).
20. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks trans, and ed. Quintin Hoareand Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, 1971), p. 125.
21. Malcolm Bull, "You Can't Build a New Society with a Stanley Knife," review of Empire, by Hardt and Negri, in London Review of Books, 4 Oct. 2001, p. 3.
22. Although invariably marked by circumspection, not all of the public response has been adulatory. Gopal Balakrishnan faults Empire for its "series of dubious assumptions" (Gopal Balakrishnan, "Virgilian Visions," review of Empire, by Hardt and Negri, in New Left Review 5 [Sept.-Oct. 2000]: 145);
23. John Kraniauskas is skeptical of the book's "neo-positivist ontology of becoming" (John Kraniauskas, "Empire, or Multitude: Transnational Negri," review of Empire, by Hardt and Negri, in Radical Philosophy 103 [Sept.-Oct. 2003]: 35).
24. "New Times" as a purported cultural dominant is associated with circles around the (now-defunct) British journal Marxism Today in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Several writers argued that systemic transformations in capitalism had forced the Left to place a new emphasis on consumerism, abandon the emphasis on industrial labor, and jettison the goals of the welfare state. See New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, ed. Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (London, 1990).
25. It is beyond the scope of this essay to provide a critique of post-Fordist conceits, but readers may want to consult the following concise accounts of the problems found in them: Neil Lazarus, "Doubting the New World Order: Marxism, Realism, and the Claims of Postmodernist Social Theory," Differences 3 (Fall 1991): 94-138;
26. Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (New York, 1990);
27. and Daniel T. McGee, "Post-Marxism: The Opiate of the Intellectuals," Modern Language Quarterly 58 (June 1997): 201-25.
28. According to Carlo Vercellone, the phrase animated the entire movement throughout the 1970s and functions now in the present as a structure of feeling; see Carlo Vercellone, "The Anomaly and Exemplariness of the Italian Welfare State," in Radical Thought in Italy, pp. 81-96;
29. for the will to be against, see E, p. 274.
30. See Mario Tronti, Operai e capitale (Torino, 1977).
31. See Tronti, "The Strategy of Refusal," Semiotexte 3, no. 3 (1980): 30.
32. There are also suggestive parallels between new Italian thought and those new ambivalent, left/right tendencies of postunification Europe described by Douglas R. Holmes in Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism (Princeton, N.J., 2000), pp. 44, 46, 56. Holmes's ethnography (he did his fieldwork in, among other places, Northern Italy) investigates a new political hybrid in a reconfigured Europe that works within the counter-Enlightenment traditions of German romanticism, opposes the ideals of modernity, and looks to build a collectivity that champions a holistic integralism. Both sharing and rejecting key parts of this amalgam, new Italian thought teeters at its edges. Although the integralists reject the supranational aims of European Union, their concept of collectivity is strikingly similar, taken from the social modernism of Jean Monnet in France of the 1940s in pursuit of the "formation of broad and unlikely alliances" as well as the "delineation of unusual possibilities" (p. 46). Holmes goes on to discuss the links between integralism and an earlier neo-Thomist tradition of social Catholicism out of which Negri grew (see below).
33. Norbert Trenkle, "Crisis Theory in a Crisis Society," interview by Timo Ahonen and Markus Termonen, http://www.krisis.org/
34. See Virno, "The Ambivalence of Disenchantment," trans. Michael Turits, in Radical Thought in Italy, pp. 20, 26, 28.
35. See Robert Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for Twenty-First-Century Capitalism (New York, 1991),
36. and Anthony Giddens, "The Contours of High Modernity," in Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, Calif, 1991), pp. 10-34.
37. Maurizio Lazzarato, "Immaterial Labor," trans. Paul Colilli and Ed Emory, in Radical Thought in Italy, p. 132; hereafter abbreviated "IL."
38. See Negri and Jim Fleming, Marx beyond Marx (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1991), esp. pp. 1-21,
39. and Virno, "The Ambivalence of Disenchantment," pp. 13-36.
40. Virno, "The Ambivalence of Disenchantment," p. 22.
41. The passage is found in Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London, 1973), p. 705.
42. Tom Brass traces the conservative heritage of the popular-culture-as- resistance thesis that dominates Hardt and Negri's revolution of the already-is: An almost identical concept of non-confrontation with the state, a form of indirect political action known as the 'theory of small deeds', was actually pioneered by Russian populists during the late 19th century. More importantly, much of the theory which prefigures the 'resistance' framework is already present in an earlier text by [James] Scott [Political Ideology in Malaysia] where he endorses both the 'limited good' argument of George Foster and the 'culture of poverty' thesis advanced by Oscar Lewis. (Tom Brass, "A-Way with Their Wor(l)d: Rural Labourers through the Postmodern Prism," Economic and Political Weekly, 5 June 1993, p. 1163.)
43. This is not to suggest that Heidegger is an unproblematic source for them (as he is, for example, for Derrida, Franco Rella, or Agamben). He is a tragic philosopher in their opinion. Also, Hardt and Negri attack postmodernism at one point as "the poisonous culture of the 1980s" and the benefactors of a de facto corporate cheerleading (Hardt, "Introduction," p. 7; see also E, pp. 137-39).
44. See Richard Falk and Andrew Strauss, "On the Creation of a Global Peoples Assembly: Legitimacy and Power of Popular Sovereignty," Stanford Journal of International Law, 36, no. 2 (2000): 191-219 and
45. "Toward a Global Parliament," Foreign Affairs 80 ( Jan.-Feb. 2001): 212-20.
46. For Empire's concept of the constituent republic and its analysis of the state, see for example Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (Minneapolis, 1994). For its slogan of the "mass worker," its view of work as an "environment" or "ecology," and its emphasis on the subjectivity of labor, see The Politics of Subversion. For its theories of the Grundrisse and the nature of "value," see Negri and Fleming, Marx beyond Marx.
47. See Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York, 1998), p. xxix and
48. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, N.J., 1991), pp. 3-34. Empire takes its discussion of "non-places quot; from Marc Augé.
49. Hardt and Negri's recent op-ed in the New York Times offered a startling illustration of ambivalence in cultural theory, in this case self-serving. Written to explain what the antiglobalization protesters at the Genoa summit really wanted, the authors concluded - in spite of the protesters' emphatic declarations to the contrary - that the Genovese rebels were not against globalization. In what must have come as great relief to the editors of the Times, the authors further argued that the insurgents did not see the United States as the major antagonist in the new global order (which also contradicts the protesters' reported statements). The prominence of the forum in the Times undoubtedly moves readers to associate Hardt and Negri's work with the rebelling forces, as though proof of their prophetic and radical aims. Actually, the analysis indicates their forcing of the movement into the theses of Empire. See Hardt and Negri, "What the Protesters in Genoa Want," New York Times, 20 July 2001, p. A21.
50. The uses of Heidegger in new Italian texts is seen clearly in Massimo de Carolis, who defines "autonomy" - his goal - in terms of "an authentic and complete existence" that requires being "exposed to the world" so that one might "dismantle at the outset the myth of a pure subject." It takes us closer to new Italian method when we appreciate this articulation of the existential in terms of the economic. As he puts it, the "world is now for us," since "exoticism" has been liquidated, and there is no such thing any longer as "a full and concrete alterity," a phrase that - like much of Heidegger's influence - vastly strengthens the discourses of Eurocentrism (Massimo de Carolis, "Toward a Phenomenology of Opportunism," trans. Turits, in Radical Thought in Italy, PP- 43, 44, 43, 44).
51. For an excellent analysis of the disingenuous attractions to Heidegger on the Italian Left, see Renate Holub, "Italian Heidegger Affairs," in Tainted Greatness: Antisemitism and Cultural Heroes, ed. Nancy A. Harrowitz (Philadelphia, 1994), pp. 173-89.
52. Interesting, if troubling, are the historical traces found in the word "anthropological." Seeing the traditional political parties in shambles in the Italy of the 1970s, Pier Paolo Pasolini decried the new radicalism as a consumerist hedonism modelled on the American type. He called it an "anthropological mutation." What revolted Pasolini inspires Negri, who here appears to quote Pasolini against himself (quoted in Richard Drake, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy [Bloomington, Ind., 1989], p. 154).
53. Theodor Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music (Stanford, Calif, 1998), p. 141.
54. Warren Montag, according to Kraniauskas, has shown that Spinoza tends to tell us three stories at once: "the story of God, the story of Nature and the story of God-as-Nature, or, the story of transcendence, the story of immanence and the story of transcendence-as-immanence" (Kraniauskas, "Empire, or Multitude," p. 36;
55. see Warren Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries [New York, 1999], p. 4).
56. Howard P. Kainz, An Introduction to Hegel: The Stages of Modem Philosophy (Athens, Ohio, 1996), p. 21.
57. For example, see Hardt, "Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between Michael Hardt and Thomas Dumm about Hardt and Negri's Empire," interview by Thomas Dumm, Theory and Event, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory-&-event/v004/4.3hardt.html, 6.
58. As Jürgen Habermas was pointing out long before the Schmitt revival took shape in the English-speaking world, Schmitt plays a curious role in current cultural theory. His approach to the political is about freeing political actors from ethical constraints in the practice of sovereign power. He plays a compensatory role here, saying what the authors are unwilling to enact - that is, striking the note absent from their discourse. His conservative credentials bring his views more in accord with the conservatism that attends the neoliberal age to which the new Italians form an adversarial adjunct. And, yet, since Schmitt was radical in his earlier period, he has been cleansed by the decades into a new acceptability - a conformism that is not a conformism. See Jürgen Habermas, "The Horrors of Autonomy: Carl Schmitt in English," The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 128-39.
59. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1987), p. 23.
60. As Holmes points out in Integral Europe, the Sorelians "emphasized the potential of a cultural assemblage to serve as the basis of collectivity.... They sought to formulate a politics that could ... engage directly the human substance of an integral lifeworld" (Holmes, Integral Europe, p. 61).
61. Nicola Badaloni has also shown how Sorel is key for understanding the interwar period from which many of the new Italian ideas are drawn, including its ambiguous political location. A theory that abandoned "the theme of the necessity of socialism and its replacement by a combinatory of various possibilities, connect[s] with the co-penetration of the juridical and the economic. He presented this result (in a way which does not differ from that which, fifty years later, the structuralist school of French Marxism was to arrive at) as the authentic thought of Marx." Results are achieved "in spite of man's intellectual consciousness" (Nicola Badaloni, " Gramsci and the Problem of the Revolution," trans. Della Couling, Gramsci and Marxist Theory, ed. Chantal Mouffe [London, 1979], p. 82).
62. And nowhere more emphatically than in Anti-Oedipus, where Deleuze and Guattari write, "There has never been but a single State, the State-as-dog that 'speaks with flaming roars'" (the latter part of their statement is a quote from Nietzsche). In response to that singular evil, on the very next page, they posit "the dream of a spiritual empire, wherever temporal empires fall into decadence" (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 192,193).
63. See, for example, Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from "The Baffler," cd. Frank and Matt Wieland (New York, 1997).
64. Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London, 2001), p. 3.
65. One illustration of this element in Negri's work can be found in Hardt and Negri, The Labor of Dionysus, pp. 28-29.
66. Throughout Prison Notebooks, Gramsci describes the scholastic national-cultural training of Italian high intellectuals and the Catholic excrescences on modern thought that had remained resilient in the face of modernization. It is ironic that the new Italian amalgam - in particular, Negri whose status as a prisoner gives him a superficial resemblance to Gramsci in the minds of younger theorists - would gain from association with Gramsci 's prior fame. One could say - above all in their Sorelian echoes - that they were the cult he sought to expose. See the entries on Sorel in Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 2:58, 98,112,123,139-41,168-72,193-94, and 235.
67. Drake, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy, p. 52.
68. Tronti, "Workers and Capital," trans. Paul Picconne, Telos 14 (Winter 1972): 62.