A Critique of Imperial Reason
Thoughts on the impact and receptive history of Antonio Negri and
Michael Hardt’s »Empire«
»It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but
vigilant and insomniac rationality« (Anti-Oedipus, Gilles
Deleuze/Félix Guattari)
In the political debates of the Left - and not only there -
»Empire«, by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, abruptly formed a sort
of international point of crystallization. There has barely been any
socio-theoretical discourse within the past three years that has not
referred, positively or negatively, to central categories of this
“grand narrative”. Moreover, the book provides something like an
implicit-explicit frame of reference for political theories and
interests of every sort, or is instrumentalized as one. Even though
all the hype has died down and Giorgio Agamben is now more in vogue,
the congress »Indeterminate! Kommunismus«2, for example, which took
place in Frankfurt in November, very clearly showed the ambivalent
traces left by »Empire«. The initial excitement of the debates, the
»promise« that the text exuded at the start, celebrated by many and
opposed by others, have, in many quarters, given way to an
indifferent negation: Empire? Much ado about nothing!
At any rate, there is nothing more to be seen of a new dawn. This
change certainly also has to do with the fact that »Empire« was
written before September 11, 2001. But war is still raging within
the debates. If one randomly looks at some of the texts once more,
the feeling of resentment almost leaps out at one. Precisely because
the radical criticism appears filtered through a fine meshwork of
rationality, the debates have something insane and monstrous in
their tendency to take things to absolute extremes. The upshot of
all this is that the ontology of »Empire« is placed close to fascist
jargon and reveals the ugly features of anti-Semitism. Robert Kurz
and Detlef Hartmann agree at least on this point, even if their
comprehensive reviews »Empire« differ spectacularly in many regards.
The latter suggested the direction of his criticism in the title of
his book: »Empire – linkes Ticket für die Reise nach rechts« (Empire
– Left-Wing Ticket for the Journey to the Right)3. He puts
Negri/Hardt in one box with Peter Sloterdijk and Joschka Fischer as
kindred spirits espousing a new elitism. The fact that this
comparison is absurd solely by virtue of the fact that Sloterdijk
promotes himself via TV as a sort of media Plato and Fischer has
handed in the Molotov Cocktail to pose as a mover of worlds instead,
while Negri was in prison until recently – as a result of political
conflicts and intrigues in the seventies – does not count. For
Detlef Hartmann, the case is clear: »Empire« is a piece of
propaganda from above that aims to make the compromise with global
capitalism palatable to the Left by celebrating it as a pseudo
self-liberation. Precisely the immanence of which Negri/Hardt
constantly speak when writing about the relationship between
»Empire« and multitude opens up no opportunities for emancipatory
struggles, but represents a theoretical betrayal of real past and
future fights of the militant and undogmatic Left. Seen in this way,
the operaistic neologism »multitude« is nothing but a neo-liberal
trap into which many too many people have fallen.
It seems to be almost a micro-political law that, when the social
situation becomes complex, the Leftist sub-cultures either turn the
most unsubtle theoretical weaponry on one another or gather together
in a diffuse consensus. Both reflexes, particularly when combined,
bring about strange death throes. One does not have to join in the
swan song that Robert Kurz4, Hartmann and others are singing in
unison, if with different intonation, to take some of the most
important criticisms of »Empire« seriously and look more closely at
central theoretical points made by Negri/Hardt - the more so because
these two writers themselves are not gentle in their treatment of
other theories, as can be seen in their criticism and rejection of
Giorgio Agamben, their simplifications of theoreticians like Gilles
Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault, and their reductionist
use of feminism and post-colonial studies, for example. This essay
is not the place to run once more through the debates on
bio-politics, class struggle, immaterial work, value theory, world
order, war or globalization. Rather, in what follows, I am concerned
with the crystallization points of different discussions and their
linguistic or real effects, using the example of some topoi raised
by »Empire« - as well as various feedbacks on them. Who lays claim,
explicitly or implicitly, to this concept, and what happens as a
result? The effectiveness of political theories for the constitution
of a »revolutionary project « cannot be measured by their conceptual
distance from terms like »Empire« and »ideational total
imperialism«, as Robert Kurz would like, but by the way the various
conceptual apparatuses can be mutually reinforced in a political
practice. This does not mean blurring the differences, but following
the distinctions as far as possible, neither sacrificing them to
resentment nor deadening them by repetition. As far as the real
debates of the last three years are concerned, precisely these
splits have occurred at many points of the discourse. Journalistic
factions have formed that either roundly dismiss Negri/Hardt’s
entire theory for totally opposed reasons – such as the journals
»Bahama »Bahamas«, »Krisis«, »Das Argument« and »Konkret« - or that,
like the »Subtropen«, try to carry out a balanced discussion, but
tend to eternally repeat the same concepts and models.
However, in order to evaluate the content of concepts and models in
a more exact and also more productive fashion, it is necessary to
leave this often extremely polemic level and to take the »patchwork
of minorities« in its concrete forms as a point of departure; the
more so because precisely the critique of capitalism premised on the
value theory, as espoused by Robert Kurz, for example, in his
scenarios of barbarization and decline, tends to misjudge
contemporary political counter-movements as being themselves
impotent by-products of the great decline. Perhaps the potentiality
that a term like »multitude« envisages is situated precisely
in-between. This level can be more exactly grasped by using three
widely differing political and aesthetic practices as examples. In
the public appearances of the Germany-wide action alliance »Kanak
Attak«5, which has formed around an anti-racist campaign organized
by migrants and non-migrants in imitation of the »Sans Papiers«
movement in France, various means are used to work on a revaluation
of the negative social construction of the »migrant«. Kanak Attak
not only criticizes the repressive mechanism of illegalization,
segregation, invisibilization, criminalization, control and
deportation using slogans like »Right to Legalization« or “Relative
Autonomy of Migration”, but concretely works on it and shifts it
performatively from within, so to speak. For example, in the
»KanakHistoryRevue – OPEL PITBULL AUTOPUT«, which was put on at the
Volksbühne Berlin in 2001 as part of the action »Dieser Song gehört
uns!« (This Is Our Song), the history of the struggles and protests
by »migrant workers« of the first generation in the seventies in
West Germany was »performed« and thus brought to the general
awareness as social reality. It was intended as a counterbalance to
the »official« image of a passive »problem« that refuses integration
and has to be observed and controlled, showing as it did a social
subject that does not simply resign itself to fate, but is actively
involved in political struggles; one that thus also has an autonomy
that itself then produces social reality and possesses concrete
powers and existential contexts that are constantly discriminated
against and denied by the racist apparatus. Kanak Attak’s actions,
which it sees as part of this resistance, subvert the distinction
between »inside« and »outside« based on the criterion of »cultural
identity«, and thus hit right at the centre of the state regime of
regulation. In this way, they get around a problem that has often
crippled certain forms of political activism: the inner tensions
that arise from having a representative function. »Speaking in the
name of others« almost necessarily entails repeating – and thus
reinforcing - certain externally imposed ascriptions, therefore
weakening autonomy. Kanak Attak calls these categories themselves
into question, opening up scope for maintaining a variety of links
to other political powers.
The movement of the »sans papiers« in France has shown that the
combination of legal discourse, the right to legalization and a
practice of political identity – that is, of the relative autonomy
of migration – can be become a political power. Here, too, two
central provisions of the term »multitude« as defined by Negri/Hardt
are practically fused: the very abstract demand for the right to
world citizenship, and the emphatic stress on the positivity of the
migratory streams and the »exodus« with regard to the constitution
of the »multitude« as political subject. In »Empire«, Negri and
Hardt stress again and again that, when they speak of a shake-up of
the political configuration of power, it is precisely movements like
the »sans papiers« that they have in mind. At the same time,
however, it is apparent that the emphatic way they put a positive
sheen on the exodus at the edges, but also in the centres, of the
global space, and describe the empire as an even space in which a
bio-political, ontological fusion between productivity and
resistance takes place that in itself could bring about an immanent,
positive counter-power to global exploitation, undermines their own
theoretical apparatus. On this point, I would very much agree with
Detlef Hartmann when he points out the false use made in »Empire« of
Foucault’s microphysics of power and, particularly, the concept of
bio-power. When analyzing apparatuses, it is, after all, of
paramount importance to transform seemingly fixed ontological forms
into relations and power balances and thus to lay bare the
potentials for resistance. In addition, the concept of even space
that Negri/Hardt take over from Deleuze/Guattari only makes sense,
strictly speaking, when it is placed in relation to »notched space«.
A major part of the theoretical endeavour in »Thousand Plateaus«
consists in showing how the two forms constantly merge into one
another and coexist. Fences, borders and deportation camps are not
even spaces, but »notched spaces«, territories in which power can
take hold and be exercised, imposing forms and identities and
depriving them of their autonomy.
The method of emphatic short-circuiting that Negri/Hardt very often
use here shows its very striking weaknesses. The New York artists’
group “Bernadette Corporation” seems, however, be interested in
precisely this theoretical style and its aesthetic implications. Its
film »Get Rid of Yourself« employs documentary material of street
fights in Genoa (2001) and television images of the attack on the
WTC to glide through a very lucid reflection on political militancy.
Here, very different forms of violence are deliberately brought into
a diffuse proximity with one another, projecting, with direct
reference to »Empire«, a strange apocalyptic scenario of transition
whose actual political intention does not really become apparent.
Rather, it seems to want to produce a fusion between forms of
radical chic, product fetishes, violence, fashion and a deliberate
aestheticization of politics and resistance to give an idea of what
could face us if globalization starts to panic. It is interesting
here that a dimension is added to the complex of political
militancy, as it is also outlined by Negri/Hardt in their book, that
is completely disregarded in »Empire«: What actually happens to the
energy and the desire that attach people positively to the world of
goods and the capitalist ways of life after they have left them or
destroyed them, and why would they want to do without them anyway?
The enormous pull of the »capitalist way of life« consists, after
all, in precisely this attachment. The film »Get Rid of Yourself«
works, with reference to a certain idealistic Leftist vocabulary,
with distinctive situationist pathos, but at the same time
reproduces one-to-one the myth of the machismo of the militant
street fighter.
The musician, label-founder (Comatonse Recordings6) and queer
activist Terre Thaemlitz also works in a way distinct from Leftist
myths, but is much more radical and exact, precisely because he
reflects on the much-reviled »queer politics« in his universe and
does not disregard them as a “subordinated contradiction”. His
deconstructive approach to the codes of pop history with their
implicit political fantasies is an aesthetically precise rejection
of any fetish of directness and expression, without opening up a bad
contrast between culture and politics. For example, at the
»Communism Congress« he expressed his profound scepticism as far as
the concept of love in connection with issues of a future communism
goes: if we all love one another, it will certainly not produce
communism, precisely because love can legitimate all forms of
violence as well, and requires a balance of power.
Even if there are those that see the kitsch at the end of »Empire«
as camp, I would like to propose replacing the italicized verbal
eruptions on love and militancy by the new CD »Lovebomb« by Terre
Thaemlitz and simply hearing what happens.
Nicolas siepen
Translation: Timothy Jones
1 Harvard University Press, 2000
2 http://www.kommunismuskongress.de
3 Berlin 2002
4 Weltordnungskrieg: Das Ende der Souveränität und die Wandlungen
des Imperialismus im Zeitalter der Globalisierung. (World-Order War:
The end of sovereignty and the changes in imperialism in the era of
globalization) Bad Honnef 2003
5 http://www.kanak-attak.de
6 http://www.comatonse.com
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