Alex has begun his summary of Hardt and Negri’s latest work Commonwealth. My response, in the comments, is this:
1) This notion that “contemporary capitalism enables an ontology that is at least partially grounded in the common,” as you note raises some interesting possibilities for seeing alternatives to what, if we listen too much to Zizek, Agamben, et al., too often seems like an impossible situation. However, it also raises what I think are some crucial questions, which so far as I can tell are unanswered in the first section of the book. That is: are H&N proposing that this thinking in terms of the common is a wholly new development, contingent first on the globalisation of capital? Is the contemporary situation the only situation that could give rise to an ontology of the common? Is it possible that this is the re-emergence of “commons” thinking (and here I am thinking, as I do, of notions of gift-cultures developed by Mauss and others, in which “property” was less individual than collective – or even trans-individual.) Also, would it have been possible for a commons-based paradigm to have emerged out of alternative political-economic paradigms?
2) Related to the above: if it is the case that capital sets up the possibility for a new (or even renewed) sense of the common, then there is a possible, though I think in the end minor, issue that appears in their assessment of the “second stream” of interpretations of Foucault (pp. 57-58) (Agamben, Derrida, Nancy) in which they seem to take a shot at Holderlin’s notion that “where ther is danger/so the rescue grows as well,” which Heidegger also picked up on in his notion of the “saving power.” I realise that they are suggesting that these theorists don’t do enough to see the possible affirmative possibilities of the saving power, but it seems that H&N could have done a little more to acknowledge that their thesis begins from a similar perspective if only inasmuch as they locate the power of the common from within contemporary developments in globalisation.
3) I really like their comparison of Badiou and Foucault’s differing notions of the event. One thing that has bugged me in my reading of Badiou (and it is nascent) is the problem with how one knows whether or not what one is doing counts as an event? With Badiou you don’t know until after…and if after all your efforts you discover that it wasn’t an event, then what? This is what makes Zizek propose the refusal thesis I think, maybe because it is assured that doing nothing does something (?). Their reading of Foucault is more to my liking in that it doesn’t require hindsight – biopolitics is an event pure and simple; the trick is, as they suggest, this needs to be organised in some way. If not, it seems that simply accepting the reality of biopolitics as an event leaves the door open for complacency of the sort we find in the armchair activism of Gap purchases, Starbuck’s charity, and Green consumption.
@paaitken
Thank you for the insightful comments Paul, here are my thoughts.
(1) These points raise interesting questions. I think that the multitude is a trans-historical yet radically contextual concept, meaning that in a Spinozian sense bodies/subjectitivities are perpetually so many forces of combination, decomposition, and production. This view affirms the multitude as always already an immanent potentiality that insofar as it stands in opposition to the order of property tends toward the common (think back to the historical delineation they make in the chapter from Empire “Two Europes Two Modernities” between transcendental orders and the forces of immanence). This contingent and radically plural understanding of the multitude does not mean it cannot be historicized insofar as we understand historicization as a mapping of conditions of possibility. Here, Hardt and Negri take stock of given productive forces and make some definitive claims around the relative potential of social transformation in the contemporary moment. Thus I do not see their intervention as a re-affirmation of forgone social movements/perspectives of the common, nor a negation of latent possibilities of the common in alternative political-economic paradigms such as in state socialism. Finally, while they locate within contemporary regimes of production partially realized material elements and ontologies of the common, this does not mean that they are claiming egalitarian social transformation shares a determined relationship in the present.
(2) Again, I don’t think that it is global capitalism per se that determines their analysis of social transformation, it just so happens that we live within its circuits and this has produced a particular set of productive economic and social co-ordinates which both enable and constrain the possibilities for the articulation of a democracy of the multitude. Their problem with Heidegger/Agamben is that these theorists pose a conception of being and power entirely as negation and thus fail to adequately apprehend the immanent affirmative power of bodies in composition within one another—this isn’t to say that social formations always tend toward the construction of the common but that the potential is always present for individual and collective agency.
(3) Yes! It appears that while Hardt and Negri extract from Foucault a concept of biopolitics that recognizes the necessity of freedom and resistance to all power relations, this does not mean that events of freedom as they tend toward democratic social transformation do not require strategic thinking, organizing, and action. In other words, the biopolitical event as it enacts democratic futures is an accumulation of strategic action.