Alex and I have decided to embark on a collaborative project to ultimately critically engage with Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth. He has already posted a summary of Part 1 at Jajuna and Critical Stew, and we’ll each be taking alternate sections. These will spawn a book review that will aim to accomplish two things (1) an excavation of some productive criticisms/limitations of Hardt and Negri’s project (2) the creation of something new by thinking with and against Hardt and Negri in the context of our respective intellectual interests. For Alex, this means thinking about what productive insights Commonwealth might contribute to discussions of urbanization, education, and security/insecurity, and for me, it means thinking about online communities, internet surveillance, and theories of gifting and exchange. Of course, we hope to also think about how these fields speak to one another, the common, and possibilities for social transformation. This underscores a parallel co-written project that problematizes internet surveillance within higher education through an examination of campus-based corporate anti-piracy campaigns and questions of security and neoliberal governmentality.
The summaries will be cross posted at Critical Stew.
Admittedly, I think might have went a little crazy with this summary, but hey, it’s a really interesting chapter!
Part 2: Modernity (and the Landscapes of Altermodernity)
2.1 Antimodernity as Resistance
Power and Resistance Within Modernity
In this section Hardt and Negri problematise the traditional dialectic opposition of modernity/antimodernity. This opposition, they argue, is what gives rise to problematic notions of modernity as an “unfinished project,” inherently good, and simply in need of further advance. They counter the traditional view of modernity as a process of a benign, universalised enlightened European sensibility that civilises an oppositional savage external world, by proposing that modernity itself is dualistic, characterised by the immanent coupling of domination and resistance. The forces of antimodernity, they argue, cannot be seen as being outside modernity but rather internal to it. This means that modernity, for Hardt and Negri, should be seen first and foremost as a power relation. In order to facilitate this ontological shift they first draw on contemporary characterisations of coloniality as a series of “encounters.” Encounters, as opposed to conquests, acknowledge the mutual mixtures and transformations experienced by the coloniser and colonised. Examples given include the adaptation by colonialists to pre-existing spatial layouts of Aztec city states and the influence of Iroquois Federalism on the political history of the United States. The language of encounter misses the violence of coloniality and thus Hardt and Negri continue with a psychoanalytic metaphor: European modernity is “psychotic” because it forecloses the possibility of alternative existences and the influence of the subjugated on the dominant. This is evident in attempts to erase alternate or antimodern histories, which are seen as a threat from the outside, as opposed to being constitutive of modernity itself. Finally, though centre/periphery models come closest to Hardt and Negri’s proposed duality, they run the risk of homogenising both the coloniser and colonised. “The West” is seen as the only “pole of domination,” without internal struggles and resistances, while “the rest” is seen as uniformly subordinate, without it’s own axes of domination. When modernity is understood as a power relation then seeing modernity as an unfinished project is much less benign than is suggested by Habermas and other theorists of social democracy. “More modernity,” Hardt and Negri argue, “is not an answer to our problems.” (71)
Slave Property in the Modern Republic
For Hardt and Negri modernity and republicanism are intimately linked because the republican form of property relations became the dominant form within modernity. Slave property is thus scandalous for the republic because it fundamentally contradicts notions of equality and freedom espoused by the French, American, and English revolutions, yet it forms the cornerstone of emerging republican economies. They ask: if slavery is so antithetical to these foundational notions of republicanism then why did it last so long, “not as a peripheral remnant of the past but as a central sustaining pedestal?” An ideological operation takes place in which republican discourses locate slavery as both an ancient phenomenon and a foil that operates against the capitalist conception of free labour. For Hardt and Negri then, this is “the point of maximum ideological contradiction with the republic of property…either freedom or property can be preserved, but not both.” (72) In posing slavery as a remnant of the premodern, modernity/capital can then propose that it offers modern solutions to this problem. Yet the issue of slavery is also a material one. Though Eurocentric histories see modernity as vanquishing slavery, in reality slavery was crucial to modernity’s development and a “massive segregation schema” (73) was enacted; freedom existed on one side of the Atlantic and was economically supported by slavery on the other. Racism then can be seen as one of the material supports for modernity. Attempts to foreclose or disavow the racist history of modern republicanism help to explain why the Haitian revolution has been systematically cast outside of historical accounts of “the Age of Revolution,” which are focussed on the “big three” republican revolutions. The Haitian revolution “reveals the profound contradiction between the ideology and substance of republicanism and modernity” (75) because, firstly, it freed slaves (thus violating modernity’s rule of property) and, secondly, it ended racial segregation (thus threatening modernity’s racial hierarchies).
Highlighting the relationship between slavery and modernity also helps us understand the power of slave resistance. Slaves are traditionally viewed abstractly as completely dominated subjects, though as Foucault noted, power and domination can only be enacted over subjects that resist.
Share