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.
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