<nettime> fwd: debate on counter-empire at sherwood (23-24 february 2002)

[geert lovink <geert@Desk.nl>]

[fwd from the generation online list which discusses the empire book by
hardt & negri]

From: "arianna" <a.bove@sussex.ac.uk>
To: <generation_online@kein.org>
Sent: Friday, May 17, 2002 4:02 AM
Subject: [Generation_online] debate on counter-empire at sherwood (23-24
february 2002)

I wanted to send to the list some summary points taken and roughly
translated from audiofiles seminar/debate with Negri at
http://www.sherwood.it/controimpero/ they reiterate many known points, but
are simple direct and political,  some might find them useful. excuse the
note form in places, due to lack of time and patience :-) For italian
readers, there are other interesting interventions on the site.
enjoy
arianna

Negri: Thanks for inviting me...
Some methodological points on Empire:

· With the end of absolute categories of modernity, new concepts arise that
ought to characterise new research of postmodernity. With Hardt we have been
accused and blamed for adopting a Marxist conception of history. This is
true. We are convinced that struggles are the motor of history and in the
Postmodern phase all forms of authority (whether imperial or of what is left
of the nation state) actively follow the behaviour of movements (or of the
multitude if we want to use this term). This Marxist conception has been
washed in the Seine. For as far as I am concerned it was confronted and put
in touch with the theoretical apparatus, mainly appeared in France, called
French Post-structuralism. That which goes from Foucault to Deleuze with all
its articulations. This thought had a different history from operaismo but
breathed the same air of time. We find there too the exaltation, both
theoretical and ontological, of movements and the production of history
through the emergen!
ce of subjectivity in history. We've gone beyond the traditional Marxism
that offered a theoretical as well as organisational framework, we have gone
beyond because now we have the new instruments to start telling what
happened outside of the aporias of the nations state, this space where
people lived that was closed in national capital. We can recognise the past
now as folly and denounce it. We can understand how these things got
destroyed by the struggle of popular movements, those great contestations
that raised against these miseries. We had been inculcated the values of
patriotism, of the state as a fundamental principle. It is not true, as
capital shows. [.]

· Methodologically it is important to have the approach of the subaltern who
is the salt of the earth, that we found in postcolonial studies people, who
started to show the liberation struggles behind the colonial images. These
methodological approaches each gave us different things to say, that became
increasingly banal. Such as the line of transferral of sovereignty. It is
banal because we know this. All categories related to nation states have
fallen apart. Like international law for instance. The UN occupies a
secondary position and is the last element of contractual right being
exercised amongst nation states.

· This method also introduces biopolitics. Politics today is not exercised
on a plane of abstract power (administratively separated), but on a plane
that has invested the whole of life. Class struggle had imposed on states
the fact of sustaining the development of life (through salaries, schooling,
birth, death, health etc.). Politics and life have become engrained into one
another. On this terrain class struggle developed and expanded enormously
(from the guaranteed/direct salary etc.) With these processes the whole
anthropological structure was put into question. The subject was no longer
substantial (or before, prior to) but produced within these movements.
Produced in its double meaning:
-Capitalist production: I impose this consumption on this salary scale, in
these spaces, according to this hierarchy of needs to which you can or
cannot respond;
-Antagonistic production: I resist, and antagonism became more intelligent,
it expanded. It became uncatchable.

This process of dissolution of the political categories of modernity
coincides with the third industrial revolution: IT and the constitution of
production as decentred throughout society. This also has a double effect:
-An expansion of biopolitical power, capitalist command of the general
intellect
-A reappropriation of the instruments of labour.
Life style is reinvented as productivity. Labour, living labour, activity
remains at the centre of our lives, so do exploitative relations. By
exploitation I mean your capacity to steal my labour versus my capacity to
take it back and use it for my own desires.
You can see that they had to get rid of the nation state cause they could
not economically sustain it, for instance, in the monetary realm. So, this
redefined space of sovereignty: is it a good or a bad thing that it
happened? Well, we say it was worth it, and we shouldn't be nostalgic. The
concept of sovereignty changed. Sovereignty was always a relationship, even
in modernity. It couldn't be defined in terms of the sacred or
unidirectionality. Exercising sovereignty means to have a relation with the
subject (subjected). This relationship becomes more complex when this
subject produces and is posed in a creative dynamics. Sovereignty, in its
dialectical mode, always posed an obstacle for the subject to overcome.
Today, without an outside, nor utopias (we can only construe things, here)
can this group of social forces constitute an insurmountable limit for
capitalist development?

The multitude then, is a great quantity or multiplicity of singularities.
The people was that unitary group that corresponded to the sovereign. The
multitude is irreducible to a sovereign.
Secondly, the multitude has a capacity to act, in this it is also class,
creative activity, limit with respect to the possibility of being exploited,
capacity for self-government.
Today the common is a condition, we are not capable of working without
co-operating. We can't do anything without co-operating. We don't need a
capitalist to come and give us the instruments, the hammer. The instruments
are in our anthropology, our brain is the instrument that constitutes
wealth, a wealth that must be common. We each are like a word, alone a sign,
where meaning is only given by the entire language.

The struggle has already started but in the worst way: with a mercenary
knight who rebelled against his King. This empire is a non place and a mixed
constitution, where democracy is that which we are familiar with, not
participative nor absolute, but that left to the small states, some NGO etc.
this empire is heavily traversed by capital. The relation between the line
of sovereignty and that of capital is contradictory. Where is the place of
command? It is all open, we can't construe a new genealogy of the monster,
the leviathan.
There's neither desperation nor hope, but a situation where we have to
determine forms and directives of struggles and engagement of our
responsibility.

Discussion:
I must say that when the book came out they asked us to write an appendix.
We thought it wasn't necessary, that this moment of war was in continuity
with what we'd said in the book. S11 revealed what we already knew:
-The US is not an island
-The US is as vulnerable as other countries
-US isolationism had to end, even the British had to undergo London bombings
to understand that they are not an island.
Already before S11, in July we wrote articles to the New York Times and
Liberation about alternative Empires:
The Byzantine model with Bush's star war, with the King, the Apostles, signs
of apocalypse and transcendence of power. The US imposing a ferocious rule.
The Roman model, and its hybrid (rather than mixed) constitution, which we
wrote was the least worst.
After S11 the attempt to unilateralism appeared. The US tried to reinvent
war as a police operation, but a constituent operation too, from the point
of view of the art of war, a 
'military revolution'. The reconfiguration of
the strategy of war, the reduction of the army to intervention groups, the
dissolution of the mass army (following that of the mass worker).
This process had already started in 1972, with the end to the exponential
arms development. In  between the dates that we see as signalling the entry
to the postmodern: 1971: the declaration of the inconvertibility of dollar
into gold; 1973: the first great oil crisis.
War is now police and Palestine (and Genoa too) are at the margins
of the mechanism of high intensity police mixed with a low intensity war.
With this, the definition of the enemy as criminal. It is up to us to decide
whether it is good or bad. As it stands it is crazy: we have the marines
chasing the immigrants, generals becoming judges, but it all follows a logic
that is precise however chaotic the situation.

Debate: questions and answers:
Some guy: I am interested in this idea of an anthropoligisation of the
tool.{bla bla bla.irrelevant-AB}
Casarini: on the theme of war, there is not enough in Empire. How do we
rebel in Empire? There needs to be a reflection on the civil war mechanism,
on the reasoning of war, the dynamics between conflict and consent. How do
we use co-operation as a tool for struggle? The police/army and the
permanent civil war that is functional to a country, how do we build a
reasoning on war and how is it subsumed by the mechanisms of domination? Is
politics really war by other means?
A girl: isn't Empire a version of the thesis on ultraimperialism, and in
being so isn't it dangerous for the possible consequence it had for the
world-war?

Answers:
On ultra imperialism.
The objection is right with one difference: today the franco-german war is
impossible. My impression is that the process is irreversible. The global
market is made of structures that cut out the nation states. Multinationals
aren't American multinationals. They are multinationals.
The definition of American national interest raises doubts at all levels. If
there is one thing for sure is that ultraimperialism exists, and the nation
state is everything BUT the way to react to it. Why?
· The regulation process of the global market entails states cooperation.
There can't be a global market without rules. Rules are given by lex
mercatoria, by private agreements that occur beyond the states, in lawyers
offices. Lawyers are legislators, policemen are army officers..
· Positions that try to feed in the illusion that it is possible to resist
through nation states are bad. The French are the worst in this: Chevenement
went to Porto Alegre to feed on this disposition.
The movement must solve this problem: I take sides in this, I am against it:
it is theoretically archaic and politically dangerous.

On war and international justice and on how to be rebellious in Empire.
Is insurrection possible in Empire? No.
By insurrection I mean:
Resistance (through mass structures such as the unions)
Kairos (the moment of insurrection)
The Constituent moment.
The working class movement experienced the crisis in the transition between
these three phases. To rebel in Empire today means that it is impossible to
resist without constituting. One needs to break the homology between power
and the movement.
Exodus means to express potenza. It doesn't mean to go from here to there.
It is a conception of being: to act is to create new things all the time.
Today we can't rebel without constituting:
-forms of communication
-meaning
-joy

The end of the political must be forgotten, and with it all ferocious
giustizionalismo. The joy of the movement is to introduce strong generosity.
This was already present in the working class movement. It has just
expanded. The end of the factory is a good thing. The working class had to
be destroyed sooner or later as Marx said, but it also gives rise to
something else. It is not useless to debate at the Carlini stadium (Genoa's
disobedients residence-AB). It is boring sometimes but we have dwelled too
much on decision. The problem of decision is important.

We think of international tribunals like the inquisition: based on great
principles, it needs to put a hat on everything. They remind me of heavy
stuff. These courts will be there. The US don't want them (since they
attempt to push for a unilateral form of dominium), even though they would
not be in too much danger.

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