[Generation_online] Reply to Malcolm Bull

[M]

Some people expressed an interest in seeing the reply to Malcolm Bull's
review of 'Empire' I have been working on. So I hope you don't mind if I
send it to the list as a whole. My intention is to place this, or a version
of it, with the LRB where Bull's piece first appeared. I'm not sure what
luck I'll have there. Anyway, I though it may bring about some discussion on
this list if nothing else.

Any comments would be appreciated.

Matteo

P.S. for those who haven't read Bull, you can find it at:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n19/bull2319.htm
Reply to Malcolm Bull [1]


Malcolm Bull's review of Empire follows many other commentators in seeing
Negri & Hardt's project as an essentially liberal one. One must wonder
whether critical thought has been so subsumed by capital that it can only
conceive of the collective through the hypostasis of the individual in the
market or dissolution in a totalitarian state? Certainly Bull doesn't appear
to leave us with many options: the state writ large or... the status quo,
liberalism or totalitarianism. It will become clear, however, that the 'or'
is not a choice between alternatives. Bull must, nevertheless, be given
credit for providing one of the most closely argued and most fair-minded
critiques to date.

He begins by setting Negri and Hardt's position in a context that will mark
his reading right through to his conclusions, in which something like a
liberal utopia emerges. The first sign of this appears when Bull sets Negri
& Hardt neatly alongside the advocates of 'negative liberty' and, therefore,
in opposition to the Marxist demand for 'positive liberty': 'from each
according to his ability to each according to his needs.' But one question
that immediately springs to mind is: is this distinction not so marked by
the question of the variety of forms of government, i.e. minimal state as
opposed to 'big government' in its relation to 'civil society', that it is
entrapped by it? Does the fact the Bull sets this distinction to work from
the beginning mean that his reading of Empire is indelibly marked by it?

Let us begin by turning to the account Bull gives of Negri's reading of
Spinoza. Bull presents Negri's turn to Spinoza as a way of 're-theorising
autonomia's strategy' after the repression that struck at 'il movimento' in
the '70s and '80s. But why Negri should turn to Spinoza is a mystery for
Bull. This political decision is presented outside any determined
conjuncture of economic and political transformations - other than that of
the repression of the extra-Parliamentary left. Negri at this time was also
working on a text called La Costituzione del tempo, in which he argued that
what Marx had spoken of as the 'real subsumption of society by capital' had
been realised. The question became, where is resistance to come from in a
society that has been entirely subsumed by capital, i.e. where there is no
exteriority for resistance to come from? The turn to Spinoza was dictated by
this situation: in Negri's reading Spinoza provides an immanent ontology
with no exteriority, in which practice becomes constitutive of the real (and
in the context that we are concerned with here), of sovereignty itself; and
where the multitude augments its potentia (creative power) in the
commonality of relations: the co-operating multitudes (to adopt Negri &
Hardt's terminology). Bull points out the distinction in Spinoza, missed in
English translations, that renders both potentia and potestas (sovereignty,
authority) as 'power', but his reversal of the ontological primacy of
potentia results - as we shall see - in closing any possible alternative to
either the status quo or 'big(ger) government'. But returning to Negri's
decision. It is real economic, political and social displacements that push
Negri towards an engagement with Spinoza.

As Bull points out, Spinoza argues that there are no rights separate from
power, to be precise, right or potestas is determined by the potentia of the
multitude. The crucial point here is that what we are provided with is a
description of the essential materiality of politics in terms of the
relation of forces, as well as concentration on the creative role played by
the masses in the constitution of sovereignty itself. With the rejection of
rights separate from the power to act we also have the removal of the
individual as a meaningful political agent, and the collective dimension of
power (potentia) comes immediately to the fore. To suggest, as Bull does,
that this is the same as saying 'might is right' is to misrepresent the
problem. For with Spinoza's ontological and political prioritsation of the
multitude, it means that to utter such a statement is either to state a
simple tautology (when might is understood as potentia, the power of the
multitudes, as in Spinoza), or it is simply the hypostasis of sovereignty
(if understood as potestas), as is the case - I would argue - with Bull's
reversal of the ontological order. But as Warren Montag points out, if one
accepts Spinoza's account (adopted by Negri & Hardt), then: "There exists no
system of rule, no matter how apparently absolute, that does not rest on an
equilibrium of forces and the ruler who ignores this fact will not rule very
long." In this way any transcendent justification of sovereignty is removed,
by indicating the potentia of the multitude as the material condition of
right. The reversal removes the constitutive role of the multitude (whether
this be in the form of 'the masses' or of 'the people') and means that
sovereignty is 'always already' instituted.

Bull's reversal of the distinction, making potentia dependant on potestas,
means that it is difficult to see a) how sovereignty would be constituted at
all, and b) how the people would be able to influence sovereignty in any
significant way. One would have to rely merely on the good will of the
sovereign - in whatever form it takes, while having no material influence on
its interventions. Following the time-honoured traditions of liberal
thought, the subject is first isolated from relations with others, and is
then constrained in practice, de facto and de jure, by the dictates of
sovereignty. However, the subject, it is argued, would remain free in
thought and speech. For liberals, it is this latter freedom that needs to be
saved, and is considered - in itself - a sufficient counter-power to
sovereignty. One must ask, however, whether by cutting the subject off so
rigorously from practice, we are not left with merely the illusion of
freedom. What we see here is Bull's liberal presuppositions dictating the
reading. There are a variety of political effects that flow from this. We
should not forget, for example, that it is without question 'on the liberals
watch' that we have observed the progressive separation of the institutions
of sovereignty from the multitude, which will be most dramatically
illustrated by the G8 meeting in the Canadian Rockies, or the WTO meeting in
Dubai. But Bull's acknowledgement in the closing stages of his argument that
the tragic events of September the 11th could indicate a watershed in the
transformation of US foreign policy is surely the recognition of the
precarious balance of forces that have produced so much discontent and
insecurity, and that have been duly registered: note the pressure put on
Ariel Sharon to meet with Yasser Arafat, and the fear of further instability
in numerous surrounding states in the region that has lead to the attempt to
create numerous alliances with numerous regimes in the region, with no doubt
economic and security assurances to enable them to pacify the somewhat less
subservient populations of these states. At least in practice,
neo-liberalism acknowledges the power of the multitude. One is forced to
agree with Spinoza that politicians have been far better at understanding
the political, with its complex balance of forces, than the philosophers.
There is no doubt an optimism of the intellect in Empire. But Bull's
suggestion that this analysis fails to comprehend the 'reality of
powerlessness' is only true to the extent that isolated individuals in
poverty are truly powerless. But this powerlessness is multiplied ten-fold
by the liberal presupposition that divides the multitude, that set out from
the presupposition of the isolated individual as the foundation of civil
society.

Bull's disingenuous claim that Negri's 'rediscovery of republican thought
parallels that of Quentin Skinner in Britain, and the retrieval of
Anti-Federalism by libertarians in the United States', arguing further that
Emprie is somehow more Jeffersonian (!) than Marxist is paradigmatic of the
misreading underway. He even quotes from Negri's Insurgencies to back-up
this claim. The fact that in the latter text these traditions take up only
the first part of the analysis of the concept of constituent power (i.e. the
progressively becoming immanent of the relation between the multitude and
potentia) that develops historically and ontologically, moving then on to a
discussion of Marx and Lenin, as those who - in some sense - provide the
conditions for a fully realised account of the constituent potentia of the
multitude, is passed over in silence. Indeed Negri points out that it was
the shortcomings of the Jeffersonian answer that resulted in the reversal of
the libratory idea of the frontier to be overcome, into a hunger for
appropriation and ultimately into imperialism. Empire is - if anything - the
confirmation of this failure, arguing as it does, that the open frontier
that lies at the heart of the American constitution forms the basis of the
'constitutional' structure of modern Empire - one that is always open to
further spaces of accumulation. Had Bull not skated over in silence the
discussion of Marx and Lenin in Insurgencies, he would have discovered a
further deepening of the analysis of constituent power, beyond the
republican tradition, that finds in living labour (i.e. co-operation) the
increasing becoming immanent of the relation between multitude and potentia.

Bull's suggestion that there is in Negri's account of potentia and potestas
an assertion of the 'state of nature' over and against that of civil
society, or rather that subsumes civil society, serves to radically
misrepresent the situation further. The first thing to point out is that the
'state of nature' debate is a mystification that serves merely to: present
the isolated individual as the precondition for the historical eschatology
that ends in the State; as the condition that allows for the construction of
civil society (which Negri argues for Spinoza meant the market, as he was
writing in the days of the 'embarrassment of riches' that was Dutch
capitalism) to operate as a mediator between the egoistic individualism
exemplified in the state of nature; and finally, that both would come to be
subsumed and regulated by the State. I believe, however, that Negri's
argument goes further. I would argue that there has been a radical
displacement of the terms that subverts each of them in turn. But the
subversion is not merely theoretical, but emerges from the changes undergone
by capitalism in reaction to the struggle of the multitude (potentia).
Indeed, I would argue that Negri has shifted the very terrain on which the
distinction operated, opening new theoretical and practical horizons. In the
case of Empire, this real displacement leaves one with neither a hypostasis
of the state of nature or of civil society. What we are left with rather, is
simply the concrete relations in which an individual always already is, and
the rights and laws created by their potentia.

What, on this account, becomes of politics? And what becomes of the relation
between the multitude and the State once both the state of nature and civil
society are done away with? First of all one should note that, if one
retains the tri-partite formula of liberal teleology, any reading of Empire
will inevitably miss the central point: that is, to think a politics of the
multitude outside the pre-conceived schema of civil society and the State.
What Negri finds in the thinking of potentia is the notion of a constitutive
power that can operate outside any notion of constituted (sovereign) power,
precisely because it is its precondition. Liberal theory itself recognises
this constitutive process, but renders it impotent in the theological schema
of the state of war, state of commerce, and state of right. We may have had
to wait for Hegel for this formula to attain its full theological heights,
but all those elements were in place long before.

Negri argues in the last chapter of Insurgencies, that the point is not that
of making the political 'correspond' to the social, but rather of
'inserting' the production of the political into the creation of the social.
In Empire this account is enriched through the adoption of the Foucaultian
notion of biopower, understood here as collective, co-operative, production
of subjectivity by and through the multitude. No doubt Negri & Hardt's
account of such a politics or practice of the multitude is somewhat sketchy.
So it will not surprise Bull to hear that the second volume of Empire is
rumoured to be on the multitude, although Negri's Kairòs, Alma Venus,
Multitudo can also be considered an intense meditation on these questions.

The question remains, however, of the relation of this constituent power
(i.e. the multitude as potentia) to constituted power (i.e. sovereignty, or
potestas). For if constituent power is constitutive of sovereignty one must
ask how constituted power can suppress, control, that which produces it.
Crucial to this question is that of politics in the relation between
constitutive and constituted power. Negri argues that in modernity the State
always returns to bring the constitutive process to an end. That is, in
modernity, constitutive power becomes a peculiar power that is summoned only
at particular moments in time to legitimise the constituted order in
proscribed ways. Modern parliamentary democracy is a paradigmatic example of
this. Every four or five years 'the people' are called to the polls to
decide on the new government. This is on the hand the recognition of the
power of 'the people' as the ultimate source of power, whilst it is also the
neutralisation of that potentia. Constituted power operates a horizontal
representation of the multitude, and a vertical subsumption. That is,
constituent power is dissolved in representation, and projected in the
'space of politics'. This is, in effect, the becoming autonomous of
politics, or its becoming spectacular. Negri goes on to argue that the
neutralisation of the multitude in the predetermined space of politics
requires the further operations of control of the multitude on what we can
call the plane of the social.

The great precursors here are Marx and Foucault. The notion of a
micro-physics of power, developed by Foucault, sees the diffuse distribution
of a diagram of power, or control, that is deployed by social institutions
throughout society. The paradigm of which is the 19th century panopticon
Here potestas exists in all the interstices of society, and operates just as
much through the production of subjects, as it does by brute repression.
Marx, on the other hand, de-mystifies the apparently smooth operations of
the market that structure the social, while at the same time revealing the
material world of antagonistic forces that compose it, and that do so
increasingly as a collective multitude brought together in productive
co-operation. We are left with two elements in an antagonistic relation, on
the one side capital/sovereignty, that operates a subsumption of the social
sphere by intervening in it directly while emasculating it politically; and
the multitude upon which it depends and which exists in the productive
co-operation of its elements. There is no element that may operate a
dialectical resolution here. Thus antagonism becomes ontologically
fundamental. The conditions for a liberal solution simply no longer exist.

Constituted power operates by operations of command, control, and
subsumption - for potestas now aims to shape the multitude directly. Any
pretence to mediation is lost. Potestas does indeed do its best to create
potentia (I refer you once again to Foucault), but it must do this in the
face of the resistance of the multitude. The fundamental separation of
thought and practice that the state watches over and perpetually reproduces,
creating a transcendent realm of freedom of thought while at the same time a
standardisation and repression of practice, what we might call the truth in
practice of liberalism, this is undercut by the ontology of potentia, in
which freedom is identified with the possibilities of material co-operation
and in the relations of the bodies of the multitude. Following Spinoza,
Negri & Hardt, question whether one can truly speak of freedom when all one
has is freedom of speech and thought, i.e. where the latter are utterly
divorced from the practices of the multitude.

But one question we have not yet considered is that of the social production
of potentia. With Marx's notion of living labour as the expression of
multitude and power we have on the one hand an ontological deepening of the
notion of constitutive power, but we have not yet seen how this constitutive
power can in some sense develop, progress, alter, i.e. how time or history
is introduced into this potentia other than abstractly. Hasn't the
separation between constitutive and constituted power become so radical that
it is either a case of suppression of the one or of the other? That is,
where is the innovation of potentia to come from? Negri argues that rather
than see the State always being brought back in as a block on constitutive
power, as occurs in the history of modernity, constituted power should be
made immanent to constitutive power. That is, constituted power is to be
organised in an open relation between origin and exercise of power. In this
way the multitude always operates within determinate conditions that its
serves to constitute, by which it is in turn shaped, but which it is always
able to re-connect with its own founding constitutive power, articulated by
changing balances of forces.

We see most clearly Malcolm Bull's strategy of reversal of potentia with
potestas when he argues that 'it is a case of sympathy rather than
sovereignty, of justice rather than power'. Negri & Hardt, on the other
hand, refuse to move to such an abstract notion of justice, preferring
rather to see justice only in the form directly expressed in the practices
of the multitude; recognising that either such a notion is produced
materially by the concrete demands of the multitude or it is nothing other
than the expression of the potestas of modern sovereignty: which is all too
often more closely linked to strategic decisions and demands of 'big
government' (WTO, G7, NATO...), along with 'big business', than anything
else. This, for example, is evident when we consider an example that Malcolm
Bull himself cites: that of US support for decolonisation. To suggest that
this was a case of sovereign justice, rather than a) the active resistance
of the peoples of the various colonial territories, along with b) a critical
moment in the creation of US economic and political hegemony, is - I
believe - to too readily buy the story of the US as the disinterested
supporter of freedom. Rather, and this time in agreement with Bull, it is
sympathy or love, which augments the potentia of the multitude, that is the
answer: 'Francis in opposition to nascent capitalism refused any
instrumental discipline, and in opposition to the mortification of the flesh
(in poverty and in the constituted order) he posed a joyous life, including
all being and nature, the animals, sister moon, brother sun, the birds of
the field, the poor and exploited humans, together against the will of power
and corruption.'

Bull argues that answers given to the problems of the powerless, in recent
years, have been addressed 'through a dynamic that works in the opposite
direction to the one Negri and Hardt suggest.' Which he characterises as a
form of opting out, or desertion. Bull's answer appears to be some form of
benign totalitarianism, but I feel that this must surely be merely a
provocation. The claim that one should somehow globalise American norms is
at best comical, when one considers that America has the weakest labour laws
in the western world (apart from perhaps the UK), its wealth is dependent
upon exporting the costs of its debt onto the rest of the world and
sustaining some of the most repressive regimes in the middle-east so as to
maintain cheap oil supplies, its democratic credentials are based on the
choice between two identical 'alternatives' (when not decided by a judge)
that vie with one another for who can pocket more wealth from
multinationals, that feels itself entirely justified in bombing whoever it
feels is a threat to its national security (always very flexibly
interpreted), and that has vetoed more UN resolutions than any other country
since the UN was founded. Global totalitarianism is what we have, and it
isn't pretty.

There are of course problems with Empire, some of which Negri himself has
acknowledged (see the interview with Luis Navarro in Carta), not least of
which is the provision of an adequate account of the politics of the
multitude in very different conditions around the globe. There is also a
question about whether this diversity is itself accounted for in Empire.
Perhaps the question of combined and uneven development across the globe
raises its head again. However, the suggestion that 'big(ger) government'
(WTO, G7, the UN Security Council, multinationals, NATO...) is the solution,
can only be maintained if one fails to see that 'big government' is very
much part of the problem. In the present, to call for some mythical contract
can only be to cynically re-legitimise the status quo, or it is an example
of impotent despair. It reminds me rather of Heidegger's impotent cry of
'only a God can save us'. Liberalism very easily turns into totalitarianism,
for its presuppositions are the same, and I am glad that Malcolm Bull has
made such an important contribution by reminding us of this. Bull is right
on another count as well. The terrorist network that carried out the
horrific attacks on New York is indeed closer to the US (but I would add, to
all of the elites of the global Empire) than we might at first think. But
not for the reason he suggests. Let us not forget, the leading members of
the 'terrorist network' are composed of members of the Arab elites who have
never questioned the neo-liberal agenda, who finance themselves thanks to
the liberalisation of financial markets of the global economy, who operate
by a massive repression of their own populations and - in the case of the
terrorists - were trained by the CIA. '"I am an American Airline pilot,'
boasted one hijacker drinking in the local bar"' - apart from anything else,
is this the behaviour of a Muslim fundamentalist?

It is surely naïve to believe that 'big government' - however big - will
step in and regulate global financial markets. Bull's reversal of the
ontological, the material priority of potentia over potestas, would leave us
impotent - more of the same. Rather, it is another system that is needed.
'Un altro mondo è possibile' (Another world is possible) is the slogan on
the placards at Genoa, and perhaps the strategy of autonomia, the strategy
of exodus is no less realistic than to call for the WTO, IMF and G8 to
regulate the system for the benefit of the poor.
Matteo Mandarini
1 I would like to thank Jon Beasly-Murray for comments to a first draft of
this 'reply'. I hope I have been able to answer some of his questions.