R: [Generation_online] News from the gutter

[richard pithouse]

I've read one other article from the New Criterion. I stumbled across it on
Arts and Letters Daily (http://www.aldaily.com) It was a review of David
Macey's new biography of Frantz Fanon. I was absolutely astounded. It was
full of the most extreme right wing and racist bile and declared Fanon to
be 'lazy'; 'stupid'; 'irrational' and so on. The New Criterion must be an
extreme right wing publication.

So, if they didn't hate Empire there'd be a problem. Like Nietzsche said:
Judge a person by their enemies.

Richard

At 02:30 PM 10/16/01 +0100, M wrote:
>An absolutely unbelievable review! I assume the New Criterion is US based,
>if so Negri could make a packet suing this arse hole just on the basis of
>the totally incredible statements made about his relations to the red
>brigade - even the red brigades said he had f.a. to do with them!
>
>The fact that the review begins by saying that Empire is 'reader proof' and
>later, shows his total ignorance of the subject by his inability to explain
>formal and real subsumption (which can be done in about a sentence) just
>shows that - if nothing else - the 'author' of this piece has had to
>substitute hear-say and bullshit for critical thought.
>
>Ok, got that out of my system.
>Once I read the final paragraph I began to wonder whether the whole thing
>was actually some kind of pastiche of the views of the extreme
>libertarian/fascistic wing of global capitalism. Check this out:
>Although written in the abstract language of the graduate seminar, Empire
>has an ominously pragmatic aim: to undermine faith in the liberal
>institutions that inform American democracy. It is a poisonous book whose
>ultimate goal is not to understand but to destroy society. Harvard
>University Press should be ashamed of publishing it. Sensible citizens
>should be alarmed that it is glorified by trendy intellectuals and the
>press. It is sometimes suggested that America's culture wars are over. The
>adulation showered upon Empire and its authors, together with the horrible
>events of September 11, show that the real battles have yet to be joined.
>
>
>-----Messaggio originale-----
>Da: generation_online-admin@kein.org
>[mailto:generation_online-admin@kein.org]Per conto di Erik
>Inviato: martedì 16 ottobre 2001 13.54
>A: generation_online@kein.org
>Oggetto: [Generation_online] News from the gutter
>
>This is a particularly sickening bit of slander, enjoy!
>
>
>
>The new anti-Americanism
>by Roger Kimball
>
>http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/oct01/empire.htm
>
>In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary
>criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost
>completely lacking in meaning.
>-George Orwell, 1946
>
>Another reaction to the events... has been to ignore them altogether and to
>burrow deeper into academic Marxism, concentrate on the more esoteric
>critiques of American society and capitalism, and chart new approaches
>toward their delegitimation.
>-Paul Hollander, 1995
>
>A new species of political activist has been born with a spirit that is
>reminiscent of the paradoxical idealism of the 1960s.
>-Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, July 2001
>
>The accolades have been extraordinary. The venerable literary Marxist
>Fredric Jameson opined that it is "the first great new theoretical synthesis
>of the new millennium." The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek-a plausible
>replacement for Jameson as the world's trendiest academic Marxist -declared
>that it is "nothing less than a rewriting of the The Communist Manifesto for
>our time." Further down the intellectual food chain, Emily Eakin, a
>journalist for The New York Times, delivered herself of an ecstatic summary,
>simultaneously certifying and increasing the book's prestige. Perhaps, she
>speculated, it is the "Next Big Idea," the successor to structuralism and
>deconstruction in the halls of literary academia. It is too soon to say for
>sure, she cautioned, but, possessed as it is of "the formal trappings of a
>master theory in the old European tradition," the book "is filling a void in
>the humanities." [1]
>
>Neither blurb writers nor cultural journalists write under oath, of course.
>But even with all of the appropriate discounts this is an exceptional
>outpouring. And what is the object of all these bright encomia? It is
>Empire, a five-hundred-page reader-proof tome written jointly by Michael
>Hardt, a thirty-something associate professor in the literature program at
>Duke, and Antonio Negri, an Italian political philosopher in his late
>sixties who is described on the book's dust jacket as "an independent
>researcher and writer and an inmate at Rebibbia Prison, Rome." I will say
>more about Negri below.
>
>It is in some ways a curious success story. Empire was published without
>particular fanfare by Harvard University Press in March 2000. It was in fact
>something of a sleeper (a term whose dual associations- with the realms of
>cultural fashion and terrorist espionage-make it peculiarly appropriate for
>a book that preaches revolution). The book's combination of owlish scholarly
>pretentiousness, on the one hand, and bristling Communist militancy, on the
>other, more or less guaranteed it at least a respectful audience in the
>academy. About the former-the owlish pretentiousness-it must be said that
>Hardt and Negri have perfect pitch. There are few fashionable academic
>clichés that do not make at least a cameo appearance in Empire. On every
>page Hardt and Negri field a large army of names and catch phrases-from Duns
>Scotus and Nicholas of Cusa to Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, from
>"postmodernization" to "biopolitical production." Their book luxuriates in a
>vast proliferation of abstract categories, schema, and prognostications.
>They are particularly adept at maintaining an atmosphere of inescapable
>menace. "In the passage from disciplinary society to society of control,"
>they write in one of many passages that takes off from the work of Foucault,
>
>a new paradigm of power is realized which is defined by the technologies
>that recognize society as the realm of biopower. In disciplinary society the
>effects of biopolitical technologies were still partial in the sense that
>disciplining developed according to closed, geometrical, and quantitative
>logics. Disciplinarity fixed individuals within institutions but did not
>succeed in consuming them completely in the rhythm of productive practices
>and productive socialization; it did not reach the point of permeating
>entirely the consciousness and bodies of individuals.
>Contemporary academics simply adore this sort of thing. Promiscuous talk
>about "power" and "discipline" seems to provide them with an almost erotic
>frisson. The charge is especially great when the talk is translated into
>academese-never say "discipline" when you can say "disciplinarity" -and
>dark, irresistible forces unrecognized by the rest of us are postulated. Who
>knows what "permeating entirely the consciousness and bodies of individuals"
>in the above passage means? Think about it: we are supposed to inhabit that
>"society of control" Hardt and Negri describe (or warn about: they never
>describe anything without an air of admonition). In what sense does power or
>discipline or disciplinarity or whatever permeate "entirely the
>consciousness and bodies of individuals"-for example, you and me? In no
>sense. What, for that matter, are "closed, geometrical, and quantitative
>logics"? Who knows? But the aura of bad news is unmistakable, and for
>intellectuals bent on promulgating anguish bad news is glad tidings.
>
>Empire is a veritable compendium of such passages. This alone made it a good
>candidate for academic stardom. And naturally the imprimatur of the Harvard
>University Press did not hurt. Still, it took a while before the book really
>developed a following. But by the time Emily Eakin and The New York Times
>caught up with it, in July 2001, translation rights had been lined up in ten
>countries and the book had become the darling of right-thinking-which means
>left-leaning-literary academics from New York to Sydney.
>
>It is worth pausing over Eakin's mash note. Not because what she says is
>astute. She even manages to get the basic message of the book exactly 100
>percent backward. But Eakin's panegyric is symptomatic of the smug,
>destructive cultural milieu that nurtures books like Empire.
>
>"Empire" is Hardt's and Negri's term for that transnational, capitalist
>entity-or perhaps it is a process: it is difficult to say-that has
>supposedly succeeded the nation state. (The nation state they regard as a
>dinosaur that is well on its way to the dust-bin of history.) Hence Empire
>is not coterminous with the United States, though Hardt and Negri clearly
>believe that the U.S. figures prominently in the architecture of Empire. In
>fact, what they call Empire does not really exist. Hardt and Negri sometimes
>come close to acknowledging this (though a page later they are populating
>Empire with all sorts of powers and attributes). In their preface, Hardt and
>Negri boldly claim that Empire is "not a metaphor but a concept, which calls
>primarily for a theoretical approach."
>
>The words "theoretical approach" should send a shiver down the spine of any
>sensible person. The burden of their remark is to declare intellectual open
>season. When it comes to applying a "theoretical approach" to a "concept,"
>the bottom line is: anything goes. Still, using a capital letter whenever
>Empire is mentioned was a sound rhetorical move. It helps to give this airy
>nothing local habitation and a name, and people who are reassured by being
>told that something is not a metaphor but a concept will be grateful for
>that. Eakin writes that Hardt and Negri believe "Empire is good news." In
>truth, they excoriate it on virtually every page. "In Empire corruption is
>everywhere," they write in one typical passage. "It is the cornerstone and
>keystone of domination." One of their central questions is how the
>"multitude" (their term for what Marx called the proletariat) can become
>political and overcome "the central repressive operations of Empire." (The
>answer, which comes on page 400: "We cannot say at this point.") Does this
>sound like "good news"? No, Hardt and Negri do not regard Empire as good
>news. They regard it as Marx regarded capitalism: something so bad that it
>would necessarily perish of its own badness. (Marx, being a Hegelian,
>substituted "contradictions" for "badness" in order to invest the process
>with the appearance of logical necessity, but there is no reason to dignify
>that philosophical sleight-of-hand by perpetuating the linguistic solecism.)
>
>Eakin is also wrong to suggest that Empire may represent the "Next Big
> Idea." This is mainly because Empire is based on a laughably tiny idea, and
>one that is also old and wrong. The idea, again, is Marx's idea about the
>inevitable collapse of capitalism. It seemed big once upon a time. It is now
>as thoroughly discredited as an historical or political idea can be. Hardt
>and Negri gussy up Marx with a formidable panoply of New Age rhetoric about
>globalization. But the creaking you hear as you make your way through the
>book is the rusty grinding of the dialectic: it goes nowhere, it means
>nothing, but it keeps creaking along.
>
>Eakin is mistaken not only about the intellectual size of Empire. She is
>also wrong about the intellectual size of the movements Empire is enlisted
>to succeed. Structuralism was not an important intellectual development.
>Neither was deconstruction, or post-colonialism, or new historicism, the
>other academic fads to which Eakin genuflects. One and all they were-they
>continue to be-intellectual con-games, utterly void of merit except as tools
>of obfuscation and intellectual corruption. (They can also help in the
>campaign to obtain tenure, but that is a separate matter.)
>
>One of the things that makes Eakin's discussion of Empire so distasteful is
>the crass and stunningly superficial view of the humanities it presupposes.
>It is a view that celebrates novelty and "daringness" to the exclusion of
>concern for truth. Of course Eakin is not alone in this bad habit. On the
>contrary, the subordination of permanent human concerns to the winds of
>intellectual fashion is epidemic in the humanities. It is a major reason
>that Empire is enjoying its fifteen minutes of fame. But the fact that an
>evil is widespread and popular does not mean it is any less objectionable.
>
>Eakin speaks of "the need in fields like English, history, and philosophy
>for a major new theory." What those fields really need, however, is not a
>"major new theory"-or any sort of theory, come to that-but a return to first
>principles. Professors of literature do not require a theory to make Milton
>or Shakespeare come alive. What they need is a straightforward concern for
>the text and the questions it raises. Great works of literature are
>inexhaustible when confronted by candid human curiosity.
>
>It is the same in other fields. Plato or Aristotle or Aquinas or Kant seem
>like old hat only to someone who has lost the ability to read philosophy.
>But such persons ought not to be teaching. Eakin quotes Stanley Aronowitz, a
>Marxist professor of sociology, who praises Empire for "addressing the
>crisis in the humanities, which has reached the point where banality seems
>to pervade the sphere." Aronowitz is right that there is a crisis in the
>humanities; he is right, too, that it is in part a crisis of banality. But
>the cause of the crisis is not the lack but rather the ceaseless pursuit of
>new theories. Is there anything more banal than the expostulations of
>Derrida, Foucault, and their countless epigones and progeny? The triumph of
>what goes under the name "theory" has proven to be a prescription for
>frivolousness, grandstanding, and mendacity. If the past few decades have
>shown anything about the state of the liberal arts, it is that theory,
>so-called, does not enliven or illuminate the humanities: it replaces the
>humanities with an ideological counterfeit.
>
>Which brings me back to Empire. Eakin cheerfully suggested that it was
>"filling a void in the humanities." It would be more accurate to say that it
>epitomizes that void. I have already mentioned its style. Even Orwell would
>have been impressed. When he observed that it was "normal to come across
>long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning," he surely did
>not anticipate authors who would be able to keep up the unintelligibility
>for nearly five-hundred pages. (Perhaps that is why Empire is co-authored:
>the strain of unrelieved crit-speak would have been too much for any one
>individual.) Empire is full of passages like this on "The Dialectic of
>Colonialism":
>
>In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a separate
>colonized other and the segregation of identity and alterity turns out
>paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely intimate. The process
>consists, in fact, of two moments that are dialectically related. In the
>first moment difference has to be pushed to the extreme. In the colonial
>imaginary the colonized is not simply an other banished outside the realm of
>civilization; rather it is grasped or produced as Other, as the absolute
>negation, as the most distant point on the horizon.
>It is not just the style of Empire that is rebarbative. Its judgments are
>too. They are mostly a tapestry of Marxist chestnuts updated for
>contemporary circumstances. Remember the Cold War? Leftist dogma maintains
>that it is impossible that the United States won the Cold War. Ergo, the
>fact that the United States did win it-that the policies of the Reagan
>administration brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union-must be denied
>at every turn. So it is business as usual when Hardt and Negri solemnly
>assure us that "the United States did not defeat the socialist enemy" in the
>Cold War; rather "The Soviet Union collapsed under the burden of its own
>internal contradictions."
>
>"Internal contradictions"? We require permits for handguns: why not for
>lethal concepts such as the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic? Its careless use is
>clearly a public intellectual-health hazard. The dialectic is the ultimate
>sophist's tool. Marx himself realized this. In an 1857 letter to Engels
>about an election prediction, Marx wrote: "It's possible that I shall make
>an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a
>little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right
>either way." Hardt and Negri are not as cautious as the master. They are
>adept at deploying the dialectic, but they haven't mastered the art of
>duplicitous ambiguity. Thus they baldly conclude that the Gulf War was
>"really an operation of oppression"-perpetrated, of course, not by Saddam
>Hussein but by the United States. The Los Angeles riots they describe as one
>of "the most radical and powerful struggles of the final years of the
>twentieth century." High praise indeed! Most of us, looking back over the
>history of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century, would conclude that there
>was no international proletarian revolution as Marx predicted there would
>be. But according to Hardt and Negri such a judgment would be superficial
>and short-sighted: "actually," they write, the proletariat "'won'" because
>nation states are not as powerful now as they once were.
>
>I suspect that part of the reason Empire is such a hit in the academy is its
>superior insulation. Hardt and Negri have sealed every point of ingress: no
>hint of reality is allowed to seep in. The single greatest embarrassment to
>Marxist theory has always been the longevity of capitalism. It was supposed
>to implode from "internal contradictions" long ago. But here it is 2001 and
>capitalism is still going strong and making the world richer and richer.
>Attempting to explain this is the greatest test of a Marxist's ingenuity.
>Here is how Hardt and Negri handle the problem:
>
>As we write this book and the twentieth century draws to a close, capitalism
>is miraculously healthy, its accumulation more robust than ever. How can we
>reconcile this fact with the careful analyses of numerous Marxist authors at
>the beginning of the century who point to the imperialist conflicts as
>symptoms of an impending ecological disaster running up against the limits
>of nature?
>They offer three hypotheses for this imponderable situation. One, that
>capitalism has reformed itself and so is no longer in danger of collapse (an
>option they dismiss out of hand). Two, that the Marxist theory is right
>except for the timetable: "Sooner or later the once abundant resources of
>nature will run out." Three-well, it is a little difficult to say what the
>third hypothesis is. It has to do, they say, with the idea that capitalism's
>expansion is "internal" rather than "external," that it "subsumes not the
>noncapitalist environment but its own capitalist terrain- that is, that the
>subsumption is no longer formal but real." I won't attempt to explain this
>for the simple reason that I haven't a clue about what it means.
>Is there any important option they have neglected? Could it, just possibly,
>be that the "careful analyses of numerous Marxist authors" was just plain
>wrong? This is a possibility apparently too awful to contemplate, for Hardt
>and Negri never raise it.
>
>It might seem that the best response to Empire is also the easiest: simple
>neglect. If anything is going to "implode" from its own "internal
>contradictions," wouldn't it be silly neo-Marxist diatribes written in
>polysyllabic gobbledygook? Who really cares whether books like Empire are
>considered hot stuff by the folks who run the Modern Language Association?
>Isn't that just another confirmation of the complete irrelevancy of the
>academic world today? Writers like Hardt and Negri are clearly out of touch
>with reality: doesn't that render them harmless?
>
>Would that it were so. Unfortunately, preposterousness has never been a
>barrier to effectiveness. There are plenty of ideas that are fatuous,
>wrongheaded, or simply ridiculous that nevertheless have a great and baneful
>influence on the world. Books like Empire are a veritable repository of such
>ideas. The one unequivocally true statement in Empire is the observation (in
>italics in the original) that "the 'merely cultural' experimentation [of the
>1960s] had very profound political and economic effects." Hardt and Negri
>are both children of the 1960s, Hardt by adoption, Negri because he
>participated in them to the hilt. Empire dilates enthusiastically on the
>radical movement of the 1960s, on the great benefits of ingesting
>mind-altering drugs and the happy "experimentation with new forms of
>productivity" undertaken by the feckless denizens of Haight-Ashbury and
>other ghettos of irresponsibility.
>
>A prime ingredient of the ideology of the 1960s was anti-Americanism.
>America- generally spelled "Amerika"-was public enemy number one, not only
>because of the Vietnam War but also because of its embrace of capitalism and
>Western liberal values. Susan Sontag spoke for many left-wing intellectuals
>when she excoriated American culture as "inorganic, dead, coercive,
>authoritarian," wrote that "the white race is the cancer of human history,"
>and insisted that what America "deserves" is to have its wealth "taken away"
>by the Third World. (Some things never change. In the aftermath of the
>terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Sontag published an angry
>letter in The New Yorker lambasting "the self-righteous drivel and outright
>deceptions being peddled by public figures," including our "robotic
>President," who did not understand that those terrorists attacks were
>"undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.")
>
>Empire is a contemporary redaction of the radicalism and anti-Americanism of
>the 1960s. It is the intellectual rationalization of attitudes whose
>practical effects were demonstrated so vividly on September 11. Books like
>Empire are not innocent academic inquiries. They are incitements to violence
>and terrorism. This is something that Antonio Negri, at any rate,
>understands perfectly well. Emily Eakin described Negri as a "flamboyant...
>Italian philosopher and suspected terrorist mastermind who is serving a
>13-year prison sentence in Rome for inciting violence during the turbulent
>1970's."
>
>That is putting it mildly. Antonio Negri was an architect of the infamous
>Red Brigades, a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group. In 1979, he was arrested
>and charged with "armed insurrection against the state" and seventeen
>murders, including the murder of the Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who
>was kidnapped in 1978 and shot dead fifty-five days later, his body dumped
>in a car. Negri did not actually pull the trigger. But, as David Pryce-Jones
>noted in an excellent article about Empire in the September 17 number of
>National Review, "The Italian authorities had no doubt that Negri was
>ultimately responsible. Just before Moro was shot dead, someone telephoned
>his distraught wife to taunt her, and that person was identified at the time
>as Negri." He fled to Paris, where he struck up friendships with Michel
>Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and other specimens of enlightenment. He
>eventually returned to Italy and negotiated a sharply reduced sentence for
>"membership in an armed band."
>
>There is nothing in Empire to suggest that Negri has had second thoughts
>about his activities in the Red Brigades. On the contrary, whenever violent
>insurrection is mentioned, it is praised. In an op-ed piece published in The
>New York Times in July, Hardt and Negri congratulated the violent protesters
>in Genoa who took to the streets this summer when world financial leaders
>met there. "These movements," they enthused, "are what link Genoa this
>weekend most clearly to the openness-toward new kinds of exchange and new
>ideas-of its Renaissance past." (Hardt and Negri have what might generously
>be described as an idiosyncratic view of the Renaissance. In Empire, they
>write-in italics, to be sure we don't miss it-that "Michel Foucault's final
>works on the history of sexuality bring to life once again that same
>revolutionary impulse that animated Renaissance humanism." I wonder what
>Jacob Burckhardt would have said about that.)
>
>Empire concludes with a section called "Militant," printed entirely in
>italics. "In the postmodern era, as the figure of the people dissolves, the
>militant is the one who best expresses the life of the multitude: the agent
>of biopolitical production and resistance against Empire." Hardt and Negri
>praise "the communist and liberatory combatants of the twentieth-century
>revolutions" and assure us that "militancy today is a positive,
>constructive, and innovative activity." The most nauseating part of the book
>comes at the very end: "This is a revolution that no power will
>control-because biopower and communism, cooperation and revolution remain
>together, in love, simplicity, and also innocence. This is the irrepressible
>lightness and joy of being communist."
>
>Although written in the abstract language of the graduate seminar, Empire
>has an ominously pragmatic aim: to undermine faith in the liberal
>institutions that inform American democracy. It is a poisonous book whose
>ultimate goal is not to understand but to destroy society. Harvard
>University Press should be ashamed of publishing it. Sensible citizens
>should be alarmed that it is glorified by trendy intellectuals and the
>press. It is sometimes suggested that America's culture wars are over. The
>adulation showered upon Empire and its authors, together with the horrible
>events of September 11, show that the real battles have yet to be joined.
>
>
>
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 The social milieu affects the content of philosophy, and the content of
 philosophy seeks to affect the social milieu, either by confirming it or 
 by opposing it.
   - Kwame Nkrumah