[Felix Hoenikker]

Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between Michael Hardt and Thomas Dumm about Hardt and Negri's Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000)
4:3 | © 2000 Michael Hardt and Thomas Dumm

Thomas Dumm. First of all it seems important to ask, how is Toni Negri? When might he be released?
· Michael Hardt. Negri now has a work release arrangement whereby he is free to go where he pleases during the day but must return each night to the Rebibbia prison near Rome. After spending fourteen years in exile in France, he returned to Italy and prison in 1997 in the hope that he could both resolve his own case and work for a general amnesty for all those accused of crimes on the basis of their political activities in the 1960s and 70s. There has been no movement in the Italian parliament toward such an amnesty, however, and Negri's own case has proceeded according to normal criminal procedures. In 1998 he reached the midpoint of his sentence (including the four and a half years he served before going to France) and he was thus eligible for work release. In 2001, when he reaches the point when three years remain on his sentence, he will be eligible for parole.
· TD: It is good to know that despite his status it is possible for him to be able to continue his work, which includes the collaborative projects he has completed with you.
· One of my favorite aphorisms is the opening sentence from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: "The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd." Some may already be aware that the two of you have already written Labor of Dionysus together, and have worked on the French journal Futur Antérieur for some time, but could you tell us a little bit about how you and Antonio Negri came to collaborate on Empire?
· MH: Negri has worked collaboratively for a long time, in journal collectives and political organizations. He also wrote a book together with Félix Guattari. I imagine that I learned how to write collaboratively largely from him.
· I profit enormously from collaboration and I think collaborative writing should be encouraged more in the humanities. (It is already necessary in the natural sciences and many areas of the social sciences due in part to the technologies of research.) It is obvious I imagine how much collaborators learn from each other. Negri and I have very different disciplinary training -- he in political science and I in comparative literature -- and we refer primarily to different national literatures. Our writing projects thus always begin by making reading lists for the other person of what each of us consider to be the relevant literature. The collaboration is in this way a kind of mutual education process.
· What is most exhilarating and challenging about collaborative writing is the negotiation involved in the writing itself. But really negotiation is not the right concept, because that would involve some kind of dialogue between two individuals. Alchemy is a better notion for the process. In cooperation, Marx says, humans are stripped of the fetters of their individuality. And this is why so many people have difficulty embarking on collaborative writing projects -- it is so hard to abandon our individuality! I have found that there is a tendency when writing collaboratively to think like the other person and construct sentences that he or she would form. I feel the resulting prose is both mine and not mine. That is why it is futile to try to divide collaborative texts into passages written by this author or the other. Each author is adopting the other's voice or, really, they are both adopting some third voice or numerous other voices. This is what I think Deleuze and Guattari mean when they refer to the crowd who wrote Anti-Oedipus. The alchemy of collaboration does not merge the two authors into a single voice but rather proliferates them to create the chorus of a multitude.
· TD: The way you describe your process of collaboration sounds very much like the way you and Negri imagine labor having new opportunities to realize itself in the rhizomatic model of communication anticipated by Deleuze and Guattari, a model that seems crucial to your vision of absolute democracy in Empire. Indeed, your reference above to a "multitude" gestures toward the de-centered hybrid of the new revolutionary subject, one perhaps not identified with the either/or of the citizen or laboring body, but with a yet to be realized emergent being. The realization of this project seems to require a new vocabulary, and "the multitude" seems to be one of your most crucial conceptual interventions, in that regard. One is reminded of Marx's comment in the 1844 manuscripts about how the authentic language of humanity would, in present circumstances, be heard as a scream.
· MH: Perhaps Marx's notion of a general intellect captures best this process of collective theorizing. It is easy to see that all of us stand on the shoulders of others when we think, using concepts, logics, and knowledges that we have inherited. What Marx's notion of general intellect does for me is to pose this observation in social rather than individual terms. We are all part of a general intellect or a collective intelligence that produces concepts and knowledges. It is difficult and finally pointless to try to determine which idea was mine and which yours. We're thinking together. (And that is why private property in the realm of the intellect is such a tenuous proposition.) That doesn't mean that we all think the same or even less that we all agree, just that the process of thought is a social process.
· TD: Perhaps it is partly a result of your collaborative process that Empire doesn't dwell so much in the realm of negative critique. Instead, it appears as both a critical history of the present and a vision for the future. But whereas other recent interventions in theory seem to focus on one side of the problem of politics, perhaps too reductively we could call this the problem associated with techniques of normalization -- say, Habermas's theory of communicative action, Derrida's deconstruction, Foucault's genealogy of disciplinary society and governmentality, and even Deleuze and Guattari's nomadology -- you and Negri seem to focus your most important critical energies and constructive efforts into understanding and providing ways of resisting sovereignty as it migrates away from the nation-state and to its newest networks. In this sense, the work you have done and the work of other thinkers like Giorgio Agamben concerning an immanent, rather than transcendent mode of thinking politically, seems both to resurrect an idea of history as movement and to resist Hegelianism while trying to use Hegel still. Why do you think sovereignty is now appearing as such a central problem for political theory?
· MH: I assume that the renewed interest in the concept of sovereignty in the field of political theory is related in part to the analyses of the autonomy of the political that first focused on the work of Hannah Arendt and more recently on that of Carl Schmitt. Sovereignty does identify what is distinctive about the political or, at least, about the nature of rule and resistance. Another reason for increased interest today on the concept of sovereignty, not only among political theorists, is the decline of the sovereignty of nation-states. It is quite clear that in the various processes of globalization the locus of sovereignty has shifted away from the nation-state, at least in part, but it is not so easy to identity its new locus, if indeed it can be located at all. Furthermore, and this is the much more interesting question, perhaps the nature itself of sovereignty has changed in this passage. We claim that indeed there has been a shift from the modern form of sovereignty, theorized by authors from Bodin and Hobbes to Schmitt, to what we call an imperial sovereignty. The form of modern sovereignty can be characterized schematically by the dialectic of inside and outside. (Think of Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction as its basic unit if you like.) Imperial sovereignty, in contrast, operates on a network model and functions through hybrid identities and differences of degree.
· Our perspective, of course, is against sovereignty in all its forms: imperial sovereignty, the nation-state, even the "popular" forms of sovereignty that arose in modernity. Absolute democracy is incompatible with sovereignty. But in order to challenge sovereignty and pose an alternative to it, one must understand first its contemporary form. Resistances to old, outdated forms of rule often tend not only to be ineffective against the present form but contribute to its functioning.
· TD: In that regard, my sense is that you both recognize the power of Giorgio Agamben's argument in Homo Sacer concerning the extraordinary violence of sovereignty at the end of modernity and yet you seek to overcome what may (not too unjustly) be thought of as a terrifying passivity that his position could result in.
· MH: Our argument in Empire does share some central concerns with Agamben's Homo Sacer, particularly surrounding the notions of sovereignty and biopower. Agamben brilliantly elaborates a conception of modern sovereignty based on Carl Schmitt's notions of the decision on the exception and the state of emergency, in which the modern functioning of rule becomes a permanent state of exception. He then links this conception to the figure of the banned or excluded person back as far as ancient Roman law with his usual spectacular erudition. The pinnacle and full realization of modern sovereignty thus becomes the Nazi concentration camp: the zone of exclusion and exception is the heart of modern sovereignty and grounds the rule of law. My hesitation with this view is that by posing the extreme case of the concentration camp as the heart of sovereignty it tends to obscure the daily violence of modern sovereignty in all its forms. It implies, in other words, that if we could do away with the camp then all the violence of sovereignty would also disappear.
· The most significant difference between our projects, though, is that Agamben dwells on modern sovereignty whereas we claim that modern sovereignty has now come to an end and transformed into a new kind of sovereignty, what we call imperial sovereignty. Imperial sovereignty has nothing to do with the concentration camp. It no longer takes the form of a dialectic between Self and Other and does not function through any such absolute exclusion, but rules rather through mechanisms of differential inclusion, making hierarchies of hybrid identities. This description may not immediately give you the same sense of horror that you get from Auschwitz and the Nazi Lager, but imperial sovereignty is certainly just as brutal as modern sovereignty was, and it has its own subtle and not so subtle horrors.
· But still none of that addresses the passivity you refer to. For that we have to look instead at Agamben's notions of life and biopower. Agamben uses the term "naked life" to name that limit of humanity, the bare minimum of existence that is exposed in the concentration camp. In the final analysis, he explains, modern sovereignty rules over naked life and biopower is this power to rule over life itself. What results from this analysis is not so much passivity, I would say, but powerlessness. There is no figure that can challenge and contest sovereignty. Our critique of Agamben's (and also Foucault's) notion of biopower is that it is conceived only from above and we attempt to formulate instead a notion of biopower from below, that is, a power by which the multitude itself rules over life. (In this sense, the notion of biopower one finds in some veins of ecofeminism such as the work of Vandana Shiva, although cast on a very different register, is closer to our notion of a biopower from below.) What we are interested in finally is a new biopolitics that reveals the struggles over forms of life.
· TD: How are people to be convinced that the relevant opposition is to sovereignty, though? That is, to put it maybe too simplistically, beyond the call for the end of big government, a call which has its ironies, through what communicative means do you see the constituent power of the multitude realizing itself against the nation-state?
· MH: It is not a matter of convincing anyone to oppose sovereignty. It is natural to refuse authority and the refusal of authority is going on every day at all levels of society. And all of the various forms of modern and contemporary liberatory politics are at base a refusal of servitude, a refusal to accept as natural our subordination to rulers. I see the opposition to sovereignty as a way to name the generality of all these activities.
· TD: Your resistance to all forms of sovereignty is certain to provoke some very strong responses, I would think especially among post-colonial thinkers who still see in the nation-state a way of advancing a progressive agenda. You and Negri are very appreciative of this position in Empire, yet you also urge people not to "harbor any nostalgia for the powers of the nation-state or to resurrect any politics that celebrates the nation." (p.336)
· MH: Anti-colonial and post-colonial thinkers have certainly not been united in their political evaluations of the nation-state. Franz Fanon's work itself demonstrates the numerous complexities that surround the question. And the Marxist tradition too has been divided (the conflict between Lenin and Luxemburg was one powerful instance). But these were all tactical matters. The only logical and honest argument for the nation-state in these contexts is as a defense weapon against more powerful foreign forces, such as colonialist armies or transnational capital. The state itself, however, is at its base an apparatus of domination; it establishes a ruling authority that stands separate from and above society. The question is not should the state be destroyed in order to establish a democratic society but when is the right time to do so.
· TD: But some post-colonial theorists -- here I am thinking of Homi Bhabha's essay "The Postcolonial and the Postmodern" -- might argue that the question of the nation-state is not a tactical one, but a cultural one, in the deepest possible sense. For Bhabha, the emergence of a post-colonial episteme may offer up a hybrid subjectivity that might allow us to evade the fate of the normalized subject. How would you respond to this argument?
· MH: First of all, nation is the wrong concept to use to name cultural heritage, identity, and community in this case. There may exist nations without states, but every nation contains within itself the dream of a state. I sometimes think that Benedict Anderson's motto should be reversed: the nation sometimes seems to be the only form in which we can imagine community. And that is only testament to our poverty of imagination. Nation, of course, is a specific form of community, one that is inevitably characterized by exclusion of others, internal hierarchy, and ultimately sovereign authority.
· More important for our argument in Empire, however, is the question of hybridity. Homi Bhabha's work is rich and complex, but many readers come away from it with the impression that hybridity itself is liberatory because it defies the binaries through which power functions: white/black, male/female, and so forth. We claim, however, that imperial sovereignty is not threatened in the least by hybrid subjectivities. In fact, Empire rules precisely through a kind of politics of difference, managing hybrid identities in flexible hierarchies. From this perspective, then, a politics of hybridity may have been effective against the now defunct modern form of sovereignty but it is powerless against the current imperial form.
· TD: Let's shift gears slightly to discuss some of the methodological features of your book. One way of describing Empire might be to say that you and Negri challenge your readers to follow you to the green pastures of a new communism, one nurtured by what might be thought of as a certain eclecticism at the level of method. You combine a rigorous resistance to modern formulas of transcendence through both a continued adherence to critique and the embrace of a immanence indebted to Spinoza (among others) while admittedly, as you say, continuing to "flirt with Hegel." Indeed, you present as your twin models Marx's Capital and Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. This makes the book a great adventure to read, if not the least because of the surprising juxtapositions of thinkers and categories of thought usually thought to be utterly incompatible. Are you concerned that some may find Empire too eclectic, that is to say, not rigorous enough? Or do you find such a concern itself to be misplaced?
· MH: I think the greater danger, if one had to choose between the two, would be dogmatism rather than eclecticism. Dogmatism narrows our range of theoretical possibilities; the dogmatic calls eclectic any effort to read thinkers and traditions differently and arrange them in new constellations. The charge of eclecticism really assumes that the writer has no method or perspective of her or his own: moving among different traditions thus appears as an incoherent combination. When the writer does have his or her own method and perspective, however, the various traditions and thinkers enlisted in the argument are organized by its overall coherence. In this case, what is really at stake is the formation of a new canon, a new constellation of political and philosophical traditions. Our project aims at such a new constellation and perhaps for that reason may appear to some as eclectic.
· The dogmatic division that I find most prevalent and troublesome today is the one that separates Marxism from poststructuralism. First of all, the division is simply historically inaccurate. Poststructuralism is a vague term, but the majority of the French philosophers who are generally grouped under that rubric developed their thought within one vein or another of the Marxist tradition. The fact that many of them at various points of their careers challenged established Marxist doctrines or Marx's own writings does not warrant our posing some theoretical opposition: such challenges are what commonly keep traditions alive. Poststructuralism in the U.S. is not so easily characterized, but recently someone criticized me of eclecticism when I crossed the Marxist / poststructuralist divide and discussed Donna Haraway's cyborg manifesto in the context of a communist project. There is obviously some historical amnesia involved when we cannot remember that Haraway's cyborg manifesto was explicitly a project of socialist feminism.
· Secondly, and more important than any such historical arguments, enforcing an intellectual division between poststructuralism and Marxism distorts the content of both traditions and deprives us of many significant theoretical and practical possibilities. I must admit that I have only recently become aware of the division and the dedication many have to it. Previously I crossed the lines in blissful ignorance. The Left Conservatism debate (featured in an earlier issue of Theory & Event) and reactions to my own work have forced me to recognize the problem. Negri and I often prefer to conceive of our orientation as communist rather than Marxist and, for us at least, this serves to circumvent this kind of dogmatic division. Dedicating a tradition to a single thinker, rather than a set of methods, principles, and ideas, always runs the risk of precluding innovation and creating a new dogmatism. We certainly have as substantial criticisms of Marx as we do of Spinoza, Deleuze, Machiavelli, and others. In fact, the tradition of communist thought and practice has perhaps been too dominated by the name of Marx, eclipsing its various alternatives and possibilities. Communist thought, in other words, is much bigger than Marx. We claim, for example, that Spinoza was a communist thinker long before Marx -- how else can we understand his proposal of an "absolute democracy" -- and Deleuze was a communist thinker even if he did not conceive of himself as one.
· TD: The Left Conservatism debate has seemed to hinge on claims about differences between culture and economy, among some of the protagonists (such as the interesting and productive debate between Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser, which you cite in Empire), and arguments about the powers of identity and the claims of recognition advanced by critical race theorists and some others and a more traditional unionism and nationalism as represented these days by Richard Rorty and Adolph Reed, to name two. More than simply naming yourselves as communists, in Empire you and Negri seem to be suggesting that these differences are bound to dissolve in the crucible of the informatization of labor.
· MH: You're probably right that the most substantial aspect of these debates was the question of whether culture or economy should serve as the primary field of explanation in such political discussions. It seems to me, though, that the question is poorly posed because separating economy from culture we end up with false notions of both economy and culture. Moreover, if in the recent transformation, as we claim, economic production is becoming increasingly cultural and cultural production increasingly economic, then the entire problematic would be significantly displaced. We try to think this shift under the rubric of immaterial labor, which includes not only work with images and analytical-symbolic tasks but also affective labor and caring labor. In immaterial labor the economic and the cultural are inseparable.
· TD: In this sense you make respectable yet another term that has fallen on hard times: postmodernism. Nietzsche once claimed that the only word with a clear meaning is one without a history. What work does that term do for you, especially since you are so aware of its troubled history?
· MH: Well, our entire project is indeed based on the recognition of an epochal break or an historical passage that brought modernity and modernization to an end. Foucault was brilliant at naming for such shifts a very specific date or event, which appeared absurd for its very specificity; we might seem equally absurd for indicating too many events as the marker of this passage. At times we locate the shift in the victorious national liberation struggles of the 1960s and the end of European colonialism, at other times we point to the explosion of workers movements, liberation struggles, and feminist movements throughout the world in 1968, at still other times we indicate Nixon's decoupling of the dollar from the gold standard in 1971, at others we conceive the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall as the central event, and so forth. We try to demonstrate that all of these events are elements of the passage. So if the postmodern is meant to indicate the end of modernity and modernization, then yes our project is certainly postmodern. On the other hand, it bears little resemblance to the various postmodernist theories that seemed so urgent a few years ago. Perhaps in retrospect we should reread those postmodernist theories as symptoms of a passage rather than as a model or paradigm for thought.
· TD: A compelling feature of Empire is the explanatory framework it provides for understanding the contemporary transformations that are taking place in the production of space and how this change is crucial to the emergence of a new imperial sovereignty. To quote:
·
The striated space of modernity constructed places that were continually engaged in and founded on a dialectical play with their outsides. The space of imperial sovereignty, in contrast, is smooth. It might appear to be free of the binary divisions or striations of modern boundaries, but really it is crisscrossed by so many faultlines that it only appears as a continuous uniform space. In this sense, the clearly defined crisis of modernity gives way to an omni-crisis of the imperial world. In this smooth space of Empire, there is no place of power -- it is both everywhere and nowhere. Empire is an ou-topia, or really a non-place (p. 190).
· This passage, with its multiple debts both explicit and implicit -- to Deleuze, to Foucault (the description is redolent with gestures to Deleuze's "diagram of Foucault" in Foucault), to Lefebvre, to Debord, among others -- underlines the point that "The modern dialectic of inside and outside has been replaced by a play of degrees and intensities, of hybridity and artificiality" (pp. 187-188). It seems that for this reason the postmodernist writers you are most enthusiastic about are those who have tried to apply the lessons of poststructuralism to international relations theory. Why do you think that there has been no correspondingly powerful critical insight achieved in other domains of theory?
· MH: I do see the reconceptualization of space as a general project that is being pursued across various domains of theory. For example, the increasing importance of geography to theory more generally -- the work of David Harvey, Edward Soja, and Doreen Massey come to mind -- is perhaps a symptom of this renewed focus on space. But you may be right that this reconceptualization of space is often not recognized explicitly as such.
· As is evident from the passage you cite, we try to capture the various ways in which space had been transformed in the transition from the modern to the postmodern, or the imperialist to the imperial, with the claim that "there is no more outside," by which we mean that the distinction between inside and outside becomes increasing less clear. (I had been intrigued by Fred Jameson's claim that in postmodernity there is no more nature and this is one way of interpreting that.) It is perhaps most obvious, as you say, to examine our claim in the context in international relations because one effect of the contemporary processes of globalization is to blur national boundaries, that is, to make less clear what should be situated inside and what outside the nation-state. This blurring clearly poses a challenge to the realist tradition of international relations theory because it makes reading the world scene as if state actors were the primary agents acting as individuals more and more implausible.
· It is more challenging and perhaps more important to bring this observation down to the level of the subject itself. The claim that there is no more outside means here that identity and difference are no longer the adequate concepts for recognizing the constitution and interaction of subjects. But here too our claim is not particularly original. If fact, I consider this -- the conception of the subject beyond the boundaries of identity and difference -- one of the central propositions of queer theory in its best formulations. What is distinctive about our contribution in this regard, I think, is our proposal of a general framework that demonstrates the continuity among these different realms in which there is no more outside.
· TD: This observation may be a key to understanding how the multitude is different from the masses? That is, it ties back to the explanation for the need for progressive forces to "get over" the nation-state?
· MH: For us it is most important, first of all, to distinguish the concept of the multitude from that of the people. The people is a single identity, a representation or synthesis of the population, whereas the multitude is a multiplicity. The people cannot exist without the nation and vice versa. On the other hand, the concept of the multitude is also different from that of the masses or the mob. The masses and the mob are most often used to name an irrational and passive social force, dangerous and violent because so easily manipulated. The multitude, in contrast, is an active social agent -- a multiplicity that acts. It is in fact the foundation of all social creativity.
· This may be relatively clear conceptually, but it is still not at all evident how to understand the multitude in social and sociological terms. This appears to us now as the most significant shortcoming of our book. After a theory of Empire, we now need to write a theory of the multitude. We have started to work on this along two axes: first, the various recent theorizations of the body particularly among feminist theorists and, second, the innovative forms of political organization that are emerging in the new social struggles around the world. I hope you can see how these two axes fit together. The multitude is not a body in the sense that Hobbes theorized the body politic; it is rather a corporeal assemblage that acts as a living multiplicity. But this is already a question of political organization. It may involve finding a way to set up a dialogue between these theoretical problematics on the one axis and the practical experiments on the other.
· TD: I'm sure a lot of people will be looking forward to this next step. Thank you very much.

Michael Hardt teaches in the Literature Program and Romance Studies Department at Duke University. He is author of Gilles Deleuze (1993) and co-author with Antonio Negri of Labor of Dionysus (1994) and Empire (2000). He is co-editor with Paolo Virno of Radical Thought in Italy (1996) and with Kathi Weeks of The Jameson Reader (2000). He is currently working on a book about Pier Paolo Pasolini. He can be reached at hardt@duke.edu.