Commonwealth for beginners

I am the beginner. Although I've read, taught, and written about Empire, I feel like a beginner with Commonwealth. It's not that Hardt and Negri are covering entirely new ground. Much of the argument summarizes and repeats themes from Empire and Multitude. Nonetheless, I feel like a beginner reading it. In this post, I will try to sort out why. In later posts, I will take up some specific questions about biopolitics, the common, affective labor.

At least one component of feeling like a beginner stems from the resistances the book stirs up in me. Joy, love, cooperation, happiness: these are not much part of my critical political theoretical vocabulary. So I find myself becoming nastier, more cynical, more dismissive. And then I react to Professor Snide and think, maybe a way out of the current left impasse does begin with joy and affirmation. I can't hold that position very long, though. It reminds me too much of the power of positive thinking and perpetual American optimism, like Oprah thinking or the political equivalent of taking a positive attitude toward cancer.

This oscillation might indicate enjoyment. That is, I swing from side to side because I am confronted with Hardt and Negri's political enjoyment. Faced with their enjoyment, I experience anxiety, and then I try to escape it. But what would happen if I accept that they are enjoying politics, that their's is a politics of enjoyment?

First, if any political system relies on some structure or economy of enjoyment (whether enjoyment is posited as stolen, as in nationalism, or is provided in an obscene fashion via a You May!, as in fascism), then a left politics of enjoyment that is neither rooted in sacrifice nor in an injunction to enjoy, could be a good idea (Mark Fisher said something along these lines a couple of years ago over at K-Punk).

Second, joy and happiness are likely better tactically: it's hard to mobilize people around choosing the worst.

But, but, but...something doesn't ring true (or is it because I am buried in negativity?). Although I tend to associate a politics oriented toward happiness as so much soma (entertainment, pleasure, ease), Hardt and Negri of course have something else in mind, not Aristotle's idea of happiness as the Good (although it isn't clear why they don't link to it) but rather an 18th century conception that has more to do with a kind of striving, desire, movement (could still be Aristotelian...it's also interesting that they don't consider any utilitarian versions of this sort of idea).

Perhaps what bothers me is the emphasis on cooperation. Although they acknowledge that cooperation isn't easy, that there will always be conflict, etc, it seems like these acknowledgements are patches on what for them is already a cloth with no holes. Because conflict doesn't play much a role, it doesn't seem to drive anything (the motor force is the desiring multitude or, as they say more in this book, biopolitics), and then it seems basically like something to get over, get beyond. Indeed, from my first reading of the book, it feels like the bifurcation of multitude and Empire has been replaced by a more essential division between biopolitics (good) and biopower (bad). Everything that is bad (identity, family, corporations, anything that blocks biopolitical production) is ejected from the multitude which is now a kind of cooperative biopolitics that produces the common.

Well, this warrants closer reading. Enough with the first impressions.

Comments

[Alain]

Your quick thoughts remind me of a line from a famous basket ball coach who was tired of criticism from the media: it went something like "all the negativity in this town really sucks." Being negative can be a drag and discourage action, but sometimes it is appropriate.

[alex]

"Oprah thinking or the political equivalent of taking a positive attitude toward cancer" :)

I look forward to reading more of your thoughts on Commonwealth.

I just started reading "Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies". Your critique of the left academic discourse of depoliticization is brilliant.

As Zizek blurbs on the back of your book you eschew the language of "cheap pseudo-Marxist denunciations". Although you certainly offer heaping scorn on the left's fetishistic celebration of technocratic/consumerist forms of political participation.On this note, I think that Hardt and Negri have (regardless of the limitations of imagining the capacity of the multitude to take power and govern itself)formulated an innovative forward looking image of post-hegemonic/post-capital political possibility.

To arrive beyond the current left impasse, whether that means embracing/inaugurating the ethico-political coordinates of the multitude or not, will necessarily require negative critique/denunciation (castrating those in power as Zizek has suggested), but also commitments to affirmation and love (in order to collectively take responsibility for power).

As Foucault writes being a militant does not require being sad. Enjoy already!

[Simon]

Did I misread this, or did you say you consider sacrifice a bad idea for political mobilization? Or is it just that it's worse then a politics not based on sacrifice? I would be interested in hearing why, since I think this would be a point of disagreement with Žižek, who is going around shouting 'we should rehabilitate discipline, civility and sacrifice!'

And what's wrong with cooperation as a political idea? Did you write anywhere on this?

[Scu]

Thanks for this. I made a short post on this over at my blog. Look forward to reading the rest of your posts.

http://criticalanimal.blogspot.com/2010/02/hardt-and-negri-and-love-in.html