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Hardt's and Negri's basic move, an act which is by no means ideologically neutral (and, incidentally, which is totally foreign to their [[philosophical ]] paradigm, [[Deleuze]]!), is to [[identify ]] (to [[name]]) "[[democracy]]" as the common denominator of all today's emancipatory movements: "The common currency that runs throughout so many struggles and movements for liberation across the [[world ]] today - at local, regional, and [[global ]] levels - is the [[desire ]] for democracy." <tt><b><a name="1x"></a><a href="#1">1</a></b></tt> Far from standing for a [[utopian ]] [[dream]], democracy is "the only answer to the vexing questions of our day, /.../ the only way out of our [[state ]] of perpetual [[conflict ]] and war." <tt><b><a name="2x"></a><a href="#2">2</a></b></tt> Not only is democracy inscribed into the [[present ]] [[antagonisms ]] as an immanent telos of their [[resolution]]; even more, today, the rise of the [[multitude ]] in the heart of [[capitalism ]] "makes democracy possible for the first [[time]]" <tt><b><a name="3x"></a><a href="#3">3</a></b></tt> Till now, democracy was constrained by the [[form ]] of the One, of the sovereign state [[power]]; "absolute democracy" ("the rule of everyone by everyone, a democracy without qualifiers, without ifs or buts," <tt><b><a name="4x"></a><a href="#4">4</a></b></tt> only becomes possible when "the multitude is finally able to rule itself." <tt><b><a name="5x"></a><a href="#5">5</a></b></tt><br><br>

For [[Marx]], highly organized corporate capitalism already was "[[socialism ]] within capitalism" (a kind of socialization of capitalism, with the [[absent ]] owners becoming more and more superfluous), so that one only [[needs ]] to cut the nominal head off and we get socialism. For Negri and Hardt, however, the limitation of Marx was that he was historically constrained to the centralized and hierarchically organized machinical automatized industrial labor, which is why their [[vision ]] of "general intellect" was that of a central planning [[agency]]; it is only today, with the rise of the "immaterial labor" to the hegemonic [[role]], that the revolutionary [[reversal ]] becomes "objectively possible." This immaterial labor extends between the two poles of [[intellectual ]] ([[symbolic]]) labor (production of [[ideas]], [[codes]], [[texts]], programs, [[figures]]: writers, programmers...) and [[affective ]] labor (those who deal with our [[bodily ]] affects: from doctors to [[baby]]-sitters and flight attendants). Today, immaterial labor is "hegemonic" in the precise [[sense ]] in which Marx proclaimed that, in 19th century capitalism, large industrial production is hegemonic as the specific color giving its tone to the [[totality ]] - not quantitatively, but playing the key, emblematic [[structural ]] role: "What the multitude produces is not just goods or services; the multitude also and most importantly produces cooperation, [[communication]], forms of [[life]], and [[social ]] relationships." <tt><b><a name="6x"></a><a href="#6">6</a></b></tt> What thereby emerges is a new vast [[domain ]] the "common": shared [[knowledge]], forms of cooperation and communication, etc., which can no longer be contained by the form of [[private property]]. This, then, far from posing a mortal [[threat ]] to democracy (as [[conservative ]] [[cultural ]] critics [[want ]] us to believe), opens up a unique [[chance ]] of "absolute democracy". Why? In immaterial production, the products are no longer [[material ]] [[objects]], but new social (interpersonal) relations themselves - in short, immaterial production is directly biopolitical, the production of social life. It was already Marx who emphasized how material production is always also the (re)production of the social relations within which it occurs; with today's capitalism, however, the production of social relations is the immediate end/goal of production: "Such new forms of labor /.../ present new possibilities for [[economic ]] [[self]]-management, since the mechanisms of cooperation necessary for production are contained in the labor itself." <tt><b><a name="7x"></a><a href="#7">7</a></b></tt> The wager of Hardt and Negri is that this directly socialized, immaterial production not only renders owners progressively superfluous (who needs [[them ]] when production is directly social, formally and as to its [[content]]?); the producers also [[master ]] the regulation of social [[space]], since social relations ([[politics]]) IS the stuff of their [[work]]: economic production directly becomes [[political ]] production, the production of [[society ]] itself. The way is thus open for "absolute democracy," for the producers directly regulating their social relations without even the detour of democratic [[representation]].<br><br>

There is a [[whole ]] series of [[concrete ]] questions that this vision gives rise to. Can one really [[interpret ]] this move towards the hegemonic role of immaterial labor as the move from production to communication, to social interaction (in Aristotelian [[terms]], from techne as poiesis to praxis: as the overcoming of the Arendtian [[distinction ]] between production and vis activa, or of the Habermasian distinction between instrumental and communicational [[reason]])? How does this "[[politicization]]" of production, where production directly produces (new) social relations, [[affect ]] the very [[notion ]] of politics? Is such an "administration of [[people]]" (subordinated to the [[logic ]] of profit) still politics, or is it the most radical sort of depoliticization, the entry into "[[post-politics]]?" And, last but not least, is democracy by [[necessity]], with [[regard ]] to its very notion, non-absolute? There is no democracy without a hidden, presupposed elitism. Democracy is, by definition, not "global"; it HAS to be based on values and/or truths which one cannot select "democratically." In democracy, one can fight for [[truth]], but not decide what IS truth. As Claude [[Lefort ]] and [[others ]] amply demonstrated, democracy is never simply [[representative ]] in the sense of adequately re-presenting (expressing) a pre-existing set of interests, opinions, etc., since these interests and opinions are constituted only through such representation. In [[other ]] [[words]], the democratic articulation of an interest is always minimally [[performative]]: through their democratic representatives, people establish what their interests and opinions are. As [[Hegel ]] already knew, "absolute democracy" could only actualize itself in the guise of its "[[oppositional determination]]," as [[terror]]. There is, thus, a [[choice ]] to be made here: do we accept democracy's structural, not just accidental, imperfection, or do we also endorse its terrorist [[dimension]]? However, much more pertinent is [[another ]] critical point which concerns Negri and Hardt's neglect of the FORM in the strict [[dialectical ]] sense of the term.<br><br>

Negri and Hardt continuously oscillate between their [[fascination ]] by the global capitalism's "deterritorializing" power, and the [[rhetoric ]] of the [[struggle ]] of the multitude against the One of the [[capitalist ]] power. The financial [[capital ]] with its wild speculations detached from the [[reality ]] of material labor, this standard bete noire of the traditional [[Left]], is celebrated as the germ of the [[future]], capitalism's most [[dynamic ]] and nomadic aspect. The organizational forms of today's capitalism - decentralization of the decision-making, radical mobility and flexibility, interaction of multiple agents - are perceived as pointing towards the oncoming reign of the multitude. It is as if everything is already here, in the "[[postmodern]]" capitalism, or, in Hegelese, the passage from [[In-itself ]] to [[For-itself ]] - all that is needed is just an act of purely [[formal ]] conversion, like the one developed by Hegel apropos the struggle between [[Enlightenment ]] and [[Faith]], where he describes how the "silent, ceaseless weaving of the Spirit"</font></p>

<p align="justify"><font color="#000000" face="DIDOT" size="4"><font size="3">infiltrates the noble parts through and through and soon has taken [[complete ]] possession of all the vitals and members of the [[unconscious ]] idol; then 'one fine morning it gives its comrade a shove with the elbow, and bang! crash! the idol lies on the floor.' On 'one fine morning' whose noon is bloodless if the infection has penetrated to every [[organ ]] of spiritual life. <tt><b><a name="8x"></a><a href="#8">8</a></b></tt></font></font></p>

<p align="justify"><font color="#000000" face="DIDOT" size="4"><font size="4">Even the fashionable parallel with the new cognitivist notion of [[human ]] [[psyche ]] is not [[missing ]] here: in the same way brain [[sciences ]] teach us how there is no central Self in the brain, how our decisions emerge out of the interaction of a pandemonium of local agents, how our [[psychic ]] life is an "autopoietic" [[process ]] which, without any imposed centralizing agency (a [[model ]] which, incidentally, is explicitly based on the parallel with today's "decentralized" capitalism). So the new society of the multitude which rules itself will be like today's cognitivist notion of the ego as a pandemonium of interacting agents with no central deciding Self running the show... However, although Negri and Hardt see today's capitalism as the main site of the proliferating multitudes, they continue to rely on the rhetorics of the One, the sovereign Power, against the multitude; how they bring these two aspects together is clear: while capitalism generates multitudes, it contains them in the capitalist form, thereby unleashing a demon it is unable to [[control]]. The question to be asked here is nonetheless if Hardt and Negri do not commit a mistake homologous to that of Marx: is their notion of the pure multitude ruling itself not the ultimate capitalist [[fantasy]], the fantasy of capitalism self-revolutionizing perpetual movement freely exploding when freed of its inherent obstacle? In other words, is the capitalist FORM (the form of the appropriation of [[surplus]]-[[value]]) not the necessary form, formal [[frame]]/condition, of the self-propelling productive movement?<br><br>

Consequently, when Negri and Hardt repeatedly emphasize how "this is a philosophical book," and warn the reader "do not expect our book to answer the question, What is to be done? or propose a concrete program of [[action]]," <tt><b><a name="9x"></a><a href="#9">9</a></b></tt> this constraint is not as neutral as it may appear: it points towards a fundamental [[theoretical ]] flaw. After describing multiple forms of [[resistance ]] to the [[Empire]], <i>Multitude</i> ends with a messianic note pointing towards the great Rupture, the [[moment ]] of Decision when the movement of multitudes will be transubstantiated the sudden [[birth ]] of a new world: "After this long season of [[violence ]] and contradictions, global civil war, corruption of imperial biopower, and infinite toil of the biopolitical multitudes, the extraordinary accumulations of grievances and reform proposals must at some point be transformed by a strong [[event]], a radical insurrectional [[demand]]." <tt><b><a name="10x"></a><a href="#10">10</a></b></tt> However, at this point when one expects a minimum theoretical determination of this rupture, what we get is again [[withdrawal ]] into [[philosophy]]: "A philosophical book like this, however, is not the [[place ]] for us to evaluate whether the time for revolutionary political decision is imminent." <tt><b><a name="11x"></a><a href="#11">11</a></b></tt> Negri and Hardt perform here an all to quick jump: of course one cannot ask them to provide a detailed empirical description of the Decision, of the passage to the globalized "absolute democracy," to the multitude that rules itself; however, what if this a justified [[refusal ]] to engage in pseudo-concrete futuristic predictions masks an inherent notional deadlock/impossibility? That is to say, what one does and should expect is a description of the notional [[structure ]] of this qualitative jump, of the passage from the multitudes RESISTING the One of sovereign Power to the multitudes directly RULING themselves. Leaving the notional structure of this passage in a darkness elucidated only by vague homologies and examples from the movements of resistance cannot but raise the anxious suspicion that this self-[[transparent ]] direct rule of everyone over everyone, this democracy tout court, will coincide with its opposite. <tt><b><a name="12x"></a><a href="#12">12</a></b></tt><br><br>

Negri and Hardt are [[right ]] in rendering problematic the standard [[Leftist ]] revolutionary notion of "taking power": such a strategy accepts the formal frame of the [[power structure ]] and aims merely at replacing one bearer of power ("them") with another ("us"). As it was fully clear to [[Lenin ]] in his <i>State and [[Revolution]]</i>, the [[true ]] revolutionary aim is not to "take power," but to undermine, disintegrate, the very apparatuses of state power. Therein resides the ambiguity of the "postmodern" Leftist calls to abandon the program of "taking power": do they imply that one should ignore the existing power structure, or, rather, [[limit ]] oneself to resisting it by way of constructing alternative spaces [[outside ]] the state power network (the Zapatista strategy in [[Mexico]]); or do they imply that one should disintegrate, pull the ground of, the state power, so that the state power will simply collapse, implode? In the second [[case]], the poetic [[formulas ]] [[about ]] the multitude immediately ruling itself do not suffice.<br><br>

Hardt and Negri conform here a sort of [[triad ]] whose other two terms are Ernesto [[Laclau ]] and Giorgio [[Agamben]]. The ultimate [[difference ]] between Laclau and Agamben concerns the structural [[inconsistency ]] of power: while they both insist on this inconsistency, their [[position ]] towards it is exactly opposite. Agamben's focusing on the vicious circle of the link between [[legal ]] power (the rule of Law) and violence is sustained by the messianic utopian hope that it is possible to radically break this circle and step out of it (in an act of the Benjaminian "divine violence"). In <i>The Coming [[Community]]</i>, he refers to Saint Thomas's answer to the difficult theological question: What happens to the souls of unbaptized babies who have died in [[ignorance ]] of both sin and God? They committed no sin, so their [[punishment]]</font></font></p>

<p align="justify"><font color="#000000" face="DIDOT" size="4"><font size="4"><font size="3">cannot be an afflictive punishment, like that of hell, but only a punishment of [[privation ]] that consists in the perpetual [[lack ]] of the vision of God. The inhabitants of limbo, in contrast to the damned, do not feel [[pain ]] from this lack: /.../ they do not [[know ]] that they are deprived of the supreme [[good]]. /.../ The greatest punishment - the lack of the vision of God - thus turns into a [[natural ]] joy: irremediably lost, they persist without pain in divine abandon. <tt><b><a name="13x"></a><a href="#13">13</a></b></tt></font></font></font></p>

<p align="justify"><font color="#000000" face="DIDOT" size="4"><font size="4"><font size="4">Their fate is for Agamben the model of redemption: they "have left the world of [[guilt ]] and justice behind them: the light that rains down on them is that irreparable light of the dawn following the novissima dies of judgment. But the life that begins on earth after the last day is simply human life." <tt><b><a name="14x"></a><a href="#14">14</a></b></tt> (One cannot but [[recall ]] here the crowd of [[humans ]] who remain on [[stage ]] at the end of [[Wagner]]'s <i>Twilight of Gods</i>, silently witnessing the self-[[destruction ]] of gods - what if they are the happy ones?) And, <i>mutatis mutandis</i>, the same goes for Negri and Hardt who perceive resistance to power as preparing the ground for a miraculous LEAP into "absolute democracy" in which multitude will directly rule itself - at this point, the tension will be resolved, [[freedom ]] will explodes into eternal self-proliferation. The difference between Agamben and Negri and Hardt could be best apprehended by means of the good old [[Hegelian ]] distinction between abstract and determinate [[negation]]: although Negri and Hardt are even more anti-Hegelian than Agamben, their revolutionary LEAP remains an act of "determinate negation," the gesture of formal reversal, of merely setting free the potentials developed in global capitalism which already is a kind of "[[Communism]]-in-itself"; in contrast to them, Agamben - and, again, paradoxically, in spite of his animosity to [[Adorno ]] - outlines the contours of something which is much closer to the utopian longing for the <i>ganz Andere</i> (wholly Other) in late Adorno, [[Horkheimer ]] and [[Marcuse]], to a redemptive leap into a non-mediated [[Otherness]].<br><br>

Laclau and [[Mouffe]], on the contrary, propose a new version of the old Edouard Bernstein's arch-revisionist motto "[[goal ]] is [[nothing]], movement is all": the true [[danger]], the temptation to be resisted, is the very notion of a radical cut by means of which the basic social [[antagonism ]] will be dissolved and the new era of a self-transparent non-[[alienated ]] society will arrive. For Laclau and Mouffe, such a notion disavows not only the Political as such, the space of antagonisms and struggle for [[hegemony]], but the fundamental [[ontological ]] [[finitude ]] of the [[human condition ]] as such - which is why, any attempt to actualize such a leap has to end up in a totalitarian disaster. What this means is that the only way to elaborate and [[practice ]] livable [[particular ]] political solutions is to admit the global a priori deadlock: we can only solve particular problems against the background of the irreducible global deadlock. Of course, this is no way entails that political agents should limit themselves to solving particular problems, abandoning the topic of [[universality]]: for Laclau and Mouffe, universality is [[impossible ]] and at the same time necessary, i.e., there is no direct "true" universality, every universality is always-already caught into the hegemonic struggle, it is an empty form hegemonized (filled in) by some [[particular content ]] which, at a given moment and in a given conjuncture, functions as its stand-in.<br><br>

Are, however, these two approaches really as radically opposed as it may appear? Does Laclau and Mouffe's edifice not also imply its own utopian point: the point at which political battles would be fought without remainders of "[[essentialism]]," all sides fully accepting the radically [[contingent ]] [[character ]] of their endeavors and the irreductible character of social antagonisms. On the other hand, Agamben's position is also not without its [[secret ]] advantages: since, with today's [[biopolitics]], the space of political struggle is closed and any democratic-emancipatory movements are meaningless, we cannot do anything but comfortably wait for the miraculous explosion of the "divine violence." As for Negri and Hardt, they bring us back to the [[Marxist ]] confidence that "[[history ]] is on our side," that historical [[development ]] is already generating the form of the [[Communist ]] future.<br><br>

If anything, the problem with Negri and Hardt is that they are TOO MUCH Marxists, taking over the underlying Marxist scheme of historical [[progress]]: like Marx, they celebrate the "deterritorializing" revolutionary potential of capitalism; like Marx, they locate the [[contradiction ]] within capitalism, in the gap between this potential and the form of the capital, of the private-property appropriation of the surplus. In short, they rehabilitate the old Marxist notion of the tension between productive forces and the relations of production: capitalism already generates the "germs of the future new form of life," it incessantly produces the new "common," so that, in a revolutionary explosion, this New should just be liberated from the old social form. However, precisely as Marxists, on behalf of our fidelity to Marx's work, we should discern the mistake of Marx: he perceived how capitalism unleashed the breath-taking dynamics of self-enhancing productivity - see his fascinated descriptions of how, in capitalism, "all things solid melt into thin air," of how capitalism is the greatest revolutionizer in the entire history of humanity; on the other hand, he also clearly perceived how this capitalist dynamics is propelled by its own inner obstacle or antagonism - the ultimate limit of capitalism (of the capitalist self-propelling productivity) is the Capital itself, i.e. the capitalist incessant development and revolutionizing of its own material [[conditions]], the mad dance of its unconditional spiral of productivity, is ultimately nothing but a desperate flight forward to escape its own debilitating inherent contradiction... Marx's fundamental mistake was to conclude, from these insights, that a new, higher social [[order ]] (Communism) is possible, an order that would not only maintain, but even raise to a higher degree and effectively fully release the potential of the self-increasing spiral of productivity which, in capitalism, on account of its inherent obstacle ("contradiction"), is again and again thwarted by socially destructive economic crises. In short, what Marx overlooked is that, to put it in the standard Derridean terms, this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the "condition of [[impossibility]]" of the [[full ]] deployment of the productive forces is simultaneously its "condition of possibility": if we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of capitalism, we do not get the fully unleashed [[drive ]] to productivity finally delivered of its impediment, but we lose precisely this productivity that seemed to be generated and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism - if we take away the obstacle, the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates... (Therein would reside a possible [[Lacanian ]] critique of Marx, focusing on the ambiguous overlapping between surplus-value and surplus-<i>[[jouissance]]</i>). So the critics of Communism were in a way right when they claimed that the Marxian Communism is an impossible fantasy - what they did not perceive is that the Marxiam Communism, this notion of a society of pure unleashed productivity outside the frame of Capital, was a fantasy inherent to capitalism itself, the capitalist inherent [[transgression ]] at its purest, a strictly [[ideological ]] fantasy of maintaining the thrust to productivity generated by capitalism, while getting rid of the "obstacles" and antagonisms that were - as the sad [[experience ]] of the "really existing capitalism" demonstrates - the only possible framework of the effective material [[existence ]] of a society of permanent self-enhancing productivity.<br><br>

So where, precisely, did Marx go wrong with regard to the surplus-value? One is tempted to [[search ]] for an answer in the key Lacanian distinction between the [[object ]] of desire and the surplus-[[enjoyment ]] as its [[cause]]. Recall the curl of the blond hair, this fatal detail of Madeleine in [[Hitchcock]]'s <i>[[Vertigo]]</i>. When, in the [[love ]] [[scene ]] in the barn towards the end of the [[film]], Scottie passionately embraces Judy refashioned into the [[dead ]] Madeleine, during their famous 360-degree kiss, he stops kissing her and withdraws just long enough to steal a look at her newly blond hair, as if to reassure himself that the particular feature which makes her into the [[object of desire ]] is still there... So there is always a gap between the object of desire itself and its cause, the mediating feature or element that makes this object desirable. And, back to Marx: what if his mistake was also to assume that the object of desire (the unconstrained expanding productivity) would remain even when deprived of the cause that propels it (the surplus-value)? The same holds even more for Deleuze, since he develops his [[theory ]] of desire in direct opposition to the Lacanian one. Deleuze asserts the priority of desire over its objects: desire is a positive productive force which exceeds its objects, a [[living ]] flow proliferating through the multitude of objects, penetrating them and passing through them, in no [[need ]] of any fundamental lack or "[[castration]]" that would serve as its foundation. For [[Lacan]], however, desire has to be sustained by an object-cause: not some primordial incestuous [[Lost Object ]] on which desire remains forever transfixed and whose unsatisfying substitutes all other objects are, but a purely formal object which causes us to desire objects that we [[encounter ]] in reality. This object-[[cause of desire ]] is thus not transcendent, the inaccessible [[excess ]] forever eluding our grasp, but behind the [[subject]]'s back, something that from within directs [[desiring]]. And, as is the case with Marx, it is Deleuze's failure to take into account this object-cause that sustains the [[illusory ]] vision of unconstrained productivity of desire - or, in the case of Hardt and Negri, the illusory vision of multitude ruling itself, no longer constrained by any totalizing One. We can observe here the catastrophic political consequences of the failure to develop what may appear a purely academic, "philosophical," notional distinction.<br><br>

<b>[[Notes]]</b>:<br><br>

<tt><b><a name="1"></a><a href="#1x">1</a></b></tt>. [[Michael Hardt ]] and [[Antonio Negri]], <i>Multitude</i>, New York: The Penguin Press, 2004<br>

<tt><b><a name="8"></a><a href="#8x">8</a></b></tt>. [[G.W.F. Hegel]], <i>[[Phenomenology ]] of the Spirit</i>, Oxford; OUP, 1977.<br>

<tt><b><a name="12"></a><a href="#12x">12</a></b></tt>. This is also why Negri and Hardt's reference to Bakhtin's notion of carnival as the model for the protest movement of the multitude-they are carnevalesque not only in their form and atmosphere (theatrical performances, chants, humorous songs), but also in their non-centralized organization-is deeply problematic: is late capitalist [[social reality ]] itself not already carnevalesque? Furthermore, is "carnival" not also the name for the [[obscene ]] underside of power-from gang rapes to mass lynchings? Let us not forget that Bakhtin developed the notion of carnival in his book on [[Rabelais ]] written in the 1930s, as a direct reply to the carnival of the Stalinist purges.<br>