Contro-Impero.

Transcript selections from the audiofiles of a seminar with Antonio Negri.

Antonio Negri: Thanks for inviting me...

Here are some methodological points on Empire:

• End of absolute categories of modernity. New concepts arise that ought to characterise new research of postmodernity. With Hardt we have been accused and blamed for adopting a Marxist conception of history. This is true. We are convinced that struggles are the motor of history and in the Postmodern phase all forms of authority (whether imperial or of what is left of the nation state) actively follow the behaviour of movements (or of the multitude if we want to use this term). This Marxist conception has been washed in the Seine. For as far as I am concerned it was confronted and put in touch with the theoretical apparatus, mainly appeared in France, called French Post-structuralism. That which goes from Foucault to Deleuze with all its articulations. This thought had a different history from operaismo but breathed the same air of time. We find there too the exaltation, both theoretical and ontological, of movements and the production of history through the emergence of subjectivity in history. We’ve gone beyond the traditional Marxism that offered a theoretical as well as organisational framework, we have gone beyond because now we have the new instruments to start telling what happened outside of the aporias of the nations state, this space where people lived that was closed in national capital. We can recognise the past now as folly and denounce it. We can understand how these things got destroyed by the struggle of popular movements, those great contestations that raised against these miseries. We had been inculcated the values of patriotism, of the state as a fundamental principle. It is not true, as capital shows. […]

• Methodologically it is important to have the approach of the subaltern who is the salt of the earth, that we found in postcolonial studies people, who started to show the liberation struggles behind the colonial images. These methodological approaches each gave us different things to say, that became increasingly banal. Such as the line of transferral of sovereignty. It is banal because we know this. All categories related to nation states have fallen apart. Like international law for instance. The UN occupies a secondary position and is the last element of contractual right being exercised amongst nation states.

• This method also introduces biopolitics. Politics today is not exercised on a plane of abstract power (administratively separated), but on a plane that has invested the whole of life. Class struggle had imposed on states the fact of sustaining the development of life (through salaries, schooling, birth, death, health etc.). Politics and life have become engrained into one another. On this terrain class struggle developed and expanded enormously (from the guaranteed/direct salary etc.) With these processes the whole anthropological structure was put into question. The subject was no longer substantial (or before, prior to) but produced within these movements. Produced in its double meaning:

-Capitalist production: I impose this consumption on this salary scale, in these spaces, according to this hierarchy of needs to which you can or cannot respond;

-Antagonistic production: I resist, and antagonism became more intelligent, it expanded. It became uncatchable.

This process of dissolution of the political categories of modernity coincides with the third industrial revolution: IT and the constitution of production as decentred throughout society. This also has a double effect:

-An expansion of biopolitical power, capitalist command of the general intellect

-A reappropriation of the instruments of labour.

Life style is reinvented as productivity. Labour, living labour, activity remains at the centre of our lives, so do exploitative relations. By exploitation I mean your capacity to steal my labour versus my capacity to take it back and use it for my own desires.

You can see that they had to get rid of the nation state cause they could not economically sustain it, for instance, in the monetary realm. So, this redefined space of sovereignty: is it a good or a bad thing that it happened? Well, we say it was worth it, and we shouldn’t be nostalgic. The concept of sovereignty changed. Sovereignty was always a relationship, even in modernity. It couldn’t be defined in terms of the sacred or unidirectionality. Exercising sovereignty means to have a relation with the subject (subjected). This relationship becomes more complex when this subject produces and is posed in a creative dynamics. Sovereignty, in its dialectical mode, always posed an obstacle for the subject to overcome. Today, without an outside, nor utopias (we can only construe things, here) can this group of social forces constitute an insurmountable limit for capitalist development?

The multitude then, is a great quantity or multiplicity of singularities. The people was that unitary group that corresponded to the sovereign. The multitude is irreducible to a sovereign.

Secondly, the multitude has a capacity to act, in this it is also class, creative activity, limit with respect to the possibility of being exploited, capacity for self-government.

Today the common is a condition, we are not capable of working without co-operating. We can’t do anything without co-operating. We don’t need a capitalist to come and give us the instruments, the hammer. The instruments are in our anthropology, our brain is the instrument that constitutes wealth, a wealth that must be common. We each are like a word, alone a sign, where meaning is only given by the entire language.

The struggle has already started but in the worst way: with a mercenary knight who rebelled against his King. This empire is a non place and a mixed constitution, where democracy is that which we are familiar with, not participative nor absolute, but that left to the small states, some NGO etc. this empire is heavily traversed by capital. The relation between the line of sovereignty and that of capital is contradictory. Where is the place of command? It is all open, we can’t construe a new genealogy of the monster, the leviathan.

There’s neither desperation nor hope, but a situation where we have to determine forms and directives of struggles and engagement of our responsibility.

Discussion:

I must say that when the book came out they asked us to write an appendix. We thought it wasn’t necessary, that this moment of war was in continuity with what we’d said in the book. S11 revealed what we already knew:

-The US is not an island

-The US is as vulnerable as other countries

-US isolationism had to end, even the British had to undergo London bombings to understand that they are not an island.

Already before S11, in July we wrote articles to the New York Times and Liberation about alternative Empires:

The Byzantine model with Bush’s star war, with the King, the Apostles, signs of apocalypse and transcendence of power. The US imposing a ferocious rule.

The Roman model, and its hybrid (rather than mixed) constitution, which we wrote was the least worst.

After S11 the attempt to unilateralism appeared. The US tried to reinvent war as a police operation, but a constituent operation too, from the point of view of the art of war, a ‘military revolution’. The reconfiguration of the strategy of war, the reduction of the army to intervention groups, the dissolution of the mass army (following that of the mass worker).

This process had already started in 1972, with the end to the exponential arms development. In between the dates that we see as signalling the entry to the postmodern: 1971: the declaration of the inconvertibility of dollar into gold; 1973: the first great oil crisis.

War is now police and Palestine (and Genoa too) are at the margins

of the mechanism of high intensity police mixed with a low intensity war. With this, the definition of the enemy as criminal. It is up to us to decide whether it is good or bad. As it stands it is crazy: we have the marines chasing the immigrants, generals becoming judges, but it all follows a logic that is precise however chaotic the situation.

Questions:

Some guy: I am interested in this idea of an anthropoligisation of the tool…{bla bla bla…irrelevant-AB}

Casarini: on the theme of war, there is not enough in Empire. How do we rebel in Empire? There needs to be a reflection on the civil war mechanism, on the reasoning of war, the dynamics between conflict and consent. How do we use co-operation as a tool for struggle? The police/army and the permanent civil war that is functional to a country, how do we build a reasoning on war and how is it subsumed by the mechanisms of domination? Is politics really war by other means?

A girl: isn’t Empire a version of the thesis on ultraimperialism, and in being so isn’t it dangerous for the possible consequence it had for the world-war?

Answers:

On ultra imperialism.

The objection is right with one difference: today the franco-german war is impossible. My impression is that the process is irreversible. The global market is made of structures that cut out the nation states. Multinationals aren’t American multinationals. They are multinationals.

The definition of American national interest raises doubts at all levels. If there is one thing for sure is that ultraimperialism exists, and the nation state is everything BUT the way to react to it. Why?

· The regulation process of the global market entails states cooperation. There can’t be a global market without rules. Rules are given by lex mercatoria, by private agreements that occur beyond the states, in lawyers offices. Lawyers are legislators, policemen are army officers….

· Positions that try to feed in the illusion that it is possible to resist through nation states are bad. The French are the worst in this: Chevenement went to Porto Alegre to feed on this disposition.

The movement must solve this problem: I take sides in this, I am against it: it is theoretically archaic and politically dangerous.

On war and international justice and on how to be rebellious in Empire.

Is insurrection possible in Empire? No.

By insurrection I mean:

Resistance (through mass structures such as the unions)

Kairos (the moment of insurrection)

The Constituent moment.

The working class movement experienced the crisis in the transition between these three phases. To rebel in Empire today means that it is impossible to resist without constituting. One needs to break the homology between power and the movement.

Exodus means to express potenza. It doesn’t mean to go from here to there. It is a conception of being: to act is to create new things all the time. Today we can’t rebel without constituting:

-forms of communication

-meaning

-joy

the end of the political must be forgotten, and with it all ferocious giustizionalismo. The joy of the movement is to introduce strong generosity. This was already present in the working class movement. It has just expanded. The end of the factory is a good thing. The working class had to be destroyed sooner or later as Marx said, but it also gives rise to something else. It is not useless to debate at the Carlini stadium (Genoa’s disobedients residence-AB). It is boring sometimes but we have dwelled too much on decision. The problem of decision is important.

We think of international tribunals like the inquisition: based on great principles, it needs to put a hat on everything. They remind me of heavy stuff. These courts will be there. The US don’t want them (since they attempt to push for a unilateral form of dominium), even though they would not be in too much danger.

Typed and translated by Arianna Bove from http://www.sherwood.it/controimpero/