Friday, March 11, 2005
(8:05 AM) | Anonymous:
Sovereignty Week: For and Against Negri
The question of sovereignty can be posed from various points of entry, so any discussion of it should be frank about its vantage. Certain posts this week began with Schmitt, or with Agamben’s problematic. Derrida has his own manner of approach, which is mentioned in McLemee’s article linked below by “Kotsko.” The Derridean position is useful as a contrast to my own, for Derrida places the political with the bind of performative and constative. I think such a bind is due to his insistence on thinking democracy in relation to “the people.” One could also say that sovereignty is an inescapable question for Derrida because of this determination of the political by the people. A people cannot coincide with itself, because the people spoken of in, for example, the originary American political documents, cannot pre-exist its act of constitution. As Derrida explicates so very thoroughly, the American declaration functions as a statement about a people that is in fact constituted by this report – thus the bind. While this is not entirely Hobbesian, I think it is faithful to that contractarian philosopher in that a people can only be a people in virtue of some condition which is relatively exterior to it. We need to pay attention to the way Derrida’s mode of critique is indebted to its object. Does a deconstructed account of sovereignty distance Derrida from Hobbes, or does it simply complicate a substantial identification? The same sort of question arose for me in reading Politics of Friendship. His analysis of Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction was undoubtedly insightful, but my nagging response: is this simply an elaborate way of saying our situation overdetermines the Schmittian paradigm, but of avoiding the task of discerning the new paradigm? A somewhat rough question, certainly, but hopefully these introductory comments, where polemic goes far beyond exegesis, might incite some debate!My point of entry into this sovereignty debate is generally Negrian. His theses, that national sovereignty has been superseded by imperial sovereignty, that a certain stage of socialization has emerged, that real subsumption names our condition adequately, seem correct. More importantly, I agree that the concept of multitude is preferable to that of the people. Now, we might say there are two aspects to the notion of multitude. There is a sort of empirical or historical aspect, where multitude accounts for the globality as well as the differentiation of what are called subjects, and there is a more ontological aspect, where multitude indicates the constitutive power that is prior to constituted power. While it is probably a commonplace by now, it may be worth repeating that Negri’s driving thought depends on a distinction elided by the univocity of English’s “power.” Constitutive power, a creative power or force, can be opposed to power understood along the lines of state- or hegemonic-power; the former is the condition of the latter, the latter can only exist by capturing the former. Thus constitutive power and constituted power can be thought, outside the English language, as potenza and potere, potentia and potestas, puissance and pouvoir, or however you like it. The value of such a distinction is that it puts the relation to sovereignty out of play, for sovereignty belongs in this way to the constituted, which is derivative or parasitic in every sense. This is in concord with the Zapatista remark, “we do not want to take power, we want to exercise it.” “A people,” on the other hand, disengages its definition from its power, it ceases to be autoconstitutional.
But what does all this have to do with the multitude? Negri has an historical narrative directed by the aforementioned ontology. If constitutive power is prior in every way, then constituted power (hereafter “Power”) can only keep Power through a kind of (dependent but ceaseless) proximity to constitutive power (hereafter “power”). Along these lines, Negri wants to see a certain development on behalf of power – so, most notably, the age of “Empire,” while amounting to a global sovereignty, has had to spread itself so pervasively and horizontally in order to maintain Power that it has created the conditions for power to “overcome” Power. Again, more clearly: Power, in order to keep extracting power, has had to become a global network, and this network creates conditions whereby power can produce and reproduce itself without the mediation of Power. In other words, the network provides an historical mode of production in which power no longer needs to “resist” Power, but can actually exercise power autonomously (or in a transversal network). Thus “multitude” names the historical condition of subjects in the global network as well as the ontological mode of constitutive power.
All of this has been basic for some, but I think it gives a strong account of why sovereignty, at least in its Derridean or Schmittian form, is not the important question. In what remains, I want to agree with Negri (in his critique of Agamben) and to disagree with Negri (in relation to Deleuze). Against Agamben, then, because one cannot draw a distinction between form of life and naked life. Agamben is in agreement with Negri insofar as he keeps the distinction of potenza (power) and potere (Power), but he multiplies this distinction by that between form and nudity. This is what conditions his discourse of the exception. Agamben: “Political power (potere) as we know it… always founds itself… on the separation of a sphere of naked life from the context of the forms of life…. The ultimate subject that needs to be at once turned into the exception and included in the city is always naked life.” This naked life, “which was the hidden foundation of sovereignty, has become… the dominant form of life everywhere. Life… is the naked life that in every context separates the forms of life from their cohering into a form of life.” By thinking of life according to form and nudity, Agamben puts power in need. It is for this reason that Agamben goes running with Derrida (and Hobbes?) and Schmitt. Sovereignty, or at least a dialectic with it (the exception!), is reintroduced, since Power is a primordial condition. Furthermore, I would contend that the valid question is not one of inclusion and exclusion; it is a matter of the organization of everything, prior to inside and outside. Negri develops a response to Agamben – in the second piece included in Time for Revolution – by way of the concept of “poverty.” What he wants to highlight is that life, even impoverished and desiccated, is never naked. One is poor because one is exploited, but one is exploited because one is productive – therefore, to think life as naked is to think of it in terms of Power.
Against Negri, however… because the way that “multitude” functions – that is, as what collates the historical condition and the ontological lineaments – is, for me, not finally satisfactory. Negri succeeds in banishing certain conceptions of sovereignty, but he seems to conflate too quickly the historical with the ontological, or the actual conditions with creation. Of significance, in this regard, is Negri’s interview of Deleuze (collected in English in Negotiations), where he asks whether the biopolitical era (viewed here in relation to improved technology and communication) signals the possible realization of communism. Deleuze responds that control societies may be far worse than days past, and that communication is corrupted (in its essence) by capital. The key comment: “Creating has always been something different from communicating.” My disagreement with Negri is that I don’t think creation can be founded on the historical condition, even where this historical condition is joined to an ontology of constitutive power (though I agree with the ontology). Without a crack of the movement, innovation does not result in creation. The multitude is preferable to the people, but I don’t think the multitude can conceive creation adequately. Yet I should say, finally, that it is important not to drive a wedge between Deleuze and Negri (as Thoburn’s book on Deleuze and Marx seems to do). These are two independent philosophies that should be made to collaborate and to mark new paths (in my mind, these are two of the three comprehensive contemporary philosophies worth working through – Badiou, though significantly different, has to be the third). In other words, it is too often overlooked that Negri is a strong philosopher (as such), and no one should be allowed to read Empire or Multitudes without first reading both The Savage Anomaly and the essays in Time for Revolution.
