Political Geography 23 (2004) 457–461 www.politicalgeography.com
Philosophical aspects Neil Turnbull Department of English and Media, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane, Nottingham, NG11 8NS, UK
In Hardt and Negri’s view, the end of the second millennium represents something of an apocalyptic moment for both modern political structures and the modern theoretical discourses that strove to account for their origin and development. In particular, they claim that the political offspring of the Thirty Year’s War—the ‘Westphalian’ nation state—is now in a phase of terminal decline; and with its decline those political and economic discourses that assume its significance as a maintainer of identity and security have lost their validity and appeal. The postmodern moment in geopolitics, in their view, is the time of the appearance of new planetary forms of capitalistic governance with a new agenda of ‘biopolitical’ control that ‘democratically’ inscribes the ‘mechanisms of command’ somatically and affectively in the new ‘global multitudes’. This, for them, amounts to the emergence of a new political age—the ‘age of Empire’—where the power of sovereignty that was formerly invested in the modern nation-state assumes the ‘higher form’ of a global imperial right. H/N’s provocative thesis draws upon, and presupposes, a highly eclectic set of philosophical discourses. In one way Empire offers us a Foucauldian vision of international relations in that in the context of Empire political power is seen as diffuse and omnipresent: moving easily and invisibly through the capillaries of capitalist social and technological networks. But in another way, Empire’s analysis reveals all the tell tale markings of Hegelian influences. Empire’s main thesis amounts to a left-Hegelian version of Fukuyama’s notorious right-Hegelian ‘end of history thesis’ in that the emergent Empire is seen as a political absolute and the dialectical resolution to the diremptions of the modern nation-state system. Thus although H/N admit to ‘flirting’ with Hegelianism (see p. 42), perhaps ‘courting’ might have been a more appropriate term. These Hegelian influences are in some sense an inevitable consequence of another important philosophical aspect of E-mail address:
[email protected] (N. Turnbull). 0962-6298/$ - see front matter # 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2003.12.001
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Empire: its attempt to engage in a revisionist Marxist metaphysics. For H/N, in ‘Empire capitalism’, political struggle and resistance are conceived as integral to the new political system but at the same time are seen as forced to operate beyond the familiar terrains delineated by traditional sociological concepts such as race, class and gender: relocating themselves on the new ontological grounds of ‘the multitudes’ of the poor and the new cyborg bearers of the emergent virtual and machinic techno-ontologies of the cybernetic age. However, H/N’s Hegelianism is deeply contradictory in that the Hegelian form of their central argument—Empire as an emergent historical synthesis of the contradictions inhering in the modern nation state system—contradicts the anti-Hegelian flavour of many of the more minor arguments developed in the book. In pp. 129– 131, for example, H/N attack what they term the post-colonial ‘politics of recognition’ for being too Hegelian (and thus too idealist). For them, the left-Hegelian negative dialectics of emancipation—although useful in several respects—represents an ‘illusory strategy’. According to H/N, the attempt by thinkers such as Sartre and Fanon to resist colonialism by means of a reversal of the colonialist logic—by negating the negation of colonial forms of power and transforming dominated subjectivity into more politically agentive forms—represents a mistaken attempt to construct a real form of political practice from its mere appearance in the distorting mirror of western dialectical philosophy. In their view, this kind of dialectical inversion of power merely reproduced the false and mystifying idealisms of the colonisers. For them: [t]he power of the dialectic, which in the hands of colonial power mystified the reality of the colonial world, adopted again as part of an anti-colonial project as if the dialectic were itself the real form of the movement of history. Reality and history, however, are not dialectical, and no idealist rhetorical gymnastics can make them conform to the dialectic (H/N, 131). There could be no stronger statement of anti-Hegelianism than this. And one wonders how Hardt and Negri can claim to belong to the ‘radical left’ whilst at the same time denying the strategic validity of Hegelian philosophy. Thus one is left wondering what philosophical resources are available to H/N; philosophical resources that could provide, as Hegelianism did, a lexicon of critical concepts. The answer to this question clearly emerges in section 2.4, where H/N discuss the— now often rather tired and wilting—poststructuralist philosophical critiques of the Enlightenment. For them, it is important that we take these postmodern critiques seriously in that they show the errors of modern dualistic—‘binary’—thinking. But, rather than sign up as bona fide post-structuralist philosophers, they perform a nimble swerve through this dangerous intellectual chicane. They argue that the postmodern critique of dualistic thinking only applies to particular traditions of Enlightenment thought and not Enlightenment thought per se. By their light, the post-structuralist critique of Reason and its dualisms applies to the Cartesians and their heirs the Kantians and the Hegelians; but it does not apply to the most politically and philosophical radical elements of the Enlightenment—the philosophers
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most feared and despised by the ecclesiastical authorities—les Spinozistes. Thus in their view, the postmodern ‘left-Heideggereans’ mistakenly equate the Enlightenment with Cartesian rationalism and in doing so the more radical and philosophically defensible ideas of the early Enlightenment—especially the anti-transcendentalism of Spinozan naturalism, where God and nature were deemed to be the identical—are overlooked. Thus, they borrow much of their theoretical lexicon from Spinozist philosophical philosophy in the belief that Spinozist ideas can help develop a nondialectical yet progressive political discourse. In fact the core ideas of Empire, the equating of right with power, the idea that political power is ultimately a reflection of the passions of the multitude, the priority of affect and bodily corporeality in social and cultural life, and the idea that contemporary theory must proceed from localised ‘common notions’ and not abstract universalisms, are all derived from Spinoza. Spinozism, for them, stands out as an immanent and thoroughly monistic rationalism that systematically opposes all forms of dualistic thinking; providing a modern rationalist philosophical framework from which to launch a new style of theoretical exploration that concurs with the underlying motivation driving postmodern social critiques but without embracing the postmodern philosophy tout court. In their terms: [w]e should take care, however, to look more closely at what exactly is intended by ‘‘Enlightenment’’ and ‘‘modernity’’ from this postmodernist perspective. We argued before that modernity should be understood not as uniform and homogeneous, but rather as constituted by at least two and conflicting traditions. The first tradition is that initiated by renaissance humanism, with the discovery of the place of immanence and celebration of singularity and difference. The second tradition, the Thermidor of the Renaissance, seeks to control utopian forces of the first through the construction and mediation of dualisms. . .When postmodernists propose their opposition to a modernity and an Enlightenment that exalt the universality of reason only to exalt white male European supremacy, it should be clear that they are only attacking the second (and unfortunately ignoring or eclipsing the first) (H/N 140). Thus H/N suggest that the antinomies of postmodern and Enlightenment philosophies are ultimately resolvable in Spinozist thinking. For them, radical thought needs to return to its roots in the radical Enlightenment, bypassing the later Kantian and Hegelian conservative systematisations of this tradition. Thus H/N can perhaps more usefully be seen as working within, and striving to develop, a ‘left-Spinozist’ rather than a ‘left-Hegelian’ philosophical paradigm. However, like Marx did with Hegel, so H/N turn ‘Spinoza on his head’. His key terms are inverted and his political philosophy is read more radically. The multitude—who Spinoza, in the Ethics, despised as a vainglorious and over-emotional mob, ‘that strains after rarities and exceptions and thinks little of the gifts of nature’—is seen as both the ontological foundation of Empire and the ground of the hope for a new republican and democratic future. In championing Spinoza as the new philosophical ‘godfather’—no pun intended—of contemporary left-radicalism, H/N
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follow in footsteps Althusser and Delueze. Like them, they attempt to devise a more ontologically radical version of ‘new left’ thinking: one that does away with dualisms—and thus all transcendentals—and operates entirely on a Deleuzian ‘plane of immanence’, working with ‘common notions’ and not ‘abstract universalisms’. Thus for H/N, it is Spinoza and not Hegel—and thus not Marx—who stands out as our philosophical contemporary. Their Marxism is simply a mask for a Spinozist ‘ontological politics’ of ‘becoming-different’: where the human subject gives up on liberal illusions of rationality, responsibility and autonomy—where the human is seen as ‘separate kingdom’ within a ‘wider kingdom’—accepting the technological and embodied nature of human subjectivity. Thus in their view political action must now become an ethics concerned with a radical ‘ontological displacement of the subject’ (see p. 384). Thus in philosophical terms, Empire’s theoretical discourse moves in a fluid and ill-defined conceptual space somewhere between Spinozism and Hegelianism. However, both of these philosophical traditions can be used to pose critical questions to the main thesis itself. For as it is deployed in Empire, the term ‘Empire’ has no limits, and thus seen in strictly Hegelian terms, strikes as something of a ‘speculative illusion’. For the doubt that immediately surfaces when contemplating Empire’s central thesis is that political reason might have overstepped its proper bounds and has lost its sense of Kantian ‘self-criticality’. And a moment’s reflection on the current state of post 9–11 international relations clearly exacerbates these doubts: for they show the extent to which Empire, if there is one, is not as global as they make out but perhaps only an abstract misrepresentation of a more familiar world subject to global Anglo—US political domination. The use of Spinoza too is not without its problems and H/N’s adoption of the Spinozist philosophical lexicon is a something of gamble. For Spinozan radicalism cannot easily be separated from its historical context: a context where, as Jonathon Israel has pointed out Spinoza emerged as ‘the chief challenger of the fundamentals of revealed religion.and what was everywhere regarded as . . .divinely constituted political authority’ (Israel, 2001, 159). Perhaps we can view neo-liberal cosmopolitanism as the orthodox faith of Empire’s ‘Church militant’—its new ‘religion’—and Spinozism as repository for a new, and much needed set of heresies. But as the Clinton era’s neo-liberal relativism about ‘cultural values’ is replaced by Bush’s neo-conservative moral absolutisms, it is unclear how to assess the value of Spinozism as a critical philosophical discourse. In the current political context, it is cosmopolitanism itself, and postmodern attempts to re-articulate a wider notion of ‘the cultural’, that still seem more useful and critical. However, Spinoza can be useful in drawing out other submerged and politically radical aspects of Empire. For many passages clearly show that Empire—see for example pp. 156–159—is an attempt to write a radical-left ‘Scripture’ or perhaps better ‘counter Scripture’. In fact, one cannot fail to read Empire as a manifesto for a new political theology capable of mobilising all those on the left who see the huge social, cultural and ecological dangers involved in current forms of globalisation. A Spinozist understanding of the nature and significance of Scripture can be used to evaluate the significance and likely success of this effort. For the anti-Calvi-
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nist Spinoza, there can be no hermeneutics of Scripture; for to interpret Scripture is only to come up against paradoxes (that some then interpret as deep ‘mysteries’, and one could clearly read Empire ‘enigmatically’ in just this way). In the Spinozist account however, Scripture’s significance is defined by it materiality and its meaning is seen as residing in the bodily ‘effectivity’ of its linguistic forms. Thus for Spinoza, Scripture must be judged solely via a consideration of its corporeal effects; especially the extent to which it creates an affect that might spur us to action. When seen in these terms, Empire can only be judged as an intellectual success. References Israel, J. I. (2001). Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
