The Audio Stylings of Chris Levens
"I'm a Gangster"

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I Had to Share This

This guy Mayer Hawthorne is a winner. I can't wait for the disk to come out.
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Historical Cycles

Yes, that's right, more Hardt and Negri. This time, it is a double edged quote: on the one hand, it should put to rest the complaint Stratkey made about these guys being Marxist and Hegelian; on the other hand, it offers a healthy view of history.

"History has a logic only when subjectivity rules it. [. . .] We find this entire mode of reasoning [historical cycles] completely inadequate, because every theory of cycles seems to laugh at the fact that history is a product of human action by imposing an objective law that rules over the intentions and resistances, the defeats and the victories, the joys and the suffering of humans."

So first, putting to rest the Marxist/Hegelian smear. Hegel's dialectical understanding of historical cycles, and Marx's own version of dialectical materialism, don't work in the era of postmodern Empire. The dialectic is a product of Modernity's own internal crisis. When Modernity ends and its crisis evaporates, so does its dialectical logic. These guys are saying that we shouldn't maintain a theory of historical cycles, Hegelian or otherwise. They go on to say that these superimposed theories of historical necessity blind us to the possibilities that are around us.

Once they make this point, I'm not sure in what sense we can label them Hegelian or Marxist.

Now to my second point: I like their view of history. History isn't objective -- it is subjective. In other words, it takes human subjectivity to create a theory of historical laws. We may use these theories of historical laws or logic, as they call it, to try to understand experience, but we must always make sure we do not naturalize these laws -- we can't mistake the creation of our minds with independent reality.

It reminds me of Old Testament mockery of idolatry: the human makes a statue out of wood one minute, then the next minute they are kneeling down before the statue as if the statue were their creator. The creation becomes naturalized.

The value of their understanding of history's subjectivity is that it allows us to identify short comings in our own theories. If we don't recognize the subjective nature of history, then we are trapped in the theoretical creation of others. Like an idol worshipper, we mistake the creation of humans with something uncreated, something natural, something objective. But once we realize that the idol was our creation -- once we see historical laws as human creations -- we are no longer enslaved to it.

If we think something is impossible, then it becomes impossible. We make it impossible by thinking it is impossible. We won't try to do things we think are impossible. If we think there is a natural law that makes certain things impossible, then we will never try to achieve those things. The first step to opening up new possibilities is to recognize that "natural laws" are the creation of subjectivities -- they do not exist independently.
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So Good:


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Mounting Excitement

So the book Empire by Hardt and Negri is getting even more exciting. What I found particularly fun is their analysis of how both postmodernist discourses and religious fundamentalisms are unwitting handmaidens of postmodern Empire.

"How so?"

So glad you asked. Since it is, "Difficult to generalize about the numerous discourses that go under the banner of postmodernism," they boil it down to a "generalized attack on the Enlightenment." While these postmodernists are engaging in what they think is a struggle for liberation, Empire suggests that they are fighting old Modernist enemies like the idea of sovereign nation-states.

Postmodern Empire, on the other hand, ignores sovereign nation-states -- think of the "police" actions of the US and UN and the boarderless flow of NGOs like Amnesty Int., the Red Cross and Doctors Without Boarders. The latest development of capitalism is a shift from modernist notions of sovereignty to postmodern notions of empire.

Hardt and Negri claim that, "Despite the best intentions, the postmodernist politics of difference not only is ineffective against but even coincides with and support the functions and practices of imperial rule." Basically, postmodernists are fighting against the memory of modern forms of capital rule while a fundamentally new form of rule takes its place.

"How about religious fundamentalisms?"

They boil these down to different forms of Muslim and Christian fundamentalism. At its core, both are committed to a social agenda of recreating "The stable and hierarchical nuclear family, which is imagined to have existed in a previous era."

"If they are trying to go back to past ways of life, how are they helping to usher in postmodern Empire?"

They say, "Fundamentalist visions of a return to the past are generally based upon historical illusions." When I read that, I was like, "BINGO!" The "traditional family" fundamentalists champion never really existed, but instead are a "Pastiche of values and practices that derive more from television programs" then from history. Their conclusion is that fundamentalisms are not "backward-looking at all, but rather a new invention that is part of a political project against the contemporary social order." In this sense, fundamentalism, like postmodernist theorists, are assisting with the passage to postmodern Empire.

When I read this chapter, I was giving them mental high-fives. To me, it made so much sense. I really agree with their perception that both postmodernists and religious fundamentalists are unwitting helpers of late capitalism.

In addition, I think this understanding of fundamentalism helps explain why Conservative Christianity tends to be very much in favor of the free-market. A global free-market is very postmodern in the sense that it overpowers modern forms of sovereignty like independent nation-states and fixed boarders.
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The Wisdom of Italian Prisoners

As you may know, I'm a big fan of Antonio Gramsci -- Marxist theorist imprisoned by the Italian Fascists.

I don't know what it is, but there is another Italian prisoner's political writings that are exciting me: Antonio Negri. I'm reading a book Negri co-authored with Michael Hardt called Empire, and it is really good.

I've been a lazy blogger lately -- every time I read a book that I find interesting, I want to blog about some of the issues, but I never can get myself to sit in front of my computer and put anything down. Well, tonight, I'm breaking that trend. Tonight, I'm going to tell you a thing or two that is cool about Negri and Hardt's book Empire.

Their idea is that Empire is a new logic that is structuring our world. It has some similarities to previous empires, but those similarities can't account for what is new about the truly global Empire. Empire today is unique because it has the capacity and the means to structure the entire world under its sovereignty. This Empire is not to be equated with America, though America is the chief handmaiden of Empire. Empire, according to them, has no center of power and has no barriers. Empire is truly postmodern: the decentered and deterritorializing trajectory of capitalism.

One thing I like about this book is the way it investigates the overlapping of all of life in what it calls "biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest in one another." As they say elsewhere, "In the imperial world the economist needs a basic knowledge of cultural production to understand the economy, and likewise, the cultural critic needs a basic knowledge of economic processes to understand culture." I like the interdisciplinarity approach of this book.

Finally, what I really like about this book is that it seeks to explore ways to create an alternative to the enormous power of Empire to oppress and destroy. "Our political task," they write, "is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them towards new ends." I like this approach. Since Empire is all encompassing, deterritorializing, everyone is a part of it. There is no outside of Empire for us to position ourselves against it. Instead, our political strategy is try and reorganize Empire from within. In a sense, we pollute it from within, we infect it like a virus. Pollution and infection have negative connotations. The pollution and infection we seek, though, is not destructive of life, but supportive of life. It is Empire (postmodern capitalism) that treats life as a commodity. Like a virus, we need to infect Empire with a new logic, a new morality, a new way to understand life without commodifiying it.

Pick up the book and read it with me, if you like. It is heady -- a slow read. But it is exciting and enlightening.
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