An Empire of Cant: Hardt, Negri, and Postmodern Political Theory
Cohen, Mitchell
Cant—the word is English and is said to have been first used in the sixteenth century as a description of the saintly singsong of the Puritans. More generally, it denotes an unreal manner of...
...Rashid Rida, Abduh's student, did so, and his notion of an Islamic state was similar to that embraced by the Muslim Brotherhood and the leaders of Iran's revolution.° In short, everything about this term, and about the relation between fundamentalism and modernism, is more complex, both historically and conceptually, than allowed by Hardt/ Negri's binary oppositions...
...First, "global citizenship...
...In Being and Time, Heidegger formulated the phrase "Being-with" (Mitsein) to describe how an individual can lose his Self in "the Others," that is, how an individual can become "inauthentic" by "falling" EMPIRE OF CANT into the mass...
...It is an understanding, even empathetic voice when they discuss fundamentalists, however "antithetical" the discourse is to their own...
...5. See Albert Hourani's classic study Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (Oxford University Press, 1970...
...Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini...
...Early Renaissance humanism, according to this grand narrative, was a good thing because it unleashed "immanent''—that is, creative, this-worldly, "revolutionary"—forces...
...Kantianism denies "every form of immediacy" and "immanence," write Hardt/Negri...
...In our times Being-against will release the multitude's "desire" so that "technologies and production" may be directed "towards its [the multitude's ] own joy and its own increase in power...
...The syndicalism—the "perpetual movement"—of the Industrial Workers of the World at the turn of the twentieth century was "an immanent pilgrimage...
...Had he approached "Islamic government" on its own grounds, he would have started with classical Islam's refusal to separate religion and political authority—the notion, as Khomeini once put it, that "all of Islam is politics...
...But it is contemptuous when they speak of noncommunist socialists...
...A basic change then took place when "deliberate and socially sanctioned violence began to be directed through established governmental, judicial and social institutions against groups of people"—heretics, Jews, lepers, "sodomites," others—"defined by general characteristics such as race, religion or way of life and . . . membership of such groups in itself came to be regarded as justifying these attacks...
...THE POTENCY OF Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt beginning in the 1980s was in some ways a comparable phenomenon...
...The Muslim Brotherhood has long declared its "constitution" to be the Quran...
...Foucault did what postmodernist theorists (like himself) often warned against...
...Was he engaged in postmodern revolt against global markets when he declared in March 2002 that "women can carry out suicide actions only if they have the protection of a man alongside them...
...It is true that the victorious Iranian clerics rejected the shah's "modernity...
...4-5, and pp...
...This system must also obliterate challenges...
...But "Islamic modernism" is much more complicated and diverse than "overcoded" compliance with "Euro-American hegemony," and it has ambiguous ties to fundamentalism...
...Only an "it" can remain in "perpetual movement," as in Hardt/Negri's fantasy of the Augustinian Pilgrimage of the Wobblies...
...Had the shah been a megalomaniacal left-wing (and anti-American) dictator rather than a megalomaniacal royal authoritarian, part of the Western left would have cheered these measures— except, perhaps, privatization...
...This reversal is reminiscent of the most precarious moment in Marx's political thought—when he imagined that a proletarian state that centralized dominion over economic life (in the first phase of communism) would lead dialectically to a stateless society (in the second, classless phase of communism...
...Augustine believed that "the whole mass of the human race is condemned" to "punishment without end" because of Original Sin...
...Is the mulEMPIRE OF CANT titude an "it...
...There were "summary trials," "hasty executions," and these were "alarming," he said in an open letter to Mehdi Bazargan, once an oppositionist with whom he conversed about revolutionary events, and now prime minister, thanks to Khomeini's designation...
...The "biopolitics" of Empire recalls Karl Kraus's characterization of psychoanalysis: part of the ailment it professes to cure...
...AND WHAT IF a "thousand machines of life, art, solidarity, and action" don't bloom...
...Look at those demonstrations...
...And so revolt will have to be through those mechanisms, decentered, everywhere...
...However much our ideas may differ," Lukacs wrote to him in the 1920s, "discussion is possible so long as our judgments of capitalism are similar...
...It is "the essential key to every active political position in the world...
...Denoel/Gonthier, 1973), pp...
...This ambitious tome of nearly five hundred pages has been translated into more than a dozen languages...
...At this point, then, as Augustine says, our task is to discuss, to the best of our powers, 'the rise, the power, and the destined ends of the two cities . . . which we find . . . interwoven .. . and mingled with one another.'" But here again, as soon as their political spirituality is asserted, the language (and ideas) become fungible...
...The poor is god on earth," they tell us, "there is World Poverty, but there is above all World Possibility, and only the poor is capable of this...
...No wonder that the Holocaust appears in their account to be little more than a detail of modernity...
...James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (Simon and Schuster, 1993), pp...
...For instance, about a third of the way into Empire, we read that the Iranian revolution was "the first postmodernist revolution...
...But self-government and nationalism (the latter was a left-wing term in the early nineteenth century) entail both inclusive and exclusive, democratizing, and "Other"- creating dimensions...
...It is also why Kantianism is a species of liberal universalism...
...The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 established the modern state system and confirmed the sixteenth-century principle "cuius regio, eius religio" (he who rules a domain may impose his religion on it...
...Still, Hardt/Negri chastise cold war ideology for obscuring the "ex2 2 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 tremely strong instances of creativity and freedom" in Soviet history...
...Hardt/Negri recognize that the proletariat, in the old Marxist sense, won't be a messiah class...
...Empire is for them a new paradigm that issues from modernity's transfiguration into postmodernity...
...Without a chaperone, something untoward might happen en route...
...Not that the Middle East is the sole preoccupation of this style of leftism...
...This was, after all, Lenin's problem...
...See R.I, Moore's The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250 (Blackwell, 1992), pp...
...But there is more to the story...
...And if Enlightenment universalism provides an ideological justification of bad modernity, John Rawls's social liberalism, which owes a good deal to Kantian rationalism, does likewise on behalf of Empire...
...For Hardt/Negri, the veil is really an ideological mask...
...Hardt/Negri, having described nongovernmental organizations as moral police early in Empire, go on, later in the book, to characterize them as "the capillary ends of the contemporary networks of power...
...Order was then reestablished by a new "transcendental" power, the "sovereignty machine...
...The two other demands championed by Hardt/Negri are a guaranteed social wage for all and the "reapportionment" of the means of production...
...Globalization must be met with counterglobalization, Empire with counter-Empire...
...It would be like proposing that Muslim fundamentalism is a postmodern phenomenon...
...Instead of Big Brother's party, "a globalized . . . machine" that is "economic-industrial-communicative" commands "the entire life of the population...
...He solved it by placing the Vanguard Party, with its "scientific" grasp of history, between the two cities...
...How could anyone see both positive and negative dimensions of, say, the Enlightenment or the liberal democratic state...
...The use of high technology...
...The worrisome political strength of the populist right is one consequence...
...The "discourses" of postmoderns and fundamentalists are antithetical "in most respects," write Hardt/Negri, yet "postmoderns and the current wave of fundamentalists have arisen not only at the same time but also in response to the same situation, only at opposite poles of the global hierarchy...
...The concept of the nation did not simply reinvent "the patrimonial body of the monarchic state...
...The word 'government' by itself is enough to awaken vigilance...
...The goal of postmodern dialectical reversal is a world of deterritorialized movements, rhizomes— and Hardt/Negri believe it is inscribed in the present...
...0 NE NEED NOT be a philosophical foundationalist— a believer in ahistorical verities—to find in this last formula the autopoietic short circuit through which antifoundationalism and fundamentalism connect...
...He wishes to thank Michael Walzer and Richard Wolin for helpful comments on drafts of this article...
...This step required sovereign states stationed above competing religions...
...It is a world of doublethink, a "society of control" in which the "mechanisms of command" pretend to be democratic when they actually generalize "disciplinarity" throughout our "brains and bodies...
...But whereas one can recall paroxysms within the Western left (and among European governments) when Israel bombed Iraq's French-built nuclear reactor in 1981, one won't find comparable agitation about the slaughter—massive, hideous slaughter— of the Iraq-Iran war...
...The former believed that he had found the messiah class, the vehicle through which life and history—Life and History—would be made whole...
...The mullahs were not "fanatics," but the voice of the oppressed...
...They want the multitude to be a "constituent power" at the "site of ontological constitution...
...Did the fact of Iran's new repression "condemn" the "intoxication" of its revolution, Foucault asked aloud...
...And if you don't know that you are really against the world market—if, say, you are a Palestinian who has lived in misery for decades in a Gaza refugee camp and you don't grasp that post-Fordism is your real problem— well . . . Hardt/Negri know for you...
...And he wondered: "In the expression 'Islamic government,' why cast suspicion on the adjective 'Islamic...
...Or human beings...
...So when Augustine says that the "destined ends" 26 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 of the two cities intermingle in our world, his assumptions are the opposite of those of Hardt/ Negri...
...Lukacs, critic and philosopher, became a Bolshevik...
...Mullahs fomented the demonstrations to protest (among other things) the emancipation of women...
...DISSENT / Summer 2002 .2 7 EMPIRE OF CANT 7. See Michel Lowy, Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism (New Left Books, 1979), p. 46...
...reasonable law comes from within all of us...
...Althusser strangled his wife and then spent a decade in and out of mental hospitals...
...National identity was indissolubly linked to "the construction of an absolute racial difference," and so, bad modernization also gives us Eurocentrism DISSENT / Summer 2002 n 23 EMPIRE OF CANT and (modern) imperialism...
...Some of them were, of course, duly disturbed when Khomeini later decreed that Salman Rushdie ought to die for his literary imagination...
...One can, on the other hand, link readily the 1963 demonstrations against the White Revolution to Khomeini's republic...
...Imperial power is distributed in networks through mobilized and articulated mechanisms of control...
...Let a thousand machines of life, art, solidarity, and action sweep away the stupid and sclerotic arrogance of the old organizations, " wrote Guattari and Negri in an essay entitled "Communists like Us...
...It was "subordinated to the territorial control of the sovereign...
...Similar measures by an Israeli government would have led to condemnatory UN resolutions for which Cairo would surely have voted...
...The Iranian revolution could herald a "transfiguration" of the world...
...Postmodern Empire "presents us, alongside the machine of command, with an alternative: the set of all the exploited and subjugated, a multitude that is directly opposed to Empire, with no mediation between them...
...It embodied "the great Augustinian project of modern times...
...Then the responsibility of the left is to imagine global, regional, national, and local reforms that will enable these human beings to take political, social, and economic life into their own hands—rather than make them the means of (decentered) intellectual fantasy...
...To those living outside of Iran, spiritual romance brought no consequences (as earlier romances hadn't to Western Stalinists or Maoists...
...The problem is often revealed with acuity when the Middle East is addressed...
...The Internet is one such technology because it is a "nonhierarchical and noncentered network structure"—a "rhizome" in Deleuzese...
...Social democratic parties sat in governments across much of Europe in the 1990s—and adjusted...
...Sadat, who served as a link between Nasser's Free Officers underground and the Muslim Brotherhood before the 1952 revolution, let many Brothers out of jail after he became president...
...For them, recent debate about just and unjust wars functions as so much ideology...
...They explain that this Arabic phrase means "original thought" and that Is20 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 EMPIRE OF CANT lamic radicals are engaged in "the invention of original values and practices, which perhaps echo those of other periods . . . but are really directed in reaction to the present social order...
...But, frankly, postmodern hybridity wasn't much of an option at the time...
...Our deregulated, "informatisized" world reproduces itself "immaterially...
...He crammed particular developments into his own intellectual macrocosm and then pronounced on them...
...11-13...
...They conclude, and surely Orwell's O'Brien would concur, that "truth will not make us free, but taking control of the production of truth will...
...In other words, the "universal moral call" of these NGOs might, dialectically, usher along a reversal of biopower's direction...
...As long as You Are Against, the basis doesn't seem to matter...
...machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections...
...This modernizing program called, among other things, for land redistribution, administrative reform, a literacy campaign, nationalization of forests, privatization of state-owned industry along with plans for profit-sharing, and the enfranchisement of women...
...76-79...
...It is influential on campuses and among segments of the antiglobalization movement...
...About 97 percent of the country's population lived on 3 percent of the land (the Nile delta and valley), and the majority was very, very poor...
...Bazargan, often characterized as a Muslim liberal, was out of office within nine months...
...Communication is now "the central element that establishes the relations of production...
...The concept of the nation emerges, little more than a reinvention of "the patrimonial body of the monarchic state," except that the "feudal order of subject yielded to the disciplinary order of the citizen...
...Otherwise, they might have understood that the principle of "cuius regio, eius religio" in both the Peace EMPIRE OF CANT of Augsburg (1555) and the Treaty of Westphalia, meant acceptance of multiconfessionalism in place of bloody efforts to impose religious uniformity across the continent...
...you sidestep by using fungible formulations and you avoid vexatious details—all while you footnote copiously...
...So Hardt/Negri tell us that "imperial command" needs an "inclusive" moment...
...153-53...
...Hardt/Negri are interested in "immanence," not tolerance...
...Because they see human beings as "desiring" machines, DISSENT / Summer 2002 n 25 EMPIRE OF CANT mechanical and organic images always seem to merge for Hardt/Negri...
...Without global oil markets, the Saudis—and also Osama bin Laden's coterie, most of whom come from comfortable families—would have succeeded little in their efforts to identify their sectarianism with Muslim civilization...
...How to realize them today...
...18-19...
...The world did change dramatically in the last quarter century due to the revolutions in technology and communications, the progress of neoliberal globalization, and the end of the cold war...
...Fundamentalist thinking usually draws on some mix of writ and an imagined, distant past—which is why it can appear "radical" when applied to the contemporary world...
...This book is clearly influenced by Foucault's methods but with a much surer grasp of history than that of most Foucauldians...
...It isn't, although an unusual agitation can be detected when this terrain is in focus...
...Anyway, women should be at home "ensuring the survival of the nation...
...And so Hardt/Negri tell us that it is the "militant" who "best expresses the life of the multitude...
...this is why there are Gulf Wars...
...Muslim fundamentalism had, alternatively, burst out into the public realm and been repressed over decades...
...They hope that the "global multitude" will forge a new, liberating, collective force through "Being-against," and especially through "Being-against" Empire...
...For postmodernists, it seems, the Enlightenment is the Jahilliya of the West...
...What was possible was a pragmatic step toward European pluralism, which was considerably less miserable than holy warriors slaughtering each other...
...instead, they continue Foucault's fumble...
...These powers were indeed filled with "political spirituality," although others might simply call it devout extremism...
...Read Augustine and you will find that there can be no "Augustinian project" in Hardt/Negri's sense...
...9. Tibi, pp...
...But if you exit history, someone else is likely to barge in...
...ARECENT CASE of twist-and-turn is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire, and I want to look at it in some detail...
...The "lived experience of the global multitude" is animated by it "at the most basic and elemental level...
...You arrive, finally, at the telos— your prejudgment...
...The Good, the Bad, and the Modern Actually, Hardt and Negri do think that something has been wrong on the left, and you find it not just in what they write...
...Liberals and social democrats largely accepted the resulting framework, that is, the necessity of bounded political communities...
...The word "multitude" in Empire doesn't embody postmodern humanism...
...What if the multitude is just suffering human beings...
...These are hardly postmodern demands— they are among the oldest in the history of the left...
...those in the Earthly City do not know if they have it or if they will be separated from the damned, who are bound in the opposite direction from God's City...
...Has the spread of Wahhabi fundamentalism, always an extreme, minority variant within Islam, been driven by the wretched of the postmodern earth...
...Hardt/ Negri, for instance, dismiss rationales for the Gulf War...
...But for Hardt/Negri, if you connect Kant's law within to law imposed from outside (by the "sovereignty machine"), liberal modernity becomes virtually totalitarian...
...It rejected both modernity and the world market, the authors explain...
...281-295...
...Complex considerations of right and wrong in Western or third world (or Israeli or Palestinian) politics crumble, along with the integrity of anything that might be called a "left" appraisal of them...
...Yet it is a "systemic totality," write Hardt/Negri, whose thinking draws from postmodernist philosopher Gilles Deleuze and systems theorist Niklas Luhmann...
...Was the attempted assassination of Nasser in 1954 by one of its members a postmodern transgression...
...But they were hardly a postmodern phenomenon...
...Immanence in Our Time...
...An "Islamic government," he supposed, might initiate a new "political spirituality" of the sort unknown in the West for half a millennium (since modernity's rise, that is...
...What Foucault called "disciplinary society," a product of modernity, becomes, according to Hardt/Negri, a "society of control," of "biopower" in postmodern Empire...
...Lucien Goldmann, Lukács et Heidegger, Youssef Ishaghpour, ed...
...The only serious question was—what sort...
...6. 1 draw in part from Fazlur Rahman, Islam (Anchor Books, 1968), esp...
...Well, perhaps cosmopolitan intellectuals can too when they chase conferences and international celebrity...
...If we look a little more closely, we find that Hardt/Negri on "ijtihad" are much like Foucault on "Islamic government...
...Capillaries are small vessels between the terminations of arteries and the starts of veins, that is, between the blood channels from and to the heart...
...It contributed to secularism mainly by legitimating competing authorities (more specifically, the Ancients alongside the Church), but most Renaissance intellectuals assumed that their humanism didn't contradict their Christianity...
...Yet the Empire in which we live, as they characterize it, is in significant ways a postmodern 1984...
...In Empire we learn that Bad Postmodernity can be replaced by Good Postmodernity thanks to Being-against...
...And it is a postmodern project too...
...A kindred tone could be discerned in part of the intellectual left after September 11—among those whose first impulse was not to mourn murdered innocents, but to explain how this event (yes, yes, an unfortunate event) demonstrated how they were always right about everything...
...Three decades later, only 2 percent of the land is arable...
...The Renaissance was surely a great force of intellectual emancipation, but it hardly represented "the triumph of secularism," as they characterize it...
...The interview is in a video, "Retour vers le futur," which was also published in book form as Exil (L'Yeux Ouverts, 1998...
...If you are one of the multitude and this doesn't quite explain your world to you, well, not everyone grasped Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism...
...In the period around the 1973 war, he drew closer to the Saudis, who were actively promoting Wahhabi-influenced fundamentalism in the Muslim world...
...Now their adjustment is being repudiated in election after election...
...If we accept Hardt/Negri, a new caliphate would then be postmodern...
...One reason is that it aims to fill an empty space on the left...
...in Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Foucault, Vol 3 (The New Press, 2000...
...The ensuing war rallied Iranians and was important in the consolidation of the Islamic republic...
...81-93 and Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (University of Texas Press, 1982), esp...
...If you link Deleuze's vision to Luhmann's notion of "autopoiesis," that is, of a self-producing and self-referential system of communication, then the "fundamental principle" of the Hardt/Negri "totality" begins to take its somewhat indeterminate shape: in Empire, "power has no actual and localizable terrain or center...
...One scholar, Bassam Tibi, summarizes this well when he writes that Muslim fundamentalists "invoke . . . selectively chosen `fundamentals' (usul) of Islam and they present them in a distorted manner as the basics and essence of political-cultural authenticity...
...Like Foucault, they search for an art of not being governed...
...No wonder that the postmodern left hasn't won a real political battle anywhere...
...As Leninists and conservative nationalists were, despite their differing ideas, on the same side of the barricades against capitalism, so, it seems, postmoderns and fundamentalists respond in concert, despite antithetical discourses, to what Hardt/Negri call "Empire...
...for Yassin, see Zvi Bar'el, "Make Children not War," Ha'aretz (March 14, 2002...
...Some time before postmodernity—over a dozen centuries—ascendant, expanding Islam posited world struggle between the "Camp of Islam" and the "Camp of War...
...I 4 UCIEN GOLDMANN, a socialist humanist whose work was eclipsed by postmodernism, once noted how Lukacs and Heidegger rallied to dictators, respectively to Stalin and Hitler, in the belief that they, as theorists, grasped the meaning of the "totality" better than their political leaders.'° One finds, I think, a similar hubris in Hardt/Negri, not just in their discussions of fundamentalism and of everyone who is "against," but in their strident, oracular tones...
...But because Hardt/Negri don't acknowledge that Said does this himself when he addresses the Middle East, one hardly expects them to recognize that they too are relentless homogenizers when they write of "Being-against...
...It did so in the eleventh and twelfth centuries—before "modernity"— during what is sometimes designated "the twelfth century Renaissance...
...He saw, in their words, that "no limited community could succeed and provide an alternative to [decaying, Roman] imperial rule...
...In the end, one senses that Hardt/Negri's concern is ontological tantrum rather than alternative politics...
...47-49 and 81-102...
...WHAT OF Ra'ad Salah, perhaps the leading fundamentalist among Israeli Arabs today...
...They go on to explain that "Our pilgrimage on earth, . . . in contrast to Augustine's, has no transcendent telos beyond...
...Social and economic "modernization" also produced considerable dislocation, with few peasants actually getting land and large numbers flocking into the cities...
...I only mean to suggest that the more we deconstruct how this tiers-mondiste/postmodern left treats this particular region, and the more some detailed counter-history is presented, the more we find within its polemics a method that I call "twistandturn...
...Ernst, playwright and poet, became a nationalist conservative...
...From here bleaker developments ensue...
...Nothing they do gains it...
...When he proclaims that homosexuality is a "great crime...
...But some probing shows that Hardt/ Negri are not Marx/Engels...
...After Sadat's assassination, the Egyptian regime—which is, finally, a military regime—repressed fundamentalists ruthlessly...
...1. On Foucault and Iran in English, see especially, Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Harvard University Press, 1991), pp...
...It is difficult to imagine how anyone who followed the Iranian events of 1978-1979 could have envisioned anything but a religious panopticon as their likely result...
...Of course they had no economic program—only a more indigenous ideological panacea...
...In the interim another idea—Anwar Sadat's infitah (opening the economy to Western capitalism)— failed, leaving a large breach that fundamentalists sought to fill...
...FOR MOST READERS, Rawls's Theory of Justice is a thought experiment in which people who differ in social advantages and natural capacities negotiate basic principles of justice for a society...
...It was and remains a symptom of something troubling in the kind of left-wing thinking that mixes postmodernism, simplistic third worldism, and illiberal inclinations...
...But usually they also want—and need—the security of tenure...
...Negri's view of prison might be compared usefully with his (and Hardt's) characterization in Empire of the last years of Louis Althusser's life as "his period of seclusion...
...The Soviet Union, also a "factory-society," failed because it was unable to transcend "disciplinary governability...
...This is possible because "the body of the multitude can configure itself as a telos...
...Even religion became the ruler's property," they complain...
...In fact, Westphalia went beyond Augsburg by maintaining, albeit in a limited way, that subjects of minority religions in a princedom should have civil protections...
...But a good number of people on the left—Foucault was not alone—did imagine otherwise...
...These states, even when absolutist in character, did not represent the "Thermidor" of Renaissance humanism...
...His government was undermined by competing powers, both macro and micro (the Council of the Islamic Republic, local revolutionary committees...
...This is why we can communicate rationally with one another and speak of the world as law-like...
...it represents the congealed "desire" of its authors...
...Iran's military, the shah's mainstay, didn't have a comparable opportunity, partly because the monarch fled, partly because Khomeini's regime neutralized its upper echelons and created competing militia, and, significantly, because Iraq attacked Iran...
...they want sovereignty (like the Zionists...
...These risings, regardless of their content, are postmodern and potentially liberating...
...The Muslim Brotherhood itself designated its own fundamentalism as Muslim "modernity...
...But they have a postmodern tiers-mondiste substitute...
...8. Negri, a prominent intellectual figure in the Italian far left, spent several years in Parisian exile to avoid jail...
...4. Bassam Tibi, Islam between Culture and Politics (Palgrave, 2001), p. 15...
...After all, most human beings need moments and places no less than metamorphoses...
...The social democratic left in Europe (and Bill Clinton in the United States) responded with talk of a "third way" that was mostly devoid of social imagination...
...Is he really a postmodern transgressor when he propounds that "all those who claim that women have the right to do with their bodies as they please are implementing anarchy...
...It democratized it by suggesting that a political community of equal citizens might displace realms composed of royal subjects...
...Inspired by a "religion of combat and sacrifice...
...That is, most Western scholars don't examine "the Orient" empirically but as an object created by their own prejudiced discourses...
...Hardt/Negri are so eager to denounce Eurocentrism that they fail to perceive how premodern prejudice against Europe's internal Others could translate into intolerance among Christians, and then into negation of external Others...
...only a universal, catholic community bringing together all populations and all languages in a common journey could accomplish this...
...This term actually comes from eighth- and ninth-century Islamic jurisprudence...
...Both men had been romantic anticapitalists before World War I, and then parted political ways...
...The antimodern thrust that defines fundamentalisms might be better understood . . . not as a premodern but as a postmodern project...
...4 Thus it is easy for Hardt/Negri to speak interchangeably of Islamic "fundamentalism" and Islamic "radicalism" without branding the radicalism reactionary...
...It was anti-imperialist and espoused Salafiyyah (the idea that Islam's "early generations" provide the model for contemporary life...
...His pilgrims are the tiny minority who are saved by "unmerited" grace...
...To say that a prince could impose his religion within his territories meant in the context of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries that Europeans were resigning themselves to difference, that is, to accepting Catholicism and Protestantism along side one another...
...Participants in the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and the intifada may not realize it—one might say that they may have only local focus rather than decentered global consciousness—but they are all refusing "the post-Fordist regime of social control...
...Contemporary Islamic fundamentalism, they write, "should not be understood as a return to past social forms and values," but as "a new invention...
...Edward Said is lauded at one point in Empire for complaining that "Orientalists" homogenize the "Orient...
...This millenarianism always remained a potent tendency within Islam...
...After the shah fell, Foucault fumbled...
...For Hardt/ Negri, Kantian "transcendental" rationalism is "the definitive liquidation of the humanist revolution...
...It soon becomes clear that the novelty of Islamic fundamentalism for Hardt/Negri lies in what it opposes—or in what Hardt/Negri imagine it opposes...
...For Hardt/ Negri, the important truth is what You Are Against...
...Was Sayyid Qutb, the major intellectual figure of the Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s, postmodern when he compared Arab nationalist—"modern," according to Hardt/Negri—regimes to the Jahiliyya (the Quran's term for the pre-Muhammad era of "ignorance") and wanted them replaced by a globalizing Islamic state like the original caliphate...
...in power, seventeen years later, mullahs veiled them...
...In a telling metaphor, they provide what might be called "the capillary theory" of postmodern change...
...More simply, the modern state, defined by its capacity to make and enforce law, represents "counterrevolution" to Hardt/Negri...
...Globalization, Hardt/Negri believe, harbors the alternative...
...Perhaps it is not an accident but a "symptom" that "biopower," "multitude," and "rhizome" appear in Empire's index but "democracy" does not...
...Indeed, virtually all the books discussing totalitarianism can be "thrown away without hesitation...
...This enables them to bargain "fairly," that is, solely on the basis of a common human rationality and without the intrusion of self-interested prejudices...
...But these forces of good modernity also gave rise to the Reformation and religious wars...
...But where do the Saudis fit in this hierarchy...
...They want "Being-against" to become, dialectically, politically spiritual immanence, but they must know that only postmodern intellectuals will digest their discourse...
...Hardt/Negri turn for inspiration to Saint Augustine...
...Consider what "Being-against" should be for, according to Hardt/Negri...
...But they have a higher estimation of the function of what they refer to as "so-called fundamentalisms...
...For these measures threatened the most conservative interests in Iranian society, especially large estate owners, the Shi'i clergy (who stood to lose considerable land holdings along with educational and juridical prerogatives), and bazaar merchants—a configuration of social forces much like that which would one day spearhead the shah's overthrow...
...I believe that you are mistaken on nearly every question, but you are not on the other side of the barricades...
...In simpler terms, Kant proposed that we would know the world only as a chaos of sensations if we did not share an a priori cognitive structure that deploys concepts...
...When Sadat later began to liberalize Egyptian politics, he allowed fundamentalists growing scope, although he didn't perceive adequately the threat posed by their radicalization...
...It doesn't matter that contemporary Muslim fundamentalists believe, in Tibi's words, that "modern knowledge ought to be Islamicized" or, more properly, re-Islamicized, because they imagine that all science comes, finally, from Islam...
...Both countries, Saudi Arabia and Iran, were commonly situated in the "global hierarchy," but they also sit across from each other on what Tehran calls the Persian Gulf and Riyadh calls the Arabian Gulf...
...Perhaps this revolution would demonstrate "an art of not being governed," he wrote in the fall of 1978...
...Or was it, as postmodernists like to say, a symptom...
...In disciplinary society, social "apparatuses," ranging from prisons to asylums to clinics, impose standards of normality and deviance...
...Hardt/ Negri slide into postmodern Bolshevism...
...Then the caliphate of the eighth century must have been postmodern...
...Moreover, Europe did not become what historian R.I...
...In their quest for counter-Empire, which they also call "the earthly city of the multitude," Hardt/Negri seem to enter their own realm of political spirituality...
...He did not believe that humanity is composed of pilgrims bound for a transcendent telos...
...MITCHELL COHEN is co-editor of Dissent and professor of political theory at Baruch College of the City University of New York...
...The police includes everything," as Foucault once wrote...
...If we begin on a mi18 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 cro level and examine their treatment of a particular case—with an eye to fragments missing from their story—we'll also see the problem of the macro theory...
...While social democracy stutters, postmodernism chants...
...Against "global hegemony...
...There is no substantial difference between prison and the rest of life," said Negri in a 1998 interview, just before he went to jail in Italy on (very arguable) charges, from several years earlier, of inciting political violence.' The New Deal embodied "the highest form of disciplinary government," we read in Empire, because the entire society, a "factory-society," was "subsumed under the command of capital and the state...
...3. For Salah's comments, see Jalal Bana, "Among the Believers," Ha'aretz (October 26, 2001...
...The last half century of Egyptian history can be seen as a series of failed efforts to apply some big, yes "modern," ideas—state nationalism, Pan-Arabism, Arab socialism—to . the country's problems...
...The stripes of fundamentalists—Muslim, Christian, Jewish, liberal, Marxist, nationalist, postmodern, others—may vary, but they share a similar mental structure, a commitment to some system of "eternal" basics that they would impose on the present, and that they always seek to interpret from within...
...You show that anything bad that happens in the third world (or the postmodern, globalized version of what we used to call the third world) must really be the fault of "the West" or the "global market...
...Decline in oil revenues helped to precipitate EMPIRE OF CANT the upheaval, but those revenues greased the revolution no less than the faltering state...
...Applying it to the end of the twentieth century may well have been "new," but then the end of the twentieth century had not previously occurred...
...And they claim, breathlessly, that DISSENT / Summer 2002 n I 9 EMPIRE OF CANT the novelty of "the contemporary resurgence of fundamentalism is . . . the refusal of the powers that are emerging in the new [postmodern] imperial order...
...Or perhaps, the important truth is simply that You Are Against—because they don't seem to appreciate that nobody is more foundationalist than a fundamentalist...
...A revolt against "the planetary system...
...The popularity of Empire, with its combination of political spirituality and sing-song tiers-mondisme, is another...
...He hoped that they would be a counterweight to pro-Soviet forces in Egyptian politics...
...28 n DISSENT / Summer 2002...
...Being-against" allows Hardt/Negri to bring together under the same rubric Chiapas, fundamentalism, and Tiananmen Square...
...More generally, it denotes an unreal manner of speech, either thoughtlessly repetitive or used with the consciousness of its untruth to attain any kind of object, whether it be a matter of religion or politics, dead theory or living reality...
...If you undertook to study Egypt at the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser's death in 1970, among the first things you would learn is that its size on a map belies much smaller effective capacities...
...Its continuous movement, gathering aliens in community, making this world its home, is both means and end, or rather a means without end...
...Palestinians don't want perpetual motion...
...You twist, you turn...
...What if no General Strike of the multitude makes the Earthly City divine...
...Just "the point of fixation of a collective will...
...A mujtahid ("one who exerts") does not invent original values...
...According to Hardt/Negri, "today's struggles slither," snakelike, "across . . . superficial, imperial landscapes...
...And those women who don the veil—what an impressive political statement...
...WHY, THEN, IS Empire in such vogue...
...They do this under an imaginary "veil of ignorance," which conceals from them knowledge of their own social situation or abilities (their particularities...
...In AntiOedipus, Deleuze and Felix Guattari insisted that our lives are machines—"real ones, not figurative ones...
...Qutb, whom Nasser executed in 1966, had an enormous influence on fundamentalists throughout the Middle East in the last quarter of the twentieth century...
...Biopower "regulates social life from its interior...
...Khomeini published a book entitled Islamic Government a few years before he came to power...
...Compare their linkage of postmoderns to fundamentalists with comments Georg Lukacs made in a letter to Paul Ernst...
...Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), the Jewish settler movement in the West Bank, combines "modern" religious orthodoxy and nationalism, and finds its "constitution" in the Torah...
...9 What matters for Hardt/ Negri is "Being-against...
...Moore calls "a persecuting society" when Bad Modernity took shape as the sovereign state...
...This is a quasi-Heideggerian riff, although the authors don't say so...
...And the alternative, if there was one, would still have been some sort of "government...
...Deliberations, Rawls proposed, would arrive finally at a consensus on political liberalism and the idea that inequalities are justifiable only when they can be shown to benefit the least advantaged members of society...
...It leaves behind sovereign states, nations, and imperialism, and has no "center...
...Being•against The problem is not just that Hardt/Negri pluck as they please from textual sources and contemporary history The problem is the politics they aim to embellish by doing so...
...Rawls's co-citizens are linked through a common human rationality, and all good postmodernists know that rationality must entail some trick of domina24 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 tion...
...This telos is "theurgical,"— which means, says my dictionary, that divine agency is at work...
...These fundamentalists, spiritual forebears of the Saudi regime, also championed a puritanical egalitarianism of believers in opposition to what they perceived to be decadence in the Islamic world...
...So it "is not American," even if the United States retains a privileged position DISSENT / Summer 2002 n 21 EMPIRE OF CANT within it...
...Then perhaps it would be better for the left to speak of human beings as if they were ends in themselves rather than "desiring machines...
...By 1978-1979, the shah's plans floundered, along with his regime, which was deeply corrupt and sustained by a nasty, Americansupported security apparatus...
...Poor migrants in our globalizing world don't pursue "continuous movement" as an end in itself...
...You show that anything Palestinians do is the fault of Israelis...
...But the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928...
...Deleuze advocated "systematic" metaphysical thinking, in contrast to most postmodernists, who oppose "grand narratives" and speak of a "fragmented" universe...
...It has even been hailed as a Communist Manifesto of our times...
...It is written in the Koran and in the Surma" [traditions associated with the Prophet Muhammad...
...IT IS TRUE that Westphalia didn't establish what Hardt/Negri want—postmodern "hybridity...
...Everyone who is authentically "against" is on the same side of the barricades...
...They write as if nothing ever went awry in the name of "the left" or "authenticity...
...By blinding us to differences, "a veil of ignorance prepares a universal acceptance" of Empire's "totality," which runs on its own logic like a "high tech machine...
...it is and remains absolutely immanent...
...And nongovernmental organizations—especially human rights groups like Amnesty International, Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Oxfam— are "moral police" whose "moral interventionism" often "prepares the stage" for military intervention...
...This third way simply became a way of adjustment, the acceptance of "the end of history...
...The meaning of Islamic "modernism" is fungible for them...
...Contemporary Islamic radicalisms," Hardt/Negri inform us, are based "primarily" on "ijtihad...
...306-324...
...Rivalry between the (Wahhabi, Arab) Saudis and the (Shiite, Persian) Khomeinists for hegemony among Muslim movements throughout the Middle East and beyond explains considerably more about the spread of fundamentalism than do the categories of postmodern theorists...
...If you take Augustinian premises seriously, you cannot reach Wobbly conclusions...
...and half of it is under twenty-five years old, with few happy prospects...
...What is the content of this novelty...
...Francis of Assisi...
...But what if the poor do not incarnate World Possibility or the god of the Earthly City...
...This militant is personified not only by the "liberatory" combatants and intellectuals of the last century, but more important— this would appear to be Hardt/Negri's version of Salafiyyah—by St...
...Or has it been fueled globally by Saudi oil revenues...
...Islamic "modernism," they complain, was "overcoded as assimilation or submission to Euro-American hegemony...
...It means an individualized effort at legal reasoning in the interpretation and application of religious law...
...In the meantime, bazaar merchants, principal backers of the country's 180,000 mullahs and 80,000 mosques, paid more in religious than state taxes in the 1970s thanks to the global oil market.' Although the revolution was undoubtedly against the shah's rule and its benefactors, it becomes a postmodern revolt against "the world market" only by postmodern splicing...
...he deduces rules of behavior from holy sources...
...So "postmodernists continually return to the lingering influence of the Enlightenment as the source of domination...
...He returned to Italy under a special arrangement which allows him to be in prison only in the evenings...
...I suggest that it was the latter...
...Once again in post-modernity we find ourselves in Francis's situation, posing against the misery of power the joy of being...
...Eduard Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism AS THE SHAH tottered, Foucault prophesied...
...Politicized spirituality can, it seems, be quite vigilant—perhaps more DISSENT / Summer 2002 n 17 EMPIRE OF CANT so than the disciplinary regimes Foucault identified with modernity and the Enlightenment...
...Worse still, it gives us the Enlightenment as personified by Immanuel Kant...
...Humanity does not have a common journey, and utopia is given from above to a very limited few in the afterlife...
...This did require "difference" among republics or nations, because it presumed self-government, rather than mobilization of a global "multitude...
...2. Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development (Penguin Books, 1979), pp...
...Science was resplendent in classical Islamic civilization...
...After all, they expect "Beingagainst" to bind the multitude...
...The Iranians, it turned out, were to be governed again...
...One wonders...
...Ijtihad has a complex role throughout Islamic history In the eighteenth century, that is, some two centuries before postmodernity, the Wahhabi sect espoused it as part of a return to Islamic basics (that is, to the Quran, the Sunna, and to the legacy of Islam's "early generations...
...This is a revolution that no power will control—because biopower and communism, cooperation and revolution remain together, in love, simplicity, and also innocence...
...the population is very, very poor, even more numerous (seventy million...
...Twist-and•Turn Was Foucault's fumble just that, a fumble...
...Or is it a grand Deleuzion...
...The latter remained an anti-capitalist and longed for an imaginary world— Golden and Organic—that was uncontaminated by the rise of commercial barbarism...
...But a Deleuzian system has no essence, no grounding principle...
...The suffering inflicted by Palestinians and Israelis on each other throughout the last century is dwarfed by the death, destruction, and displacement of populations that resulted from Saddam Hussein's assault on Iran and the Iranian counterattacks...
...In the nineteenth century, it was Islamic "modernists"—alAfghani, Abduh, others—who argued for ijtihad...
...That seventy virgins await martyrs (read: suicide bombers) in paradise because "we have proof...
...Khomeini rose to political prominence as a foe of the shah's White (bloodless) Revolution in the early 1960s...
...It turned out that Khomeini was more than "the point of fixation of a collective will...
...And what of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader of Hamas, the Palestinian fundamentalist organization (which was spawned by the Palestinian Muslim Brothers, whom he once led...
...Leading Islamic reformers of the "liberal age," thinkers like alTahtawi or al-Afghani or Muhammad Abduh, were advocates of an Islamic revival based on fundamentals along with reform, all while having critical but multitextured understandings of their faith's relation to the "modernity," rationality, and "the West...
...Thermidor" was revealed particularly by the "miserable and humiliating peace" that ended the Thirty Years War...
...On this subject Hardt/Negri have little to tell us...
...Interpenetration of religion and state...
...After all, their theory of revolutionary communication explains that the theurgical telos of the desirous multitude of decentered Empire will be realized joyously as its Being-against is configured rhizomatically...
...Liberal and socialist big government," they protest, brought great "repression and destruction of humanity" Liberalism and socialism were the two great "ideologies" of modernity's "mature phase," when "immanence" first lost out to "transcendence...
...you hear it in their voice...
...Postmodernism" explains the Iranian Revolution in the manner of Foucault's fumble...
...But when they define this, it turns into postmodern singsong: "The multitude must be able to decide if, when, and where it moves...
...and Foucault's essays "Open Letter to Mehdi Bazargan" and "Useless to Revolt...
...This is the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist...
...All postmodern history is the history of conflicting truth-producers, and there seems to be no reality check on any of them...
...Social reformism within a liberal democratic framework is apparently just one more snare in the mechanism of domination...
...they seek places in which to live decent and secure lives...
...With some detwistification, we see how Hardt/Negri's narrative conveys their hostility to liberalism and socialism...
...Only capital pursuing profits can live in relentless movement...
...they were a precondition of pluralistic societies in which competing narratives could coexist...
...Or even acknowledgment that Iraq's regime approximates fascism as much as a third world regime can...
...This, for Hardt/Negri, is their original sin...
Vol. 49 • July 2002 • No. 3
