Empire Burlesque

The profoundly silly book that has set the academic left aflutter.

Tom Peyser from the April 2002 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Somewhat surprisingly, this passage introduces a brief celebration of offbeat sexuality as one important front in the battle against Empire, in spite of the fact that the liberal societies Hardt and Negri seek to overthrow have been friendlier to kinkiness (at least for the masses, instead of just the leaders) than have their collectivist counterparts, as that new figure on the international stage, the Eastern European porn star, can doubtless confirm. But Hardt and Negri's trivialization of their own argument, while it flatters their audience by telling them they can strike a blow for revolution in the privacy of their own homes, does not obscure the real implications.

Certainly there is not a word in the book suggesting that real violence is ever or anywhere inappropriate. A good many words suggest that it always and everywhere is appropriate. Hardt and Negri explicitly make common cause with "the current enemy of Empire," an enemy "most often called terrorist, a crude conceptual and terminological reduction that is rooted in a police mentality."

Their conception of Empire as a centerless, omnipresent web of relations could be used to vindicate terrorists who seem cruelly arbitrary in their choice of targets: "The construction of Empire, and the globalization of economic and cultural relationships, means [sic] that the virtual center of Empire can be attacked from any point." No matter what you attack, whether it's a skyscraper, a prime minister, or even sexual mores, you attack Empire.

Throughout Empire one finds pronouncements that, if taken seriously, amount to a call to arms against just about everything, since Hardt and Negri maintain that government and corporations are engaged in a sinister scheme against humanity. Not only do "the great industrial and financial powers" exploit the multitude; they also control human life itself, producing "needs, social relations, bodies, and minds," while "in imperial postmodernity big government has become merely the despotic means of domination and the totalitarian production of subjectivity."

"Power is now exercised through machines that directly organize the brains...and bodies...toward a state of autonomous alienation from the sense of life and the desire for creativity," they write. Worst of all, "we are always...monitored by safety cameras." This is Parallax View's perspective on the world dressed up as serious analysis.

Hardt and Negri's description of what must now be rebelled against relies on paranoia and sheer shrillness of tone, but to account for the tumultuous events that have accompanied globalization they resort to the oddest kind of distortion. In a list of "the most radical and powerful struggles of the final years of the twentieth century," they justly include the events in Tiananmen Square but lump them in with the Rodney King riots ("the May 1992 revolt in Los Angeles"), insisting that both "directly attack the global order of Empire and seek a real alternative" -- another approving nod to anarchic violence.

Strikingly absent from the list is the little matter of revolution in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, perhaps because the merited collapse of the latter is an embarrassment they are at pains to explain away. They declare at one point that, just as some are unjustly "called" terrorists, Soviet society was merely "called" totalitarian as a result of Cold War ideology "but in fact it was a society criss-crossed by extremely strong instances of creativity and freedom." At last Gerald Ford's famous declaration that Poland is free has gotten support from the intelligentsia.

Even when discussing the democracy movement in China, Hardt and Negri are palpably uneasy about suggesting that an anti-communist revolt could in some sense be truly "radical." They thus engage in a tortuous argument to show that it really wasn't about what the protesters said it was.

"The struggles at Tiananmen Square spoke a language of democracy that seemed long out of fashion" -- seemed so to whom? -- and the trappings of the protest "all looked like a weak echo of Berkeley in the 1960s." The protesters only thought they were trying to liberalize China, a goal that, if it had been realized, would have made them into the dupes of Empire, since for Hardt and Negri liberal ideology is just the smokescreen for imperial domination. Rather, the students rallying around the replica they made of the Statue of Liberty were really attacking "the imperial constitution in its generality," not simply the repressive regime at home.

The depiction of the past several centuries offered in Empire is filled with similarly grotesque assertions for which the authors do not trouble themselves to provide much in the way of evidence. Hardt and Negri's fondness for certain aspects of life under Stalin has already been noted. But they do not have any similarly kind words for the United States, where, in the epoch of the great strikes, "U.S. class repression had no reason to be jealous of the various kaisers and czars of Europe."

Again and again, capitalism is indicted for the greatest horrors of our past, without the authors' making any distinction between capitalism and the practice whereby business abandons free market principles to conspire with government. Thus "the ideal type" of modern sovereignty "in capitalist form" turns out to be not the United States but Nazi Germany.

The Pacific branch of the Axis was also just another example of what happened when "capitalist growth took the form of militarism and imperialism." The cause of slavery? Once again, capitalism, "even though capitalism's ideology is indeed antithetical to slavery." For Hardt and Negri, if anyone in a particular nation practices double-entry bookkeeping, then every outrage committed within its borders may be ascribed to capitalism.

The authors may condescend to the allegedly '60s style of the Tiananmen protests, but given their citation of Jerry Rubin in one of their epigraphs ("The New Left sprang...from Elvis's gyrating hips"), that is a move they should be reluctant to make; it only underscores how longingly they themselves look back to the '60s for inspiration. Among the people they cast as the heroes in their historical melodrama, for example, is "the college student who experimented with LSD instead of looking for a job." Evidently the kid who actually took a job to pay for his kicks is just too square to merit inclusion in Hardt and Negri's hall of fame. The obligatory hymn to the Viet Cong gushes, "in an extraordinary feat of unparalleled strength and courage, the Vietnamese combated two imperialist powers in succession and emerged victorious." The fact that this victory required the combating of other Vietnamese goes unstated.

Most reminiscent of the '60s, however, is a kitschy utopianism that underwrites all manner of oracular dicta, odd complaints, and questionable advice to the lovelorn. We are told that "only the poor lives radically the actual and present being," and thus "only the poor has the ability to renew being....The poor is god on earth." This renewal of being will lead "toward homohomo, humanity squared, enriched by the collective intelligence and love of the community."

But before homohomohood can blossom there is much work to do, since Empire has perverted even our relation to the natural world. Hardt and Negri claim that while "we continue to have forests and crickets...they are not seen as original and independent of the artifice of the civil order." If crickets are to be encountered in all their otherness, there must emerge "a body that is completely incapable of submitting to command ...a body that is incapable of adapting to family life, to factory discipline, the regulations of a traditional sex life, and so forth. (If you find your body refusing these 'normal' modes of life, don't despair -- realize your gift!)" If there are any self-help books meant to empower deadbeat dads, they must sound something like this.