Sunday, July 7, 2002		Books

Heavy-duty scholarship on imperialism
M.L.Raina

Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass), USA. Pages xvii+478. $36.95.

WHEN Stephen Dedalus asks him to respond to his haughty exposition of the Aristotlean aesthetic in Joyce’s Portrait, Cranly replies: "Yes, it has the scholarly stink".

Empire too reeks of heavy-duty scholarship. Too many allusions hold us up; too many theorists bludgeon us into accepting their arcane pronouncements. From Polybious to Hobbes, from Plato to Gramsci to Marx and Benjamin, every one who is any one in the market-place of modernism, post-modernism, colonialism and post-colonialism is paraded here. Overseeing them all are Deleuze and Guattarri driving our authors to reverent genuflection.

As if this were not enough, the book has been widely talked about since its publication last year. Only a few days after 9/11, The New York Times splashed the authors on the front page of its art section and cited neo-Marxists and other left-leaning academics greeting the book as a new Communist Manifesto. Not many were amused, though, but the book found wings and the sales upped.

So, what is the book about? A new departure in the debate on globalisation? A new vision of the people’s utopia? Or a desperate throwback to the glory days of Marxist illusion-mongering? After a year of close reading, I did not find the book in any way a revolutionary addition to the debates on globalisation. Nor did I find its forced hopefulness grounded in the reality of contemporary world capitalism. If anything, it struck me as repetitive, laboured and blinkered by atavistic ideologising.

The authors reiterate the themes made familiar by earlier writers on globalisation and America’s new position as the super-power shaping today’s world order. We are told (for the umpteenth time!) that the present day Empire (the upper case is the authors’) has none of the trappings of the earlier Roman or later colonial empires. It is not based on conquest in the old sense of the term. It rules by consent, by ‘networking’, and implicating the world’s economic and cultural interests with those of the West, particularly the USA.

In this new concept of Empire power is exercised not through military control but through indirect ‘biopolitical’ means. Accordingly, present-day Empire "appears in the form of a very high-tech machine; it is virtual, built to control the marginal event, and organised to dominate and when necessary intervene in the breakdowns of the system". "Imperial control operates through…the bomb, money and ether", that is through military threats, economic blackmail and communicative systems of today’s information age. United States dominates in all three areas. In India we are learning this much to our discomfiture.

Nothing really original here. May be an attempt to find linkages with some philosophical, literary, critical and political theoretical positions, but these are not such as to establish their finality or their inevitability. What is new about postmodernism as Benjamin’s new barbarism ‘which sees nothing permanent’? Or the Internet as the revolutionary discovery? Robert Musil in his epic novel, Man Without Qualities, had foreseen all this in 1911.Any graduate student of history and the arts could have felt it. Then why this writerly tub-thumping by Hardt and Negri?

Though the authors map out in comprehensive detail the trajectory of imperial domination and sovereignty, they are more interested in holding out hope that the ‘multitude’ from the dominated areas will create their own resistance to this domination through their own linguistic, communitarian and creative means. As the world gets ‘deterritorialised’and borders melt away, the dominated classes the world over would offer their own alternatives to Empire. "The multitude offers itself as the new city".

Or a New Jerusalem? Marx and Engels had criticised such utopianism before, but our authors are sure that in the present world a paradise of workers, peasants and the intelligentsia will be possible, indeed practicable. Even Benjamin fell for this kind of navel-gazing.

But our realties are sterner than their fantasies. Far from creating utopias, the multitudes are thrown more and more into penury and want. The resistances foretold by our authors are disappearing in the wake of the triumphant march of the Right in Europe and elsewhere.

In our part of the world violence and terrorism have nothing ‘revolutionary’ about them, much as our Marxist ideologues would have us believe otherwise. They are sui generis and are products of religious fanaticism and sectarian intolerance, as in Gujrat.

Hardt and Negri make a distinction between emancipation and liberation, the latter being the desired goal of the ‘destruction of boundaries and patterns of forced migrations’. Here, then is a souped-up version of the age-old utopian belief in the brotherhood of all mankind, or the vision of a global village. This vision, Naipaul rudely reminds us, is falsified at the immigration counters of international airports. So much for proletarian internationalism!