Re: [AUT] Hardt interview

[gavin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

hi nate,

long overdue greets prompted by your email.

first, i'm sorry for never following this interview through with you.  
after i came to london i basically became absorbed in trying to find a
place to live and a job.  whilst i thought this would be a temporary thing
it became more engrossing than i'd anticipicated. thhen i started working
two jobs ( a fulltime day job and evening teaching job) which took up 60
hrs/week until a few weeks ago.

on top of that the other half of the greenpepper never quite co-ordinated
the deisgn of the issue as anticipated.  which meant that the emeregency
issue was just about ready to go but there was no way of getting it print
befor i was swallowed by the 60hr/week mentioned above.

which meant the project effectivley ceased.  i couldn't do any more than i
had done.  and it became to hard to pull  together between london and
barcelona. its a loonger story but i won't bore you with the details.

i'm really quite sorry for not following this through with you nate.

gavin


> hi all,
>
> Below is an interview I did with Michael Hardt by phone in October
> 2006. It was slated to appear in an issue of Greenpepper Magazine. I
> haven't been able to reach folk from Greenpepper for a while and I
> don't know if that issue came out. I'd like the piece to be read
> rather than sit on my hard drive, so I decided to circulate it by
> email. Please feel free to circulate it and so on.
>
> Many of the questions were the result of ongoing discussions with
> friends and comrades on the aut-op-sy email list and elsewhere. Some
> of us were part of an earlier interview with Hardt conducted by email.
> Because the questions come from ongoing discussions some of which were
> a year or more in length, and because the interview was done about a
> year and a half ago, I don't remember exactly who all shaped the
> questions or otherwise had a hand in this. Among those I can name for
> sure are Angela Mitropolous, Thiago Oppermann, and Gavin from
> Greenpepper.
>
> *
>
> Q: Could you start by giving a short introduction to the idea of the
> 'multitude' for those who may not be familiar with it?
>
> Hardt: I like phrasing things in formulas, so the formula is that
> multitude equals singularity plus cooperation - or autonomy plus
> association. This is, of course, recalling Lenin's slogan that
> 'communism equals soviets plus electrification'.
>
> For us, the issue of multitude is to think about a form of political
> organisation and of social life that is based on a relation of
> differences - one that doesn't preclude differences, doesn't preclude
> cooperation and association. You might think of older US political
> slogans, I think it was Audre Lord, 'our differences are our
> strength'. Or there's another: 'we don't want a world without sexual
> difference, we want one where sexual difference doesn't matter'. I've
> given various definitions, sometimes economic, philosophical. This is
> a political one.
>
> Q: There's an argument in your recent work with Negri that democracy
> is an unfinished project and that the destiny of the 'multitude' is to
> materialise 'real' and absolute democracy by discarding the current
> 'inauthentic' application of the concept. Isn't this democratic thesis
> a way of asking for more adequate and inclusive representation, rather
> than opening spaces to explore ways of moving beyond representation
> itself? Is there a way in which the teleological project of realising
> 'true' democracy and authentically applying it as a principle might
> stifle more open-ended experimentation of other non-representational
> political forms or ways of coming together?
>
> Hardt: I can understand how you might want to abandon the concept of
> democracy. I mean, George Bush gets on television and talks about
> going to war to protect and restore democracy. So I can see how you
> might want to say let's not use that word anymore. On the other hand,
> it's possible to fight over what the concept means. Not to return to a
> previously existing meaning but to think about a possible meaning. We
> can fight to make it mean something other than the forms of
> representative democracy we have today. That is, to say no, that's not
> the case, that's not what Bush is doing, that's not democracy in the
> sense that we mean it.
>
> Q: Are you saying you'd want to break the link between representation
> and democracy?
>
> Hardt: Yes, I'd want to break that link conceptually but also through
> historical investigation into how the word has been used at different
> times -- both before the link between democracy and representation was
> historically constructed and in experiments in practice today.
>
> I don't think that democracy or absolute democracy has to be
> understood as stifling. I think it can be a term for the activities
> you're talking about, the activities that you are worried might get
> stifled. I'd also like to say that I don't think the one precludes the
> other -- we can insist that representative institutions today live up
> to their claim, engage in some way with the structures of
> representative forms of democracy, while also trying out forms of
> non-representative democracy as well.
>
> Q: In Grammar of the Multitude Paolo Virno talks about Marx's
> descriptions of the working class on the US frontier, saying that we
> can see there an instantiation of the working class in the form of the
> multitude. But the idea of the 'not yet multitude' that you and Negri
> propose implies that this type of instantiation has never yet
> occurred. Can you expand on the some of the differences between your
> work and Paolo Virno's in this respect?
>
> Hardt: I don't think that Toni and I actually disagree with Paolo. In
> his introduction to Grammar of the Multitude Sylvère Lotringer might
> be trying to say that we do, but I don't think we do. We do use the
> term -- and by 'we' I don't just mean Toni and I because there are a
> lot of us using the idea of multitude -- and we sometimes use it in
> self-contradictory ways. I don't think self-contradiction is always a
> bad thing, as long as it's productive. We often use the term in
> different ways to read political possibilities in the past - like when
> Paolo talks about Marx talking about the U.S. frontier in the texts on
> primitive accumulation. In a way, we can say that multitude has
> existed before, but in another way. Another way to use the word is as
> a project that hasn't yet been done, but one that could be done.
> That's what we mean by the 'not yet multitude'. We can read history
> and earlier struggles as precedents and for inspiration but not for
> repetition. We don't want to just do what was done before or to return
> to an earlier point in time.
>
> In the 1990s, for example, Paolo had this idea to reformulate the
> International Workers of the World (IWW) based on immaterial labour,
> calling it the 'Immaterial Workers of the World'. This wasn't really a
> matter of repeating what the IWW did. It involved drawing on that
> experience, drawing inspiration from its heterogeneity in terms of
> languages, its mobility, its transversal nature. The reason I insist
> on the 'not yet' is to insist that the multitude is not immediate.
> It's an organisational project. You can think about it this way --
> which was a commonplace of 1970s feminism -- that just because someone
> is a woman doesn't mean she is automatically a feminist. You have to
> become a feminist - it's a project. I insist on this because sometimes
> people will want to say that just any group of people, any crowd, is
> the multitude. The multitude is a project that takes organisation to
> come about. And I think there's a way that Toni and - and I think
> Paolo - would agree that this project is more ever possible now.
>
> What is different about Paolo's work, though, is his focus on language
> -- his use of linguistic approaches to analyse and understand
> production today and its potentialities - which is really great, very
> important and something that Toni and I steal from him. On this note,
> I want to say that I love the collective development of concepts like
> 'multitude'. It's something I enjoy very much and it's a way to really
> develop ideas, by working on them together. It's not like they belong
> to anyone, and this type of collaboration can be very productive.
>
> Q: You say that the project of the multitude is 'ever more possible
> now'? Surely the capacity to organise ourselves autonomously -- that
> is, the capacity for singularity plus cooperation -- doesn't just
> begin to exist in post-fordism as is implied in both your work and
> Virno's?
>
> Hardt: Okay, think about Paolo again. Virno reads Hannah Arendt when
> she says, in The Human Condition, that there's a difference between
> politics and economics. Economic life is instrumental and political
> life is speaking in the presence of others. Paolo takes this idea and
> says it applies to production in the factory -- the factory is not a
> place of speaking in the presence of others. You might disagree with
> us and with Paolo and say though that there is still speaking going on
> in the factory?
>
> Q: Yes, and that the factory was always connected to the home and the
> community and other loquacious spaces as well.
>
> Hardt: That's right but today, production (the factory itself) is more
> loquacious. There's an increased proximity between the political and
> the economic. The talents needed at work are the talents used in
> politics. Frederic Jameson talks about the de-differentiation of
> fields in the era of globalisation. Virno, Toni and I are saying
> something similar - though in a different and very specific case -
> that there's a de-differentiation between work and politics happening
> today under the present form of capitalism. This means there's an
> increased capacity for democracy, for politics. Of course, this claim
> has to be verified.
>
> Q: When you talk about the capacity for multitude, for democracy, do
> you mean that we are able to perform labour because we have the
> capacity for the good life? Or do you mean that we have a capacity for
> the good life because we work? In other words, do our capacities for
> singularity plus cooperation derive from the fact that we perform
> immaterial labour, or do we have to pass through labour in order to
> arrive at the multitude?
>
> Hardt: That's an important question, the question of where our
> capacities come from, and I think the answer has to be that it's both.
> This is an aside, but I used to be really into reading management
> literature. This issue is something that management and management
> trainers are thinking a lot about - where do skills come from?
>
> Take, for example, McDonald's. McDonald's has this training school
> they send their managers to - I think they call it 'McDonald's
> University' or something like that. There's this interview with one of
> the manager trainers where he is asked how the workers get the skills
> that they need. In response, the trainer says that the workers get the
> skills from their parents in the family - they get the skills they
> need to work at McDonald's when their parents raise them and teach
> them to be 'people persons'.
>
> Q: This gets at a thread that runs through a lot of the questions we
> have about your work -- the issue of unwaged reproductive labour,
> labour that is ostensibly off the clock, but is still bound up with
> value production. There's a section of volume one of Capital where
> Marx quotes some English thinker who says "the English working class
> are phenomenally productive today, and it's because they have leisure
> time";, which makes this point. So when you and Negri talk about
> general intellect entering into production, does general intellect
> enter from the space of the home and from reproduction?
>
> Hardt: In a way, yes, that's right. There's unwaged labour before
> post-fordism and you could see some capacities present there in
> earlier times. But like with multitude, it's not a spontaneous or
> immediate thing. It's important to recognise that people have these
> capacities, to look at what specific capacities there are today, to
> see how they're used in labour and how they could be used differently.
> And then there's the matter of actually using them differently. We
> have to figure that part out and it's also a matter of organisation in
> order to be able do to that.
>
> Q: In response to a similar question on unwaged reproductive labour in
> an earlier interview you did for the aut-op-sy mailing list, you
> mentioned Deleuze and Guattari and their idea of desiring-production
> as a way of opening up the idea of production. Can you say more about
> this, particularly about different types of production? For example,
> there's desiring production and there's value production and they're
> not always the same all the time?
>
> Hardt: It's important to note that for Deleuze and Guattari desiring
> production is often co-opted. They understand that it enters into
> value production at least some of the time and that it's not always
> external. I think this is important because sometimes Deleuze and
> Guattari can be taken as being too optimistic. But they do recognize
> that desire has a relationship with value production. We also could
> look at these as perspectives, different perspectives from which to
> view things and to see what we can better understand from one
> perspective or the others.
>
>
> Q: What is at stake here is the question of practical rupture and of
> having the theoretical space to think rupture. It's like Tronti's
> point that the working class acts in certain ways that are disruptive
> of capitalism but then these behaviours get capitalised. Doesn't
> arguing that 'all life time is productive' make it hard to think about
> activity that doesn't -- or at least some day, some activity that
> won't -- get capitalised?
>
> Hardt: That's an important question. First, though, I think it's
> important to note that one doesn't preclude the other. Capitalisation
> of activities isn't solely a bad thing. If workers demands are met by
> capital and capital is forced to change that means that the working
> class gets more powerful and new spaces and possibilities open up. At
> least that's what I think Tronti meant back in the 1960s.
>
> For example, I did an interview at the last World Social Forum in
> Porto Alegre with a Brazilian journalist who asked "the World Economic
> Forum said that their agenda is to alleviate poverty, isn't that a
> problem?" And I said, "Why is that a problem?" It took a while to
> figure out what the point was, but finally he said, "they stole your
> ideas, they stole your agenda!" I told him, "that means we won." Being
> able to dictate your enemy's agenda is a strength and a sign of power.
>
> The question of rupture is another is another really important
> organisational question. In some ways it's a matter of figuring out
> what the forms of sabotage are today that we can use to turn the
> capacities that we take to work and that are learned at work and use
> them another way. I wish I had a good example of this, though and that
> it was a simple as jamming a wooden shoe into a machine!
>
> Q: You and Negri reference Lenin approvingly in your recent work. You
> have stated that if Lenin were here today he would organise in network
> form -- and, presumably, concur with the arguments presented in Empire
> and Multitude. Could you clarify what you find relevant in Lenin's
> work and in the history that he is bound up with? Inversely, if you
> and Negri were around in Lenin's time, would you have agreed with
> Lenin?
>
> Hardt: In his book on Lenin, Toni says (if I remember correctly) that
> Lenin's theory of the party is not a theory of the Bolshevik party.
> It's a theory of organisation and the idea is that the dominant form
> of labour will provide the most powerful form of organisation to
> oppose capital. The form of organisation has tended to correlate to
> the dominant form of labour -- there's a boss in the factory, there's
> a boss in the party or the union -- and these forms of organisation
> are the ones that are most effective for moving forward workers
> demands. It's basically a functionalist argument.
>
> This is what I think about with regard to the differences we have with
> Slavoj Zizek. In some ways I'm not sure if Slavoj is saying 'we need a
> party' in the former sense or the latter sense. I'd like to think he
> means the latter sense - that is, that we need a form of political
> organisation adequate to the contemporary field of labour and its
> capacities, not that we need to repeat the organisational structure of
> the Bolsheviks. On the other hand, as for the issue of what I would do
> if I was in Lenin's time, I don't really know. I don't know how to
> answer that. I don't know if what I think looking back is the same
> thing I would think if I had actually been there.
>
> Q: Could you talk more about what you refer to as the 'dominant form
> of labour'? There are, for example, dominant forms of value that are
> important in the total circuits of production and there's also
> dominance internal to the working class (or labour aristocracies). You
> seem to be saying that the most effective and the most desirable form
> of organisation are not always the same thing. Or that what are taken
> to be most effective don't actually have efficacy in addressing
> important questions, and this is a problem for communism.
>
> Hardt: Efficacy is really important, but in a way this is what Toni
> and I are saying about production today and the possibilities that are
> present. The model in production relations today is more desirable
> compared with those in prior times. The gap between desirability and
> efficacy is narrowing.
>
> What we are referring to is not what segment of the proletariat is in
> a most privileged position or has political dominance; we are asking
> rather what type of labour is having its qualities extended across to
> other areas of labour and over society as a whole. At one point,
> industrial labour's qualities were progressively imposed on all other
> forms of production and across society itself -- its mechanisation,
> its temporality, its working day, its family structure, its rhythms.
> Toni and I argue that this is what is happening with immaterial labour
> today. Of course there are big differences in how some people get
> compensated for this, and there are gendered divisions of labour,
> racial divisions of labour, geographical divisions. Affective labour,
> for example, is largely feminine and poorly compensated -- and in that
> sense it's in no way a labour aristocracy - but its qualities are
> being spread to other areas and that's where the gap between
> desirability and efficacy is narrowing.
>
> Q: But there doesn't seem to be much of a difference between unwaged
> reproductive labour in earlier times and the unwaged reproductive
> labour done today. For instance, a housewife today does things similar
> to a housewife in the 1900s (albeit in different ways) -- they are
> both bound up with value production. Why do you see the possibility
> for a new form of organisation based on the qualities of this type of
> labour?
>
> Hardt: Because now those traits are being spread throughout various
> forms of labour. In many ways, this is the point of looking at labour
> and at class composition - in order to see what people are capable of.
> We don't want to just assert people's capabilities. We don't want to
> just assume that everyone is born able to form autonomous networks. We
> have to see what capacities people have and how to verify them.
>
> I can see that the very fact of social existence means that some of
> these capacities must already exist. But I'm not sure that the
> capacity to love a child, for example, is the same as (or enough for)
> a capacity to organise and run society. And even then, doesn't love
> itself have to be learned? It seems to me that if we simply assume
> human capacities -- for love, for democracy, for self-organisation --
> as immediate and natural we fail to recognise the necessary
> organisational processes.
>
>
> Q: Your writing on biopolitics seems to overlap with - yet in
> important ways differ from -- Giorgio Agamben's ideas on sovereign
> power and naked life. Q: In Multitude you and Negri criticise Agamben
> and elsewhere forcefully argue against 'confus(ing) the flesh with any
> notion of naked life'. How would you characterise Agamben's view of
> biopolitics, particularly in relation to your own? Could you clarify
> what is at stake in this disagreement with Agamben about the condition
> of naked life and the potentiality of the body? More specifically, how
> do you understand the relationship between the condition of naked life
> and the potentiality of the multitude?
>
> Hardt: It's a methodological question. Agamben's use of the term opens
> up important possibilities, but it also closes some off. His work is
> valuable for understanding what the sovereign does and so forth. Our
> differences with Agamben all turn around bare life, it's power and its
> potentials. Toni and I are trying to do work to help recognise the
> fullness and power of multitude. And I just don't think that's
> Agamben's project. And I'm not sure I see his project as helpful for
> that. The concept of bare life doesn't seem to me to allow for
> recognising this power (of the multitude).
>
> Q: You and Negri seem to suggest that biopolitics is a new trait,
> specific to contemporary capitalism and anti-capitalism. Is there a
> biopower or biopolitics prior to post-fordism? Couldn't was say that
> child-rearing, for instance, is a production of life and of social
> life?
>
> Hardt: It's impossible to deny what you're saying. Foucault says that
> 'what's at stake in power is life itself' and of course all of power
> is always directed at life. But I would want to say that there's a new
> prominence and a new capacity for multitude, which Toni and I want to
> call biopolitics. It's along the line of what I was saying before
> about the forms of organisation that are desirable, which are now
> found in some ways already in labour.
>
> Q: Lately we've been discussing emergency, emergencies. How do you
> understand the relationship between emergency and emergence -- or, in
> different terms, between constituted and constituent power -- and what
> is at stake in the arguments about the different ways they can be
> understood?
>
> Hardt: I love that pairing of emergence and emergency. I wish I had
> more to say about it. In some ways it's a reformulation of some
> arguments about crisis, that crisis is provoked rather than the
> product of objective contradictions. I wonder, though, if the idea of
> emergence implies an idea of a thing that is pre-existent -- in the
> sense that it seemed to me earlier you were implying that the human
> capacities for communism are not historical but always already
> existing. It may not have to imply such pre-existence, but if it does
> then that's not as interesting to me. It's important to note, in any
> case, that crises are products of creativity and are also themselves
> moments of creativity, creative possibilities that open up.
>
> Q: I don't mean to say communism is pre-existent or spontaneous, or to
> minimise the need for organisation. There's no struggle without
> organizing. Sergio Bologna says that even moments that get held up as
> spontaneous are actually the result of inadequately understood
> micro-processes of struggle and organisation. At the same time, it's
> important to insist that any location whatsoever is a place where
> organising can begin.
>
> There are versions of Marxism that consign some people to being
> totally exhausted, reified, inert, and incapable of self-activity in
> any communist sense. It's a theory of people as weak, limited,
> powerless - exemplified in Leninists who say workers are objectively
> limited, only able to achieve 'trade union consciousness' on their
> own, and so they need the party to enlighten and lead them. You and
> Negri, however, seem to emphasise that everyone is capable of
> autonomous self-activity today, that workers can get past trade union
> consciousness today, which is I think why many Leninists don't like
> your work. On the other hand, your emphasis on 'capable today' -- as
> opposed to 'still capable' - implies that there were people who were
> yesterday incapable of this activity, that some workers were unable to
> act autonomously without the role played by the party or something
> similar.
>
> Hardt: I don't know how to avoid making implied claims about the past
> here: as you pointed out, insisting on 'still capable' implies a
> pre-existing capacity for communism, but insisting on 'capable today'
> implies 'incapable yesterday', a prior incapacity for communism.
> Neither is satisfactory, but if pressed I prefer the former.
>
> I don't really see that there has to be a conflict here between the
> two statements. I appreciate that you want to stand up for the dignity
> of past struggles, but to say that we have learned from them, that we
> are more powerful because of them, that we stand on their shoulders
> today: that doesn't denigrate them in any way. On the contrary! What
> better way to recognise their power and success?
>
> Q: You argue that the 'war on terror' and permanent social war that we
> are now living in has been made possible through the suspension of
> 'real' democracy. Are you then suggesting that the defence of
> democratic rights (civil liberties, privacy and human rights) is
> sufficient to the task of realising 'authentic' democracy or does
> militant resistance require something more innovative and creative? If
> so, what do you think that might look like -- specifically, in the
> context of the 'war on terror' and the states of emergency it creates?
>
> Hardt: To be clear, no one is saying that things were great before the
> suspension of rights and so on in the War on Terror. But we can and
> should fight against the attacks on these rights, and that doesn't at
> all imply that the moment before those attacks was somehow one of
> authentic democracy or a moment that we want to go back to.
>
> Q: The idea that resistance is ontologically prior to, and
> constitutive of, power is one of the central currents in your writing
> with Negri. It seems fair to say, though, that capital also has a
> creative capacity to be fluid and adaptive -- absorbing the obstacles,
> contradictions and conflicts put in its path (for example, post-1968
> demands for the refusal of work, abolition of the state) in order to
> move forward again and produce new kinds techniques of violence,
> subjugation and wage slavery (for example, the mobile and flexible
> paradigm of post-fordism). Could you speak on the importance of the
> idea of ontological priority in the political project of the
> multitude, and on the question of power being productive as well?
>
> Hardt: Certainly, yes. I don't think there's any way to deny that the
> sovereign and capital has some power to act, to do things and shape
> outcomes of things. I mean, if we give accounts based on our power and
> we don't take into account the power of the sovereign and capital then
> it seems to me that our accounts will just be lacking in some way,
> they won't be true to our experiences or to what happened.
>
> Q: Does this mean you disagree with Deleuze's or Tronti's ideas that
> resistance (or the working class) is ontologically prior and that
> production always flows from the bottom up?
>
> Hardt: I don't think so. First of all, both Deleuze and Tronti are
> posing the claims in a compensatory fashion. Against the assumption
> that capital or power is the only actor, they insist that resistance
> is also an important actor. But, secondly, they go further than that,
> because they pose a different quality to the two sides. To use
> Deleuze's terms from his book on Nietzsche, one could say that capital
> is only reactive whereas only the workers' struggle is active and
> creative. That does not mean that capital cannot exert enormous power.
> Of course, it can. It means simply that capital's power is always
> based on resentment, that it is always aimed at the threat of the
> other. Only the working class can create autonomously. That difference
> in quality is what they are pointing to and that seems an important
> point to me.
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