– it is the country where tourism is doing well and everything works peacefully. People even described Tunisia as the country, by definition, where nothing happened. But now we have a revolution there. So I think we should be open to this miraculous aspect: again, not a miraculous thing in the sense of God or religion, but a miraculous event in the sense that something can emerge out of nowhere. We cannot predict anything. Political miracles give me hope.
25
Messianism, Multitude, and Wishful Thinking
It is obvious that events – political miracles as you call them – are taking place, but who will make these political miracles happen, not in the sense of populist demonstrations or uprisings but, rather, a change of political structure and economic systems? Can the “Multitude,” according to Negri and Hardt, be the way forward, or at least an alternative – despite the crucial critiques of the actual possibility of its holding on to political power?
SŽ: No, not the multitude. Negri and Hardt basically use this term almost in a religious sense – I’ve been having a long philosophical debate with them about this. The problem with multitude is that it mobilizes a certain philosophical topic, such as the difference between presence and representation. The idea of multitude is the presence of absolute democracy and it is always against political representation. And then, the goal is to achieve some kind of immediately transparent democracy. I don’t think this works.
I’m not against representation. As Claude Lefort and others have amply demonstrated, democracy is never simply representative in the sense of adequately representing (expressing) a pre-existing set of interests, opinions, etc., since these interests and opinions are constituted only through such representation. Yet global capitalism today can no longer be combined with democratic representation. Hardt and Negri aim at providing a solution to this predicament in Empire , as well as its follow-up, Multitude . I don’t think this dream of getting rid of all forms of representation and arriving at some kind of immediate transparency, so called “absolute democracy” – “the rule of everyone by everyone, a democracy without qualifiers, without ifs or buts” – will work. I think Negri and Hardt’s intention is to repeat Marx.
All I can tell you is that the Marxist dream of there being one big agent of social change is illusory, just like the traditional Marxist answer to those who fought for the rights of women, ecology, or racism. Can’t you see that all these depend on capitalism? I still think that capitalism is the key problem. But nonetheless I don’t think that we have one agent, as it was historically predestined to be. As Hegel already knew, “absolute democracy” could only actualize itself in the guise of its “oppositional determination,” as terror. So this kind of mirror image of a reliance on Marx is their political deadlock. So, when Naomi Klein writes, “Decentralizing power doesn’t mean abandoning strong national and international standards – and stable, equitable funding – for health care, education, affordable housing and environmental protection. But it does mean that the mantra of the left needs to change from ‘increase funding’ to ‘empower the grassroots’,” one should ask the naive question: How? How are these strong standards and funding – in short, the main ingredients of the welfare state – to be maintained? What would “multitude in power” (not only as resistance) be? How would it function?
Again, the agents of change are, as I describe them, somewhat related to my idea of different proletarian positions . It means those people who are deprived of their substance, like ecological victims, psychological victims, and, especially, excluded victims of racism, and so on. It is effectively surprising how many features of slum-dwellers fit the good old Marxist determination of the proletarian
25
Messianism, Multitude, and Wishful Thinking
It is obvious that events – political miracles as you call them – are taking place, but who will make these political miracles happen, not in the sense of populist demonstrations or uprisings but, rather, a change of political structure and economic systems? Can the “Multitude,” according to Negri and Hardt, be the way forward, or at least an alternative – despite the crucial critiques of the actual possibility of its holding on to political power?
SŽ: No, not the multitude. Negri and Hardt basically use this term almost in a religious sense – I’ve been having a long philosophical debate with them about this. The problem with multitude is that it mobilizes a certain philosophical topic, such as the difference between presence and representation. The idea of multitude is the presence of absolute democracy and it is always against political representation. And then, the goal is to achieve some kind of immediately transparent democracy. I don’t think this works.
I’m not against representation. As Claude Lefort and others have amply demonstrated, democracy is never simply representative in the sense of adequately representing (expressing) a pre-existing set of interests, opinions, etc., since these interests and opinions are constituted only through such representation. Yet global capitalism today can no longer be combined with democratic representation. Hardt and Negri aim at providing a solution to this predicament in Empire , as well as its follow-up, Multitude . I don’t think this dream of getting rid of all forms of representation and arriving at some kind of immediate transparency, so called “absolute democracy” – “the rule of everyone by everyone, a democracy without qualifiers, without ifs or buts” – will work. I think Negri and Hardt’s intention is to repeat Marx.
All I can tell you is that the Marxist dream of there being one big agent of social change is illusory, just like the traditional Marxist answer to those who fought for the rights of women, ecology, or racism. Can’t you see that all these depend on capitalism? I still think that capitalism is the key problem. But nonetheless I don’t think that we have one agent, as it was historically predestined to be. As Hegel already knew, “absolute democracy” could only actualize itself in the guise of its “oppositional determination,” as terror. So this kind of mirror image of a reliance on Marx is their political deadlock. So, when Naomi Klein writes, “Decentralizing power doesn’t mean abandoning strong national and international standards – and stable, equitable funding – for health care, education, affordable housing and environmental protection. But it does mean that the mantra of the left needs to change from ‘increase funding’ to ‘empower the grassroots’,” one should ask the naive question: How? How are these strong standards and funding – in short, the main ingredients of the welfare state – to be maintained? What would “multitude in power” (not only as resistance) be? How would it function?
Again, the agents of change are, as I describe them, somewhat related to my idea of different proletarian positions . It means those people who are deprived of their substance, like ecological victims, psychological victims, and, especially, excluded victims of racism, and so on. It is effectively surprising how many features of slum-dwellers fit the good old Marxist determination of the proletarian
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