• Anton Jäger and Jan Overwijk — Measure or Misery: Hardt and Negri and the Multitude Twenty Years On

    Anton Jäger and Jan Overwijk — Measure or Misery: Hardt and Negri and the Multitude Twenty Years On

    This review has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial board.

    by Anton Jäger and Jan Overwijk

    On December 5th, 2019, London’s Conway Hall hosted an illustrious reunion. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri – authors of the 2000 classic Empire, itinerant celebrities of the academic left – came to London to revisit their theses in a “world of Trump” (Hardt and Negri 2019a). “Twenty years on”, the announcement read, “globalization remains a central issue of our era, but commentators are conducting its postmortem, as forces across the political spectrum herald the return of national sovereignty” (Hardt and Negri 2019a). A lot had indeed changed in twenty years, the authors admitted. Across the world, evangelists of globalization found themselves in a state of retreat, embattled by Brexiteers, Orbánists, and other antiglobalists, led forth by the likes of Bolsonaro, Trump, and Duterte (Eichengreen 2018; Norris and Inglehart 2016). With supposed “populists” heading states from Budapest to Delhi, raising tariff barriers and restricting labor mobility, had Empire stood the test of time?

    There was a time when Empire occupied the center of global political theory. “Even if it doesn’t deliver the goods,” a reviewer charged in 2001, “Empire should inspire a multitude of empirical investigations and practical political projects” (Henwood 2001, 12). Others were less enthused: a member of the American LaRouchist movement described Negri as a “terrorist controller” who became “a leading ideologue of the new decasualization” (Celano 2001, 16). Despite such early pushback, the phrases deployed in Hardt and Negri’s book still occupy a stable place in the left’s vocabulary” – “multitude”, “cognitive capital”, “deterritorialization”, “post-Fordism” – and have found their way into scholarly language (Kioupkiolis 2016, 138-139). Interestingly, Hardt and Negri’s theory also seems to have been granted a paradoxical new lease on life after the failure of left populism in the 2010s. After ten years of experimenting with parties, institutions, elections, and representation the left finds itself sent back to a position resembling early 2000s horizontalism, but without facing a triumphantly cohesive neoliberal bloc.

    No thinkers provided a more trenchant diagnosis of this previous period than Hardt and Negri. Yet no thinkers also more clearly exemplified the limits of the previous horizontalist critique of the Washington Consensus than the authors of Empire – limits to which the left populist moment was all too attentive in its focus on party building and associative activity. The dogged return of the Hardt-Negri thesis thus speaks to a deeper contradiction in their oeuvre. While few theorists offered a more powerful theory of the new gods of fin de siècle capitalism – both economic and political – they had far less to say about the ‘old gods’ that stalked the neoliberal world, from the spread of general market dependence, the retrenchment of mid-century social rights, to the declining bargaining power of labor. On a surface level the hypothesis of Empire was so plausible as to be unassailable – the spreading of flexibility and creativity through the entirety of the capitalist labor market, and the digital ideologies this spawned. Hardt and Negri also offered a potent vision of the new modes of anti-representative politics that flourished on this new economic terrain, and how capital reconstituted both itself and the labor process. On a deeper level, Empire equally leaned into the most implausible of all hypotheses: that the fight for an old-style political economy and decommodification had to be abandoned for Marxism to remain viable, that old dogmas were only just that: dogmas, and that regression could be recast as progression.

    As the world returns to the squares and the “multitude” resurfaces, this article revisits the project begun with Empire. Although cognizant of the advancements and insights offered by Empire and the broader, anti-institutional mood it was part of, it claims that Hardt and Negri’s theory of the multitude, indexed to a specific understanding of capitalist logics and a Spinozist ontology, still retains a fatal ambiguity. That ambiguity deserves revisiting today, in a time when the left populism first proposed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and later enacted by Podemos, La France Insoumise, and Syriza has waned and Hardt and Negri’s movementism is undergoing a revival.[1] While the 2010s swore by theorists such as Laclau and Mouffe’s “organizational” tendencies, the 2020s open a chapter continuous with Hardt and Negri’s horizon (Cunliffe 2020, 122). This article thus cautions both politically and theoretically against a hasty return to Hardt and Negri’s trilogy of four after the close of the populist decade, and urges us to move beyond it while maintaining some of its key insights. In this sense, it calls neither for uncritical acceptance nor unconditional rejection. We argue that even today still, much of value can be found in Hardt and Negri’s oeuvre, even if that value is often too one-dimensional.

    1. Metaphysics of Indistinction

    Any reckoning with Hardt and Negri’s legacy must move from the abstract to the concrete, peering at the foundations propping up the political theory: their ontology. From Empire (2000) to Commonwealth (2018), both authors understood the transition from the Fordist phase of capitalism to its post-Fordist phase primarily as one of a “multitude” coming into its own. But Hardt and Negri take this faith in the productive capacities of the global working class far beyond Mario Tronti’s (2019) original, post-operaist “reversal of perspective” (Shukaitis 2015, 3). In the 1960s, Tronti sought to correct classical Marxism’s overly strong emphasis on the autonomous development of the productive forces as the principal determinant of historical progress (Balestrini 2020). Instead of envisioning history as a chain of events in which a reactive working class pre-empts capital’s maneuvers, Tronti’s operaismo understands labor as the prime historic agent, to which capital is forced to ceaselessly respond. Post-Fordism, on this count, is not so much driven by new business opportunities for capital as by a need for capital to contain the struggle of organized labor through a new regulation regime – an endogenous, rather than an exogenous, shock. Like Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) in The New Spirit of Capitalism therefore, Hardt and Negri argue that the post-Fordist mode of regulation must be viewed as capital’s response to the revolts of May 1968. The soixante-huitards, as Paolo Virno (2004, 111) notes, demanded the abolition of wage labor but instead got the abolition of the stable job. That capital is merely a reactive force, then, does not mean that it cannot be historically effective.

    This Trontian worldview informs Hardt and Negri’s elegy to the concept of proletarian resistance. “Resistance”, Hardt and Negri write, “is actually prior to power” (2001, 360). What is distinctive about Hardt and Negri’s workerism, however, is that they do not primarily understand the agency of labor as a historical force but as an ontological power. Hence their nominal displacement: instead of “labor” or “the working class”, they speak of “the multitude”, inspired by Spinoza’s original multitudo. In its simplest formula, the multitude represents “the power to act”, an ontological principle of self-organization, a purely immanent source of “creative positivity” (Negri 1999, 79; Hardt and Negri 2009, 179-180; 2001, 61). The multitude forms the sole “constituent power”, the only creative agent that produces both itself as well as its historic antagonists, the “constituted power” that is capital, sovereignty and Empire. Capital is thus not so much a freestanding counterforce to labor but a historical aberration of the multitude itself – a “failure to realize our own power” as Benjamin Noys puts it (Noys 2010, 112; see also Hardt and Negri 2001, 312).

    More concretely, the multitude under post-Fordism makes up the collective subject of cooperative immaterial laborers under Empire. “Empire”, meanwhile, is understood as the global social order organized around “biopolitical production”, or the production of living labor and subjectivity (Hardt and Negri 2001, 24). With its post-Fordist mode of regulation, Empire thus forms the attempt of capital to capture the value that the multitude always already produces in its very mode of being and becoming. Empire’s stress on networked, collaborative and flexible production—what Hardt and Negri, following Maurizio Lazzarato (1996) call “immaterial labour”— necessarily mirrors the decentralized, cooperative creativities of the multitude, since capital must always follow labor as the sole source of value. In this sense, the post-Fordist moment can rightly be said to be a further realization of the productive capacities of the multitude, which finds itself in a feedback loop with the common: it produces the common in common through the common (Hardt and Negri 2009, 123, 148; 2017, 98). A principle of pure relationality, the multitude is this very feedback loop. Or to use Hardt and Negri’s Deleuzian language, it is the relation that pre-exists the relata.

    The pre-existence of labor as a creative force also drives its primal agency. “[T]he deterritorializing power of the multitude”, Hardt and Negri (2001, 61) contend, “is the productive force that sustains Empire”. The post-Fordist formation of Empire here appears as the historical end result of the ontological pressures of the multitude, forcing capital to battle on the multitude’s home terrain of total immanence. At first glance, this may appear as a problematic proposition. It appears that, in ontologizing Mario Tronti’s sociological reversal of perspective, Hardt and Negri pre-decide historical and empirical questions concerning the development of capitalism in ontological terms. For it is not at all empirically obvious that the labor conditions in post-Fordism are the result of the dynamism of the multitude rather than of a power grab of capital in the face of stagnating accumulation in the capitalist core in the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, Hardt and Negri explicitly eschew the type of ontology that builds in a metaphysically coercive strain of teleology: “there are no final ends or teleological goals written in history” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 221). Instead, they follow the Marxist principle that theory follows practice (Hardt and Negri 2004, 140). History and ontology therefore appear to be pulling in opposite methodological directions: the one pointing to a timeless tension between “Empire” and the “multitude”, the other situating that tension in a distinct temporal setting with history as its facade.

    Hardt and Negri navigate this problem by distinguishing between a historical and an ontological multitude – in Spinozist jargon, a multitude of “actuality” versus one of “possibility”. Whereas the latter shapes an “absolute freedom” by acting in the eternity of the perpetual present, the former signals the politics required to constitute the multitude in the image of its absolute aspirations. Without falling into a Hegelianism, one can easily see these as a multitude for itself and a multitude in itself. The distinction, Hardt and Negri hurry to add, is merely analytic: the two dimensions of the multitude cannot ultimately be separated. The historical multitude, for instance, only recognizes itself in its political project based on its ontological potential. “The multitude, then, when we put these two together”, Hardt and Negri  conclude, “has a strange double temporality: always-already and not-yet” (2004, 222). By joining these two faces of the multitude, Hardt and Negri explicitly refuse a false dilemma between history and ontology and keep their eyes fixed on both at once. They then infuse their materialism with just enough historical contingency to steer clear of the philosophic vice of a grand teleology. As Kam Shapiro (2004, 294) puts it: “It is here, in the space between the potential and the actual […] that Hardt and Negri interject the teleological strain of their materialism”.

    Some tricky questions remain, however. It is difficult to comprehend, for instance, how a Spinozist monism that collapses yet separates the historical and the ontological does not simply end up muddying the two. There are, after all, still two countervailing tendencies in Hardt and Negri’s Spinozism: does the arrival of Empire and post-Fordism represent the liberation of the ontological by the historical? This fits well with the Spinozian picture in which the multitude is a vital force of excess that blooms through history like a flower slowly bursting through the asphalt. But this vision is explicitly denied by Hardt and Negri’s insistence on the priority of history (2004, 140), on the Marxian methodological principle that theory should always follow social reality. What, then, is history? Is it a contingent organization of materials that informs empirical sociology or is it a passive receptacle for the play of the ontological powers singled out by the Spinozists? If this question is rejected as a false dilemma, then one might ask: is the fact that historical Empire is the exact mirror image of the ontological multitude merely a momentous coincidence?

    Hardt and Negri’s question is never resolved. Rather than pre-deciding on the question of what entity or force forms the motor of history, Hardt and Negri’s confusion of the ontological and the historical makes it undecidable who or what is the prime mover in capitalism. This confusion stretches out over several dimensions: ontologically speaking, it remains unclear what constitutes the difference between Empire and the multitude, or, between post-Fordism and the labor force it subsumes. Empire, for Hardt and Negri (2001, 327), represents Deleuze and Guattari’s “smooth space defined by uncoded flows, flexibility, continual modulation”, a fully immanent network that sustains all relations (Hardt and Negri 2001, 327). In contrast to “sovereignty”, which is imbued with a transcendent logic, post-Fordist capital functions through what they call, again in reference to Deleuze and Guattari, an immanent “axiomatics” (Hardt and Negri 2001, 327). “The primary characteristic of such an axiomatic”, Hardt and Negri write, “is that relations are prior to their terms”. This means, shockingly, that Empire has the exact same conceptual structure as the multitude: it is the relation that precedes the relata. Empire and the multitude thus become ontologically indistinguishable.

    Adding to the confusion, Hardt and Negri argue that this indistinguishability between capital and labour is itself a product of history. Post-Keynesian capital, they maintain, survives in a permanent state of crisis: its modus operandi is the exploitation of disequilibrium and the unruly forces it discharges. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to grasp whether a crisis came “from above” or “from below”, whether the fall in profit was a ruse of capital or resistance from the multitude, whether rebellion or recuperation (Cooper 2011, 135). In an ironic twist, therefore, little to nothing remains of the original Trontian reversal of perspective. Both ontologically and historically, it has become impossible to say whether the current phase of capitalism results from the agency of labor or that of capital; ontologically speaking, they are both forces of pure “relationality” on the plane of immanence; historically speaking, it is radically uncertain on which empirical force one should pin crises.

    Despite adversity, Hardt and Negri maintain that the multitude represents the sole ontologically productive principle. Empire itself, they claim, “is not a positive reality” (Hardt and Negri 2001, 361), but merely a “parasite”, an “apparatus of capture that lives only off the ontological vitality of the multitude” (Hardt and Negri 2001, 62; 2019b, 83). Our concluding hypothesis is therefore that in this multifaceted confusion of the historical and the ontological as well as the multitude and Empire, Hardt and Negri ultimately go with the overpowering thrust of their Spinozian monist ontology. By this picture, the multitude is the causa sui, the liberating force of excess that pushes its way through history, now driving capital into the fully immanent Empire as the last vestige onto which capital is forced in anticipation of Commonwealth. The latter is Hardt and Negri’s term for communism, which, incidentally, Negri defines as “the negation of all measure, the affirmation of the most exasperated plurality—creativity” (1999, 33). However powerful the image, it brings with it a risk to misunderstand the precarious, flexible and networked labor conditions of post-Fordism as the deepest producing-desires of the working class – and thus to downplay the continuities between pre-Fordism and post-Fordism. It is to this risk that we will now turn.

    1. Historical Ambiguities

    Empire’s consequences were never exclusively philosophical. Besides its claims in ontological and philosophical registers, the implications of Hardt and Negri’s argument extend far into sociology and Marxist studies more generally, leading into social movement studies, political sociology, and political theory. Most of these fields of discussion can be centered around their description of a new, distinct accumulation regime that began in the 1970s. Hardt and Negri have consistently described the advent of their “polytechnic” work as part of a distinct, new historical phase of capitalist growth. During the late-Fordist age, they claim, workers used their historical advantages and pushed beyond the “dynamic stabilization” (Tronti) of the post-war period (Smith 2019, no page). Borrowing from cybernetics and systems theory, Tronti’s concept indicated the capacity of Italian capital to harness seemingly militant demands for wage increases and public sector expansion to their benefit, channeling popular energy into increased capital accumulation. Once it was clear that the interests of labor and the interests of capital began to diverge, however, capital went on the offensive and steadily deconstructed the post-war settlement. This could not be done without acknowledging the legitimacy of some of the revolts that had taken place within that system itself, which drove the demands for increasing spontaneity, creativity, and bottom-up input. Rather than the result of falling growth rates, Hardt and Negri argue, labor militancy itself drove declining profit margins and urged a different model of governance.

    A recurrent response to this deconstruction has been a version of left melancholy, lamenting capital’s supposed breach of contract after the Trente Glorieuses. But rather than lamenting the death of the post-war compromise, Hardt and Negri see a liberation from a corporatist cage which can stimulate even stronger militancy. Such activity was heralded in the Italian “hot autumn” of 1968-69, when workers ignored the dictates of union and party and began to agitate on their own terms. In ending this “dynamic stabilization”, a newly disorganized mass of casual workers became available in the interim, who would shun the large representative pillars which had structured mass working class politics throughout the twentieth century. A new “multitude” was becoming visible in the interstices of this old world, less beholden to organizational dogmas and open to institutional experimentation. Although it shared a structural location with the older, industrial proletariat, its set-up was also constitutively different, less tolerant of leaders, representation, and mediation, and less centered on the hierarchical, industrial workplace. The new class in the social factory tracked a broader systemic shift across capitalist economies. The model of the factory at the heart of Fordism separated a male sphere of production from a female sphere of consumption, the former’s commodification reliant on patriarchal decommodification in the latter (Winant 2019). Capital’s push to post-Fordism and the consequent “feminization of work”, in turn, transformed the whole of society into the factory, forcing workers to hire themselves out to a variety of employers and adopt an inviting, entrepreneurial pose (Hardt and Negri 2009, 133). “Neoliberalism” became the preferred mode of management for this new welfare world. After the tense maneuvering between capital and labor in the inflationary 1970s, an “entrepreneurial multitude” gradually came about, less collectivist than its industrial predecessor but still politically militant, and potentially more emancipatory.

    In its own time this vision also generated a familiar range of critiques from Marxists. Normatively, they questioned Hardt and Negri’s emphasis on labor’s supposedly deterritorializing powers and their key claim: that labor militancy rested on a supposed refusal for measurement (Negri 1999, 33). Earlier Marxists have mainly faulted Hardt and Negri for their account of the transition and for neglecting problems of industrial overcapacity in the current economy – rather than workers who wanted too large a segment of the social product, it was a global glut of manufacturing goods that drove capital’s profit rates down in the late 1960s (Brenner 2006, 2018). At the heart of Hardt and Negri’s chronicle, however, lies a deeper ambiguity: the substantial and eerie continuities between pre-Fordism and post-Fordism. These problems can be traced back to Hardt and Negri’s conceptualization of the Fordist regime itself. In their insightful passages, Hardt and Negri did acknowledge the political preconditions for this Fordist moment. Rather than an inevitable social formation, Fordism was often a political battle for decasualization and formal labor contracts, fought between workers and management in the 1920s.

    Before 1918, most labor was casual, underpaid, and precarious by nature; it was only when political struggles over these working conditions pushed towards decasualization and permanent contracts that a corporatist settlement was reached. As studies by Charles Maier (1975) and Marcel van der Linden (2014) have shown, most corporatist arrangements rebranded as “Fordist” were the result of intense revolutionary activity from 1918 to 1945, as socialist and communist parties made their first forays into bourgeois governments and began to use state power to coerce capital into the general interest (Maier 1975; van der Linden 2014, 9-21). “Fordism”, in this sense, was less of a natural stage for capitalism than a political imposition from below and above, as recent studies by Noam Maggor and Stefan Link (2011; 2018; 2020) have pointed out – an attempt to shortcut international competition and capital development without dependency, growing a solid labor force which could be kept in the factory and disciplined into consumption (see also Buck-Morss 2002). Rather than an evolutionary stage inherent in capitalism’s DNA, Fordism was a unique political product which arose out of workers’ struggles rather than being imposed on them. In no way was Fordism thus a natural development for capital, a fact that is acknowledged by Hardt and Negri but never properly thought through (Link 2018; Buck-Morss 2002; Link 2011, 2020). When viewed from the perspective of capital’s short-term interests, after all, labor protection, decasualization, welfare rights, and formal contracts are no more than legal and political barriers in the free flow of capital and its maximum valorization in production. As John Clegg notes, “in a capitalist order of fully specified property rights, it is wage labor rather than slave labor that is the anomaly” (Clegg 2015: 303). Completely “enforceable labor contracts”, in this sense, would “be the dream of many an employer”, allowing them to extract surpluses without having to honor any contractual obligations (Clegg 2015, 303).

    This prehistory of post-Fordism sensitively reshuffles the stages of capitalism implicit in Hardt and Negri’s story. Rather than a completely new historical situation, the post-Fordist era has seen the return of phenomena reminiscent of a pre-welfarist capitalism. Precarious labor conditions, loss of control over labor time, or the offloading of market risks have all reappeared vigorously, now coupled to a new ideology of human capital development. A return to self-entrepreneurship and self-employment form the legal counterpart of this shift, heralded by Hayek and other neoliberal ideologues. Organized capitalism, in this sense, was an interlude, not an evolutionary successor.[2] This similarity should induce healthy caution against Hardt and Negri’s periodization. What looks like the new is rather a resurrection of the old, now motivationally enforced through a radically “embedded” form of neoliberalism, organized by states, intergovernmental bodies, and carefully constructed trade treaties (see Slobodian and Plehwe 2020).

    This critique has both descriptive and normative ramifications. Descriptively, it relativizes the transition from pre-Fordism to Fordism from an ontological development to a contingent process mediated by political struggle. Normatively, this analysis casts doubt on Hardt and Negri’s assertion of labor’s supposedly deterritorializing powers, culminating in the prospect of commonwealth as the “negation of all measure” (Negri 1999, 33). Rather than a tool for employers, measurability and rationalization were often a demand pressed by workers who sought better contracts, clarified working hours, and higher pay rates. This became clear in the first bill for the 8-hour day and the setting of wage scales in Belgium, Germany, and France after the First World War. Likewise, late nineteenth century statistical research that uncoupled poverty from innate character and instead linked it to social forms of unemployment, though doubtless an instrument of state discipline and biopower, simultaneously effected a pushback against charity-based poverty relief and pried open a political field of labor market regulation and social security (Desrosières 1998, 262). More than a refusal to be “measured”, measurability was a potent response to market-dependence and workplace discipline – the insistence to enumerate the exact amount of labor paid rather than remain in the dark. As Max Henninger notes, “we have an interest in taking the categories developed in the Marxist critique of political economy more seriously than Negri seems to do, for the simple reason that if we don’t ‘do the math’ ourselves, others will do it for us” (Henninger 2007, 177; see also Morozov 2017).  Capital was in large part rational when forced to be so from below or above, whether a militant working class a domineering developmental state.

    1. The Politics of Immeasurability

    Unsurprisingly, the metaphysical and historical ambiguities and inconsistencies reverberate through the post-Operatist duo’s politics. In this context, a reckoning with the influence of cybernetic theory on left-wing thinking has also remained overdue. Taken in by a new digital ideology of verticality and absence of hierarchy, Hardt and Negri built on the promises of the terrain created by the end of “organized capitalism”, where large-scale institutions such as parties and unions were replaced with looser networks and assemblies. As Hardt and Negri put it in Multitude: “once again, a distributed network such as the Internet is a good initial image or model for the multitude because, first, the various nodes remain different but are all connected in the Web, and, second, the external boundaries of the network are open such that new nodes and new relationships can always be added” (2004, xv). Here, “immaterial labor” thus “seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism” (Hardt and Negri 2001, 294).  The emancipatory switching of cybernetic languages has thus played a key role in this ambition, with computerized “societies of control” offering their own unique “line of flight” or “exodus” (Deleuze 1992). Yet, as contemporary critics continue to point out, cybernetics was never a neutral science and cannot be so today. Strangely, there are two contradictory risks involved, attesting to cybernetics’ complex logic and development: one of control and one of anti-control. First of all, with cybernetics implicated in war time strategy and post-war management, its in-built assumption of entropy and tendency toward homeostasis blunts the tools of critical analysis and smuggles in neoclassical assumptions about perfect capitalist equilibria (Galison 1994; Tiqqun 2020). On this account, offered most forcefully by Peter Galison (1994), cybernetics cannot simply be dissociated from its heritage of behaviorism, old-school rationalization and control. Rather than recognizing the persistence of hierarchy and domination in the new digital workplace, Hardt and Negri took the self-presentation of the neoliberal bloc at face value and saw the digital as a less vertical mode of organization.

    Contrary to these worries of persistent control, there exists the danger of importing the “Californian Ideology” (Barbrook and Cameron, 2015) into a supposedly emancipatory program. This celebration of anti-control runs from old libertarian fantasies through 1960s counterculture into the ideology of Silicon Valley today.  Underneath the rhetoric patina of horizontality and participation, this ideology thus hid an increasingly classical capitalism in which cybernetics simply imported market mechanisms into the realm of state management itself. Attempts at “repurposing” these new organizational logics – part of the general internet euphoria typical of the early 2000s – obscure this essential co-originality between cybernetic management and capitalist profit imperatives, the one driving the design of the other. And rather than superseding the immobile monolith of the party, the cybernetic swarm simply affirms and reproduces the disorganization and refusal of general will formation implicit in an atomized market. A mere fetishism for physicality – “nothing can beat the being together of bodies and the corporeal communication that is the basis of collective political intelligence and action”, as Hardt and Negri postulate recently – will not solve this organizational deficit (cited in Lovink 2016, 19; Gardiner 2020, 1-15). In the face of the paradoxical legacy of cybernetics, it is clear that there are no easy answers when it comes to politics in communication-heavy societies. The threat remains palpable however, that by buying into this “cybernetic illusion”, Hardt and Negri rather threaten to liquidate the only historic forces ever capable of coercing capital into a less adversarial mode.

    A similar problem of self-presentation holds for the concept of “cognitive capital” or its cognates recurrent in the Hardt and Negri corpus (Boutang 2011; Vercellone 2007). These theories can be traced to earlier debates in the 1980s and 1990s, when the disappearance of the industrial proletariat led to theorizing about a new “non-class of non-workers”  who would supervise an increasingly automated industrial landscape (Gorz 1982, 82). André Gorz’s work remains a prime point of reference here. Himself enamored with Hardt and Negri in his late life in the 1990s, Gorz and Negri claimed that the “crisis of measurability” inherent to the post-Fordist regime meant that labor itself had become impossible to standardize and all activities could now conceivably count as “work” (Marazzi 2008, 43). Workers outside of stable contracts spend their entire lives perfecting CVs and reskilling capacities or reframing every inch of human activity as enhanced human capital—all under the imperative to become as reprogrammable, networked and adaptive as the new cybernetic machines that now streamline the workplace. They thereby rendered the very notion of “socially necessary labor time” a pitiful anachronism.

    Since it was no longer possible to satisfyingly measure labor performance in strict clock hours, a permanent grant would provide the only natural political response to a measurability crisis, completing the neoliberal dissolution of the waged worker. This was three years after Gorz proclaimed that “as a system, socialism was dead,” together with its “philosophy of work and history.” If the left still “stood for the emancipation of the workers,” he claimed, this would turn them into the spokespersons for “those 15 percent who still define themselves chiefly by their work” (Gorz 1994, vii). Negri usually followed Gorz on this score. “Flexibility and mobility of labor force”, he claimed in 2001, “are irreversible: The question is not to oppose the new organization of labor, but to guarantee a salary and freedom for the post-Fordist worker.” Basic income schemes remain a classical alternative here, which would allow casual contracts to survive while offering workers a minimum means of sustenance. It is a logical train of thought if one sees the negation of measure as the fulfilment of a liberating ontological movement.

    A second, connected question concerns the key concept mobilized in Empire—“immaterial labor”. In Hardt and Negri’s view, the new multitude’s mode of production was less centered on the large scale, industrial factory but on the small-scale, flexible value chains of a globalized world. It also implied a change of personnel from a proletariat into a “cognitariat”, which worked with information rather than producing physical objects. As capitalist production shed its basis in concrete, physical objects, production was now more fleeting and moved into the confines of the human brain, or even into the network of cooperating brains—the social brain (Boutang 2011). Following the ontological push of the multitude, measurable labor-power had become immeasurable “invention-power”. This shift, Hardt and Negri claim, has had momentous consequences for Marx’s classical value theory. Loyalty to this theory would imply the view that labor can be measured in neat, homogeneous slices of time, which is then repaid in monetary form. Such a model of the labor theory of value was clearly premised on the figure of the factory clock, which herded workers to their posts at a time in the morning only to end by emptying at a designated ring of the bell.

    Around this Fordist set-up the post-war welfare state was constructed, centering male producers who spent wages earned from material production. Post-Fordist labor markets, in which workers surf from one job to the other desperately searching for gigs, hardly conform to the same model. They also severely complicate the claim to “measurability” posited in the classical labor theory of value. As Hardt and Negri note, in a world where time discipline has become diffuse, the workplace has dissolved into an encompassing ‘social factory’ and workers are not enumerated with the same wage scales, what future is there for a labor theory of value in the classical mold? Instead of relying on the intrinsically Fordist measurement unit of “labor time”, the age of the new entrepreneur celebrates more ethereal activities and efforts. This crisis of immeasurability has received a new lease on life in a burgeoning “platform capitalism” literature, which sees a return to new decentralized forms of domination through networks, rather than the semi-military forms of discipline associated with Fordist factory (Wood 2020; Standing 2016; Huws 2019).

    Yet critics have also continued to question the novelty of this “cognitariat” in recent years. As Charles Post notes, Hardt and Negri’s “immaterial labor” tends to “confuse highly material labor – work in the telecommunications industry creating and maintaining the infrastructure for computerization” with “forms of mental labor”  such as “designing machinery and work-systems” (Cummings and Post 2016, 251). Rather than debunking Marx’s value theory, the paying of wages for “immaterial” activities is simply an extension of capitalist practice, not a complete qualitative break. The same continuity has been applied to Hardt and Negri’s reworking of Marxian value theory. Michael Heinrich has similarly cautioned against Hardt and Negri’s innovation. Although the transition to a service economy has undeniably rewired European economies and initiated a switch from tradeables to non-tradeables, this has not put an end to classical processes of value creation. “What is relevant”, Heinrich counters, “is the act of exchange, not the fact that physical objects are being exchanged. “Services, after all, “can also be exchanged and therefore become commodities”, and “the difference between a material product and and ‘immaterial’ service consists solely of a different temporal relationship between production and consumption: the material product is first produced and subsequently consumed (a bread roll should be consumed on the same)” (Heinrich 2012: 44).

    Heinrich’s point provides a potent tonic against “the frequently stated argument” that with the “transition from an industrial to a service economy” or in the left-wing variant of Hardt and Negri— the transition from “material” to “immaterial” production—Marx’s value theory has become outmoded” (Heinrich 2012, 44). In regular economics registers, this shift has been explained in terms of a move towards non-exportables and services, part of the new “information economy” that implies a rewiring of classical economic registers (Castells 2011). Hardt and Negri’s incessant stress on the immeasurability of immaterial labor has been a powerful and welcome sociological gesture—one thinks of intellectual property, intangible assets and brand management—but should never tip over into denying the necessity of measurement as a moment in the realisation of value. Rather than a supersession of old capitalist logics, then, the advent of the computer or the cybernetic machine has not fundamentally displaced the question of class composition or the basics of class conflict, it has merely induced new cybernetic strategies for “governing” or “navigating” capitalism’s unruly contradictions.

    1. Before and After the Multitude

    If the twenty-first century looks uncannily more like the nineteenth than the twentieth, where does that leave us with Hardt and Negri’s multitude? Stripped of its linguistic charms, Empire’s subject looks more painfully familiar than it might: a planetary proletariat with no recourse to mass institutions or statist safety nets, slowly losing its claim to the “making” class due to deindustrialization. In essence, the new “multitude” thus reveals itself as the cybernetically managed proletariat of yore, stripped of its organizational encasing and as cruelly market-dependent as its nineteenth-century predecessor, but without the cage of “integration” (as Horkheimer put it) of a previous disciplinary era, indicating working class submission to the planning state (Abromeit 2011; Horkheimer 1978). Piece work, putting-out systems, and unsalaried labor have all seen a return in the era of neoliberalism, now engineered through algorithmic devices rather than despotic overseers. Yet the steady automation of middle management or the disappearance of the foreman in this new “digital Taylorism” do little to decrease the relevance of the nineteenth-century models Hardt and Negri are quick to reject (Leberecht 2015). In this sense, the “multitude” still offers a surface reading of a disorganized new global proletariat. Should the rise of precarious labor, sharply formulated, not rather be considered as an example of downright “class war from above”, rendering Hardt and Negri’s redeeming narrative “nothing less than ideology “ (Palmer 2014: 40)?

    Such an argument for putative continuity should not obscure real differences between the pre- and post-Fordist phase of capitalism. Hardt and Negri are fully correct to insist on the new techniques of management and steering which have been implemented since the late 1960s, when capital saw a chance to break free from the post-war compromise and reclaim prerogatives over investment. In terms of political leadership, the new regime did come with a new hegemonic order – indicated by Boltanski and Chiapello’s “projective city” (2007), the justificatory regime of the “third spirit of capitalism.” Networks function as the watchword of this new city, a normative space which interpolates workers to ‘surf” the decentralized market signals as “agile”, “lean”, “employable” agents (Bernes 2017, 122; Thrift 2005). The summum bonum of the cybernetic city is the virtue of “connexionism”: the extension of the network to the benefit of all. As with Foucault’s neoliberal “governmentality”, precarious market dependence reminiscent of the nineteenth century now figure in a new strategic field in which subjects are motivated to accept their material condition under the banner of self-entrepreneurship. This is also what distinguishes digital Taylorism from its analogue predecessor: not so much a radical change in the precarity of labor conditions, but in the celebration of this precarity as “gamified”, fluid existence (Neilson and Mezzadra 2019, 82-83; Slobodian 2020). What used to run through the soft power of impersonal market coercion now is increasingly glorified through the even softer attractions of human capital development. Capital’s political encasing has thus become less top-down, hierarchical, and vertical than in the managerial age. Yet none of these normative diagrams should lead one to overstate their importance in the face of the essential continuity with the capitalism analyzed by Marx’s generations, in which the capitalist macrocosm spanned only one part of the globe (Mattick 2018, 8-9).[3]

    This fact has become ever clearer to our post-2008 world, in which a global surplus population faces an increasingly stagnant capitalism unable to absorb its services. Notions such as the “multitude”, in turn, do little to elucidate the specific modalities of market dependence all workers experience and how these stratify labor markets across lines. Anno 2019, humanity inhabits an almost fully proletarianized planet: nearly 60% of the world is currently employed in wage relations with a sizable portion of the remaining 40% in partial or complete market-dependency. What was still a condition confined to European workers in the late nineteenth century – foreclosed by the safety valve of colonial emigration – is now a planetary fait accompli (Jäger 2019, 1-22).

    Capitalism’s universalization should however caution against deriving a new political stand to this order. Across the global South, market-dependent producers eke out a living without employers, selling wares on the streets or marketing themselves. Ever since urbanization’s decoupling from development and development’s decoupling from growth, this surplus population has not ceased to grow (Benanav 2019, 2014; Benanav and Clegg 2010). But there is a danger of taking this new subject as a prepackaged agent rather than a truly “deterritorialized” anti-subject deserving of legal rights. As Mike Davis notes, speculations about “a new politics of ‘multitudes’ in the ‘rhizomatic spaces’ of globalization remain ungrounded in any real political sociology” (Davis 2020, 7). Rather than focusing on the differing scales of market dependence in the new global economy, Hardt and Negri took the cyber-proletariat as a given and transposed it into an ontological category (Dyer-Witherford 2015). While the attempt to find a new idiom to collect and unite all those wretched of the earth—including those not employed in wage labor—must be applauded, there is a definite risk involved in the task. As Davis (2020, 7) sharply claimed, “imprudent coronations of abstractions like the ‘multitude’ as historical subjects simply dramatize a poverty of empirical research” and do little to point at potential conflicts of interest between sections of the wage dependent classes.

    Rather than a new phase of ontological prowess, the new multitude thus tends to appear as the result of a failed Fordist integration which has reverted back to the classical age – a radically embedded neoliberal capitalism in which capital is longer an agent of growth and thrives on state predation. Likewise, Davis cautions against celebrations of spontaneity and casualness which come with these “ideologies of informality” (Van Ballegooijen and Rocco 2013, 1794-1810; Scott 1999; DeLong 2007). Rather than arguing for cash transfers or microcredit for the slums, the classically “Fordist” demand for labor rights, coupled with transformative post-growth programs, should still be at the center of an anti-neoliberal left. To claim the proletariat is “fading away” in the face of the “increasing heterogeneity of work situations and, thus, of social conditions”, as sociologists in the information age often do, elides the fact that “informal workers… tend to be massively crowded into a few major niches where effective organization and “class consciousness” might become possible if authentic labor rights and regulations existed” (Davis 2000, 185 (f)). Overall, “it is the lack of economic citizenship, rather than livelihood heterogeneity per se, that makes informal labor so prone to clientelist subordination and ethnic fragmentation” (Davis 2000, 185 (f)) More than a new political subject, the new “multitude” thus risks tumbling into its very opposite: a floating signifier in desperate search of material grounding in our social reality. At worst, it is a symptom of the disorganization of the populist age in which the measurement techniques of focus groups, real time polls and approval ratings struggle to delineate “the people”. These metrologies have become the face of the multitude’s supposed “immeasurability” (Csigo 2017; Cooper 2011; Feher 2018).

    This strategy would require more than invocations of an “entrepreneurial multitude” which survives in the grottoes of globalization, and revisit earlier questions of social rights and decommodification (Hardt and Negri 2018, 146). “The main issue in the informal sector”, Davis notes, “is normalization of the rights and protections of labor, not property” (Davis 2000, 185 (f)). Such a vision would depart from the accelerationist optimism implicit in the Negrite vision, which celebrates the new informal masses as harboring an exclusively new emancipatory promise. Instead, even the oldest dogmas of social democracy, from labor rights to public provision, are “as good as ever”.[4] The closing of the left-populist decade, symbolized by the successive defeats of the Sanders, Syriza, and Corbyn coalitions, has made this point even clearer: rather than stick to an horizontalism, left populists began by returning to the party and rethinking the organizational basics of a previous age. Although they failed, the questions they asked had been left neglected and underused, distracting leftists from the task that the twentieth century originally posed – and which Hardt and Negri sought to bury in 1999.

    *

    Coming at the tail end of a series of anti-police protests and the storming of the Capitol, early 2021 offers a unique vantage point to assess the valences of Empire. At the close of the neoliberal 1990s, Hardt and Negri’s work offered creative and penetrating insights into the changing nature of labor under capitalism and the ramifications of the neoliberal settlement. It spoke to a disenchanted left traumatized by the counter-revolutionary wave of the 1980s and 1990s, which pulverized the structures of an organized left in the Third World, Europe, and the US, and liquidated the fragile counter-powers built up during the red century. Empire was a new theory for new times, forcing the left to strategies on new terrain. As a holistic theory of politics and social change, its omissions still risk underplaying the continuities between pre- and post-Fordist capitalism and reads an erroneously emancipatory dynamic into a mode of cybernetic management now sold as human capital development. This historical sloppiness and slipperiness stem from a series of metaphysical blunders, where cybernetic techniques of labor control and new strategies of accumulation are recast as an ontological subject reaching its final state. Its practical consequences remained equally suspect: the “multitude” refuses a politics and sociology of class articulation and skirts over real differences in today’s proletarian landscape, abandoning the sphere of production and measurability to a new illiberal bloc (Slobodian 2018; Körösényi, Illés, and Gyulai 2020). As the left-populist decade ends and movementism regains its attraction, Empire indeed seems to offer a useful point of retreat for a newly disillusioned left. One must wonder, however: what is gained by racing from one cul-de-sac into another?

     

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    [1] For contrasts with the “populist” decade, see Laclau (2005).

    [2] As Charles Post (in Cummings and Post 2016, 251) notes, “the ‘Golden Age’ was… exceptional in the history of capitalism… the product of a combination of a long period of rising profitability (1933-1966) and a militant labor movement across the industrialized world. Workers had threatened the foundations of capitalist rule (France and Spain in the mid-1930s, France and Italy immediately after World War II, France in 1968, Portugal 1974-1975) or severely disrupted capitalist accumulation in mass strike waves in the mid-1930s, immediate post-war years and again between 1965-1975. Capital was forced to make major concessions to labor.”

    [3] As Mattick (2018, 8-9) notes, “when Marx wrote Capital, capitalism was hardly the world’s primary system for the production and distribution of goods (even in England there were still more domestic servants than industrial workers), though it could be argued that at least in Europe and North America it was already socially dominant, in the sense that its institutions were central enough to social life to determine their continuing growth in importance as society continued to evolve. By abstracting from the complex range of features characterizing the actual societies of his time to focus on what he took to be basic to capitalism as such, Marx was able to explain both the evolution towards a more completely capitalist society and specific, apparently essential, features of that evolution.”

    [4] A phrase used by Michael Foot to celebrate Tribune’s twentieth anniversary (Warde 1982, 85).

  • Arne De Boever  — The End of Art (Once Again)

    Arne De Boever — The End of Art (Once Again)

    by Arne De Boever

    ~

    Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.
    —Heinrich Heine

    You Morons

    In early March 2021, a group of “tech and art enthusiasts” who make up the company Injective Protocol[1] burnt Banksy’s work Morons (White) (2006), which they had previously acquired from Tagliatella Galleries for $95,000.[2] At first sight, the burning could be read as performance art in the spirit of Banksy’s Morons (White), which shows an art auction where a canvas featuring the text “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU MORONS ACTUALLY BUY THIS SHIT” is up for sale (and going for $750,450). As such, the performance would take further Banksy’s own criticism of the art market, a market whose dialectic has easily reappropriated Banksy’s criticism as part of its norm and turned it into economic value. The burning of the Banksy would then seek to more radically negate the value of the work of art that Banksy’s Morons (White) challenges but cannot quite escape as long as it remains a valuable work of art.

    However, such negation was not the goal of the burning. As the tech and art enthusiast who set the Banksy aflame explained, the burning was in fact accomplished as part of a financial investment, and to inspire other artists. In other words, the burning in fact confirmed the art market’s norm rather than challenging it, and it encouraged other artists to make work that does the same. You see, before Banksy’s Morons (White) was burnt, Injective Protocol had recorded the work as what is called a non-fungible token or NFT in the blockchain. This means that for the work’s digital image, a unique, original code was created; that code—which is what you buy if you buy and NFT–is the new, original, NFT artwork, henceforth owned by Injective Protocol even if digital copies of Banksy’s Morons (White) of course still circulate as mere symbols of that code.[3] Such ownership, and the financial investment as which it was intended, required the burning of the material Banksy because Injective Protocol sought to relocate the primary value of the work into the NFT artwork—something that could only be accomplished if the original Banksy was destroyed. The goal of the burning was thus to relocate the value of the original in the derivative, which had a bigger financial potential than the original Banksy.

    The Banksy burning was perhaps an unsurprising development for those who have an interest in art and cryptocurrencies and have been following the rise of cryptoart. Cryptoart is digital art that is recorded in the blockchain as an NFT. That makes cryptoart “like” bitcoin, which is similarly recorded in the blockchain: each bitcoin is tied to a unique, original code that is recorded in a digital ledger where all the transactions of bitcoin are tracked. As an NFT, a digital artwork is similarly tied to a unique, original code that marks its provenance. The main difference between bitcoin and an NFT is that the former, as currency, is fungible, whereas the latter, as art, as not.[4] Now, NFTs were initially created “next to” already existing non-digital art, as a way to establish provenance for digital images and artworks. But as such images and artworks began to accrue value, and began to comparatively accrue more value than already existing non-digital art, the balance in the art market shifted, and NFTs came to be considered more valuable investments than already existing works of non-digital art.

    The burning of Banksy’s Morons (White) was the obvious next step in that development: let us replace the already existing work of non-digital art by an NFT, destroy the already existing work of non-digital art, and relocate the value of the work into the NFT as part of a financial investment. It realizes the dialectic of an art market that will not hesitate to destroy an already existing non-digital work of art (and replace it with an NFT) if it will drive up financial value. The auction houses who have sold NFTs are complicit to this process.

    Crypto Value = Exhibition Value + Cult Value

    The digital may at some point have held the promise of a moving away from exceptionalism–the belief that the artist and the work of art are exceptional, which is tied to theories of the artist as genius and the unresolved role of the fake and the forgery in art history–as the structuring logic of our understanding of the artist and the work of art. The staged burning of the Banksy does not so much realize that promise as relocate the continued dominance of exceptionalism—and its ties to capitalism, even if the work of art is of course an exceptional commodity that does not truly fit the capitalist framework—in the digital realm. The promise of what artist and philosopher Hito Steyerl theorized as “the poor image”[5] is countered in the NFT as a decidedly “rich image”, or rather, as the rich NFT artwork (because we need to distinguish between the NFT artwork/ the code and the digital image, a mere symbol that is tied to the code). Art, which in the part of its history that started with conceptual art in the early 1970s had started realizing itself—parallel to the rise of finance and neoliberalism–as a financial instrument, with material artworks functioning as means to hedge against market crashes (as James Franco’s character in Isaac Julien’s Playtime [2014] discusses[6]), has finally left the burden of its materiality behind to become a straight-up financial instrument, a derivative that has some similarities to a cryptocurrency like bitcoin. Art has finally realized itself as what it is: non-fungible value, one of finance’s fictions.[7]

    Although the video of the Banksy burning might shock, and make one imagine (because of its solicitation to other tech enthusiasts and artists) an imminent future in which all artworks will be burnt so as to relocate their primary value in an NFT tied to the artwork’s digital image, such a future actually does not introduce all that much difference with respect to today. Indeed, we are merely talking about a relocation of value, about a relocation of the art market. The market’s structure, value’s structure, remain the same. In fact, the NFT craze demonstrates how the artwork’s structuring logic, what I have called aesthetic exceptionalism,[8] realizes itself in the realm of the digital where, for a brief moment, one may have thought it could have died. Indeed, media art and digital art more specifically seemed to hold the promise of an art that would be more widely circulated, where the categories of authorship, value, and ownership were less intimately connected, and could perhaps even—see Steyerl; but the argument goes back to Walter Benjamin’s still influential essay on the copy[9]—enable a communist politics. Such a communist politics would celebrate the copy against the potentially fascist values of authenticity, creativity, originality, and eternal value that Benjamin brings up at the beginning of his essay. But no: with NFT, those potentially fascist values are in fact realizing themselves once again in the digital realm, and in a development that Benjamin could not have foreseen “the aura” becomes associated with the NFT artwork—not even the digital image of an artwork but a code as which the image lies recorded in the blockchain. Because the NFT artwork is a non-fungible token, one could argue that it is even more of an original than the digital currencies with which it is associated. After all, bitcoin is still a medium of exchange, whereas an NFT is not. In the same way that art is not money, NFT is not bitcoin, even if the NFT needs to be understood (as I suggested previously) as one of finance’s fictions.

    What’s remarkable here is not so much that a Banksy is burnt, or that other artworks may in the future be burnt. What’s remarkable is the power of aesthetic exceptionalism: an exceptionalism so strong that it can even sacrifice the material artwork to assert itself.

    Of course, some might point out—taking Banksy’s Morons (White) as a point of departure–that Banksy himself invited this destruction. Indeed, at a Sotheby’s auction not so long ago, Banksy had himself already realized the partial destruction of one of his works in an attempt to criticize the art market[10]—a criticism that is evident also in the work of art that Injective Protocol burnt. But the art market takes such avant-garde acts of vandalism in stride, and Banksy’s stunt came to function as evidence for what has been called “the Banksy effect”[11]: your attempt to criticize the art market becomes the next big thing on the art market, and your act of art vandalism in fact pushes the dollar value of the work of art. If that happens, the writer Ben Lerner argues in an essay about art vandalism titled “Damage Control”,[12] your vandalism isn’t really vandalism: art vandalism that pushes up dollar value isn’t vandalism. Banksy’s stunt was an attempt to make art outside of the art market, but the attempt failed. The sale of the work went through, and a few months later, one can find the partially destroyed artwork on the walls of a museum, reportedly worth three times more since the date when it was sold. For Lerner, examples like this open up the question of a work of art outside of capitalism, a work of art from which “the market’s soul has fled”,[13] as he puts it. But as the Banksy example shows, that soul is perhaps less quick to get out than we might think. Over and over again, we see it reassert itself through those very attempts that seek to push it out. One might refer to that as a dialectic—the dialectic of avant-garde attempts to be done with exceptionalist art. Ultimately they realize only one thing: the further institutionalization of exceptionalist art.

    That dialectic has today reached a most peculiar point: the end of art that some, a long time ago, already announced. But none of those arguments reached quite as far as the video of the Authentic Banksy Art Burning Ceremony that was released in March: in it, we are quite literally witnessing the end of the work of art as we know it. It shows us the “slow burn”, as the officiating member of Injective Protocol puts it, through which Banksy’s material work of art—and by extension the material work of art at large—disappears (and has been disappearing). At the same time, this destruction is presented as an act of creation—not so much of a digital image of the Banksy work but of the NFT artwork or the code that authenticates that digital image, authors it, brands it with the code of its owners. So with the destruction of Banksy’s work of art, another work of art is created—the NFT artwork, a work that you cannot feature on your wall (even if its symbolic appendage, the digital image of the Banksy, can be featured on your phone, tablet, or computer and even if some owners of the NFT artwork might decide to materially realize the NFT artwork as a work that can be shown on their walls). But what is the NFT artwork? It strikes one as the artwork narrowed down to its exceptionalist, economic core, the authorship and originality that determine its place on the art market. It is the artwork limited to its economic value, the scarcity and non-fungibility that remain at the core of what we think of as art. This is not so much purposiveness without purpose, as Immanuel Kant famously had it, but non-fungible value as a rewriting of that phrase. Might that have been the occluded truth of Kant’s phrase all along?

    In Kant After Duchamp,[14] which remains one of the most remarkable books of 20th-century art criticism, Thierry de Duve shifted the aesthetic question from “is it beautiful?” (Kant’s question) to “is it art?” (Duchamp’s question, which triggers de Duve’s rereading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment). It seems that today, one might have to shift the question once again, to situate Kant after Mike Winkelmann, the graphic designer/ NFT artist known as Beeple whose NFT collage “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” was sold at a Christie’s auction for $69,346,250. The question with this work is not so much whether it is beautiful, or even whether it is art; what matters here is solely its non-fungible value (how valuable is it, or how valuable might it become?), which would trigger yet another rereading of Kant’s third critique. Shortly after the historic sale of Beeple’s work was concluded, it was widely reported that the cryptocurrency trader who bought the work may have profited financially from the sale, in that the trader had previously been buying many of the individual NFTs that made up Beeple’s collage—individual NFTs that, after the historic sale of the collage, went up significantly in value, thus balancing out the expense of buying the collage and even yielding the trader a profit. What’s interesting here is not the art—Beeple’s work is not good art[15]—but solely the non-fungible value.

    It seems clear that what has thus opened up is another regime of art. In his essay on the copy, Benjamin wrote of the shift from cult value, associated with the fascism of the original, to exhibition value, associated with the communism of the copy. Today, we are witnessing the anachronistic, zombie-like return of cult value within exhibition value, a regime that can be understood as the crypto value of the work of art. That seems evident in the physical token that buyers of Beeple’s NFTs get sent: in its gross materialism—it comes with a cloth to clean the token but that can also be used “to clean yourself up after blasting a hot load in yer pants from how dope this is!!!!!!111”; a certificate of authenticity stating “THIS MOTHERFUCKING REAL ASS SHIT (this is real life mf)”; and a hair sample, “I promise it’s not pubes”–, it functions as a faux cultic object that is meant to mask the emptiness of the NFT. Assuaging the anxieties, perhaps, of the investors placing their moneys into nothing, it also provides interesting insights into the materialisms (masculinist/ sexist, and racist—might we call them alt-right materialisms?) that reassert themselves in the realm of the digital, as part of an attempt to realize exceptionalism in a commons that could have freed itself from it.[16] As the text printed on the physical token has it: “strap on an adult diaper because yer about to be in friggn’ boner world usa motherfucker”.

    NFT-Elitism

    It’s worth asking about the politics of this. I have been clear about the politics of aesthetic exceptionalism: it is associated with the politics of sovereignty, which is a rule of the one, a mon-archy, that potentially tends abusive, tyrannical, totalitarian. That is the case for example with exceptionalism in Carl Schmitt, even if it does not have to be the case (see for example discussions of democratic exceptionalism).[17] With the NFT artwork, the politics of aesthetic exceptionalism is realizing itself in the digital realm, which until now seemed to present a potential threat to it. It has nothing to do with anti-elitism, or populism; it is not about leaving behind art-world snobbery, as some have suggested. It is in fact the very logic of snobbery and elitism that is realizing itself in the NFT artwork, in the code that marks originality, authenticity, authorship and ownership. Cleverly, snobbery and elitism work their way back in via a path that seems to lead elsewhere. It is the Banksy effect, in politics. The burning of the Banksy is an iconoclastic gesture that preserves the political theology of art that it seems to attack.[18] This is very clear in even the most basic discourse on NFTs, which will praise both the NFT’s “democratic” potential—look at how it goes against the elitism of the art world!—while asserting that the entire point of the NFT is that it enables the authentification that once again excludes fakes and forgeries from the art world. Many, if not all of the problems with art world elitism continue here.

    With the description of NFT artworks as derivatives, and their understanding as thoroughly part of the contemporary financial economy, the temptation is of course to understand them as “neoliberal”—and certainly the Banksy burning by a group of “tech and art enthusiasts” (a neo-liberal combo if there ever was one) seems to support such a reading. But the peculiar talk about authenticity and originality in the video of the Banksy burning, the surprising mention of “primary value” and its association to the original work of art (which now becomes the NFT artwork, as the video explains), in fact strikes one as strangely antiquated. Indeed, almost everything in the video strikes one as from a different, bygone time: the work, on its easel; the masked speaker, a robber known to me from the tales of my father’s childhood; the flame, slowly working its way around the canvas, which appears to be set up in front of a snowy landscape that one may have seen in a Brueghel. Everything is there to remind us that, through the neoliberal smokescreen, we are in fact seeing an older power at work—that of the “sovereign”, authentic original, the exceptional reality of “primary value” realizing itself through this burning ritual that marks not so much its destruction but its phoenix-like reappearance in the digital realm. In that sense, the burning has something chilling to it, as if it is an ancient ritual marking the migration of sovereign power from the material work of art to the NFT artwork. A transference of the sovereign spirit, if you will, and the economic soul of the work of art. For anyone who has closely observed neoliberalism, this continued presence of sovereignty in the neoliberal era will not come as a surprise—historians, political theorists, anthropologists, philosophers, and literary critics have shown that it would be a mistake to oppose neoliberalism and sovereignty historically, and in the analysis of our contemporary moment. The aesthetic regime of crypto value would rather be a contemporary manifestation of neoliberal sovereignty or of authoritarian neoliberalism (the presence of Trump in Beeple’s work is worth noting).

    Art historians and artists, however, may be taken aback by how starkly the political truth of art is laid bare here. Reduced to non-fungible value, brought back to its exceptionalist economic core, the political core of the artwork as sovereign stands out in its tension with art’s frequent association with democratic values like openness, equality, and pluralism. As the NFT indicates, democratic values have little to do with it: what matters, at the expense of the material work of art, is the originality and authenticity that enable the artwork to operate as non-fungible value. Part of finance’s fictions, the artwork thus also reveals itself as politically troubling because it is profoundly rooted in a logic of the one that, while we are skeptical of it in politics, we continue to celebrate aesthetically. How to block this dialectic, and be done with it? How to think art outside of economic value, and the politics of exceptionalism? How to end not so much art but exceptionalism as art’s structuring logic? How to free art from fascism? The NFT craze, while it doesn’t answer those questions, has the dubious benefit of identifying all of those problems.

    _____

    Arne De Boever teaches in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts and is the author of Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis (Fordham University Press, 2017), Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), and other works. His most recent book is François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Acknowledgments

    Thanks to Alex Robbins, Jared Varava, Makena Janssen, Kulov, and David Golumbia.

    _____

    Notes

    [1] See: https://injectiveprotocol.com/.

    [2] See: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/financial-traders-burned-banksy-nft-1948855. A video of the burning can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4wm-p_VFh0.

    [3] See: https://hyperallergic.com/624053/nft-art-goes-viral-and-heads-to-auction-but-what-is-it/.

    [4] A simple explanation of cryptoart’s relation to cryptocurrency can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlgE_mmbRDk.

    [5] Steyerl, Hito. “In Defense of the Poor Image”. e-flux 10 (2009). Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.

    [6] See: https://www.isaacjulien.com/projects/playtime/.

    [7] I am echoing here the title of my book Finance Fictions, where I began to theorize some of what is realized by the NFT artwork: Boever, Arne De. Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.

    [8] See: Boever, Arne De. Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

    [9] See: Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction” In: Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217-251.

    [10] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxkwRNIZgdY&feature=emb_title.

    [11] Brenner, Lexa. “The Banksy Effect: Revolutionizing Humanitarian Protest Art”. Harvard International Review XL: 2 (2019): 35-37.

    [12] Lerner, Ben. “Damage Control: The Modern Art World’s Tyranny of Price”. Harper’s Magazine 12/2013: 42-49.

    [13] Lerner, “Damage Control”, 49.

    [14] Duve, Thierry de. Kant After Duchamp. Cambridge: MIT, 1998.

    [15] While such judgments are of course always subjective, this article considers a number of good reasons for judging the work as bad art: https://news.artnet.com/opinion/beeple-everydays-review-1951656#.YFKo4eIE7p4.twitter.

    [16] The emphasis on materialism here is not meant to obscure the materialism of the digital NFT, namely its ecological footprint which is, like that of bitcoin, devastating.

    [17] See Boever, Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism.

    [18] On this, see my: “Iconic Intelligence (Or: In Praise of the Sublamental)”. boundary 2 (forthcoming).

  • Linette Park — Fantasies of Utopia: On the Property of Black Suffering (Review of Alex Zamalin’s Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism)

    Linette Park — Fantasies of Utopia: On the Property of Black Suffering (Review of Alex Zamalin’s Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism)

    This review has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial board.

    Review of Alex Zamalin, Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018)

    by Linette Park

    Split between the injuries of the past and the possibilities of the future, black political thought has always emerged from inequalities of power that avow a property of suffering. Whether this suffering is conceived in relation to the systematic and repressive forces of the nation-state that fortify structural inequality, or in relation to the limits of the reason and laws of the state, the split between the terms of the past and the contours of the future has led black political thought to scrutinize the ineffable conditions that allow black suffering in the name of the political. The notion of the political has held up well, presenting a mirage of politics that hinges on a structure of anti-blackness. This structure of anti-blackness is most sharply indexed by the unprecedented intensification of black murder at the hands of law enforcement and the growing carceral archipelago in the United States and globally.

    On this score, the property and conditions of black suffering in the United States in relation to Western political thought have rightly, in the words of Saidiya Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson III, remained fundamentally unthought.[i] Black suffering, in other words, remains absent in the theorization of the political in spite of the monumental history of racial slavery’s violence, which gives rise to the political, social, and economic orders of modernity in the Americas and the relations that conceive them. More simply put, such an absence constitutes and sustains the relation between political thought and possibility. In the face of deep-seated insecurities (and an even deeper and axiomatic incommensurability of anti-blackness in Western political thought), Black Studies, to this ever unfolding (and enfolding) split, has engaged with questions of the imagination, freedom and rights, sovereignty, and matter(ing) of black life. In this broadest sense, black political thought—whether it be formulated via Afro-pessimism, Black optimism, or Afro-futurism or by taking up their internal theoretical differentiations—is necessarily critical of the political and the conditioning of thought that avers the plural and intersubjective character of political formations all whilst excluding the question of blackness. Positing these varying movements of thought just now is not to say that they are all one and the same. For, indeed, the debates at the fore of Black Studies—the political movements and praxes of black thought—are contiguous in their critiques and take form on different sides of this constellation.[ii] The intellectual history of black political thought binds invention to the ontological question of blackness, which is dispositioned as a disinheritance from civil society.[iii] For slavery always preceded (and inadvertently enabled) “the empty space of power” in which people could lay claim to the possibility and property of the commons.[iv] Within this history, the turn to hope has been figured as probability, object of critique, and course of action with utopia as its horizon.[v]

    Alex Zamalin’s Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism is in high pursuit of utopia as a horizon for political thought, with fantasies of its possibilities as its engine. In the book, Zamalin, author and scholar of several books on political thought and African American freedom struggle in the US, confronts the split between past injuries and future possibilities. At the outset of the book, he writes:

    Utopia’s landscapes are unfamiliar because they bring into life familiar fantasies. Utopia is like religion not because of the dogmatic theology or secular truths it postulates, but because it conjures powerful, irrepressible, sometimes ecstatic feelings: of salvation, of being at home in the world, and of reconciliation with strife. For this reason, utopia is as fruitful a site from which to test the value of our extant political formulations as it is a horizon toward which we might look to improve our lives (6).

    Zamalin premises Black Utopia on this feeling of hope driven by the familiarity of fantasy through which, accordingly, a transcendent culture and politics emerge in spite of the subjugation of black life in the long and present history of enslavement and imprisonment. Alluding to the iconography of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Martin Luther King Jr., Zamalin is the first to point out that such a trajectory of hope and utopia has been evident in African American political thought, yet nonetheless he puts forth the concept of utopia as the neglected site in the American cultural and political imagination. For Zamalin, something is lost in contemporary American political thought—and utopia, as conceived in Black Utopia, is able to retrieve this loss while also advancing its way forward in the African American political and literary tradition and its praxis. In this schema, however, one might argue that black utopia can only spring from a recuperative gesture which has been internal and external to, which is also to say that it does not depart different from, the liberal repressive mechanisms of the nation-state that perpetuate the structural and systematic exclusion of black life in civil society and politics in the US. Zamalin submits that the methodological approach to the book is not “analytical” but “more concerned with politics” in its excavation of black utopia as an untheorized site for political thought (17). He writes, “Black Utopia’s intellectual ambition is to texture and restore its proper place a neglected site of the black American political and cultural imagination; and it is to offer a critical interpretation of the idea of utopia” (18). Further, Zamalin claims that the goal of the book is “as much to understand the boundaries of the black political and cultural imagination as it is to see what lessons it has for contemporary political life. It is to assess which elements of black utopian and antiutopian thought ought to be reclaimed or abandoned” (18, emphasis added).

    Zamalin’s invitation to center the black American political and cultural thought to the center is admirable and reflects his own sustained commitment to the multiplicity within African American literary and political traditions over the years. Yet, because Zamalin separates the “analytical” from “the political”—the structural from the theoretical field and the terms within it which mark an absence and assume the demand to be reclaimed or abandoned—utopia, too, becomes both an ambiguous yet ostensibly malleable concept for Zamalin that allows for a recuperative reading of and for politics. With this, both black utopic and dystopic thought—which appear interchangeable at times in the book—and the boundaries of their imagination, gesture to a politics and ethics that have yet to be realized in the political present but, nonetheless, can be retrieved from black utopic thought. Hope becomes the operative tour de force to acquiesce an (un)imagined and unattained politics that has yet to arrive. But what remains unclear: if “utopia” is as fungible as it is imagined to be restorative for politics, why black utopic and dystopic thought? Why not simply black thought as a meditation on the movement of thinking and imagination that remains veiled in the common political and theoretical fields and in what is proper to politics?

    To posit the landscapes of utopia as “unfamiliar,” given their capacity to “bring into life familiar fantasies,” Zamalin designates a particular model of politics and an intrusive mode of enjoyment (disguised as fantasy) as the decisive representations of hope. I would argue, however, that the question as concerns black political thought—what and how it may throw light on contemporary political life—lies not in the exceptional space of fantasy, but rather in the exceptional place in fantasy where the most burdened and buried components of the imaginary reside and are illicit from the conditions of hope. To centralize the space of fantasy as the possible site of liberation for and of black politics sets up a mechanism through which a politics can be reclaimed over and over again while eliding the ethical and structural problematic of how blackness occupies a position in the American psyche and has yet to be truly liberated. This reclaiming is neither politics nor political, but is an insistence on a method of finding a representative of black political thought that represses the originality of a resistance within that which is unnamable in the symbolic practices and politics of culture.[vi] What underlies Zamalin’s book is a structural problematic: how is the imagination of the free black in a post-emancipation context conceived and re-inscribed through language at the level of imagination and collective fantasy? In other words, whose fantasy of utopia is this and whom is it for? The reinscription of the black imagination as a politics—full stop—and the reading of that imagination as reducible to fantasy would seem to disavow the privilege in reading and rewriting the other’s dreams of freedom as an emancipatory world. This might be evident in Zamalin’s use of the phrase “utopia in black” as interchangeable with “black utopia” throughout the book.[vii] Indeed, the book never articulates this important distinction between whose fantasy it is and who is subject to it. Such a distinction would not only provide a reorientation that gives view to a horizon of utopia undercut and projected by an imagined “we,” but it also would signal more explicitly how the configurations of fantasy at the expense of blackness authorize the subjects of political thought—utopic or otherwise.

    Zamalin’s Black Utopia ambitiously draws an intellectual and literary history of utopia and dystopia in African American cultural production, focusing on particular works by Martin Delany, W.E.B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Richard Wright, Sun Ra, Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler, and others. Reading this set of texts symptomatically as a restaging of the drama of and for hope, Zamalin attempts to substantiate his claim that the utopic image of hope offers a vision of “untapped possibilities already embedded within society—unconditional freedom, equality, interracial intimacy, solidarity, and social democracy” (10). These symptomatic readings  perform a structure of “affirming the affirmation…of utopia,”[viii] and in doing so, they bypass the question of how these very terms—freedom, equality, interracial intimacy, solidarity, democracy—scaffold the illusions of political promise without interrogating the grammar of the political itself or the radical site of difference in which black aesthetics has been constituted. In this sense, Zamalin’s discussion throughout the book of the sight of black cultural production as an interventional force relies on utopia as a primary conceptual device to marshal the explanatory power of black inequality in the history of politics and the societal makeup of anti-blackness. Utopia is a placeholder; conceptually, as Zamalin figures it, it functions to suspend the struggle that calls it forth as a space.

    Zamalin traces the utopic characteristics of the “black radical imagination”—a concept he positions in conversation with major African American scholars, notably Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Cedric Robinson, author of Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition—through a selection of African American texts. While he acknowledges in his footnotes the contributions made by scholars such as Kelley and Robinson to the history of black radicalism, he ultimately claims that his exploration departs from this history, in which Kelley and Robinson “consider the links between class and race.” Instead, Black Utopia intends to focus on a “vision of utopia within black communities” that is “left open-ended and not specified” in the vein of Marx (148). Following this view, Zamalin’s “utopia in black” might be better understood as appropriating utopia with and within representations of blackness and as pursuing a selective reading of German idealism and French philosophy. This gesture contains a contradiction that undergirds Zamalin’s desire for visions of black utopic thought “on its own terms” that could also be productive for Western political thought. While for Zamalin the ostensibly utopic (and dystopic) ruptures signal a teleology for theorizing the political, black political thinkers and black feminists have long asked about the very viability of a teleological turn which, in turn, has reflected on the conditions and terms that a black radical tradition may signify.[ix]

    Let us turn to his reading of Martin Robison Delany, which commences the book. For Zamalin, Delany, an African American abolitionist and emigrationist, is emblematic of “[extending] to black citizens a vision missing from the nineteenth-century utopian communitarian energy being spread throughout the United States” (21). Accordingly, Zamalin writes about Delany: “his work imagined what history couldn’t: black liberation on black terms” allowing for “Black escape to a new world was the first idea of black utopia” (21). Centralizing Delany’s fictional work, Blake; or the Huts of America (1859), rather than his previous substantive work, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852), Zamalin takes great interest in the ways in which Delany offers “a story” about race, interracial intimacy, black citizenship, and sovereignty at the height of the long nineteenth century. With Delany’s fiction, “race became a story that required a beginning, middle, and end” (31). While, as Zamalin makes clear, the often contradictory views on race and politics staged by Delany set up an uneven gender politics, Zamalin distinguishes Delany as “nonetheless [providing] the very architecture for how to articulate a radical black imagination beyond the possible and to defend black utopia” (33). Even across contradictions, Zamalin maintains that Delany’s politics were utopic, turning “blackness into a force for resistance against arbitrary power” (25). As Zamalin writes, “Delany found equality, dignity, and freedom in black lives. He said no to white supremacy, exposed the drama of political contingency, and told of power’s vulnerability. This was the vision Delany modeled to inspire resistance to reach black utopia abroad. But it wasn’t extended to a defense of gender equality, popular rule, and economic freedom” (33). The utopic imperative here rests on the disavowal of a racialized gendered politics in several aspects: escape (into an imagined and pure homeland), what Zamalin describes as sovereign mind, and interracial desire—all read through the genre of fiction or story. These aspects are not fully interrogated yet are industrialized under and for the banner of utopia and this raises the question: can or is a politics, (or aesthetics) of utopia be compromised in relation to other registers of difference? This question returns us implicitly to our previous one: who is this fantasy for and who is authorizing this fantasy? If the above  are the objects of politics—escape to a pure homeland of Africa, sovereignty, interracial intimacy—why have these dimensions been legislated as prohibitions in the first instance and cast off as forbidden pleasures of freedom? This question echoes the problem of the relation between law and the renunciation of black desire theorized by David Marriott: “It is because [blackness] is deprived of being and forced to renounce desire that the black experiences the whiteness of the law in terms of what both allows and commands his rebellious servility.”[x] The inextricable relation between the whiteness of law and the renunciation of black desire that Marriott identifies raises questions about how to consider black self-governance in a utopia that has yet to come.  For Zamalin, the illusion of utopia that has yet to arrive requires politics to have a narrative arc that assumes racial self-governance as its vitalization or at the very least a form of agency. That said, a story of race that requires a teleology and an order to politics underscores precisely how black agency and desire are veiled and subordinated by the whiteness of law and its vision of race. Put otherwise, the story of race—the one “with a beginning, middle, and end”— reproduces the prohibition of black desire that Zamalin believes to be unveiled through utopia. The separation of issues of gender and sexuality from race, and the idea that they can be compromised in and for a utopic vision underscores the negation of black desire in this schema.

    In my reading of Zamalin, interracial relationships return as an object of politics and thus are the consolation of a pure politics of desire and a pure desire of politics—a perverse representation of how desire has been desexualized and deracialized in its articulation.[xi] In the third chapter, “W.E.B. Du Bois’s World of Utopian Intimacy,” Zamalin pursues the idea of interracial relationships further in his idea of a harmonious society of relationships. Following an attempt to recuperate a black feminist politics in the previous chapter, Zamalin finds promise in the respective visions of “an unknown postracist community” in Du Bois’s “The Comet,” Darkwater, and Dark Princess (53). According to Zamalin, Du Bois’s depictions of a postracist society stem from his ability to reverse practices such as dominant forms of knowledge production, namely that which finds value in scientific notions of racial hierarchy. However, Zamalin does not consider here the ways in which Du Bois explicitly questions race as a teleological concept in the making of the modern subject. In construing Du Bois’s own narrativization as a “postracist ethics,” Zamalin misses the nuance of Du Bois’s reformulation of narrative, which, as Nahum Chandler argues, provides a necessary and critical “desedimentation” of a “privileged orientation toward the very texts and historiographical subjects that are themselves the products of social hegemony.”[xii]  Instead, Zamalin finds a “postracist ethics” in Du Bois’s fictionalization of another world wherein there is a future of possibility outside of normative constructions that deem interracial intimacy as socially and morally objectionable. After attempting to translate Du Bois to critics who characterized his work as racial essentialism, Zamalin peculiarly endeavors to advance his claims of a “postracist ethics” by describing Du Bois’s approach to “[dismantling] knowledge based on utopian scientific rationality, that everything could be measured, known, tested, fully understood.” He writes about Du Bois: “Values instead came from the failure to fully recognize social meaning and, instead, a sensitivity to human expressiveness—the different gestures, tones of voice, and textures of speech—that provides cues for responding to an engaging with the person who appears before them” (53). Zamalin’s project of finding value in human expressiveness rather than questioning the signs of race that culture and politics prescribe, sets up in Du Bois’s work a utopian intimacy wherein “the suffering, pain, violence, and marginalization associated with ‘darkness’ are as apparent as the light—the reflection of beauty and resilience in the ocean of a reimagined blackness” (61, emphasis added). And yet, within this reflection, Zamalin cannot see how he mirrors a necessary reimagining of race that reinscribes the very problem at the heart of Du Bois’s work, the “problem of the color-line,” organized “around an axis of denial… with regard to the ensemble of practices and concept-metaphors organized around the sign of race.”[xiii] Chandler stresses this in his rigorous theoretical and archival account of Du Bois’s oeuvre, that “from the turn to the twentieth century Du Bois had already offered a narrativization of the formation of a new organization of hierarchy, a new global order, as ‘the problem’ of that century.”[xiv] The distinction between the concept of race and what organizes that concept is critical to understanding the remaining problem of the color-line.

    For the achievement of utopian intimacy and postracial ethics then, one must shed both sexuality and race from the very nature of difference—an onto-political rupture in and of itself. To be clear, this exfoliation engenders a postracial politics premised on barring the intermingling of sexuality and race. Zamalin’s suspension of the ontological via this separation allows for the reimagining not only of a harmonious society but of blackness as something other than one’s own being. Zamalin does not explore these ontological distinctions, or the debates raised within Black Studies about the status of blackness and being. Rather, he moves away from the problematization of what constitutes racial distinction at a crucial point in his argument in order to imagine the parameters of a new ethics. In this move, he elides the issues of deracination and the tendency of blackness to be exploited by politics and the political. And while Zamalin’s objectives may not concern the current debates around ontology and blackness, Black Utopia’s endeavors to conceptualize the current status and state of the field of black political thought would benefit from these discussions that emphasize that blackness can neither be reduced to identity nor politics. That is to say, these critical discussions signal that blackness is more than identity and politics and elicits an inhabitation for political thought in its multiplicity and without term.[xv]

    In Black Utopia, the most utopic form of intimacy is imagined to coalesce around an antagonism between race and sexuality rather than to seek out the incommensurable conflict between anti-blackness and civil society, which projects a necessary segregation between differences (of race, gender, and sexuality). Zamalin reimagines blackness in the light of the “darkness,” failing to see the violence that accompanies segregating a miscegenation of desire. In doing so, he unwittingly allows for the disposability of blackness itself, along with the queering of gender and sexuality, and stages (white) desire in an even more particular (hetero)normative way. Utopic intimacy performs a transgression against the myth of interracial desire: it makes representable the becoming and intermingling of race and sexuality, but only in principle by emptying the radical difference of blackness and sexuality from their uncertainty rather than by addressing their existing entwinement in identity, culture, and society.  As Jared Sexton writes, “racism is not an obstacle to interracial intimacy but its condition of possibility.”[xvi] Following Sexton’s argument, we can then also assume that the post- in postracial inhabits a curious and cruel arrangement of temporality and historicity wherein utopia must necessarily bracket blackness as something other than being. Utopia is therefore forced to follow an identity politics of multiracialism, imprisoning itself within the language and signs produced synonymously with a utopic politics.

    It is not surprising that Zamalin cannot see this dialectical imprisonment between blackness and the signs of culture in his reading of Richard Wright’s formidable work, Black Power. In this chapter, Zamalin makes utopia interchangeable with dystopia while leveraging the utopic/dystopic as a way of reading the possibilities for black social and political life. The irony to this approach is strikingly clear in his misuse of the word “unconscious” to describe Wright’s engagement with Ghanaian citizens, culture, and political life during his visit to Africa. Zamalin writes, “Wright lost sight of the way Black Power was itself an unconscious catalogue. It was something of a waking daydream, of how to accomplish this differently in a way that created a postcolonial society unmoored from the political theory of Western colonialism” (83, emphasis added). He goes on: “Dreams, for (Wright), were the apolitical ream of fantasy, immaturity, and unconscious desire. Reality, in contrast, was that of strategy, rule and government. But this very opposition was betrayed by Wright’s unconscious investment in psychoanalysis” (84, emphasis added). Throughout the chapter, Zamalin positions Wright as if without the self-awareness to realize his “American” views eclipsed the ways in which traditional political art was celebrated in the Gold Coast’s revolutionary movement for independence. As a result, Zamalin argues that Wright “mistakenly denigrat[ed] the nonrational elements of traditional culture” and therefore “couldn’t appreciate the way its symbolism contained a philosophy that challenged the orthodoxy of Western systems that promoted inequality” (92). Ultimately, this is what leads Wright, according to Zamalin, to develop his anti-utopian critique in Black Power. But who is performing their unconscious? Could it be that the unconscious cataloguing that Zamalin reads in Wright’s own meditation—which one might also call a conscious study of the way in which censorship, political desire, and blackness intersect—is his own racial anxiety and guilt for a more African black than a black African American? Could this be why Zamalin finds that Wright cannot supposedly see the utopic transcendence in traditional Ghanaian song and dance? Is it this idea of blackness that Zamalin refers to in the introduction when he writes utopia in black?

    Nearly twenty years before Zamalin’s reflections on Wright’s Black Power, David Marriott wrote about the importance of Wright’s meditations on the Gold Coast in his path-breaking book, On Black Men, a reference that is surprisingly absent given Zamalin’s assessment that Black Power has been left more or less unexplored.[xvii] Marriott’s elaborations on Wright’s Black Power are, in fact, short, but serve as a compelling and incisive provocation to questions of political thought, dreams, and blackness, implicitly returning us to the function of the unconscious in the projection of utopia or hope. Marriott begins with a scene in which Wright reflects on a projection of blackness that is always already thrown in an alienating crisis of one’s identity and psychic life in public: the cinema. Explaining a scene in which Wright attends a movie house in northwestern Africa, Marriott writes:

    … for Wright the spectacle of African spectators reacting to cinematic images, advertisements and stories throws him into disarray. It is as if Africans are not credulous enough, unable to surrender to the fascination of dream and illusion which cinema (and storytelling) represents. They cannot dream because they cannot project themselves into that trance of relinquishment which true dreaming and true spectatorship warrant. In fact, throughout Black Power, Africa and Africans remain, for Wright, an underdeveloped film negative, a censored dream: ‘Though the African’s whole life was a kind of religious dream, the African scorned the word ‘dream’…. The African takes his religion, which is really a waking dream, for reality, and all other dreams are barred, are taboo.’[xviii]

    Marriott importantly highlights Wright’s critical investment and investigation into the world of collective fantasy and takes seriously Wright’s own question about what it means to have one’s (black) dreams barred. In contrast to Zamalin, who perceives Wright to be writing as if in “a waking daydream” (83), Marriott points to how signs of culture produce substitutive images as “waking dreams for reality” for one’s black existence.[xix] The difference is crucial: Zamalin portrays white fantasies of how blacks dream, whereas Marriott  underscores Wright’s ongoing observation about how dreams are necessarily always already blackened out of existence—leaving one’s unconscious “to live with hatred as our most intimate possession [to become], then, the truly difficult task of our dreams.”[xx] While Zamalin disavows the projection of his own desires for identification leaving unquestioned how such identifications are not separate from, and in fact work with, the fantasies of culture to typecast how blackness should be, Marriott addresses the relations of  culture, image, fantasy, and projection (as it were) structurally untenable. Ultimately, these are the structural political and ethical questions that go unattended in Black Utopia.

    Zamalin’s explicit engagements with the notion of Afrofuturism in the remainder of the book do little other than reproduce a teleological narrative of redemption upon which Black Utopia relies heavily. Although Zamalin makes efforts to move away from this point—for example, on Samuel Delany he writes that “the science fiction writer brings into a relief a future that is not driven by the demands of the present, but explodes its commons sense” (112)—an  Afrofuturistic utopia remains an eschatological concept, a final destination for black liberation. Zamalin finds this emancipatory politics in the utopic/dystopic depiction of social transformation in the works of Sun Ra, Samuel Delaney, and Octavia Butler. Afrofuturism in these works is linked with postracialism, destabilizing gender binaries, and “taking seriously radical hope in the face of the unknown without messianic deliverance” (140).[xxi] Throughout the book, utopia has been the end point of a destination that has yet to be reached and the future, a vision “from which to rethink the present” (108). In the futures imagined by Ra, Delany, and Butler, “subjecting power to immanent critique would forget a society in which freedom became more of a reality for most. And it would create a world where what seemed fixed became overturned” (113). Here, Zamalin alludes to the structural inequalities coextensive with settler-colonialism, housing crises, as well as trans-, gender, and racial violence addressed by the authors. But assuredly for Zamalin, “Black utopian and antiutopian work chastens contemporary American faith in postracialism—that good intentions and better laws could solve the problem of racism, as if it can be remedied through better civic education or harsher penalties for bad deeds” (140). This faith in postracialism or a postracial moment can only be further secured by “better” law, though there is little reference to the profane system of belief and commandment that composes America’s existing juridical order and cannot be separated from anti-blackness. It is the moralistic undertone and the peculiar (and perverse) pairing of political reform and black futurity with which Black Utopia ends that may leave some readers dissatisfied with the book’s promise to provide serious engagement with black political thought. But if this is the case, it is not because something like Afrofuturism or current questions of black futurity do not engage with the political. Rather, it is because Black Utopia oddly partitions off a vast constellation of black political thought that engages with such questions in its intellectual history and in the very present. In her own brilliant explorations of Sun Ra and Octavia Butler’s work, Kara Keeling elucidates the difficult formulation and double bind from which these works labor to imagine a world outside of the preconditions of anti-blackness. Keeling writes on Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place:

    Sun Ra’s solution in Space Is the Place to the violence and humiliation of US race relations is to give Black folks a world they can own. Sun Ra seems unconcerned about the specter of African American and Black complicity in a settler colonial project when he advocates for a spatio-temporal rupture in Black consciousness sparked by his musical vibrations and profound enough to transport Black people to another planet. Afrofuturist narratives that advocate for colonizing another planet raise (and less often consider, and/or offer, speculative strategies and solutions to) the ethico-political issues that have attended anti-Black settler colonial societies.[xxii]

    Keeling’s attention to how black world-making opposes the act of (white heteronormative) reproduction can be extended to include its opposition to the specters of anti-blackness that qualify an understanding of the ethical and political conditions that structure the modern world. It is worth concluding that hope for a black future is never simply utopic nor dystopic. An aesthetic of black futurity, of what has yet to be from the world as one knows it, cannot be retrieved simply by way of revolutionary instruction. It is in this way that blackness (re-)invents thought, which, in spite of its uncertainty, its contested meaning, or non-meaning, is political. To conclude with Keeling then: “From within the logics of existing possible worlds and the range of possible trajectories into the future that they currently make perceptible, a Black future looks like no future at all.”[xxiii] Otherwise put, the end is not the beginning.

     

    Linette Park is the Thurgood Marshall Postdoctoral Fellow in the African and African American Studies Program at Dartmouth College. She is currently preparing her first book monograph, At the Edge of Abolition: Violence and Imagination in the History of California Lynch Law, which examines the present day “lynching arrests” by interrogating the historical, political, and psychosocial formations of violence that inextricably bind these arrests to the afterlife of racial slavery, lynching, and segregation in the United States. She has published in Theory and Event, Haunt: Journal of Art, and has forthcoming work in the peer-reviewed journals: Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, and Political Theology.

     

    [i] See Saidiya Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought.” Qui Parle, vol. 13, no. 2, Spring/ Summer 2003, pp. 183-201.

    [ii] At the time of writing this, Black Studies celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. The first Black Studies program was established at San Francisco State University in 1970 due to the relentless labor of students who went on strike and fought for the program and for the formation of Ethnic Studies (1968). This historical fact is important because the set of literary and historical references in the study of hope and utopia (and the study of that study) in Black Utopia is somewhat peculiar and problematic given that utopia has been an object of extensive exploration and critique in Black Studies. See forthcoming special issues in the journals on the fiftieth anniversary of Black Studies, “Inheriting Black Studies” with Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society and “What Was Black Studies?” in Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research (2020).

    [iii] Most notably, perhaps, Frantz Fanon has written on the notion of invention in Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Charles Lam Markmann, London, Pluto Press, 1952. The notion of “invention” has also been powerfully taken up in contemporary scholarship by David Marriott in his book, Whither Fanon?: Studies in the Blackness of Being, Stanford University Press, 2018. I take up the notion of disinheritance and anti-blackness as a structural condition of political life in “Whence Disinheritance Holds: On Ida B. Wells and America’s ‘Unwritten Law,” Souls, forthcoming, 2020.

    [iv] See Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, translated by David Macey, Polity, 1991.

    [v] For a compelling critique on the politics of hope, humanism, and the political in relation to blackness, see Calvin Warren’s “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 15, no. 1, Spring 2015, pp. 215-248.

    [vi] Frank Wilderson, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Duke University Press, 2010, p. 57.

    [vii] For example, he writes: “Utopia in black became much more critical and infused by a sense of tragedy. It became defined by unfinished conversations, unresolved debates, critical problematics which resisted easy resolution.” He writes immediately thereafter: “In black utopia, a sense of committed struggle in the face of the unknown was coupled with a realistic sense of subversion and collapse” (12).

    [viii] See David Marriott’s critique of José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, “Black Cultural Studies.” This Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, vol. 19, 2011.

    [ix] There are several thinkers on this topic that are explored chiefly in the works of Afro-pessimism. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Losing Manhood: Animality and Plasticity in the (Neo)Slave Narrative.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 25, no. 1-2, 1 Dec. 2016, pp. 95-136; Jared Sexton, “People-of-Color Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery.” Social Text, vol. 28, no. 2, summer 2010; Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016; Frank Wilderson. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonism; and Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/ Power/ Truth/ Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003), pp. 257-337. David Scott directly contends with the question of the political and a black radical tradition. He writes: “Similarly, radical is an idea no less complex, no less ambiguous (“radical” as opposed to what?), if also no less important to the story of the modern black subject. But in the constrained aftermaths of the various black nationalisms, black Marxism, the Cold War, and so on, what idea of politics does radical signify or organize? It is not easy to say with any certainty. And finally, what idea of a “tradition” does the idea of a black radical tradition depend upon? Tradition is a term with a complex and contested genealogy. Indeed, some would argue that the tradition does not belong in the same semantic universe as radical, appearing as it does to be the very reverse of subversion or transgression. What relation between past, present, and future does a tradition comprehend?… And yet, curiously, however contested, there seems a persisting demand for some notion of a tradition that is black and radical (implicit or explicit, marginal or central) in organizing the strategies of criticism within the discursive area of black intellectual life, some stubborn grain against which to position our dissent, a recognition perhaps that even in our attempts to disengage from the claims of tradition we are nevertheless oriented by it” (2). See David Scott, “On the Very Idea of a Black Radical Tradition.” Small Axe, vol. 17, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1-6.

    [x] David Marriott, Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity. Rutgers University Press, 2007, p. 102.

    [xi] See Jared Sexton. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiculturalism. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

    [xii] Nahum Chandler. X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought. Fordham University Press, 2014, p. 137.

    [xiii] Chandler, p. 73.

    [xiv] Chandler, p. 133.

    [xv] See Jared Sexton. “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism.” InTensions Journal, Issue 5, Fall/ Winter 2011, pp. 1-47.

    [xvi] Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes, p. 175.

    [xvii] On this note, it is also worth exploring Dorothy Stringer’s essay, “Psychology and Black Liberation in Richard Wright’s Black Power (1953),” which explains Wright’s attention to the quotidian violence and economic control of post-colonial rule. Stringer also offers an eloquent assessment on Wright’s use of classical psychoanalytic concepts while also departing from Freudian thought to revise his own notion of black identity. Dorothy Stringer, “Psychology and Black Liberation in Richard Wright’s Black Power (1954).” Journal of Modern Literature. vol. 32, no. 4, Summer 2009, pp. 105-124.

    [xviii] David Marriott, On Black Men. Columbia University Press, 2000. p. x.

    [xix] Marriott, On Black Men, p. xiii.

    [xx] Marriott, On Black Men, p. xv.

    [xxi] In contradistinction to Zamalin’s use of the messianic here, Marriott, following Fanon, incisively points out that  any liberatory possibility of the future is one that is “radically unwriteable” and that “the revolution, insofar as it always timely in its untimeliness and not just the teleological outcome of what went before, brings neither redemption, nor erasure, but the messianic promise of a new écriture.” See Whither Fanon? p. 25. With this, one could argue that a transformation in the way in which one imagines a black future (or Afrofuturism) is political not because a postracial moment that has yet to arrive delivers a reconciliation with the profound injuries of anti-black racism, but because such a transformation of and from the future presents a “historical awareness of the present as necessarily self-interrupting” unto one’s black being as a radical difference (29).

    [xxii] Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures. New York University Press, 2018, p. 67.

    [xxiii] Keeling, p. 67.

  • Étienne Balibar — Politics and Science: One Vocation or Two?

    Étienne Balibar — Politics and Science: One Vocation or Two?

    by Étienne Balibar

    ~

    One might find it alarming (as I do) that the Ministers of Education and Higher Education, encouraged from the top, have dug out of the ideological gutter an epithet with sinister resonances to justify a purge of French Academia.

    One might be worried (as I am) by the speed at which publicly-funded independent research is being dismantled, both through financial austerity and the widespread use of targeted and monitored funding.

    One might feel disheartened (as I do), to see self-proclaimed spokespersons for the “excellence of French research” seeking to prevent our students from taking part in major international currents of innovation and critical thinking, deemed incompatible with our republican values, and thereby isolating us in a chauvinistic provincialism.

    One can, even while defending, as I do, the legitimacy of the study of race, gender, class, postcolonial studies and all of their intersections, be aware of, and denounce simplistic and historically unfounded arguments and sectarian censorship that exist on the margins of academia.

    And one can be disappointed (as I am) to see historians and social scientists who, after contributing landmark studies to the critique of inequality and forms of social or national exclusion, have joined, with bitterness, the camp of intellectual conservatism and corporatism.

    But these feelings don’t address the epistemological question at the heart of the matter. In the domain of the said human and social sciences, what is the relationship between the necessity of taking a stand and that of knowledge for knowledge’s sake (the only form of knowledge that indeed merits the name)? We are brought back to the question posed by Max Weber in his 1919 lectures: what is the “vocation” of science? How is it different from the “vocation” of politics?[1] It seems that the solution that he proposed at the time—that of “axiological neutrality,” the separation of ethics into two dimensions, “conviction” and “responsibility”—turned out to be impracticable.

    I see four reasons for this, and they form something like a unity of opposites, through which we must trace our path without sacrificing our exigence.

    First, universities and research centers can no longer afford to speak only to themselves. More than in the past, they must open their doors and their ears to the rest of society, or even better, to the polity. No one is contesting that it is essential to produce and transmit verified and verifiable knowledge and to practice rational argument. All of this takes place in the classroom. But the object of study, that which we try to make intelligible, can only be found outside of the classroom and it is unavoidably conflictual, because we do not live, nor will we live anytime soon, in a peaceful society. In order for us to grasp and understand this conflict, it cannot simply be studied and investigated from afar. It must enter into our spaces of learning and knowledge through the presence of its real actors, unless researchers venture out to find them (for example in a “jungle” or in a “neighborhood”).[2] As Foucault might have put it, we must bring the teachers, students, and researchers out and let the protesters, with or without gilets, and the activists or active citizens in. They must be given a chance to speak in the same places that have, until now, been reserved for magisterial discourse. However difficult it may be, we owe it to ourselves to experiment with ways of doing this.

    With conflict comes ideology. This is obvious. The problem lies in the fact that ideology does not just come from outside, it is always already there in more or less dominant forms. To state that the foundation of economic knowledge is the rational anticipation of market actors; that sociological knowledge is the constant interplay of methodological individualism and organic solidarity; that psychology and pedagogy share the adaptation of subjects as their common object of study; or that the trajectory of historical modernity tends to the secularization of religion, is not simply to state, it is to take an ideological standpoint, indissociable from relationships of power. Obviously, there are alternative positions to those outlined here, more or less visible depending on the period. An institution dedicated to learning that is alive, one that is capable of making space for the unknown, must pursue as its main goal the systematic questioning, including in national boards of evaluation, of every “incontestable” paradigm, to make sure that it becomes a subject of discussion. Let us not forget the disastrous episode that saw the elimination of the “Economics and Society” section within the CNU (National Council of Universities), and the price we’re paying for it now in the midst of the crisis.[3]

    But the conflict between what Canguilhem called “scientific ideologies” and what Althusser named the “philosophies of scientists” may not be the heart of the problem. One could again be led to think that the conflict only resides in the object, in the intrusion of the personal interests and commitments of the practitioners of knowledge, but not in the concept, which is the real heart of knowledge. Yet, nothing is less accurate. Knowledge does not come to a concept by avoiding conflict. On the contrary, it does so by intensifying conflict around big ontological alternatives, forcing us to choose between irreconcilable understandings of the nature of things or beings. The history of truth is not to be found in synthesis, even if it is provisional, but in the polemical ascent towards the points of heresy of a theory. This is evident in many fields, from the humanities to economics and environmental science, and perhaps even beyond ­– in biology, for instance, with the theory of evolution.

    Lastly, and more deeply, we cannot forget that knowledge does not exist without subject(s). This is not a shortcoming of scientific inquiry but its very condition of possibility, at least in any science that has an anthropological dimension, and perhaps in others too. In order to know we must venture as subjects into the field in which we are already “situated”, with all the baggage of “characters” (as Kant would call them), that make us “what we are” (through processes of historical and social construction, of course). There is no “transcendental subject” of scientific knowledge. Or better still, we must venture towards that point of identity “trouble” where every subject resides, with more or less difficulty, with/in their “difference”, whether it be masculinity, femininity, or another “gender” ; blackness, whiteness or another “color”; intellectual ability or inability, or “religious” belief or disbelief, in order to make that very point the analytical lens through which we read the social forces that imprison, exclude, and direct us. For even if no one can freely choose their place in society, by virtue of the power relationships that construct and traverse it, no place is assigned once and for all. The goal, then, is to turn our lived and recognized anthropological difference in all its uncertainty into the instrument with which we dissect our collective body politic, and to make the analysis of the mechanisms that produce and reproduce it, the means of countering its normative effects. This is perhaps not the royal road of scientific inquiry, but it is certainly a necessary step. I think here of what Sandra Harding called “strong objectivity” that includes knowledge of one’s own position as subject, and of how badly positivisms tend to miss the point.

    The road ahead of us is very difficult. I have been a professor in an era which we could in retrospect describe as “golden”. Conflicts could be violent at times, but the cold-war era bans and institutional prohibitions were behind us. The “value of science” was rarely contested. May 68 and its desire to shake the foundation of academicism and take down barriers left widespread disappointment in its wake, but also a fervor and furor that have nourished a large number of “programs” in which the young scholars of today, half of whom are living from one short-term contract to the next, were trained. We realize now that our ruling class is no longer a bourgeoisie in the historical sense of the word. It does not have a project of intellectual hegemony nor an artistic point of honor. It needs (or so it thinks) only cost-benefit analyses, “cognitive” educational programs, and committees of experts. That is why, with the help of the pandemic and the internet revolution, the same ruling class is preparing the demise of the social sciences, humanities and even the theoretical sciences. To accelerate the process, why not have the victim become the culprit (“Islamo-leftism”, “activism”, “ideology”…)? It will make things easier.

    As citizens and intellectuals we must oppose with all our strength this destruction of the tools of knowledge and culture. But our success is conditional on our awakening to the revolutions that the academy needs, and on discussing them among ourselves without being too reticent or holding back our opinions.

    Translated from the French by Tommaso Manfredini. b2o would like to thank Étienne Balibar and Libération for permission to publish this translation. We would also like to thank Madeleine Dobie for her help in arranging the translation.

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    Étienne Balibar is Professor Emeritus of Moral and Political Philosophy at Université de Paris X–Nanterre; Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine; and Visiting Professor of French at Columbia University. His many books include Citizen Subject (Fordham, 2016); Equaliberty (Duke, 2014); We, the People of Europe? (Princeton, 2003); The Philosophy of Marx (Verso, new ed. 2017); and two important coauthored books, Race, Nation, Class (with Immanuel Wallerstein, Verso, 1988) and Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser and others, Verso, new ed. 2016).

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    Notes

    A version of this article appeared on March 9 2021 in the French newspaper Libération under the title: “Le conflit fait partie des lieux de savoir.” It is a contribution to the debate that followed the announcement made by Frédérique Vidal, French Minister of Higher Education, on February 16 2021 to the National Assembly, to signal the launch of an official investigation of the presence of research programs inspired by “Islamo-leftism” in French universities. Even though the statement was immediately rejected by the CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research, France’s – and Europe’s – largest research body) and, among others, by a group of 200 researchers affiliated with American institutions who, in an editorial published in the newspaper Le Monde on March 4 2021, pointed out the chilling echo of “Judeo-bolshevism” in the Minister’s words, neither the French Government nor the President have officially condemned the use of the phrase. One may thus suspect that they approved it.

    [1] Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf” (1917) and “Politik als Beruf” (1919).

    [2] The original French words, “jungle” and “quartier” respectively, have social and political meanings in addition to their seemingly plain ethnographic sense. “Jungle” refers to the camps that regularly spring up – and are periodically dismantled by the French police – in various places around Calais, and in which find shelter and sometimes humanitarian assistance persons who are trying to cross the Channel without papers. Similarly, “quartier” also defines are the poorest neighborhoods in the banlieues of Paris and other great cities where the majority of the young generations, often of African and North-African origin, and heavily unemployed, are concentrated [Translator’s note].

    [3] In 2015, the CNU (National Board of Evaluation of Qualifications for Positions in Higher Education) was considering the creation of a special section called ‘Economy and Society’, which would create a space in Universities for economists working outside the ‘mainstream’ neo-classical school. It was abruptly cancelled, through the direct intervention of the Government, after intense lobbying from the establishment, especially from Jean Tirole, ‘Nobel’ Prize in Economics in 2014.

  • Richard Hill — Multistakeholder Internet Governance Still Doesn’t Live Up to Its PR (Review of Palladino and Santaniello, Legitimacy, Power, and Inequalities in the Multistakeholder Internet Governance)

    Richard Hill — Multistakeholder Internet Governance Still Doesn’t Live Up to Its PR (Review of Palladino and Santaniello, Legitimacy, Power, and Inequalities in the Multistakeholder Internet Governance)

    a review of Nicola Palladino and Mauro Santaniello, Legitimacy, Power, and Inequalities in the Multistakeholder Internet Governance: Analyzing IANA Transition (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)

    by Richard Hill

    ~

    While multistakeholder processes have long existed (see the Annex of this submission to an ITU group), they have recently been promoted as a better alternative to traditional governance mechanisms, in particular at the international level; and Internet governance has been put forward as an example of how multistakeholder processes work well, and better than traditional governmental processes. Thus it is very appropriate that a detailed analysis be made of a recent, highly visible, allegedly multistakeholder process: the process by which the US government relinquished its formal control over the administration of Internet names and address. That process was labelled the “IANA transition.”

    The authors are researchers at, respectively, the School of law and Governance, Dublin City University; and the Internet & Communication Policy Center, Department of Political and Social Studies, University of Salerno, Italy. They have taken part in several national and international research projects on Internet Governance, Internet Policy and Digital Constitutionalism processes. They have methodically examined various aspects of the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) transition, and collected and analysed an impressive body of data regarding who actually participated in, and influenced, the transition process. Their research confirms what others have stated, namely that the process was dominated by insiders with vested interests, that the outcome did not resolve long-standing political issues, and that the process cannot by any means be seen as an example of an ideal multistakeholder process, and this despite claims to the contrary by the architects of the IANA transition.

    As the authors put the matter: “For those who believe that the IANA is a business concerning exclusively or primarily ICANN [Internet Corporations for Assigned Names and Numbers], the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force], the NRO [Numbering Resource Organization], and their respective communities, the IANA transition process could be considered inclusive and fair enough, and its outcome effectively transferring the stewardship over IANA functions to the global stakeholder’s community of reference. For those who believe that the IANA stakeholders extend far beyond the organizations mentioned above, the assessment can only have a negative result” (146). Because “in the end, rather than transferring the stewardship of IANA functions to a new multistakeholder body that controls the IANA operator (ICANN), the transition process allowed the ICANN multistakeholder community to perform the oversight role that once belonged to the NTIA [the US government]” (146). Indeed “in the end, the novel governance arrangements strengthened the position of the registries and the technical community” (148). And the US government could still exercise ultimate control, because “ICANN, the PTI [Post-Transition IANA], and most of the root server organizations remain on US territory, and therefore under US jurisdiction” (149).

    That is, the transition failed to address the key political issue: “the IANA functions are at the heart of the DNS [Domain Name System] and the Internet as we know it. Thus, their governance and performance affect a vast range of actors [other than the technical and business communities involved in the operation of the DNS] that should be considered legitimate stakeholders” (147). Instead, it was one more example of “the rhetorical use of the multistakeholder discourse. In particular, … through a neoliberal discourse, the key organizations already involved in the DNS regime were able to use the ambiguity of the concept of a ‘global multistakeholder community’ as a strategic power resource.” Thus failing fully to ensure that discussions “take place through an open process with the participation of all stakeholders extending beyond the ICANN community.” While the call for participation in the process was formally open “its addressees were already identified as specific organizations. It is worth noting that these organizations did not involve external actors in the set-up phase. Rather, they only allowed other interested parties to take part in the discussion according to their rules and with minor participatory rights [speaking, but non-voting, observers]” (148).

    Thus, the authors’ “analysis suggests that the transition did not result in, nor did it lead to, a higher form of multistakeholderism filling the gap between reality and the ideal-type of what multistakeholderism ought to be, according to normative standards of legitimacy. Nor was it able to fix the well-known limitations in inclusiveness, fairness of the decision-making process, and accountability of the entire DNS regime. … Instead, the transition seems to have solidified previous dominant positions and ratified the ownership of an essential public function by a private corporation, led by interwoven economic and technical interests” (149). In particular, “the transition process showed the irrelevance of civil society, little and badly represented in the stakeholder structure before and after the transition” (150). And “multistakeholderism [in this case] seems to have resulted in misleading rhetoric legitimizing power asymmetries embedded within the institutional design of DNS management, rather than in a new governance model capable of ensuring the meaningful participation of all the interested parties.”

    In summary, the IANA transition is one more example of the failure of multistakeholder processes to achieve their desired goal. As the authors correctly note: “Initiatives supposed to be multistakeholder have often been criticized for not complying with their premises, resulting in ‘de-politicization mechanisms that limit political expression and struggle’” (153). Indeed, “While multistakeholderism is used as a rhetoric to solidify and legitimize power positions within some policy-making arena, without any mechanisms giving up power to weaker stakeholders and without making concrete efforts to include different discourses, it will continue to produce ambiguous compromises without decisions, or make decisions affected by a poor degree of pluralism” (153). As others have stated, “‘multistakeholderism reinforces existing power dynamics that have been ‘baked in’ to the model from the beginning. It privileges north-western governments, particularly the US, as well as the US private sector.’ Similarly, … multistakeholderism [can be defined] as a discursive tool employed to create consensus around the hegemony of a power élite” (12). As the authors starkly put the matter, “multistakeholder discourse could result in misleading rhetoric that solidifies power asymmetries and masks domination, manipulation, and hegemonic practices” (26). In particular because “election and engagement procedures often tend to favor an already like-minded set of collective and individual actors even if they belong to different stakeholder categories” (30).

    The above conclusions are supported by detailed, well referenced, descriptions and analyses. Chapters One and Two explain the basic context of the IANA transition, Internet governance and their relation to multistakeholder processes. Chapter One “points out how multistakeholderism is a fuzzy concept that has led to ambiguous practices and disappointing results. Further, it highlights the discursive and legitimizing nature of multistakeholderism, which can serve both as a performing narrative capable of democratizing the Internet governance domain, as well as a misleading rhetoric solidifying the dominant position of the most powerful actors in different Internet policy-making arenas” (1). It traces the history of multistakeholder governance in the Internet context, which started in 2003 (however, a broader historical context would have been useful, see the Annex of this submission to an ITU group). It discusses the conflict between developed and developing countries regarding the management and administration of domain names and addresses that dominated the discussions at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) (Mueller’s Networks and States gives a more detailed account, explaining how development issues – which were supposed to be the focus of the WSIS – got pushed aside, thus resulting in the focus on Internet governance). As the authors correctly state, “the outcomes of the WSIS left the tensions surrounding Internet governance unresolved, giving rise to contestation in subsequent years and to the cyclical recurrence of political conflicts challenging the consensus around the multistakeholder model” (5). The IANA transition was seen as a way of resolving these tensions, but it relied “on the conflation of the multistakeholder approach with the privatization of Internet governance” (8).

    As the authors posit (citing well-know scholar Hoffmann, “multistakeholderism is a narrative based on three main promises: the promise of achieving global representation on an issue putting together all the affected parties; the promise of overcoming the traditional democratic deficit at the transnational level, ‘establishing communities of interest as a digitally enabled equivalent to territorial constituencies’; and the promise of higher and enforced outcomes since incorporating global views on the matter through a consensual approach should ensure more complete solutions and their smooth implementation” (10).

    Chapter Three provides a thorough introduction to the management of Internet domain names and address and of the issues related to it and to the IANA function, in particular the role of the US government and of US academic and business organizations; the seminal work of the Internet Ad Hoc Group (IAHC); the creation and evolution of ICANN; and various criticism of ICANN, in particular regarding its accountability. (The chapter inexplicably fails to mention the key role of Mocakpetris in the creation of the DNS).

    Chapter Four describes the institutional setup of the IANA transition, and the constraints unilaterally imposed by the US government (see also 104) and the various parties that dominate discussions of the issues involved. As the authors note, the call for the creation of the key group went out “without having before voted on the proposed scheme [of the group], neither within the ICANN community nor outside through a further round of public comments” (67). The structure of that group heavily influenced the discussions and the outcome.

    Chapter Five evaluates the IANA transition in terms of one of three types of legitimacy: input legitimacy, that is whether all affected parties could meaningfully participate in the process (the other two types of legitimacy are discussed in subsequent chapters, see below). By analysing in detail the profiles and affiliations of the participants with decision-making power, the authors find that “a vast majority (56) of the people who have taken part in the drafting of the IANA transition proposal are bearers of technical and operative interests” (87); “Regarding nationality, Western countries appear to be over-represented within the drafting and decisional organism involved in the IANA transition process. In particular, US citizens constitute the most remarkable group, occupying 20 seats over 90 available” (89); and  “IANA transition voting members experienced multiple and trans-sectoral affiliations, blurring the boundaries among stakeholder categories” (151). In summary “the results of this stakeholder analysis seem to indicate that the adopted categorization and appointment procedures have reproduced within the IANA transition process well-known power relationships and imbalances already existing in the DNS management, overrepresenting Western, technical, and business interests while marginalizing developing countries and civil society participation” (90).

    Chapter Six evaluates the transition with respect to process legitimacy: whether all participants could meaningfully affect the outcome. As the authors correctly note, “Stakeholders not belonging to the organizations at the core of the operational communities were called to join the process according to rules and procedures that they had not contributed to creating, and with minor participatory rights” (107). The decision-making process was complex, and undermined the inputs from weaker parties – thus funded, dedicated participants were more influential. Further, key participants were concerned about how the US government would view the outcome, and whether it would approve it (116). And discussions appear to have been restricted to a neo-liberal framework and technical framework (120, 121). As the authors state: “Ultimately, this narrow technical frame prevented the acknowledgment of the public good nature of the IANA functions, and, even more, of their essence as public policy issues” (121). Further, “most members and participants at the CWG-Stewardship had been socialized to the ICANN system, belonging to one of its structures or attending its meetings” and “the long-standing neoliberal plan of the US government and the NTIA to ‘privatize’ the DNS placed the IANA transition within a precise system of definitions, concepts, references, and assumptions that constrained the development of alternative policy discourses and limited the political action of sovereignist and constitutional coalitions” (122).

    Thus, it is not surprising that the authors find that “a single discourse shaped the deliberation. These results contradict the assumptions at the basis of the multistakeholder model of governance, which is supposed to reach a higher and more complete understanding of a particular matter through deliberation among different categories of actors, with different backgrounds, views, and perspectives. Instead, the set of IANA transition voting members in many regards resembled what has been defined as a ‘club governance’ model, which refers to an ‘elite community where the members are motivated by peer recognition and a common goal in line with values, they consider honourable’” (151).

    Chapter Seven evaluates the transition with respect to output legitimacy: whether the result achieved its goals of transferring oversight of the IANA function to a global multistakeholder community. As the authors state “ the institutional effectiveness of the IANA transition cannot be evaluated as satisfying from a normative point of view in terms of inclusiveness, balanced representation, and accountability. As a consequence, the ICANN board remains the expression of interwoven business and technical interests and is unlikely to be truly constrained by an independent entity” (135). Further, as shown in detail, “the political problems connected to the IANA functions have been left unresolved, …  it did not take a long time before they re-emerged” (153).

    Indeed, “IANA was, first of all, a political matter. Indeed, the transition was settled as a consequence of a political fact – the widespread loss of trust in the USA as the caretaker of the Internet after the Snowden disclosures. Further, the IANA transition process aimed to achieve eminently political goals, such as establishing a novel governance setting and strengthening the DNS’s accountability and legitimacy” (152). However, as the authors explain in detail, the IANA transition was turned into a technical discussion, and “The problem here is that governance settings, such as those described as club governance, base their legitimacy form professional expertise and reputation. They are well-suited to performing some form of ‘technocratic’ governance, addressing an issue with a problem-solving approach based on an already given understanding of the nature of the problem and of the goals to be reached. Sharing a set of overlapping and compatible views is the cue that puts together these networks of experts. Nevertheless, they are ill-suited for tackling political problems, which, by definition, deal with pluralism” (152).

    Chapter Seven could have benefitted from a discussion of ICANN’s new Independent Review Process, and the length of time it has taken to put into place the process to name the panellists.

    Chapter Eight, already summarized above, presents overall conclusions.

    In summary, this is a timely and important book that provides objective data and analyses of a particular process that has been put forward as a model for multistakeholder governance, which itself has been put forth as a better alternative to conventional governance. While there is no doubt that ICANN, and the IANA function, are performing their intended functions, the book shows that the IANA transition was not a model multistakeholder process: on the contrary, it exhibited many of the well-known flaws of multistakeholder processes. Thus it should not be used as a model for future governance.

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    Richard Hill is President of the Association for Proper internet Governance, and was formerly a senior official at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). He has been involved in internet governance issues since the inception of the internet and is now an activist in that area, speaking, publishing, and contributing to discussions in various forums. Among other works he is the author of The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (Springer, 2014). He writes frequently about internet governance issues for The b2o Review Digital Studies magazine.

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