Thesis 2: A key domain where Empire has had profound effects is the realm of identification: identity politics have been eclipsed by forms of neurotic performativity resulting in an endless fragmentation of entitlements and aspirations.
The first thesis already stressed that it would therefore be grossly mistaken to define the Empire thesis as a justification of American imperialism. Unlike the leftish-liberal ‘political’ commitment of many of its academic critics, the Empire thesis is not a conflation of analysis to normative positioning. It is political in a very different and vastly more radical sense. It is an account of the shifting ground of world politics itself; and as a result, it opens up a “differend” (Lyotard, 1988). The left-liberal critique is still trying to present an account of reality based on the categories of an old order that is almost entirely passé. The logical space in which it dwells is one marked by fixed divisions and binary struggles: bourgeoisie versus proletariat, western versus non-western; hegemon versus subordinate etc. The Empire thesis, however, suggests that such modalities endorse a type of biopower that is derived from the logic of sovereignty. It hinges on the ‘right’ to name and label, administer and confine. This right rests with a sovereign form of power whose limits cannot be contested. The sovereignty of the nation state is then reproduced in the sovereignty of the subject, which is bound to a particular class, gender, ethnicity, nationality etc.
What has happened over the last 200-300 years is a gradual but decisive erosion of the categories of sovereignty. What has emerged instead is a form of identity politics that has induced an endless differentiation and fragmentation of sovereignties. What Hardt and Negri call the multitude consists not of groupings confined to social identities, but dispersed fragments of code, similar to the retroviral traces in human DNA, that are reminiscent of particular histories, but are unable to tell render an intelligible account of themselves.
The differend is this: whereas the contributors to the special issue of Interventions understand political action to be the intentional pursuit of self-interests, by fixed and organised groups who are locked together in asymmetrical power relations, resulting in forms of struggle that are uneven and turn into specific forms of domination, the Empire thesis conceives of political action not as the corollary of particular interests and subjectivities, but merely as forces or ‘exteriorities’; belonging to the multitude but without being ‘owned’ by any particular grouping within it. That is to say, both have a radically different concept of political subjectivity and this difference is commensurable as it does not recognise any shared ‘third’ term on the basis of which one could adjudicate either the veracity of their claims or the validity of their arguments.
If anything, this differend is itself a highly apocalyptic sign that ‘progressive’ politics of enlightenment might have run into a dead end street. Today’s progressive politics of the liberal-left have very little of value to say, for example, about the plight of the underclass. Simon Charlesworth’s brilliant phenomenological account of the way in which the poor and destitute in Rotherham have to make a living, shows the deeply rooted alienation of the working class from working class politics. His analysis makes it abundantly clear that within most of social theory today, neither class, nor gender, nor race, nor nationality, nor ethnicity are fixed entitlements upon which one could call to bolster one’s political agenda; instead they are lived.
Using Fanon’s radical essentialist account of his own experiences as a Black man, Charlesworth provocatively asserts that the working class are like a race; spatially confined by their appearance and comportment and severely limited by both a lack of resources but also by an active denial of this access by those occupying key positions in civil society. Charlesworth, however, does not resort to a Marxist or left-liberal ideology to explain the misery of the working class, which would automatically imply a certain recogniseable form of politics, but points towards the logic of practice, or the modus operandum, of the systems that keep the working class in place.
What stands out in his analysis is the assertion that being working class is a lived experience, rather than a ‘birth right’. One is assigned to it through one’s encounters in public space. Most importantly, however, he shows how specific entitlements fought on behalf of those able to articulate their marginal social status by means identity politics, are actually contributing to a further entrenchment of class-based forms of exclusion.
Whereas Charlesworth does not link his phenonmenological account to arguments surrounding the nature of subjectivity; and does not extend his conclusions to reflect on the nature of the global political order; he provides highly effective insights into what the multitude is under conditions of ‘late modernity’. The multitude is fragmented, not in the form of a range of identities, but by a radical diffraction (Haraway, 1997) of identifications. Working class ‘identity’ can no longer resort to a traditional sense of community, shared experience and self-worth. These have all been blasted into oblivion by the (post-) Thatcherite global-liberal consensus. Being working class as a positive mode of subjective identification as become an impossibility.
Finally, what is striking in his rich descriptions of working class life in the North of England is that the state seems to have abandoned its disciplinary focus and retreated into forms of processing that do not require internalization of power. Working class bodies are no longer required to be docile; they are allowed to ‘let go’, immerse themselves into mindless hedonistic pursuits that merely cover up the emptiness and pointlessness of their existence. Instead of discipline, furthered via state-education, public health care monitoring systems and social welfare provision, those on the margins and those outside the perimeters of ‘civil society’ are subjected to external forms of control; of forms of data-processing in which they are merely numbers, either individuated as ‘accounts’ or lumped together as statistics. This is what Deleuze (1993) once referred to as ‘the society of control’: a proliferation of automated neurological tracking systems that merely record one’s whereabouts and are hyperlinked to modes of policing and punishment in which the subject plays no active role.
The society of control is predicated upon the universality of terror. Terror must not simply be seen here as terrorism, but as the mood within which state-operations are imbricated to mobilize concerns. It is in this sense also banal. The terror experienced by the destitute multitude of Rotherham is perhaps very removed from Islamic fundamentalism and 9/11 (although the perpetrators of the 7/7/2005 bombings in London came from Leeds, which is merely 30 mins further north), and are much closer to home, lived as fears, worries, anxieties, concerns over one’s existence, one’s relationship with others, one’s ability to take control over one’s own future; how to ‘make a living’ etc. It is manifest in the proliferation of drugs and substance abuse, the complete banalisation of the social by television, the erosion of trust and friendship within the public sphere, the banal violence of alcohol-induced innerecity night-life etc.
The differend of Empire is thus not simply a matter of geophilosophy – of how to understand concepts such as right, justice, autonomy etc (and the failure of reducing these to a ‘critical’ reasoning based on interests and needs)– but is practiced and experienced in the banalities of everyday life. It is here that the failure of traditional identity politics becomes most manifest. Carving up the multitude in terms of race, class, gender, nationhood, ethnicity and religious affiliation makes little sense in the face of terror. The terror of 9/11 is similar to the terror in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and especially now, during their prolonged occupation by the allied forces; it is indiscriminate – its modus operandum is not to endorse patriarchy, racism or colonial rule, not even capitalism (as we know it). It is functionally dissociated from all of these modern regimes; it is entirely dysfunctional and pathological from the perspective of ‘modern reason’. Yet, the multitude of Empire is unified in terror; the living paradoxical pathology of biopower is that it reduces everything to ‘bare existence’ whilst plunging everything into an abyss of hyper-mediated pre-signification: a collective neurosis of meaningless anxiety.
Also:
Seven Theses on Terror, Security and The New World Order: Thesis 1