HISTORY CONTEMP ART paper

ANTONIO NEGRI

Antonio Negri (b. 1933) became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university of Padua, Italy. Negri founded the Potere Operaio group in 1969 and became a leading member of the Autonomia Operaio group. During the “Years of Lead” in the 1970s, Negri was accused of being the mastermind of the left- wing guerrilla organization Red Brigades, which was involved in the 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Christian Democracy prime minister Aldo Moro. He was sentenced for involvement in two murders, but he fled to France, where he continued to work as a teacher, being protected from extradition by France’s non-extradition doctrine. In 1997, after a plea-bargain that reduced his prison sentence from 30 to 13 years, he returned to Italy to serve the rest of his sentence. His most influential book, EMPIRE (2000), was written and published with Michael Hardt while Negri was in prison. Upon his release in 2003, Negri relocated to Venice and Paris, were he writes and teaches.

Negri, c. 1978

EMPIRE: MAIN IDEAS

A 21st century notion of Empire is a complex balance of 3 political forces:

• Monarchy (USA, G7, NATO, IMF WTO)

• Oligarchy (Multinational Corporations and Nation-States)

• Democracy (NGO’s, United Nations, Internet)

This NEW CONCEPT OF EMPIRE constitutes a 21st century supranational ”subject” that effectively regulates a global pyramid of monarchical, oligarchical and democratic forces. The global exchanges between these forces, in turn, constitute the new sovereign power that governs the 21st century world.

Negri argues that a 21st century Empire shuffles and recategorizes the 20th century model. In a 20th century model, a single, centralized “First World” sovereign (Europe/North America) was perceived to have complete Domaine over “Second” and “Third World” colonized nations. Now things are different. “Center” and “Margin” have been displaced within a complex system of globalized capital, one that transgresses nation-state borders and shuffles the deck of power between nations:

“Most significantly, the spatial divisions of the three 20th century worlds – First, Second, and Third – have been scrambled so that we continually find the First world in the Third, the Third World in First, and the Second almost nowhere at all.”

20th C. Politics of Difference and Postmodernity have been subsumed by 21st C. Empire, (Negri, pp. 139-142)

20th C. politics of difference and postmodernity – the school of thought affiliated with an identity politics that posit counter “nations” to modernity’s unifying hegemony – offers up the “different,” the “subaltern,” the “marginalized,” the “displaced” and the “overlooked” as a place of resistance. In short, the old notion of Empire posits marginalized nations against a centralized Europe and North America.

In the 21st C. a global “Multitude” is scattered among and within ethnic and economic categories that populate nation-states. Consequently, the 20th C. notion of “identity politics” and postmodernity – as it plays out on the international stage – have now mutated into a new 21st Century power structure. Consequently, the endless flow and lack of boundaries is Empire’s success over both Sovereign States and nation-states.

GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN: “VIRGILIAN VISIONS,” New Left Review 5, Sept/Oct 2000.

“Hardt and Negri argue that, although nation-state-based systems of power are rapidly unravelling in the force-fields of world capitalism, globalization cannot be understood as a simple process of de-regulating markets. Far from withering away, regulations today proliferate and interlock to form an acephalous supranational order which the authors choose to call Empire.” p. 143.

This produces a “diffuse, anonymous network of all-englobing power.” While “an older, statist world of ruling class and proletariat, of dominate core and subject periphery, is breaking down…in its place, a less dichotomous and more intricate pattern of inequality is emerging.” p. 143.

GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN: “VIRGILIAN VISIONS,” New Left Review 5, Sept/Oct 2000.

EMPIRE’S NEW PROBLEMATICS: “This global multitude, embracing all those who work, or are just poor, from computer scientists in Palo Alto to slum- dwellers in Sao Paulo, no longer imagines communities as integral nations….[consequently] the ideology of Empire has become a supple, multicultural aesthetic that deactivates the revolutionary possibilities of globalization…” p. 144. This is problematic because: “Empire is a world order of a ‘permanent state of emergency and exception’ [a la the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s notion] justified by the appeal to essentials values.’” p. 145.

As for Empire’s permanent “state of emergency” we have:

The post 9/11 War on Terror; the 2008 Financial Collapse; The post Arab Spring Yemen and Syrian Civil Wars; The UK Brexit from the EU; and the current global Covid-19 Pandemic.

GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN: “VIRGILIAN VISIONS,” New Left Review 5, Sept/Oct 2000.

ON EMPIRE’S MULTITUDE: Empire’s Multitude does not take form as a ‘people’ or a ‘nation’ “but [is] scattered, speaking no common language, and locked into job-cages: it is in this condition that the multitude is all powerful. The world’s poor, its omnipresent have-nots, form an already existing collective subject, but they are not cognizant of it.” p. 146 Hart and Negri thus no longer advocate “local struggles” that “trigger off horizontal, upwardly spiraling revolutionary sequences.” Rather, within this diffuse internet driven Empire, struggles “can now immediately catapult up to the global level as unforeseen media events. By this more direct vertical route, the virtual center of Empire can be attacked at any point.” p. 146