Michael Hardt in the NY Times

NY Times, Saturday July 7, 2001

What Is The Next Big Idea?  Buzz Is Growing for 'Empire'

By EMILY EAKIN

DURHAM, N.C. — It comes along only once every decade or so, typically
arriving without much fanfare. But soon it is everywhere: dominating
conferences, echoing in lecture halls, flooding scholarly journals. Every
graduate student dreams of being the one to think it up: the Next Big Idea.

RESPONSE: Is this the way that Karl Marx got started?

----

In the 1960's it was Claude Lévi-Strauss and structuralism. In the 1970's
and 1980's it was Jacques Derrida and deconstruction, Michel Foucault and
poststructuralism and Jacques Lacan and psychoanalysis, followed by various
theorists of postcolonialism and New Historicism.

RESPONSE: How can the NY Times neglect mentioning Hukalakka Meshabob, the
founder of neo-Frebishoffism? Frebishoff was the Soviet linguist who wrote
seven meaty volumes attacking Bakhtin. Frebishoff met an untimely death in
the Spanish Civil War when a mule kicked him to death prior to the battle
for Barcelona.

----

And now scholars are wondering if the latest contender for academia's next
master theorist is Michael Hardt, a self-effacing, 41-year-old associate
professor of literature at Duke University and the co-author of "Empire," a
heady treatise on globalization that is sending frissons of excitement
through campuses from São Paulo to Tokyo.

RESPONSE: "Frisson" is the approved postmodernist term for shiver. When one
is shoveling snow in January, one shivers. When one watches a movie by Jim
Jarmusch, one gets the frissons.

----

Since Harvard University Press published the book in March last year,
translation rights have been sold in 10 countries, including Japan and
Croatia; the leading Brazilian newspaper has put it on the cover of its
Sunday magazine; and Dutch television has broadcast a documentary about it.
Fredric Jameson, America's leading Marxist literary critic, has called it
"the first great new theoretical synthesis of the new millennium," while
the equally eminent Slovenian political philosopher Slavoj Zizek has
declared it "nothing less than a rewriting of the `The Communist Manifesto'
for our time."

RESPONSE: My understanding is that the FARC in Colombia has organized study
groups on "Empire" in Putumayo. Any shirkers face the firing squad.

----

During the same period, Mr. Hardt has given 21 academic talks and received
tenure from Duke (a year early). And the compliments keep coming.

RESPONSE: Well, I do declare. It is high time that the workers find out
more about comrade Hardt. I plan to contact my friends in the NYC Transit
Union and set up a meeting for Hardt. The ties between a correct reading of
Polybius and upcoming contract negotiations are crystal clear.

----

"He's definitely hot," said Xudong Zhang, a professor of comparative
literature and East Asian Studies at New York University, who taught a
graduate seminar on "Empire" for the second time this spring. Masao
Miyoshi, a professor of literature at the University of California at San
Diego, said, "He's one of the very few younger people who will have an
impact."

RESPONSE: Somebody contact Spike Jonze. After doing "Being John Malkovich",
why not "Being Michael Hardt". You can travel around the Duke campus with
him, seeing things through his eyes. Football games, faculty meetings,
cocktail parties, the whole nine yards. 

----

There is no question that Mr. Hardt is unusually talented. But talent alone
does not provoke scholarly commotion. Other factors must also be at work.
For one thing, the topic must be in vogue; and globalization happens to be
the trendy subject right now.

Then there is the allure of Mr. Hardt's flamboyant co-author, Antonio
Negri, a 68- year-old Italian philosopher and suspected terrorist
mastermind who is serving a 13- year prison sentence in Rome for inciting
violence during the turbulent 1970's.

RESPONSE: Actually the goal is to stay out of prison. But flamboyant Negri
certainly is. The Radical Party of Italy tends to attract such figures.

----

In large part, however, the fuss over Mr. Hardt and "Empire" is about
something else: the need in fields like English, history and philosophy for
a major new theory. "Literary theory has been dead for 10 years," said
Stanley Aronowitz, a sociologist at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York. "The most important point about `Empire' is that
Michael is addressing the crisis in the humanities, which has reached the
point where banality seems to pervade the sphere."

RESPONSE: Stanley Aronowitz is the world's leading expert on banality. The
Times quoted exactly the right person.

----

Indeed, by the end of the 1990's, the sweeping approaches of the previous
decades had been exhausted. Yet no powerful new idea emerged to take their
place. A deep pessimism crept over the humanities. Today, scholars
complain, their fields are fragmented and rudderless.

RESPONSE: Rudderless? Exactly.

----

So just what does a disquisition on globalization have to offer scholars in
crisis?

First, there is the book's broad sweep and range of learning. Spanning
nearly 500 pages of densely argued history, philosophy and political
theory, it features sections on imperial Rome, Haitian slave revolts, the
American Constitution and the Persian Gulf war, and references to dozens of
thinkers like Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hegel, Hobbes, Kant, Marx and Foucault.
In short, the book has the formal trappings of a master theory in the old
European tradition.

RESPONSE: Yes, this tradition includes Oswald Spengler, Nietzsche and
Wyndham Lewis. The ties to Karl Marx are tenuous at best.

----

Then there is the theory itself. Globalization isn't simply the latest
phase in the history of imperialism and nation-states, the authors declare.
It's something radically new. Where other scholars and the media depict
countries vying for control of world markets, Mr. Hardt and Mr. Negri
instead discern a new political system and a new form of power taking root.
They call it Empire.

RESPONSE: My friend Patrick Bond, a professor and activist in South Africa,
said that the book was calculated to attract notice on the basis of coining
a new term: "Empire". Academics turn to new coinages (postmodernism,
structuralism, etc.) like a moth is drawn to a flame.

----

Unlike historical empires, however, this one has no emperor, no geographic
capital and no single seat of power. In fact, given the authors' abstruse
formulation, it's almost easier to say what Empire isn't than what it is: a
fluid, infinitely expanding and highly organized system that encompasses
the world's entire population. It's a system that no one person,
corporation or country can control. (It's also apparently still under
construction. One hallmark of Empire is "supranational organisms," few of
which seem to exist yet. The authors regard the United Nations, for
example, as a precursor of a "real supranational center.")

RESPONSE: What crowning foolishness. Imperialism does have a center. It is
called New York City/Washington, the modern day equivalent of London or
Rome. The United Nations is as much as a precursor to a "supernational"
center as the IMF is to a socialist funding agency. Of course, there is no
reference to the IMF in "Empire" since the authors could care less about
the real world of class relations.

----

More surprising still, Empire is good news: it's potentially the most
democratic political system to hit the face of the earth. As Mr. Hardt puts
it, "The thing we call Empire is actually an enormous historical
improvement over the international system and imperialism." The reason?
Because power under Empire is widely dispersed, so presumably just about
anyone could affect its course.

RESPONSE: True, true. Just yesterday NBC news reported that the Hague is
about to arrest Bob Kerry and Henry Kissinger who will be tried for war
crimes alongside Milosevic.

----

"Empire creates a greater potential for revolution than did the modern
regimes of power," the authors write, "because it presents us, alongside
the machine of command, with an alternative: the set of all the exploited
and the subjugated, a multitude that is directly opposed to Empire, with no
mediation between them."

RESPONSE: My only question is what Hardt will do when the revolution
starts. He spends much of his time playing chamber music and that would
interfere with throwing molotov cocktails.

----

The book is full of such bravura passages. Whether presenting new concepts
— like Empire and the multitude — or urging revolution, it brims with
confidence in its ideas. Does it have the staying power and broad appeal
necessary to become the next master theory? It is too soon to say. But for
the moment, "Empire" is filling a void in the humanities.

RESPONSE: It brims with confidence because the authors have only known the
adulation of graduate students and editors at high-toned academic
publishing houses. If they had normal jobs, nobody would pay them the least
attention.

----

For literary scholars it is evidence that the work they do is politically
important. They are not simply analyzing Milton's religious convictions or
parsing "Finnegans Wake," they argue, but shedding light on the way the
world really works. Consider deconstruction; it revolutionized scholars'
understanding of language. Lacanian psychoanalysis did the same for the
human psyche. In a similar way, "Empire" lays out a new way of thinking
about global politics. When it comes to understanding current events, the
book insists, even literary scholars have something important to
contribute. And at a moment of disciplinary crisis, that's a message that's
bound to appeal.

RESPONSE: Literary scholars of course consider their work politically
important.

----

Michèle Lamont, a sociologist at Princeton University, argued as much in a
famous article titled "How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The
Case of Jacques Derrida," which appeared in The American Journal of
Sociology in 1987. She concluded that Mr. Derrida's popularity had less to
do with the intrinsic value of his ideas than with his "sophisticated
writing style," "distinctive theoretical framework" and lucky timing.
Deconstruction, she wrote, "was an answer to a disciplinary crisis." His
famously stylish clothes and his thick French accent didn't hurt either.

Of course, Mr. Hardt can't trade on credentials like those. Not that long
ago he even had trouble finding a job. With a Ph.D. in comparative
literature from the University of Washington at Seattle, he lacked both an
Ivy League diploma and the kind of narrow specialization that many academic
departments look for these days.

"I applied to French, Italian, English, political science and philosophy
departments," he recalled recently over lunch at an Italian restaurant near
the Duke campus. "But the reality of it is that almost no one would hire me."

RESPONSE: I am really impressed with Hardt's struggle to achieve success.
It reminds me of Che Guevara's heroic efforts to participate in the
guerrilla movement to overthrow Batista despite debilitating bouts of asthma.

----

With his soft voice, denim jacket and unruly dark hair, Mr. Hardt looks and
sounds more like an idealistic graduate student than a rapidly rising star
scholar. When he did land a job in the Italian department at the University
of Southern California in 1993, he said, he found himself at odds with
colleagues in his field.

"I went to a conference on Marx and deconstruction," he recalled. "I
listened to a series of papers that were so convoluted and abstract. The
speakers said they were talking about politics, but I couldn't understand a
thing political about them. I was so frustrated after the weekend that on
the Monday after, I called the state prison commission and found out how I
could volunteer teaching at the local prison."

RESPONSE: Did the prisoners get to hear about Polybius?

----

By this time he was already collaborating with Mr. Negri. Inspired by the
Italian philosopher's writings and political activism, Mr. Hardt had asked
a friend to introduce them during a visit to Paris, where Mr. Negri had
fled to avoid serving his jail sentence. (In 1997, he returned to Rome —
and went directly to prison.) They began collaborating on "Empire" in 1994.

From a professional standpoint, it was a risky move. Though Mr. Hardt had
published a book of his own (on the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze), he
had no obvious area of specialization. Moreover, interest in contemporary
Italian philosophy was small in the United States.

For Mr. Hardt, the risks obviously paid off. Of course, his book has
skeptics. Some say nation-states are as strong as ever; that the book fails
to back up its theory with facts; that it's hobbled by Marxist ideology.

RESPONSE: This book is about as hobbled by Marxist ideology as "The Wizard
of Oz" is.

----

"The argument that the world exhibits a completely different power
structure is at least grossly hyperbolic and more probably merely false,"
said John Gray, a professor of European thought at the London School of
Economics, who has published his own critique of globalization, "False
Dawn" (New Press, 1999). " `Empire' theorizes the current state of the
world in a way which produces romantically alluring phrases that gloss over
the actual conflicts, discontinuities, uncertainties and sheer
unknowability of the world and its power relations today."

RESPONSE: John Gray is a disillusioned Tory. The Times quotes everybody
except an old-school Marxist. I will call them on Monday morning and give
them a piece of my mind.

----

Such criticisms don't seem to bother Mr. Hardt. He says he is pleased that
the book has found an audience outside what he calls "our small fanatical
readership." He has few illusions that he is the next Derrida.

"I'm sure I'm not," he said. "Toni and I don't think of this as a very
original book. We're putting together a variety of things that others have
said. That's why it's been so well received. It's what people have been
thinking but not really articulated."

And he readily concedes that "Empire" has flaws. Mr. Zizek complained that
for a book that preaches revolution, it had an unforgivable omission: no
how-to manual. Mr. Hardt agreed:

"I wrote him an e-mail and said, `Yes, it's true we don't know what the
revolution should be.' And he wrote back saying, `Yeah, well, I don't know
either.' "

RESPONSE: No problem. The idea is not to make a revolution, but how to get
invitations to speak at the next 21 academic conferences.

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/