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Dear Damian, I have written now and before that I do not see what is called post modernity as a rupture with the recent past branded modernity. I said also that a post modern approach has certain analytical values since the nature of analysis is to split, disengage, vivisect. I brought forward certain post modern concepts to highlight certain events which appear new. What you did was basically radicalise the bit in my text about the dubious validity of speaking about discontinuity. You have put forward your own (quite radical) version of how continuity was basically preserved.
You may also recall that I spoke about post modern thinking as a typically continental European affair. "Empire" in this sense is pretty much a continental European intellectual history - in content as well as style. Another point which I see in Hardt and Negri is a project aimed at getting out of "transcendence" and getting "immanent".
Now Brittish and American thinking is devoid of such problematique. Anglo-American democracy is immanence, case law is immanence, rock'n'roll is immanence. Now that the world has grown small and become one this clash of immanence and transcendence (both relative) has become unevoidable. But also each one compensates for the other. Immanence runs the risk of being unreflective while transcendence risks being over ponderous. To put it all to the extreme one may act on the principle: ready, shoot, aim, while the other: ready, aim, aim, aim. The problem is to reconcile the two.
If we brush away the concept of post modernity as inadequate, then the concept of modernity will not make much sense either. Modernity as a concept has crystallised when conditions became ripe for post modernity.
Let's see some of your points:
"Mass public divergence with official decision making is new (see the statistics)" I'm not sure this divergence matters. For instance, statistics showed that the French were massively against nuclear tests in Mururoa - so what? They got done anyway. Sometimes divergence can get big enough, and contribute to stop a war (see Vietnam). Precisely, the great lesson of politics since then, is that the US have been into the business of trying to control they own people, and not planet earth, as some accounts of events put it. Anyway, I'm not even sure anti-war protests contributed that much to stop the war in Viet-Nam. They were loosing, right? It might have happened anyway. Besides, the present 'anti-war' movement does not even compare to that case of incredible mass mobilisation. I think divergence statistics do matter. You may brush it away now but you have no way of knowing until what they show is confirmed or disconfirmed.
"Rough split in NATO is new" No, it is not. The French got half out of it, got half back into it, messed it all up: end result: French planes bombing Belgrade under Nato commands. I think it is. NATO itself has admitted that it has gone through the biggest crisis in its history. Things are made worse by the fact that NATO was quite disoriented as to its present day mission even before the split on Iraq.
"Negri's concept of "multitude" might be handy" I have to confess that I read Empire three times and I'm not quite sure what to make out of it. It seems a weird attempt at mixing up some Gramsci with some Foucault using (rather arbitrarily) the Spinozean concept of immanence. Anyway, and immanent approach to multitude...what would that look like? Like a Deleuzian 'virtual multiplicity'? A rhizomic, emergent, self organizing life? The last thing we can say about recent marches is that they are spontaneous. World public opinion has been saturated with stories about the Irak crisis for months now, for heaven's sake. I touched on this one above. You read Empire TREE times. So you see something in it after all.
"Intense stand-off in the Security Council is new" Is it? As far as I know, nobody has threatened the veto yet - China and Russia would probably abstain. Have you ever wondered why the US have decided to go through the UN this time? Why not ignoring it, as with Kosovo and Afghanistan (and missile attacks on Sudan's factories of 'chemical weapons'...). Are they not just using it precisely to drum up world public opinion? Do you doubt that, now that the historical precednts have been created, the US would hesitate into going straight into Irak without UN consultations, if that was really what they wanted to do? UN is also going through a deep crisis of identity. This loomed large during the last SC dabate and you will admit that emotions were quite Sheakspearean.
"But note, international law and the legitimacy of international institutions are being challenged" Precisely. Just like in the good old days at the peak of (modern) European Imperialism, when these norms did not even exist. The whole international law business has always been a bluff. Even when it was meant to be accepted by all, the US used it as toilet paper while it took action in Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Granada...in the name of what? In the name of Higher Absolute values: the fight against Communism, Freedom, Democracy. etc. Well, it marks a difference from previous absolute transcendentals: the Nation, the King, God, the Race...but not much really. The problem with the Law is that, while formulated upon absolute principles, it has to be applied in the realm of immanence: thus the idea that the everyone is equal before the Law. Positive international law has never existed. Modernity IS, as Michel Foucault describes it, the absolute triumph of a trascendental mode of thinking, embedded, according to him, in an emerging vision of totalising History (thus, in The Order of Things, Modernity is described as the Age of History...look around, everybody here, whether Bush or others, claim to be fighting an 'historic' battle, and justify their actions through plenty of trascendental notions...pure Modernity) I shall not try to catch you on a logical fallacy that institutions were challenged when they did not even exist. Instead I shall say that Anglo American case law is not fully applicable to the functioning of international institutions such as UN. Some of the bits here seem do be rather cynical.
"For the first time legitimacy is being given to a "preventive" war - does it not remind you of a futuristic Hollywood movie with Tom Cruz where the police arrested the criminals before they committed crimes (note also the morale from that movie" "The prospect of war is entertained on the grounds of a "just war" For the first time since when??? Since the raise of Modernity, there have been plenty of preventive wars. The notion of preventive war is absolutely not a 'post-modern' concept. Besides, if I remember the movie correctely...the plan gets abandoned in the end, does it not? The message of the movie is precisely that it is impossible to stop a crime before it happens. All sides in WW1 and 2, in fact, in all modern and pre modern wars were claiming to be fighting a just war. Note that the movie thus stresses how important it is to catch criminals fairly (that is, after they have commited the crime). The Yanks are not talking any longer about a preventive war - Saddam is said to be in 'Material Breach'... Preventive action against a sovereign state on a dubiously constructed case in full light of publicity is something extraordinary. Material breach was not confirmed by inspectors as was their job to do.
Yurek Gierus | |||
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