So what would fundamental change be?

In my previous posting, “The receptivity to the idea of change“, I suggested a possible reason why so many Americans have responded affirmatively to Barack Obama’s persistent rhetorical emphasis (no matter how amorphous) on the need for “change”.

It could be, I said, because it resonates with what Hardt and Negri have identified as the global emergence, today, of a new sovereign constellation of powers (“empire”) and concomitantly, of a countervailing force (“multitude”), which constitutes new networks of collaboration and encounter among world citizens — a kind of “commonality in difference” that is distinct from Marx’s proletariat, from the “masses” as well as the “people”, because it is not predicated on sameness of any kind, but on what the most diverse groups and individuals have in common.

Importantly, I don’t think that everyone who would fall into the category of “multitude” would necessarily be consciously aware of this. Minimally, however, such individuals would be aware of specific resistances, on their part, to manifestations of the rule of empire, ranging from lack of representation (in supposedly “representative” democracies where elected “representatives” make decisions unilaterally even when issues are involved which clearly require the “people’s” participation via referendums and so forth), to exploitation by powerful monopolies, companies and corporations (in South Africa, the collusion among manufacturers of milk and of bread, recently, for instance — all the more unforgivable because poor people depend on these basic foods for survival).

If and when people across a wide spectrum of class, gender and race show signs of such resistance, and especially when they avail themselves of communicational means to share their reasons for such resistance with one another, they have something “in common” (and may discover this fact) that unites them into “multitude”, without, however, reducing them to sameness.

It is important to understand what Hardt and Negri mean by “in common”. In Multitude (2005: xv) they offer the following clarification:

“Insofar as the multitude is neither an identity (like the people) nor uniform (like the masses), the internal differences of the multitude must discover the common that allows them to communicate and act together. The common we share, in fact, is not so much discovered as it is produced … Our communication, collaboration, and cooperation are not only based on the common, but they in turn produce the common in an expanding spiral relationship.”

The “common”, as they use it, is a concept deriving from “the commons”, which refers to the commonly shared spaces that preceded capitalism and have been destroyed by the advent of private property.

They point out that the “production of the common” is characteristic of the newly dominant forms of labour related to the transformation of economies and social forms by means of information technology: “Labour itself, in other words, tends through the transformations of the economy to create and be embedded in cooperative and communicative networks.” (Hardt and Negri 2005: xv).

The “common” therefore evokes the specific quality of information or knowledge in an era where citizens of the “information society” are communicatively interdependent and able to expand such information, in the process constructing “new common knowledge”. It happens especially, the authors claim, where “immaterial projects” that involve “ideas, images, affects and relationships” are concerned — what they refer to as “biopolitical production”.

This is why Hardt and Negri could intimate, in Empire already, that what we are witnessing today, may just be the process of paving the way for a truly democratic, global transformation of society, judging by the rate at which the protests against mainstream globalisation have grown since the late 1990s — protests against injustices, exclusions, natural degradation and social sufferings attendant upon the expansion of neoliberal politics and economics in the world.

The way in which they situate these protests in the context of a process of transition to a completely new kind of world order and its (accompanying) counterpart, I believe, is an indication that we are not dealing here with superficial change — a mere “changing of the guard” — but with the possibility of fundamental change.

In his time, Marx observed that the advent of what he thought of as the genuinely socialist society was unimaginable, because nothing like it had ever existed. However, I do not believe that what is adumbrated in the current “symptomatic” events around the world, including the apparently growing support for Barack Obama as Democratic nominee-candidate (whether he wins the nomination or not) is the advent of socialism or communism — the time for old, outdated binary oppositional thinking is over.

It is not a matter of an imminent pendulum swing to the other side of the spectrum, but of reconceptualising the very notion of a democratic society. True, as a perceptive critic — in the guise of an intoxicated Greek mythical character — has observed, what Hardt and Negri’s notion of multitude as agent of change resists is precisely the idea that the conventional form of the state could be articulated with the kind of radical democratic action implied by and called for by “multitude”.

Hence, whether Obama wins the nomination, and eventually the presidency of the US, or not, one could not in one’s wildest dreams regard the medium or goal of his potential ascendancy as being compatible with the radical novelty of multitude — after all, as I indicated in my previous piece, multitude is predicated, for Hardt and Negri, on the critique and rejection of representational politics as being fundamentally undemocratic. Hence, I agree with my critic that Obama’s quest for power (even if construed as service to the American people) would, in all likelihood, neutralise the radical moments that may be (and probably are to be) found in the variegated corpus of his supporters.

And yet, while I have never claimed that Obama would or could be the agent for the kind of change that Hardt and Negri’s work anticipates (and probably prepares the way for), I cannot help thinking that the receptivity to the need for, and possibility of, change reflected in the unexpectedly positive response to his repeated allusion to it is somehow connected to a growing, perhaps subterranean, collective awareness that what the world needs is not just a changing of the guard, but also a sea-change. And such a sea-change would have to be more than, and qualitatively distinct from, the kind of “dialectical” change that my critics refer to — as several have remarked, calls for and promises of change are nothing new in politics (if I remember correctly, French President Sarkozy recently made similar promises to the electorate in France). And this, perhaps intuitive, collectively growing awareness of the urgent need for change would signal the expansion of “multitude”.

Fundamental change of the kind that Hardt and Negri allude to would be nothing less than a novel embodiment of the most radical democratic spirit imaginable — an embodiment beyond typically modern forms such as the nation state. As such, what they call “multitude” beckons towards a social and political agency that, while certainly not without its own kind of power, would surpass familiar hierarchies of political and economic domination. What precise form it may assume, if it does finally emerge (which may not happen; there is no Hegelian or Marxist dialectical necessity involved here — collective decision and action are required, in the face of the considerable might of empire), no one could tell, and even then it would not be the “final” or conclusive embodiment of democracy.

As Derrida has put it, democracy is always still to come. But at least the work of Hardt and Negri, as well as that of a host of other thinkers (Joel Bakan, Joel Kovel, Laclau and Mouffe, the recent work of Ulrich Beck on cosmopolitanism, Zizek’s irrepressible thinking on everything from capitalism to democracy), may serve to stimulate reflection in the direction of anticipating what options and possibilities may announce themselves, perhaps unexpectedly.