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Objet a as Inherent Limit to Capitalism:
on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

Slavoj Zizek
 © lacan.com 2005 


        

What makes Empire and Multitude such a refreshing reading (clearly the
definitive exercises in Deleuzian politics) is that we are dealing with
books which refer to and function as the moment of theoretical reflection
of-one is almost tempted to say: are embedded in-an actual global movement
of anti-capitalist resistance: one can sense, behind the written lines, the
smells and sounds of Seattle, Genoa and Zapatistas. So their theoretical
limitation is simultaneously the limitation of the actual movement.
Hardt's and Negri's basic move, an act which is by no means ideologically
neutral (and, incidentally, which is totally foreign to their philosophical
paradigm, Deleuze!), is to identify (to name) "democracy" as the common
denominator of all today's emancipatory movements: "The common currency that
runs throughout so many struggles and movements for liberation across the
world today - at local, regional, and global levels - is the desire for
democracy." 1 Far from standing for a utopian dream, democracy is "the only
answer to the vexing questions of our day, /.../ the only way out of our
state of perpetual conflict and war." 2 Not only is democracy inscribed into
the present antagonisms as an immanent telos of their resolution; even more,
today, the rise of the multitude in the heart of capitalism "makes democracy
possible for the first time" 3 Till now, democracy was constrained by the
form of the One, of the sovereign state power; "absolute democracy" ("the
rule of everyone by everyone, a democracy without qualifiers, without ifs or
buts," 4 only becomes possible when "the multitude is finally able to rule
itself." 5
For Marx, highly organized corporate capitalism already was "socialism
within capitalism" (a kind of socialization of capitalism, with the absent
owners becoming more and more superfluous), so that one only needs to cut
the nominal head off and we get socialism. For Negri and Hardt, however, the
limitation of Marx was that he was historically constrained to the
centralized and hierarchically organized machinical automatized industrial
labor, which is why their vision of "general intellect" was that of a
central planning agency; it is only today, with the rise of the "immaterial
labor" to the hegemonic role, that the revolutionary reversal becomes
"objectively possible." This immaterial labor extends between the two poles
of intellectual (symbolic) labor (production of ideas, codes, texts,
programs, figures: writers, programmers...) and affective labor (those who
deal with our bodily affects: from doctors to baby-sitters and flight
attendants). Today, immaterial labor is "hegemonic" in the precise sense in
which Marx proclaimed that, in 19th century capitalism, large industrial
production is hegemonic as the specific color giving its tone to the
totality - not quantitatively, but playing the key, emblematic structural
role: "What the multitude produces is not just goods or services; the
multitude also and most importantly produces cooperation, communication,
forms of life, and social relationships." 6 What thereby emerges is a new
vast domain the "common": shared knowledge, forms of cooperation and
communication, etc., which can no longer be contained by the form of private
property. This, then, far from posing a mortal threat to democracy (as
conservative cultural critics want us to believe), opens up a unique chance
of "absolute democracy". Why? In immaterial production, the products are no
longer material objects, but new social (interpersonal) relations themselves
- in short, immaterial production is directly biopolitical, the production
of social life. It was already Marx who emphasized how material production
is always also the (re)production of the social relations within which it
occurs; with today's capitalism, however, the production of social relations
is the immediate end/goal of production: "Such new forms of labor /.../
present new possibilities for economic self-management, since the mechanisms
of cooperation necessary for production are contained in the labor itself."
7 The wager of Hardt and Negri is that this directly socialized, immaterial
production not only renders owners progressively superfluous (who needs them
when production is directly social, formally and as to its content?); the
producers also master the regulation of social space, since social relations
(politics) IS the stuff of their work: economic production directly becomes
political production, the production of society itself. The way is thus open
for "absolute democracy," for the producers directly regulating their social
relations without even the detour of democratic representation.
There is a whole series of concrete questions that this vision gives rise
to. Can one really interpret this move towards the hegemonic role of
immaterial labor as the move from production to communication, to social
interaction (in Aristotelian terms, from techne as poiesis to praxis: as the
overcoming of the Arendtian distinction between production and vis activa,
or of the Habermasian distinction between instrumental and communicational
reason)? How does this "politicization" of production, where production
directly produces (new) social relations, affect the very notion of
politics? Is such an "administration of people" (subordinated to the logic
of profit) still politics, or is it the most radical sort of
depoliticization, the entry into "post-politics?" And, last but not least,
is democracy by necessity, with regard to its very notion, non-absolute?
There is no democracy without a hidden, presupposed elitism. Democracy is,
by definition, not "global"; it HAS to be based on values and/or truths
which one cannot select "democratically." In democracy, one can fight for
truth, but not decide what IS truth. As Claude Lefort and others amply
demonstrated, democracy is never simply representative in the sense of
adequately re-presenting (expressing) a pre-existing set of interests,
opinions, etc., since these interests and opinions are constituted only
through such representation. In other words, the democratic articulation of
an interest is always minimally performative: through their democratic
representatives, people establish what their interests and opinions are. As
Hegel already knew, "absolute democracy" could only actualize itself in the
guise of its "oppositional determination," as terror. There is, thus, a
choice to be made here: do we accept democracy's structural, not just
accidental, imperfection, or do we also endorse its terrorist dimension?
However, much more pertinent is another critical point which concerns Negri
and Hardt's neglect of the FORM in the strict dialectical sense of the term.
Negri and Hardt continuously oscillate between their fascination by the
global capitalism's "deterritorializing" power, and the rhetoric of the
struggle of the multitude against the One of the capitalist power. The
financial capital with its wild speculations detached from the reality of
material labor, this standard bete noire of the traditional Left, is
celebrated as the germ of the future, capitalism's most dynamic and nomadic
aspect. The organizational forms of today's capitalism - decentralization of
the decision-making, radical mobility and flexibility, interaction of
multiple agents - are perceived as pointing towards the oncoming reign of
the multitude. It is as if everything is already here, in the "postmodern"
capitalism, or, in Hegelese, the passage from In-itself to For-itself - all
that is needed is just an act of purely formal conversion, like the one
developed by Hegel apropos the struggle between Enlightenment and Faith,
where he describes how the "silent, ceaseless weaving of the Spirit"


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