The Political Practice and its Subjects in of New Critical Theories: Complicities and Points of Adversity

These four theoretical bets on the “multitude” (Hardt and Negri), on the political subject as fidelity to an event (Badiou), on the “people” as a hegemonic interaction of heterogeneous demands (Laclau and Mouffe), on the political subject as an emergent subject of an egalitarian irruption (Rancière), illustrate the seek for new political subjectivities after abandoning the Marxist thesis that gives a decisive role to the working-class in the process of social transformation. Apart from this binding nucleus, they present divergences that place the question about the subject of emancipation in a field of confrontations, and bifurcation points. This work aims at delimiting the lines of combat, voices of consent and dissent found in these new critical theories regarding the connection between political subjectivity, and economic relations, the issue of the strategy, the nationalism/internationalism dilemma and the disjunction between statism and anti-statism.

Universal versus Decentralized Politics

This chapter compares and contrasts a negative conception of universality with key critics of universalism—those who advocate for a decentralized politics. It outlines two strains of the latter. The first is informed by the linguistic/cultural turn, including postmodernism and radical democracy (as represented by Foucault and Lyotard, and Laclau and Mouffe, respectively). The second strain operates under the ontological/affective turn, including New Materialism (Latour, Bennett), queer theory (Edelman, Ahmed), decoloniality (Mignolo), and Deleuzism (Hardt and Negri). The chapter deploys workers’ struggles as a case study for examining their place in a universal politics.

Bartleby as Subject

Interpreting Bartleby the scrivener’s formula, “I would prefer not to,” in Herman Melville’s short story is a challenge for many philosophers, and Bartleby’s inaction also hints at a political position. The problem is how to explain this (in)action. It is unclear whether the scrivener is an active subject or a passive object. One potential solution would be to reduce Bartleby’s duality to one of its modes. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri claim the scrivener is a revolutionary subject; the uncertainty of his actions is regarded as a refusal. Hardt and Negri link this refusal with the next stage in the production of a new society and a new subject. Slavoj Žižek is also ambivalent about “Bartleby politics”. Although the Slovenian philosopher criticizes the authors of Empire, he still declares Bartleby a parallax figure combining action and inaction. However, Žižek did not stake out a position on the ontological status of the scrivener: is he a cunning subject and escape artist, or is he a distinction-basis of the system itself? In the contrary direction, Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben propose a program for the desubjectification of the scrivener from Wall Street. Here Bartleby is not a subject, but a figure of the ontology of a transcendental source which exists before all ontic differences. The essay offers a radically different solution to the Bartleby problem. It rejects the dichotomy between the subject and object and moves toward the object-oriented theory of action and relational ontology as presented in the works of Bruno Latour. In this ontology, any actors (human or non-human) may turn out situationally to be active or inactive, depending on their position in relation to other actors.

Resistance at the Borders of Power: Reflections on the Zapatista and Palestinian Experiences

Palestinians and Zapatistas exist in the liminal space at the margins of an oppressive state power, which they resist through their very existence as self-defined peoples. Their everyday resistance practices, reflecting prefigurative politics, forge collective identity and social subjectivity through what the Zapatistas call “dignified rage” and Palestinians call sumud (steadfastness). In the tradition of active nonviolence, both movements creatively employ art, ironic humor, and joy in processes of resistance that strengthen the community. Both movements resist the coloniality of power through initiatives that reinforce self-sufficiency while practicing solidarity to offset the hegemonic power that attempts to divide and isolate them and strip them of their identity. Through the exercise of autonomy, de facto rather than negotiated, they refuse to recognize illegitimate authority. Their autonomous actions counterpose what Hardt and Negri call constituent power, built from below, to the state’s offer of a quota of constituted institutional power imposed from above and confined within imposed territorial borders.

The New Old Imperialism in the Arabian Peninsula

This essay argues that the horrific war in Yemen (2015–present) waged by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates against the Houthis who control the northern part of the country is not really a Sunni-Schi’a conflict or a proxy war against Iran or a replay of the Cold War—all of which have been put forward to explain it—but rather is better understood as the actions of belligerent imperialist powers located in the Arabian Peninsula, acting in their own right (rather than as puppets of Western powers). Such an explanation, however, flies in the face of what we have understood imperialism to be historically. This essay looks at two understandings of imperialism, one coming out of Marxist theory and another out of a Foucauldian understanding of power as developed by Hardt and Negri in their book Empire (2000), and then goes on to show that both are helpful, though in different ways, in explaining the Yemen war as an imperialist intervention.

Unproductive Worth

“Unproductive Worth” reads with the autonomism of Franco “Bifo” Berardi and Kathi Weeks, the political and quotidian depression of Ann Cvetkovich, and a disability poetics in order to challenge both neoliberal and more progressive (the latter represented in this chapter by Hardt and Negri and their theological deployment by Joerg Rieger and Kwok Pui Lan) productivist theologies that tie our worth to our “productive” contribution to society. As a counter to such a productivist soteriology, this chapter suggest we remain unredeemed by tapping into the post-work imaginary of Weeks, the utopia of ordinary habit of Cvetkovich, and a crip poetics inspired by Robert McRuer. The chapter suggests that we must pay grave attention to all those considered too slow, too mad, too depressed, too crippled to be of productive worth.

Decolonisation, Identity, Neo-Colonialism and Power

This paper explores the implications of “decolonisation,” first by focusing on the work of African thinker, Frantz Fanon’s work in this regard, particularly his insistence that decolonisation entails the creation of “new” people, before moving on to the related question of “identity.” Here the emphasis is on the work of Manuel Castells, specifically his examination of three kinds of identity-construction, the third of which he regards as being the most important category for understanding this process in the 21st century, namely “resistance identity.” It is argued that this casts the decolonisation debate in South Africa in an intelligible light. An interpretation of E.M. Forster’s paradigmatically “decolonising” novel, A Passage to India, is offered to unpack the meaning of the concept further, before switching the terrain to the question of the urgent need for a different kind of decolonisation, today, pertaining to the economic neo-colonisation of the world by neoliberal capitalism. The work of Hardt and Negri on the emerging world order under what they call “Empire” is indispensable in this regard, and their characterisation of the subject under neoliberal Empire in terms of the figures of the indebted, securitised, mediatised and represented, stresses the need for global decolonisation in the name of democracy. This part of the paper is concluded with a consideration of what decolonisation is really “all about,” namely power.

The urban creative factory-creative ecosystems and (im)material design practices

Post-Fordism, with its evolution towards immaterial production in the areas of information, knowledge and affective, creative commerce, foregrounds design as a central, enabling activity. If this enablement finds particular application in cities of the Global North, it testifies to a shift in the geopolitical distribution of productive agency and application of international labour, one that sees industrial activities ‘reassigned’ to the Global South, leaving cities of the variably de-industrialised countries to develop cultural, symbolic, and creative economies. This paper examines the nature of urban place and the work regimes practised there consequent to these economies. It argues firstly for ‘cityness’ in these context to be understood as a creative urban factory – a place where older managerial and organisational techniques applied to factory environments in the service of high productivity are recalibrated and diffused across the entirety of urban territories. Secondly, the paper links the productivity of the creative urban factory with a biopolitical makeover of cities themselves, seeing in an optimisation of productive capacity a situation where the entirety of living labour is taken up and commoditised via the production of ever-customised lifestyles and identities. A raft of new identifying subject and worker categories emerge that exceed or elude the older class identifications, and with it, a certain potential to collectively counter the exploitation inherent post-Fordist work. While exploring the possibility of new identifying collectives – what Hardt and Negri have referred to as the multitude – the paper makes an argument for design itself to be a key medium for rethinking and re-enacting collective agency. As the harbinger of new forms of user participation and co-operative processes that are, by way of emerging technological tools, open, evolving, ad hoc, reflexive and customisable, design practice increasingly must contend and adapt to forms of de-professionalisation. Rather than seeing in this adaption a demise in profession position, the new possibilities appearing in design point to a low-tech, yet digitally-driven enabled, re-politicisation of design and creativity, one better able to contend with the strictures of the urban creative factory.

Knæk koden. Om Michael Hardt og Antonio Negris opgør med den nyliberale finansøkonomi

The neoliberal financial economy is for Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri a reaction to the struggles for democracy, identity and sustainability since the 1960’s in particular. For Hardt and Negri the task is then to not only analyze and criticize but to crack the neoliberal financial code. This process can take place by combining exodus on the micro level with antagonistic reformism and hegemonic struggle on the macro level.