This Post is Too Long

Cultural Imperialism, the Multitude, and Empire. Dyer-Witherford talks about cultural imperialism of sorts, but I find this idea difficult to reconcile with Negri and Hardt’s idea of Empire. “Such a global projection of consumerism into zones previously relegated to economic marginality demands a reconstruction of needs and desires – of cultural traditions, religious prohibitions, dietary habits, sexual mores, traditions of self-sufficiency – similar to that experience by the Euro-American proletariat in the first part of the twentieth century, but exceeding in scale (137).

My best effort to reconcile the concepts came when Dyer Witherford admits to a relentless uniformity or systematicity to this “global bazaar”: “Every human aspiration, desire, and creative impulse will find its place within the commodity-form” (138). I guess this is what Deleuze and Guattari saw “capital as fluid, inventive, and adaptive, using every obstacle put in its path to rebound and move forward again” (Virno 12). Similarly, Bowring explains, “Empire exercises universal integration through a neutralizing liberal indifference to biological diversity and difference, combined with a pluralistic affirmation of those ‘merely cultural’ difference which do not threaten social order...The divisions that derive from these differences are managed as a means of hierarchising and controlling labor power, as well as diversifying and multiplying global markets” (Bowring 121-122). This last bit seems to speak to what Dyer-Witherford mentions later on, “capital strives to prevents its variegated opponents from combining forces: dividing, splitting, and fracturing in order to maintain the systemic integrity of its world system” (190).

However, I must admit that I then get very confused when I read Castells. He explains, “Networks readapt, bypass the area (or some people) and reform elsewhere, or with someone else. But the human matter on which the network was living cannot so easily mutate. It becomes trapped, or downgraded, or wasted. And this leads to social underdevelopment” (7). I see the hierarchising of Empire in action, but the exclusion of regions seems contradictory to the subsuming phagocyte that is Empire. I guess it’s worth adding a caveat to that notion of Empire of valorization; what has no value is discarded by Empire. I feel like Negri and Hardt are laughing at me.

Another chink in Empire’s armor seems to be Castells notion of the network state (5). It seems that post-Fordism has left the nation-state in the dust, and Empire “legitimizes the economic and military disregard for the sovereignty of nation-states” (Bowring 120). I’m not sure if the concept of “network state” is at odds with Empire, but it would seem to have some widespread consequences, especially when I think of nationalism and the construction of political subjectivities.

Capital versus Labor: Take 2. In last week’s post, I noted that Harvey’s narrative seems to give capital more agency: the change to flexible accumulation is attributed to capital’s reduction of crisis in overaccumulation (and the implied efforts to maximize profits). I bring this up again because Dyer-Witherford relies on the primacy of labor struggles as determining capital’s flows to inform his concept of “socialized worker.” Oddly enough, he borrows Harvey’s language to describe how globalization is really a response to “mass worker” unrest in the 60s (and, of course, all that other social unrest which was really a response to capital, too): “By the early 1970s, it became clear that, from capital’s point of view, the old “triplanetary” division of the world wasn’t working. With profit rates in the old centers of accumulation tumbling, the search for a reorganization of capital’s global circuits that would allow it to escape worldwide pressures of social unrest was on” (133). I’m buying his labor-determines-capital narrative less and less each time I read it.

Some other Quick Hits:

Doesn’t this fly in the face of what we’ve encountered on immaterial labor: “It is only when new information and communication technologies empower humankind with the ability incessantly to feed knowledge back into knowledge, ... that there is, ... an especially close link between the activity of the mind, on the one hand, and material production, be it of goods or services, on the other” (Castells 11).

Micropolitics and Fascism. I have not read A Thousand Plateaus where I know Deleuze and Guattari get into micropolitics and fascism; let me just say, I found this discussion really problematic. Anyone have a copy I could borrow? For those who have read it, at least assure me that it's more nuanced than DW lets on!