I promised a brief overview of Michael Hardt's recent lecture on love in the multitude, so I revisited my notes. If I totally misrepresent him here, I hope he'll forgive me.
Hardt and Negri's buzz comes from two books Empire (the entire text is available online through Wikipedia) and its sequel Multitude. Realize that I haven't read either of these texts, but Hardt gave a summary definition of "multitude" in his lecture as "singularity with cooperation." Essentially, multitude is something like political free association outside of the rubric of any organizing body, ideology, or leader. Hardt is clear about this when he says that the multitude can "lead itself." Moreover, the multitude is antithetical to a politics of the Same--its not about identity but difference. The multitude is not defined by a race, a class, a religion, a party, or an ideology. It is liquid, heterogenous; moving and spontaneous.
Perhaps the textbook example of multitudes at work that is so often cited is the Seattle WTO protests of 1999: anarchosyndicalists and christians, environmentalists and gay rights groups, academics and those crazy guys who hacky-sack all day long, all mobilizing for a political end. You get the picture, even though I'm not sure that this example quite fits the theorizing of multitude the way its advocates, including Hardt and Negri, say it does (I want to know how political ends fits into the schema. Another objection: a friend who studies philosophy recently made the point that the WTO protests were still racially homogenous.)
So how does love fit into this? Hardt is trying to reclaim it as a term to describe the association which holds the multitude together. He claims that love goes "beyond the rationality of interests and identities" and becomes a "new rationality." At the same time, he doesn't believe that love comes from no where--it needs to be developed, "trained" (in the sense of athletic training).
Although he went on to discuss greek conceptions of love, this was about the extent of the definition he gave in his talk. That's both a strength and a weekness, I think, since its easy to say "love" and harder to see what it looks like. Love, like violence, seems to be one of those terms we know when we see it; not very stable ground for a political theory.
The bulk of the talk was, essentially, a project of reclamation, of returning back to older ideas about love to either reject them or recast them. The result was a fairly eclectic set of readings ranging from Judaic notions of "Neighbor" as Other to Marquis de Sade, from Liberation Theology to Queer Theory, from Spinoza to Augustine. I won't go into all of his points, but they included the bringing together of agape (love as charity) and eros (love as desire) in our conceptions of community, a rejection of a love of the Same for a love that proliferates differences, and a critique of love as a "passion" (something we "fall into"), advocating instead love as production.
The lecture was a lot of fun and quite provocative, but the Q&A session was particularly productive (I've been generally disappointed with audiences at public lectures; this was a welcome exception.) Hardt has a very open and somewhat self-effacing persona that doesn't come off as false modesty. The questions, interestingly enough, centered on the question of violence. If you are going to present "love in the multitude," can you have a place for political violence? Hardt recognized this as a real problem; even though he claimed that most older forms of political violence were no longer effective, he was not willing to eliminate the possibility for violent protest, rebellion, intervention altogether. Although admitting that this was an element of his argument still in progress, the provisional answer he offered was that love is not something that is indiscriminate; contrary to all our common wisdom, love does not have to be, indeed should not be, blind.
When I first heard him say this, I agreed with him. I am suspicious of any political program that offers a homogenous response to the world, since homogeneity usually hides major unthought elements in our theory and practice, as well as perpetuates ideologies of purity. Even though I hold to Jesus's teachings on love, which is extended to one's enemies and those who hate and spitefully use you, I don't think that love looks the same in every situation--love, even when eros and agape come together, is shaded by difference.
But as I continued to think about it, I could not see how a love which productively proliferates difference, as Hardt was advocating, a love which was not that of the Same, could be discriminatory as he claimed. For if you discriminate, in any way, are you not positing some other definition of the Same? Christianity would say "yes: the Same is that we are all created by God," an attractive alternative to, say, racial or cultural narratives of Sameness. But Hardt, in his post-Deleuzian emphasis on production of desire, does not seem to have much theoretical tools to adequately deal with this problem.
Interestingly enough, he offered an antithesis to love not as hate but evil. His argument regarding evil is quite savvy, critiquing both Bushian "evil is irrational and must be destroyed" as well as Chomskian "evil is completely explainable and knowable, based on material and cultural factors." Instead, he sees evil as that vanishing point of our knowledge, the horizon across which we have not yet passed. He thinks that we should look for evil in "love gone bad," that is to say, that love should be the first place we turn in our contemplation of evil and not to either some mystified unknown or some fully knowable material force.
And in that "gone bad," to return to my earlier critique, I think we see that love by itself is not an adequate concept for being and doing in the world of culture, society, and multitudes. We cannot do without love; love, like evil (though I don't know if Hardt would say this), is the positive unknowable horizon, always exceeding our logics and predictions, unfolding before us. It is, I would agree with him, productive. But to what end? The Deleuzian faith (one Hardt seems to espouse) in the production of desire seems to me, as Badiou critiques it, too blind. We need a politics of "Love plus X," a positive rationality married to love and coming from it that is as strong as the bonds which bring the multitude together. To couple love with that other thing, call it ethics, morality, justice, whatever, is the almost impossible task of living together, the call of community which, perhaps, we have only barely begun to think.
Posted by pjaussen at May 9, 2006 08:00 AM | TrackBack