Barack Obama’s emphasis on change, or the desire for change, as something that unites his supporters in the race for the Democratic nomination in the US, has been so conspicuous that it is difficult not to see in it something significantly symptomatic of the general social and political mood in America, and perhaps in the world.
Leave aside for the moment the fact that, as various commentators have pointed out, his obvious rhetorical skills tend to cover up the lack of specificity in all his talk about change or the need for it. What seems to me significant, however, is the tremendous receptivity on the part of (it appears) especially young, well-educated people for this message of change, amorphous though it may be, that Obama has been disseminating in the course of his campaign. I would like to place this in a wider context.
It seems to me that, behind the appeal of Obama’s message of change lies something of global importance — not only in the fashionable sense related to globalisation, but concerning the well-being of global society. It resonates with the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2001), which addresses the emergence of a new form of sovereignty in the world (at a political, juridical, economic, social and cultural level) — a sovereignty and array of dominant forces (broadly, the capitalist states and their allies) which benefit from, constantly expand, and reinforce the process known as globalisation at various levels. In their more recent work, Multitude (2005: xiii-xiv), they remark that:
“On one face, Empire spreads globally its network of hierarchies and divisions that maintain order through new mechanisms of control and constant conflict. Globalisation, however, is also the creation of new circuits of cooperation and collaboration that stretch across nations and continents and allow an unlimited number of encounters. This second face of globalisation is not a matter of everyone in the world becoming the same; rather it provides the possibility that, while remaining different, we discover the commonality that enables us to communicate and act together. The multitude might thus be conceived as a network: an open and expansive network in which all differences can be expressed freely and equally, a network that provides the means of encounter so that we can work and live in common.”
In Empire, Hardt and Negri already argued that there is a living alternative to the structures of domination and biopolitical production of Empire, and that this alternative power — the democratic promise of “the multitude” — grows within the operations and practices of the representatives of Empire itself. For example, the exemplar of rhizomatic communicational networks, the internet, is not merely the means for expanding the process of globalisation economically; it also provides the communicational means for workers, intellectuals, journalists, political and ecological activists, artists, filmmakers and creative writers (all those who comprise the heterogeneous multitude) to use the resources of Empire to subvert it, that is, for purposes of preparing a truly democratic transformation of global society.
This is not a fiction; manifestations of the desire for such a democratic transformation — distinct from the existing so-called democracies — are detectable across the globe. For instance, in Multitude Hardt and Negri list and discuss in detail a number of “global demands for democracy” in the contemporary world, which have been increasing in strength. In so far as they are directed at governmental authorities and multinationals, they attempt to communicate a wide variety of demands and grievances pertaining to serious encroachments on the principles of democracy, which is understood by them as a form of social and political organisation which can only, justifiably, happen or “arise from below”, as “the rule of everyone by everyone” (as Hardt and Negri put it), that is, governance with the participation of the people (who would thus be both the rulers and the ruled). Is this kind of rule the case today in the world’s supposed “democracies”, or do we witness, time and again, the abuse of representational power by governments across the globe in multiple ways, from oligarchical excesses and corruption to downright power (and wealth) grabs?
Although one could challenge the authors of Empire and Multitude on certain interpretive issues, I tend to agree with them that the latter is the rule rather than the exception. And behind the success of Obama’s rhetorical emphasis on the need for change, one may discern a growing awareness on the part of ordinary people that the synthesis of liberal democracy and consumer capitalism is not all it is made out to be.
The worldwide protests (enumerated by Hardt and Negri) against the global political and economic system can therefore be understood as a sign that “democracy cannot be made or imposed from above”. They list three principal elements which recur in all the recent and current global demands as preconditions for democracy, namely: “… the critique of existing forms of representation, the protest against poverty, and the opposition to war”. These are manifestations of what may be thought of as the contemporary crisis in communication and the lack of representation at many levels.
One may gain some understanding of this crisis of representation and communication (and its link with the receptivity to change apparent in Obama’s campaign) from the parallel that Hardt and Negri draw in Multitude between the social and political significance of the more than 40 000 cahiers de doléances (lists of grievances) compiled all over France and submitted to Louis XVI just prior to the French Revolution of 1789. Today one witnesses growing lists of similar grievances, ranging from the most local contexts to the highest, most encompassing levels of governance, that is, at national as well as international level.
The fact that Hardt and Negri can write that “[m]ost contemporary protests focus, at least in part, on the lack of representation”, draws attention to the lack of communication between constituencies and those who supposedly represent them worldwide, from local through national to global (international) institutions of representation. This, I suspect, is at least in part what animates those voters in the United States who are receptive to Obama’s message of change.
Seen in this light, I would guess that it is mainly this receptivity to the idea that fundamental change is needed in societies across the globe (as argued and substantiated by Hardt and Negri) which explains Obama’s astonishing success so far in the race for the Democratic nomination, and not so much his ability to give concrete content to what such change would entail. In the process Obama may be seen, in the words of the African-American philosopher, Cornel West, as “restoring hope”.
I’m afraid it’s all about race. Obama’s white supporters do so to prove their non-racism and his black supporters because he is black like them:
“To be black and catapulting toward the presidency on charm, intellect and popularity is unacceptable to the racist paranoid and scary in America the beautiful. … They do not want to hear that he is a better American than they are, these right-wing extremist fascists in the land of America who no doubt believe it’s God’s will Barack Obama not get to the White House, no method of deterrence out of bounds, in their zealotry to protect and perpetuate Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Mom’s apple pie and the cross of Jesus in every home.”
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/obama-barack-america-1981504-new-first
Now I’ll have to plough through Hardt and Negri who appear to resent capitalist hegemony just as much as did Antonio Gramsci — and is HE ever turgid and hard to get through, but one has to, if one is to spice one’s every conversation with “thinkers” so as to appear more of an organic intellectual, hey?
It’s worth reading Hardt and Negri, Jon – they provide the intellectual backdrop to many of the important events and developments today. For example, when Stephen Friedman (in his recent piece on ‘The people shall govern – perish the thought!’) pointed to the way in which elected representatives in this country simply ignore ‘the people’ when it suits them to do so and go right ahead doing something (dissolving the Scorpions, for example) that should be tested via some of the mechanisms available to them in a democracy (e.g. a referendum), he was in fact providing a concrete example of what Hardt and Negri mean when they talk of ‘grievances about lack of representation’ worldwide. And in addition to this, Empire and Multitude are probably the best two (critical, and not just compilatory) works available on the globalization debate.
Thank you for sharing your observations, it is interesting that the one candidate running for the presidential election who is really offering REAL change and who has the slogan “Hope For America” is being ignored by the media, his name is Dr. Ron Paul and one can read more about him on http://www.ronpaul2008.com
To name just some of the issues he campaigns about: Limited Government, No Income Tax, No Regulation of the Internet and No Policing of the World.
Ron Paul supporters are growing in numbers and there are supporters in countries all around the world now, this is because people can see that his policies will ultimately be beneficial to more then just the American people.
Bert,
Very thoughtful and by the looks of it you have hit a nail on the head. What was widely celebrated as the “new social movements” at the turn of the millennium (Seattle +) gave many expressions of what you find in Negri and Hardt. Negri and Hardt spoke to those times and were widely debated. But since then seem to have simmered somewhat. Maybe this is the way writings bordering on the prophetic work. They have an immediate impact but their realities only explode later!
The term “another world is possible” came in widespread use as motto of the counter to the World Economic Forum, namely the World Social Forum held annualy around the world, mainly in Brazil.
As I see it there have been so many technological improvements in the means of communication that that have dammed up and held in check by modern statye processes that at some stage its like the sea waters coming in and withering away sand-made castles. Something is happening and who knows it needs the touch of a charismatic politician like Obama to get things to happen.
I was somewhat surprised when I noticed the election trend in favour of Obama. I at first was pro Hillary simply for the fact that she seems like a nice lady (sorry). But I also think that what some would pick up as a “racial dynamic” to the Obasma appeal are making a similar gutfelt mistake. If anything Obama indeed comes with an unblemished slate of new ideas, warts and all. In contrast, the warts are more evident in Hillary with misplaced cigars somehow still bugging people who are for newness, freshness and dumping of old baggage. Obama may well be what you are suggesting, the channel of the latent newness, more massive than many think, that by definition sets off change processes and events. A totally refreshed Administration could set off the many people with fresh minds full of new ideas and give form and shape. A totally different world is certainly not only possible, but desperately needed!
The sheer logic of coupling a need to a direct participation in a process in the immediate sense could result in politicians becoming extinct. Direct and particpatory democracy does away with the need for them. And as “old style politics” of superpolitics,super wars, massive “creative destruction (super wars, super credit flops and all that)die out, we are left by a form of direct democracy that levels needs and satisfaction of needs, of individuals and local communities by the push of the button.
There is an effervescence in the air and Obama’s timing seems just spot on. Obama has got something right and this is probably it!
The most exciting thing to watch will be what sort of an Administration team Obama puts together as a new administration should he come out tops.
Thanks for an informative and indeed very thought provoking read. You give one the feeling to wax lyrical for good human cause!
Berend Schuitema
Thanks for your constructive comments, Lindy and Berend – Lindy, it is indeed not the first time that certain candidates seem to be relatively ignored by Americans, even if he/she has a lot to offer. Ralph (is it Ralph?) Nader was another – is he running this time? Berend – very informative and incisive respponse. You probably know, in light of your response, that after Empire’s publication in 2001, it rapidly became the ‘bible’ of the alternative globalization movement (Seattle, etc.), and the reason is not hard to grasp. They have done the same sort of thing that Marx and others did in the 19th century, namely to bring together a lot of contemporary theory and look at the state of the globe through these theoretical lenses. The result is an astonishingly incisive, encompassing analysis/critique of current political, social, economic and cultural developments, which they have taken further in the later book, Multitude. But you’re right – their diagnosis does resonate with people like Obama’s ability to detect this need for another world. Let’s hope, if it comes into being, it is better than the present one.
I disagree entirely that this is a racial issue – ironically- without his political experience (so-called) this man has managed to energise the world – not only America – but also the youth AND many of us Woodstock romantics. Leadership is knowing who to get to do the best jobs. Leadership is not DOING the Teas and Toilets- it is to give us hope and get the people to do that. Initially I was for the first woman president. But I am sorry- she has shown in THAT debate- she is a woman who shows ENTITLEMENT – and as an African – that burns much of the lower reaches of the political conscience.
Obama would give us so much hope all over the world. And I am sorry Pres Mbeki – you are so paltry in comparison. It is not the rumours of drink and fear. It is VISION. What Mandela callries still. What Mugabe lost.The key to getting people to trust you.
Howzit Bert
This is certainly an interesting post, and I wish I had seen it earlier. Anyway, after reading it I thought I would mar it with a thought or two of my own. So here goes…
So, I get the sense that you arguing that the success of obama’s campaign – focused as it is on a notion of ‘change’ – is symptomatic of the broader global condition outlined in Empire. Its an interesting argument and may indeed be true. The problem is of course that platforms of ‘change’ (and their popular resonance) are pretty generic in terms electoral politics across the 20th century… in much he same way as, for instance, platforms grounded by a notion of ‘traditional values’ are. I imagine that a survey of the electoral strategies of most western democracies over the last 100 years would see a similar notion of ‘change’ being perennially mobilized by hopeful candidates (those keen on shoring up the youth vote for instance), just as more conservative leaning candidates have tended to mobilize an idea of a return to traditional values from time to time. And if candidates tend to be successful in so doing (especially in a context of an unpopular policy like a war), particularly amongst youth and others groups marginalized from the mainstreams of national political life, it is because it is part of the dialectical rhythm of liberal democratic representational politics… and not a symptom of crises into which it has fallen. Indeed, there are many examples from contemporary society that point to new (non–dialectical) forms of resolving the problem ‘the one and the many’, the growing popularity of Obama’s is not however one of them.
I wanted to say more about hardt and negri, but I’ve got one or two things I need to do first so that I can justify why I should be get paid for this day’s (immaterial) labour. so, maybe I’ll say more later.
It’s not often that I get to dual with a pro. Occasionally I attend some or other academic event, but there, without the amour of a pseudonym, I tend to sink into my chair (usually somewhere near the back of a venue) merely mumbling under my breath if I think the presenter is talking shit. See, I consider myself something of a ‘basement philosopher’, an enthusiastic amateur… perhaps without the appropriate qualifications and titles, but nonetheless driven by the yearnings of a life of thought. But modern life, the alienating tissue of the society of the spectacle, provides slim refuge for this caste… so that from the ranks of our ‘lens-grinders’ will not emerge our age’s ‘absolute philosophers’. Thus, what would have otherwise been vocation becomes a hobby, something we need to steal ‘time’ in order to do (it is no coincidence that many of this century’s most important works of philosophy owe their existence to the prison cells in which their authors were, for a ‘time’, forced to live). The real irony is that, in a world realigned by the new hegemony of immaterial (intellectual) labour, thought – the kind of thought that agamben calls the “nexus that constitutes the forms of life in an inseparable context as form-of-life” – is precisely what almost nobody has the ‘time’ to do anymore. And so, the beast of alienation let loose, I tend to resent those who do have the time for thought…those whose titles and positions secure them for them ‘time’ to do what should be the most precious part of any life…the time to think. And it for this reason bert – for your fellowships at Yale, for all your prizes collected under the sign ‘recognition of peers’ and indeed, for the status of these ideas flown with the banner ‘thought leader’ – that I (playfully) say here, you’re talking shit. Otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered.
Like you, I like Hardt and Negri, and empire is one of the texts in whose margins my own ideas have been formed (less so with multitude which I didn’t enjoy as much). I tend to disagree with certain aspects of their account of modern sovereignty but enjoy how they bring the latter into a properly biopolitical context, and how they relate both to the properly Marxist problematics of the general intellect and the real subsumption (although they are not the only folk to do this). At times I wonder if aspects of their argument are not irredeemably Eurocentric (particularly in their take on the question of primitive accumulation or the stuff about ‘subaltern nationalism’). If you’re interested we can talk more about these issues. But what i think is most important about empire, and what you seem not to get, is precisely the philosophical ground of their deployment of the notion of the multitude, as well the radical implications of their critique of representation. In this respect, and what I think is fundamental to hardt and negri, is the way the multitude, with its rhizomic biopolitical networks in which social life is produced, articulates a form of democratic action that cannot be captured on the horizon of the state form, or resolved through the traditional political categories of liberal democracy…like that of the ‘the people’ for instance. At stake here is their critique of the dialectical model of resolving the problem of the one and the many (and this is why empire is as much a critique of what negri calls the dialectical left, as it is of the new form sovereignty takes). Thus the multitude is a political subject in which the many is not resolved into the one in respect of this or that property (as in the concepts like working class or the south African people), but is the ‘one that is many’… that is its name itself denotes multiplicity. Now the issue I have is that in your formulation, it seems like simply the vagueness of obama’s notion of change is what here links it to the multitude (in fact would something like Laclau’s ‘On Populist Reason” not be better suited to understanding obama’s success?) What is of course missed is that this (obama’s) notion of change is mobilized precisely on the horizon of the state form and in the name of the very same representational politics called into question by negri’s deployment of the notion of the mutitude. And is not obama’s references to the ‘new majority’ (an idea very much part of the American political idiom) not just another (dialectical) formula for constituting the people as the subject of national political life? Thus rather than the face of the multitude, obama’s campaign (with a strong resonance of Laclauian populism) points to ways in which the radical impulses of the multitude are arrested and brought back into the orbit of the state of modern nationalism.
Would you agree?
Is there an american politician who *doesn’t* talk about change? I mean, in some ways its a competition to appear as “outside the beltway” as possible, as much of a rebel as possible…
As DS says, in the end Obama’s campaign cannot escape the horizon of the state. And in that regard I think there’s something fundamentally narrow about it. I mean, more than a century ago Eugene Pottier was writing about “spurn[ing] henceforth the old traditions”, and here I think I see a distinction… between “change”, Obama style, and the type of change talked about by Pottier and his fellow Communards. The one is a change of seat-occupants at the White House, the other is a change of the form of social life itself – a change imagined by a movement which has as its object the entire social field, not just a seat of government.
What is interesting to me from Multitudes is how N&H conceive of the way the “social field” is organised (around “the common”) and the way labour creates society & life. Some very refreshing ideas there (and not at all turgid, for the most part), quite useful in thinking about what a “social movement” could be in the world today.
Dionysusstoned, you are clearly a philosopher (whether or not you teach the discipline!) – I would prefer to answer your looooong interlocution with another posting, rather than here. And by the way – the reason for that is, precisely, that I do not have as much time for what you seem to think as the ‘luxury’ of thought – I work hard, mainly teaching (philosophy, film studies, architectural theory, media theory, etc.), and I do NOT have time to write more than one posting a week for TL – I spend more time writing for academic journals, in fact, So stop your resentment – I worked for those prizes. But I partly agree with what you say, and will write something in response.
i look forward to it.
i don’t really resent you.)
(btw, i was just teasing you prof.
Dionysus.. if something is “eurocentric” is it bad? Is it wrong?
Or is it dead-on-the-money bull’s-eye right?