richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

152 Gramsci is Deadperhaps most tellingly, Negri is known for this kind of approach inhis own political practice, as evidenced by the comments of a fellowautonomist militant:Negri can be taken as an emblematic fi gure: every time he set foot in spacesthat were opening up, in this case within the philosophical community orwithin the community of intellectual debate in general, he immediately triedto impose his hegemony on them or in any case force them into a hegemonicstrategy. Therefore, immediately the mechanism of the party was put intoplay. The paradox of Autonomia was that of being born from the dissolutionof the political groups only to maintain within itself the logic of the party,in other words that of the executive that had to direct, impose hegemony,address, to rein in to a common strategy and tactic everything that moved,whatever the aspect or contradiction. (Marazzi 2002)Thus, although it may be internally differentiated and fluid, thetask of the multitude—as it is envisaged by Hardt and Negri at anyrate—is to counter one totalizing force with another, to struggle forhegemony in the leninist sense of this term.Another problem with the project of the constituent power ofthe multitude has already been alluded to in the discussion of classcentrismabove. Although at times Hardt and Negri present themultitude as a ‘plane of singularities, an open set of relations, whichis not homogeneous or identical with itself’ (2000: 103), they alsohave a tendency to think of it as something singular, totalizable.‘[I]f we are consigned to the non-place of Empire, can we constructa powerful non-place and realize it concretely?’ (208). ‘The counter-Empire must also be a new global vision, a new way of living inthe world’ (214). Each of these questions and statements can, andshould, be rendered differently if the multitude is to be theorizedas ‘not a new body but a multiplicity of bodies’ (2001: 243). Thatis: if we are consigned to the non-place of Empire, can we constructpowerful non-places and realize them concretely? Or: counter-Empiremust also be a disparate but affinite set of new global visions, newways of living in the world. This is not a matter of mere grammar,although the language one uses in such cases is obviously important.It is a matter of the distinction between hegemonic and affinitybasedforms, of the difference between a desire to build ‘a coherentproject of counterpower’ (2001: 242) versus the desire to allow forincoherence within the ranks of those who oppose the neoliberalorder, each for their own reasons.