A Confession

A confession: I didn’t post last night because I fell asleep reading Hardt and Negri. Yes. About 38 pages in, from the last Post-It note and the book’s position on the floor this morning. (I was on the couch, even. I mean, reclined, but on the couch.) And it’s doubly embarassing because I’ve always been a defender of difficult theoretical prose. Difficult? I like big words, and these guys manage a combination of the ethereal and the turgid that would give Fred Jameson theoretical nocturnal emissions.

Now: all that is not to say that the book ain’t useful. It warmed my cranky little heart to see that, while I think they mistranslated “solitudinem”, they chose as their epigraph for Chapter 1 a portion of the same quotation from Tacitus I recently found so compelling: “They make slaughter and call it peace” (3).

But they’re very careful to point out how they’re using the term “Empire”. In their words, they use it “not as a metaphor, which would require demonstration of the resemblances between today’s world order and the Empires of Rome, China, the Americas, and so forth, but rather as a concept, which calls primarily for a theoretical approach” (xiv). This raises a problem for me, one that I’ve already partially acknowledged: drawing similarities can only take you so far. But I think it might be far enough. Through metaphor, language negotiates difference, and draws one thing close to another.

For example: Republican Senator James Inhofe of Alabama declares that “I’m probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment” and that “If they’re in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners — they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents”, judging several thousand individuals guilty without any sort of trial. Perhaps he should do that for his own state, as well, since he’s so certain. And perhaps he should do it for death row in Illinois. And perhaps he should do it for himself, for that $2550 donation to Enron. Hey, Senator Inhofe: I’d love to see the pictures Lynndie England snaps of your wretched hypocritical sycophantic apologist ass.

My apologies. The metaphor was intended to demonstrate the ways in which language negotiates and enacts difference; I got a little carried away with the hypocrisy motif. But that’s just the thing: metaphor opposes sharp definition, to the point where we must ask: what ends does it serve? What does metaphor mean, and which terms does it illuminate? In one sense, it’s a link, saying, “This isn’t just like this, this is this.” In such a sense, it takes its objects out of their proper contexts. Metaphor is an act of identification, by which one places a subjectivity in an/other context, with which it must identify.

So let’s get out of the realm of literary theory, and back to our Senator Inhofe. What are the uses of metaphor in political discourse? Conservatives, I think, morally condense the realm of metaphor: what is or has been, they say, is the way it should be. Liberals, on the other hand, extend it: what could be, they say, is the way it should be. Anyone familiar with contemporary political discourse understands that both positions misuse its commonplaces, particularly the symbol of Nazism and the language of Orwell’s 1984. While I’m aware that conservatives contrast the freedoms of individualism to what I see as the remedial duties of the state to eliminate power inequalities and unfairness, I simultaneously see the Bush administration’s self-contradictory talk about freedom and its enemies — with its support of the elimination of individual rights — as not only tyranny but an expression of a desire for validation through domination (and some might say, or have already said, through making political opponents agree that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength).

In precisely this way, “Power, as it produces, organizes; as it organizes, it speaks and expresses itself as authority. Language, as it communicates, produces commodities but moreover creates subjectivities, puts them in relation, and orders them” (Hardt & Negri 33). Many — academics and non-academics — understand this phenomenon, but fail to understand it as a relational capacity, as something metaphorical, as Bourdieu has contended: we produce relational subjectivities, and those subjectivities need not be synchronic or all-encompassing.

Why not? Because “This is certainly one of the central and most urgent political paradoxes of our time: in our much celebrated age of communication, struggles have become all but incommunicable.” Furthermore, “This paradox of incommunicability makes it extremely difficult to grasp and express the new power posed by the struggles that have emerged. We ought to be able to recognize that what the struggles have lost in extension, duration, and communicability they have gained in intensity. We ought to be able to recognize that although all of these struggles focused on their own local and immediate circumstances, they all nonetheless posed problems of supranational relevance, problems that are proper to the new figure of imperial capitalist regulation” (55).

Paradoxically, rhetoric retains its importance, despite its apparent synchronic irrelevance. How do the photographs of beatings and the beheading demand our attention, despite our apparent incommunicability? Can such things serve Empire even as they interrupt?

One answer, and perhaps a part of the reason that Curtiss decided to hang it up: it may be that I love to write these things here, in this space that you read, because that’s all that’s left to me, and to you as well. This pathetic, dissolute, and ineffectual speech is alone what is permitted by Empire.

As a teacher, I might hope for alternatives. But, were Tacitus around today, I’ll suggest that he might live in a small house in NoVa just outside the Capital Beltway, and occasionally enjoy Motorhead’s Orgasmatron.