Hardt and Negri write that “the manifestos of Machiavelli and Marx-Engels define the political as the movement of the multitude and they define the goal as the self-production of the subject” (63). While they use Spinoza to refine and extend this perspective into an ultimately hopeful “materialist teleology” (66), they do not argue with the perspective itself. Today, the politicized production of self — in the writing classroom and on the web — is an increasingly public practice.
I don’t completely understand Hardt & Negri’s freighted use of the term “multitude”, but it seems to imply a class-based connection to the term “proletariat” (I’d be grateful for definitional input from anyone who’s read Empire). Still, within the multitude, one might understand that the individual distinguishes herself from other individuals by identification and by difference; by saying that she belongs to this group and not to that group. This, of course, is class, and the public self-production of the subject is both rhetorical and classed.
Even further: from Bourdieu, we can see than the contemporary public self-production of the subject places considerable reliance upon consumptive practices. As Thomas Frank has repeatedly and polemically pointed out, you are what you buy. And here’s where the Rome metaphor breaks down, and where the comparisons of the workings of imperium become no longer useful, because the self-production of the subject via consumption, and via our contemporary informatization of production, introduces economic components of a sort that simply were not present two thousand years ago. I’m going to have a go at Carlin Barton’s brilliant work on the construction of Roman subjectivities to see if I can figure out, for this conference paper, how my metaphorical look to Tacitus for a perspective on contemporary democratic discourse on the Web and the rhetorical construction of subjectivities might be usefully limited and corrected, but what I find really interesting here is that while many of the concerns about truth, rhetoric, and representation in Tacitus still seem so urgent today, those concerns have today gained an additional economic dimension. So part of what I’m asking seems to be, what happens when we attach an economic perspective to the ideas of Tacitus about the circulation and dissipation of rhetoric?
The beginnings of an answer to that query might be in Hardt and Negri’s contention that under Empire, imperial “power has no actual and localizable terrain or center” and “is distributed in networks, through mobile and articulated systems of control” (384). Rhetoric, truth, and representation carry economic value and political power along these networks, on weblogs and in the writing classroom.
Need to think about this further. I love this feeling, when all the connections start to pop together. This is gonna be a good conference paper, if I can manage to cram it all into fifteen minutes.
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