From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Thu Apr 28 2005 - 13:13:59 EDT
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LRB | Vol. 27 No. 9 dated 5 May 2005 | Tom Nairn
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Make for the Boondocks
Tom Nairn
Multitude by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
[ Buy from the London Review Bookshop ] · Hamish
Hamilton, 426 pp, £20.00
Better to wonder if ten thousand angels
Could waltz on the head of a pin
And not feel crowded than to wonder if now's the time
for the armies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
To teach the Serbs a lesson they'll never forget
For shooting Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo
Carl Dennis, 'World History'1
The cover of Multitude invites bookshop browsers
not just to read it, but to 'Join the many. Join
the Empowered.' The missionary tone is underlined
by Naomi Klein's blurb - 'inspiring' - and a
frisson added by the book's appearance: a brown
paper wrapping like those used to discourage porn
thieves and customs inspectors. Trembling fingers
that go further are reminded that this book
succeeds Empire (2000), by the same authors,
which provided a picture of the global imperium
supposed to have followed the Cold War - not the
American Empire, but a wider settlement of which
US supremacy was just one part. This imperium has
generated global resistance, which all purchasers
are now invited to approve, in the name of
democracy.
Hardt and Negri's multitude should not be
confused with the working class, or any ethnic
and national group. It seems to mean humanity in
general - 'The multitude is many-coloured, like
Joseph's magical coat,' but the coat hides an
increasingly common will, summed up by the
authors as 'democracy'. Readers are warned that
the book's argument may not be 'immediately
clear' and are exhorted to be patient, for
Multitude is 'a mosaic from which the general
design gradually emerges'. Before turning to that
design, it's important to stress how welcome this
expansiveness is. In a venture like this, social
anthropology and philosophy are as important as
economics or conventional international
relations. As Gopal Balakrishnan wrote in his
review of Empire in New Left Review, it seems
apposite to cite Virgil: 'The final age that the
oracle foretold has arrived; the great order of
the centuries is born again.'
And yet, as in the previous book, this oracular
tone is puzzling. If the outlook for global
democratisation were as good as these prophets
maintain, then surely a more empirical,
matter-of-fact tone would suffice? Instead, an
exalted and visionary tone prevails, right up to
the high note of rapture on which they end:
'Today time is split between a present that is
already dead and a future that is already living
. . . In time, an event will thrust us like an
arrow into that living future. This will be the
real political act of love.' Hardt and Negri's
project is constantly undermined by an inebriate
tendency towards the absolute. It is as if the
authors find themselves transported by a
philosophical elixir of oneness which, though
invariably justified as 'radicalism', may in fact
carry the reader towards an odd style of
religiosity. Nor is this just a side effect: it
is this that we are really being invited to
'join' - empowerment through faith, via spiritual
transport.
You'll have to tell them frankly you can't explain
Why Nineveh is still standing though you hope to learn
At the feet of a prophet who for all you know
May be turning his donkey toward Nineveh even now.
Carl Dennis, 'Prophet'
While Empire made some readers think of Virgil
and Rome, in Multitude the defining shift is more
restricted: the postmodern has become the
premodern. The philosophy of Spinoza has replaced
both Marxism and capitalist neo-liberalism. While
affected timelessness is inherent in the
Hardt-Negri rhetoric - hence their over-easy
references to antiquity or the Middle Ages - the
centre of gravity in this book is firmly in the
later 17th century. Once regarded as an important
precursor of the Enlightenment and of Marxist
materialism, the thought of Spinoza (1632-77) is
redeemed in these pages, as a wisdom awaiting its
vindication in a globalised epoch yet to come. In
vital ways, Spinoza told the whole story: his
apparently abstract pantheistic philosophy
explained history itself, future as well as past,
and the globalisation process simply favours a
return to such understanding, after the mounting
sorrows and delusions of modernity.
Spinoza was an asylum seeker fortunate to find
refuge in the Netherlands. Under the more stable
conditions following the Thirty Years War and the
Treaties of Westphalia, his family settled in one
of Europe's most open and prosperous societies.
This fascinating world has been brought to life
by Jonathan Israel's great study, Radical
Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of
Modernity (2001). But Israel isn't mentioned in
Multitude's extensive notes. Hardt and Negri's
concern is with rebirth, not historiography. It
is the great seer who appeals to them: 'the
spiritual saboteur, a subverter of things
lawfully established, and an apologist for the
Devil', as Roger Scruton has put it, who 'after
his death was regarded as the greatest heretic of
the 17th century'.
Reviled both by orthodox Hebraism and many
Netherlands Calvinists, Spinoza insisted that
intuitive prophecy was the basis of true faith,
and that 'the prophet creates his own people.' In
Radical Enlightenment Israel claims that
Spinoza's system 'imparted shape, order and unity
to the entire tradition of radical thought, both
retrospectively and in its subsequent
development', and Spinoza's Ethics concluded in
terms significantly like those of Multitude: 'The
intellectual love of God . . . is eternal,' and
'there is nothing in nature which is contrary to
this intellectual love, or which can take it
away.' It has taken a while for 'the people' to
show up as global everybody or multitude; but
this is good luck for our authors, as they do not
hesitate to remind readers. Thanks to the Western
victory in the Cold War and to information
technology, can it be that globalisation is
putting the whole world into the hands of today's
radical heretics?
Spinoza was a republican democrat and a supporter
of the politician Johan De Witt (1625-72), an
opponent of the House of Orange. After De Witt's
death, the aristocratic Orange faction took power
and restored a more conventional social order
(which was subsequently imposed on Britain when
one of them acquired the English throne in 1689).
By that time 'Spinozism' was already a thriving
underground cult with ardent supporters in many
countries: 'The battle was on to fix the image of
the dying Spinoza in the perceptions and
imagination of posterity,' Israel writes, since
'the final hours of a thinker who seeks to
transform the spiritual foundations of the
society around him become heavily charged with
symbolic significance in the eyes of both
disciples and adversaries.' Plainly, this battle
still continues. It is not to disregard or
minimise such a striking lineage to observe that
Spinozism had limitations associated with the
society it came from, in which countries were
struggling to emerge from absolutism and
theocratic tyranny. Today, Spinoza's greatness
has to be defended against the delusions of a
belated progeny, rather as Marx had to be in the
later 19th and 20th centuries.
Among this progeny, as in the 17th century,
heresy underwrites faith. Disowning an orthodoxy
makes for a purer belief, rather than its
demolition. The heretic normally believes
self-consciously that he has some new access to
the secrets of the universal essence - as
revealed in a Da Vinci code, for example, or in
significant recent happenings, or both. In this
case, the people being fostered by prophecy are a
'network', contemporary academese for those 'born
again': souls meshed together not just by
experience but by a cultural sensibility which is
by definition universal (or cosmopolitan) in its
direction and meaning. It would be old hat to
speak of 'spirit'; but Spinoza's system proves
useful at this point. His pantheism identified
matter and mind, and the Deity, with the Universe
itself; and, in similar vein, secularism can now
be merged with spiritualism. Dreary old
historical materialism can thus be retrieved and
re-wardrobed as an idealised globalisation, an
object of belief requiring no denominations,
sects, rituals or oaths (only £20 over the
bookshop counter).
Readers of Empire were puzzled about just whose
empire was at stake. The dawning Oneness was
emphatically dissociated from the most obvious
candidate, victorious American imperialism.
Indeed, as Balakrishnan observed in his review,
the authors repeatedly cited American
revolutionary and constitutional precedents for
the style of global liberation they were
preaching. This pattern is continued in
Multitude. But while in 2000 the notion of the
multinational US as flawed staging-post towards
the Absolute remained merely difficult, in 2005
it has become absurd. Between book launches, a
war launched by super-heated American nationalism
has lurched onto the scene with a distinct
message of its own.
In the pages of Multitude, however, all this is
curiously sidelined. As some suspected from the
start, the empire turns out to be God's own: a
permanent if ethereal ascription, not threatened
but rendered more evident by the valley of
shadows we have been dragged through since 2003.
All conflicts are now redefined as 'civil wars'
within this overmastering Totality, an end-time
so final that all detours appear futile.
President Bush's descent on Iraq is just one of
these: not an aberration or a relapse into
old-fashioned imperialism, but characteristic of
the new age. That is, of a globe that has become
truly One, though still awaiting the
signal-flares of true redemption.
And in this dark meantime, Satan has taken over.
You try to imagine highways to all men
But your heart has always loved boundaries,
The heavy fields in back of your house, the
visible streets of America.
Carl Dennis, 'Native Son'
Hence the vale of sorrows recounted by
'Simplicissimus' in the first section of the
book. In the absence of love, war has overwhelmed
creation. Globalisation's first step has been a
Fall, a descent into an abyss: 'War is becoming a
general phenomenon, global and interminable.'
Postmodernity so far is doom; golems have taken
over the globe and bathed their enemies in blood,
while clerics and footling liberals either egg
them on or mutter futilely about peace. The
golem-world is not a passing phase but a 'new
ontology', demanding some equivalently total,
all-encompassing answer. Le Monde diplomatique's
current atlas of conflicts lists about 65 wars or
agitations; but Hardt and Negri discern 'almost
two thousand sustained armed conflicts on the
face of the earth at the beginning of the new
millennium, and the number is growing'. No list
is attempted, and the three examples cited are
Rwanda, the Croat-Serb wars and 'Hindu and Muslim
violence in South Asia' (presumably in Kashmir).
Anyone can add significantly to this list - Aceh,
East Timor, Eritrea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Tibet,
Darfur, Chechnya, Kurdistan etc - but it is
difficult to approach anything like the
apocalyptic vision unveiled for readers of
Multitude.
We are being told of an endless 9/11, a
climacteric of world history, but there is little
doubt that warfare is now less of a universal
threat than it was between the 1950s and the
1980s. Some years back Donald MacKenzie argued in
the LRB that - contrary to so many earlier
previsions - nuclear weapons had been in effect
'disinvented' by the closure of the Cold War, and
the colossal, escalating investment in both
material and human resources needed to make them
work was bound to diminish.2 Now, in spite of
9/11, Iraq and the proposed US Defense Shield,
Armageddon has retreated further. In The
Globalisation of World Politics (2001) Michael
Cox pointed out that today 'nuclear war is far
less likely to happen,' even though there has
been an increase in the number of wars. Later in
the same volume Andrew Linklater maintained that
'there is no doubt that globalisation and
fragmentation have reduced the modern state's
willingness and capacity to wage the kinds of war
which typified the last century.' America,
Britain and some cronies may have lapsed into
this sort of war in 2003: but that's what it was
- a throwback, not some new ontology.
The point is not just that Multitude uncannily
echoes the feigned panic of Washington
anti-terrorists. This is a philosophical argument
that ordains extremes. An unremitting Vale of
Despond is required, because the coming vision of
transfiguration must be equivalently
comprehensive - a view expounded in Negri's
Subversive Spinoza: (Un)contemporary Variations.3
Hardt and Negri are in the Redemption business,
door-steppers rather than private eyes. Nor
should it be thought such metaphysical transports
are confined to their two books, or to small
coteries of addicts. Plenty of others were on the
trail in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in
France. They included Jacques Lacan, Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as a Duke
University elite in the US. In a survey of the
trend in the journal Anthropoetics in 1997,
Douglas Collins wrote that back in 1984 Julia
Kristeva had noted that 'we're in the middle of a
regression which is present in the form of a
return to the religious . . . a rehabilitation of
spiritualism.' Spinozism was part of this: 'the
latest example of French totalism, a product of
the nostalgia for the universalising vocation of
the French intelligentsia, seeking new grounds to
assert the prerogatives of its historical role,
refusing to allow itself to be consigned to
Pareto's "graveyard of aristocracies"'.
Many readers will sense something odd about such
reliance on a vision predating not only David
Hume and Adam Smith, but Darwin, Freud, Marx and
Durkheim, from an age when genes and the
structure of human DNA were undreamt of. Can
philosophy really be so timeless? The answer is
plainly yes, provided a sufficiently passionate
sermon can be extracted out of it, for delivery
to a sufficiently huge and eager congregation of
the disoriented, looking for omens of a new
century. Naturally, those disenchanted with
neo-liberal progress are thirsty for portents of
a fairer dawn. And some will prefer it in secular
rather than theological garb, however surprising
or unfamiliar the source.
Another striking expression of this trend is
Etienne Balibar's Spinoza and Politics (1998),
the preface of which stresses its connections
with Negri's work in the 1970s. Balibar, too,
ends with pages of rapturous merging, showing how
the Spinozan framework identifies everything with
everything else, including politics, and thus
restores a universalist vocation to the
intelligentsia: 'Politics is the touchstone of
historical knowledge. So if we know politics
rationally - as rationally as we know mathematics
- then we know God, for God conceived adequately
is identical with the multiplicity of natural
powers.'
So how come He/They wrecked things with George W.
Bush? Why did the highways to all men give way to
those heavy fields in back of home? Christian
Pentecostalists and Wahhabite Muslims alike think
they know God, and that their particular
boundaries are imbued with universal spirit and
meaning. These boundaries must be fought for,
plainly, rather than relying on mathematical
reason for an answer. And such combat continues
to demand mobilisation of the inhabitants of the
nations within these boundaries. Only as a
staging-post towards the conversion of everybody,
everywhere, of course. But this is notoriously
clearer to missionaries than to the denizens of
know-nothing darkness. Thus the touchstone of
actual political history would appear still to be
somewhere specific - this or that goddam backyard
or visible street - rather than up in the ether
of universal being and implication. And somewhere
always implies somewhere else: recalcitrant,
differing elsewheres, beyond this or that
boundary - or possibly (one suspects) beyond
every one of the frontiers and diverse identities
that have, so far, structured a necessarily
disruptive and nomadic species. Undismayed by the
post-2001 setback, Hardt and Negri turn
nonetheless to look for signs of coming
redemption through the smog of their fallen world.
Be like those angels said to enjoy the earth
As a summer retreat before man entered the picture,
Staggering under his sack of boundary stones.
They didn't mutter curses as they fastened their wings
And rose in widening farewell circles.
They grieved for the garden growing smaller below them,
Soon to exist only as a story
That every day grows harder to believe.
Carl Dennis, 'Loss'
'Multitude' is defined in Webster's as 'the state
of being many', with an implication of
formlessness or indeterminacy: 'a multitude of
sins' is probably its most common use. The same
dictionary goes to Claud Cockburn for its
adjectival example: 'The mosquitoes were
multitudinous and fierce.' Hardt and Negri
attempt a more positive definition, laying
emphasis on signs of grace, and attendant
democratic virtues. But this turns out to be
curiously like the bus tours found in all big
cities. Sightseers impatient for the general
design get whisked at speed past famous
landmarks, as the guide intones a suitable (often
rather similar) judgment on each one, with too
few dodgy jokes. The guides in this case are
invariably erudite: their references take up 45
pages, and great efforts are made with innovative
concepts such as network struggles, 'swarm
intelligence', 'biopower' ('engaging social life
in its entirety'), immaterial labour, and the
multitudinous spirit as carnival ('a theory of
organisation based on the freedom of
singularities that converge in the production of
the common: Long live movement! Long live
carnival! Long live the common!'). The
'monstrosity of the flesh' gets a look-in as
well, though rendered decent as Man, 'the animal
. . . that is changing its own species'.
Yet this erudite tour leads only to an
inconclusive emptiness, where the signs portend
some somersault to come, via an unprecedented
agency that may be everywhere, and potentially
omnipotent, yet remains without a local
habitation and a name. In Chapter 2, religions,
nations, classes and existing transnational
bodies are indeed acknowledged as contributing to
the moment of advent - that is, to a process of
'making common' whose pattern will be quite
different from anything previously experienced.
All sorts of omens are read as indicating the way
forward out of modernity's blood-drenched
darkness. But how?
Take the case of anthropology. The great lurch
forward into market-driven unification -
suggesting a world in some ways akin to one
nation and state - was bound to reawaken concern
about human nature, the grander parameters of the
species now so brusquely confined to 'one boat'.
And indeed it is noted that anthropologists are
moving towards a new paradigm by 'developing a
new conception of difference, which we will
return to later'. Yet when this conception
subsequently materialises, it is as follows: 'We
are a multiplicity of singular forms of life and
at the same time share a common global existence.
The anthropology of the multitude is an
anthropology of singularity and commonality.'
This disappointingly bland aperçu is supported by
a footnote referring readers not to Barth,
Gellner or Geertz, and certainly not to such
historical revisions as Hugh Brody's The Other
Side of Eden (2001), or Stephen Oppenheimer's Out
of Eden (2003), let alone to such disturbing
stuff as Chris Knight's Blood Relations (1995),
or remarkable surveys like Jonathan Xavier Inda
and Renato Rosaldo's The Anthropology of
Globalisation (2001). No, on this crucial aspect
of prehistory, the reader is referred instead to
Deleuze's Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza
(1990).
Thus (again) speaks Spinoza, sufficient for the
multitude. His ism can still embrace everything,
including things and ideas born long after him
(and which could not have existed in the later
17th century). In fact, the authenticity of the
multitude represents an apotheosis of the ism:
that is, of a specific way of processing ideas
that emerged in the mid-19th century, and has
remained a distinctive feature of modernity. An
ism ceased to denote just a system of general
ideas (like Platonism or Thomism), and evolved
into a proclaimed cause or movement - no longer a
mere school but a party or societal trend. Ideas
acquired banner headlines and 'stood for' an aim
or tendency, and eventually for a civilisational
choice: individuals could in turn stand for this
choice, and be 'conscripted' on one side or
another. Social development linked to
industrialisation, urbanisation and the formation
of nations was bearing formerly voiceless masses
into the political picture. These had to be
formed into appropriate groups, whether Italians,
Liberals, Conservatives, socialists (or whatever).
Identity in a more than bureaucratic sense had
arrived. Its artificers were new too: the
intellectuals. As Gramsci wrote in the Prison
Notebooks, the function of modern intellectuals
is inseparable from being torn between past and
future. Their task is to reconcile the
'tradition' of established rulers with the
inescapable appeal of the new, whether by
compromise or through rejection. The formation
and reformation of 'philosophies' now meant
something dangerous, or reassuring, and that was
their stock-in-trade.
Spinozism is a last-ditch salvationist movement,
aimed at redeeming the status of isms. It stands
for 'ismhood', a necessarily total secular faith
fusing conceptual satisfaction and
moral-political guidance. The aim is redemption,
guaranteeing the future of the intelligentsia in
this postmodern, and post-everything sense.
Entrancing the globe by multitude-speak, the role
of intellectuals is to fuse the coat of many
colours into a consummate internationalism. And
what can the warp and woof of this fabric be, but
politically correct love?
And if it's hard to believe that spirit
Is anything more than a word when defined
As something separate from what is mortal,
It's easy to recognise the spirit of the recruit
Not convinced his honour has been offended
Who decides it's time to step from the line
And catch a train back to his cottage, where his wife and daughter
Are waiting to serve him supper and hear the news.
Carl Dennis, 'World History'
In the last third of the 19th century, one ism
became far more successful than all its
competitors: nationalism. Staggering with the
sacks of precious boundary-stones, it was the
peasants, the petty bourgeoisies and the emergent
working classes who won the race. That was what
drove the angels off. Because the first duty of
essences (once established) is to be essential,
it came to be believed this victory must have
been foreordained, was irresistible and - if not
eternal - then at least very long-range in its
effects. 'Realism' dictated a dominance of the
foreseeable by the ism that had shown it worked.
So universality was postponed until this had
worked itself out, either by means of warfare,
monotheist religious conversion, or
ultra-strenuous moral preaching and example.
This belief was natural, and occasionally heroic;
it was also mistaken. 'Internationalism', in the
old sense creakily replayed by Empire and
Multitude, was a part of the 1870-1989
nationalist world, not an answer to it. Like New
Imperialism and Social Darwinism, it was a
response to the force of circumstances. The ism
of nationality was not rooted in nations or
societal diversity, but had been grafted onto
them from the 1860s onwards, had led to two world
wars, and was congealed in place for a further
generation by the Cold War. What it really
expressed was fratricidal great-nation hegemony
and competition.
The term 'nationalism' did not appear in what
everyone still views as the 19th century's
outstanding denunciation of politicised
nationhood, Lord Acton's On Nationality (1862).
But it was in use by 1872, and by 1882 it had
infiltrated every major language. Soon it would
become the nature of a new century: as Ernest
Gellner liked to put it, the 'second nature' of
modernity itself. He meant that as long as the
conditions of modernity endured, there would be
no escaping from it. Even small and would-be
countries - liberal, Mazzini-inspired,
peace-inclined populations without imperial
ambitions - had to tool up accordingly.
What began in 1989 was the real deconstruction of
this phase. Both the wealth and the meaning of
nations began to struggle out from the chrysalis
of the ism. In The Globalisation of World
Politics Fred Halliday points out that
nationalism has been 'promoted by processes of
globalisation', and its paradox is to 'stress the
distinct character of states and peoples' while
itself being manifestly a global phenomenon. The
phenomenon originated mainly in the 18th century,
but its aggressive or 'closed' definition
appeared only spasmodically until the 1870s, when
the social revolt of the communards had a
critical impact on the national downfall of
imperial France, forcing a more militant and
rigid ideology into being. Napoleon III and
Bismarck between them inflicted 'nationalism' on
the globe (and it's appropriate that the French
and Germans should now be jointly undoing it,
inside the new constitutional structures of the
European Union). More surprisingly, Halliday
argues that nationalism 'was only fully
recognised as relevant by International Relations
in the past two decades'.
Hardt and Negri's blueprint for democracy is
revealed in the long final chapter of Multitude.
Having regained the invigorating wholeness of
Spinoza's 17th century, we are poised to move on.
What postmodernity must now do is to move on to
the 18th century, the century of revolutions. But
of course today's replay will be quite different,
since the multitude will be able to discard the
failures that ensued last time: 'Back then the
concept of democracy was not corrupted as it is
now.' It had not yet been diluted or betrayed by
representative or parliamentary nonsense, or by
notions of 'vanguard parties'. Unlike the liberal
bourgeoisie and the proletariat, globalised
network-humankind will be capable of
authenticity. That is, of 'a radical, absolute
proposition that requires the rule of everyone by
everyone'.
The revolutionaries of 1688, 1776 and 1789 went
wrong in believing that the city-states of
antiquity were a suitable model for modern
nations. Today's analogous error is to think that
modern nation-states are relevant to democracy on
a global scale, when 'what is necessary is an
audacious act of political imagination to break
with the past, like the one accomplished in the
18th century,' but avoiding its snares. All that
counts now is 'becoming common', the formation of
comparable lifestyles and ideas the world over.
This is the 'biopolitical', the very gist of the
postmodern - the species-speak that Foucault
described as 'genealogies', or 'more precisely
anti-sciences'. Biopolitics has no particular
role for nations. It is striking that the
countries on Hardt and Negri's list of
trouble-spots are largely sites of national
emancipation struggles - 'old-fashioned' wars of
liberation for which there can no longer be any
justification, at least according to such
peremptory and ideological views of globalisation.
Is it not reasonable to think that such struggles
may, after the disappearance of Cold War
shackles, result in attempts at new kinds of
democracy, better forms of representation, closer
links between societies and states? And that the
smaller scale of such resolutions may be more
favourable to experiments than the mastodons of
earlier times? Or that armour-plated nationalism
might, in these circumstances, give way to a more
sustainable, outward-looking version? The new
ontology thinks not. It seeks 'a democracy
without qualifiers', unconstrained by
conservative 'ifs or buts'. There's no use
looking at boring comparative stories like Arend
Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy (1999) for clues
to a way ahead. The US is bad enough, the authors
concede, and has recently made 'a mockery of
representation', but 'no other nations have
electoral systems that are much more
representative.' This bewildering judgment is
rubbed in when they turn to Europe, an area where
a growing number of observers have recently been
detecting shy symptoms of progress. Forget it:
'The European constitutional model . . . does not
really address the issue of representation,' and
may even be making things worse.
All that counts is the Spinoza-viable: democratic
absolution investing 'all of life, reason, the
passions, and the very becoming divine of
humanity'. Every other strategy is bound to
appear conservative, 'non-radical', when set
against such a spiritual assault course,
prescribed for the networked multitude of
humanity. The authors actually use the phrase
'May the Force Be with You' in a subheading, as a
prelude to their closing exhortations on 'the
insistent mechanism of desire', as displayed in
the multitude's readiness for the advent of
rupture/rapture, or at any rate of some event
manifesting the latent power of universal love.
In 'World History' Carl Dennis says that no
silence can compare to that of 'bristling nations
standing toe to toe in a field . . . given the
need of great nations to be ready for great
encounters'. This is what prompts the recruit to
step from the line, and make for the boondocks. I
suspect that reading Multitude may affect many in
the same way. It summons the great, multitudinous
nation of mankind to join in an even greater
encounter with the Absolute, a Last Day of loving
Judgment where all will be redeemed.
Globalisation is merely the wave bearing everyone
towards this end. It's the vindication of old
mystical intuitions of oneness and reconciliation
with heaven, brought to fruition unexpectedly by
capitalism's post-1989 world reach. There is no
shame in feeling like the recruit at this point,
or in suspecting that globalisation may have (or
also have) opposite effects to those extolled
here. May not the boondocks and those
multitudinous elsewheres perceive it as an
opportunity to be more themselves than previously
- to build on so many painfully assembled
boundary stones, rather than witnessing them
swept away by storms of love, as once by storms
of war?
But, however misguided it is, some may still feel
Empire and Multitude to be on their side, allied
to democracy and the left. Susan Sontag wrote
that 'an idea which is a distortion may have a
greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it
may serve the needs of the spirit.' But
unfortunately, spiritual needs are served here by
adventures onto a terrain already occupied by
fundamentalists of varying hues, all ready with
their own formulae for rapture and ecstasy. Each
one has its own multitudes of the faithful, armed
and ready for great encounters still to come.
Norman Cohn, the historian of millennial thought,
traces the idea back to Zoroaster (Zarathustra),
who added the idea of a happy ending to previous
visions of disaster: 'a glorious consummation of
order over disorder, known as "the making
wonderful", in which "all things would be made
perfect, once and for all"'. Later the notion was
transmitted via Hebraism to Christianity. In When
Time Shall Be No More (1992), Paul Boyer gave a
graphic account of how strong this belief remains
among born-again Americans, and more recently
still Anatol Lieven has underlined the rapport
between such apocalyptic convictions and US
political identity in America Right or Wrong
(2004). Unfortunately, being on our side has in
this wider context the sense of carrying our side
over to their terrain: we too have our
apocalypse, better than the rest.
No we don't. Globalisation must be about burying
such delusions, not reviving them. It's for the
boondocks and the bearers of boundary stones, not
for intellectuals avoiding the graveyard of their
kind of aristocracy through a rehabilitation of
spiritualism.
Footnotes
1 All the poems quoted are taken from New and
Selected Poems 1974-2004 by Carl Dennis (Penguin,
255 pp., $18, March 2004, 0 14 200083 3).
2 LRB, 23 January 1997.
3 Manchester, 160 pp., £11.99, August 2004, 0 7190 6647 6.
Tom Nairn, author of The Break-Up of Britain, is
assistant director of the Globalism Research
Institute at the Royal Melbourne Institute of
Technology in Australia.
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