Toward Degrees of Mediation: Revisiting the Debate Surrounding Hardt and Negri's Multitude

Abstract

This essay reviews an important scholarly debate on resistance, inspired by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's books, Empire and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. After summarizing Hardt and Negri's post-modern theory of resistance, the author reviews major criticisms against it from three edited volumes: Debating Empire, Implicating Empire: Globalization and Resistance in the 21st Century World Order, and Empire's New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri. The author concludes that, in light of this debate, communication scholars are in a special place to theorize degrees of mediation in the context of social change.

A previous version of this manuscript was presented at the 2004 Western States Communication Association convention in Albuquerque, NM. This essay is derived from Foust's dissertation (which received a 2005 Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Dissertation Award from the National Communication Association) completed at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with J. Robert Cox as director.

A previous version of this manuscript was presented at the 2004 Western States Communication Association convention in Albuquerque, NM. This essay is derived from Foust's dissertation (which received a 2005 Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Dissertation Award from the National Communication Association) completed at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with J. Robert Cox as director.

Acknowledgments

Along with Dr Cox, the author thanks Greg Dickinson and Kate Willink for their comments on previous versions of this manuscript.

Notes

A previous version of this manuscript was presented at the 2004 Western States Communication Association convention in Albuquerque, NM. This essay is derived from Foust's dissertation (which received a 2005 Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Dissertation Award from the National Communication Association) completed at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with J. Robert Cox as director.

1. “Global justice” actions include protests against the Group of Eight (G8) in Genoa, Italy (July, 2001), and Edinburgh, Scotland (June, 2005), events against the WTO in Cancun, Mexico (September, 2003) and the IMF and World Bank (WB) in Washington, DC (April, 2000), and resistance to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in Quebec City, Canada (April, 2001) and Miami (November, 2003). I refer to global justice resistance as “remarkable” because it has commenced without identifiable figurehead-leaders or a hierarchical structure. The “networked” character of global justice organizing leads to a plethora of tactics and ideologies at protest sites (see Pickard, 2006). For instance, consciousness-raising “teach ins” are held alongside non-violent marches and human blockades, and culture-jamming (like draping protest messages over streetside billboards) is conducted in concert with political theater and symbolic property damage. In spite of past conflicts and contradictions, trade unionists have marched alongside environmentalists, and property-damaging anarchists have resisted alongside non-violent peace activists. See Notes from Nowhere (2003) for vivid activist accounts of global justice tactics and ideologies.

2. Unorthodox protests of the 1960s (including draft-card burnings, lunch-counter sit-ins, and threatening speech) inspired rhetoric scholars to ask similar questions. Haiman (1967), Scott and Smith (1969), and Cathcart (1978), for instance, named such apparently non- (or extra-) symbolic resistance “body rhetoric” and “confrontation,” legitimizing it as an appropriate text for academic inquiry. For the most part, social movement critics took a sympathetic view toward radical rhetoric, conceiving it as a logical choice for oppressed groups to whom the standard channels of rational, democratic speech were closed. As I advance in this essay, Hardt and Negri's theory pushes interpretations of unorthodox protest: From their perspective, body rhetoric is a powerful form of resistance because it exceeds sanctioned channels of deliberation—not in spite of its excess.

3. Two years after its release in paperback, Empire was already in its 10th printing, which is remarkable for an academic book (Peyser & Cavanaugh, 2002). As volume editor Paul Passavant (2004) writes, “Empire is academia's version of a blockbuster” (p. 2). Remarkably, though, communication studies scholars have not engaged Hardt and Negri substantively in their work, with the notable exceptions of Ronald W. Greene (2004) and Ted Striphas (2001). Anecdotally, when I discuss Empire with colleagues and mentors, I am met with a common sheepish response: “You know, I bought that book when it was first released, but it is still sitting on my shelf. … ” As I explore throughout the remainder of the essay, the scholarly conversation surrounding Hardt and Negri's multitude is highly relevant to the communication discipline, insofar as we are invested in communication as a basic mediational process that relates people and ideas—and, insofar as we are capable of theorizing degrees of mediation between modernist dualisms, in light of what I review as political and cultural theorists’ inability to do so.

4. Hardt and Negri (2004) more recently suggest that the multitude may finally wrest immanence away from Empire's transcendently functioning grip through a spiraling relationship between singularities and the common. Biopolitical production creates “continuous encounters, communications, and concatenations of bodies” (p. 348), which are all singularities—unique entities “whose difference cannot be reduced to sameness, a difference that remains different” (p. 99). Yet these singularities are created through the common materials of human life, including bodily sensations, human language, and shared culture. As individuals invent new variations on this common stuff of life, the diversity of the multitude's commonality grows, and the likelihood of even more diverse singularities grows as well.

5. In Hardt and Negri's work, there is an ambiguity between rhetorical mediation and modernist mediation as I have distinguished between them here. Empire eradicates the realm of transcendence and thus does away with modernist mediation and its traces, as in civil society. However, Hardt and Negri (2004) suggest that activists foster rhetorical mediation or “tirelessly construct mediations, feigning (if necessary) coherence, and [play] different tactical games in the continuity of the strategy” to defeat Empire (p. 356). I consider the implications of their ambiguous stance toward rhetorical mediation below.

6. Perhaps this leads Hardt and Negri (2000) to call on readers to imagine a new language for the multitude, one which will construct meaning to “become a lasting, corporeal progression of desire in freedom” (p. 405). This language presumably reflects the chaotic, immanent energies of ever-becoming-something-else. Yet, if it is to be a purely immanent language, as I have argued to this point, it would be impossible to introduce in this rhetorical world.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christina R. Foust

Christina R. Foust (Ph.D., University of North Carolina, 2004) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Communication Studies at Denver University