Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics by Dan Hassler-Forest

Author:Dan Hassler-Forest [Hassler-Forest, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781783484935
Google: BfyIrgEACAAJ
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
Published: 2016-01-15T05:27:04+00:00

POSTDEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM AND THE COMMUNIST HORIZON

The age of global capitalism is fundamentally postdemocratic. This seemingly counterintuitive statement is one of the key points made not only throughout Hardt and Negri’s three major works but also across twenty-first-century radical thought and critical theory. In Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri reiterate that their critique of globalization is intended to articulate and thus liberate those crucial elements pointing toward a future that might once more be made democratic.18 The biopolitical hegemony of Empire is sustained by the constant and uncannily successful appropriation of the multitude’s creative energy. Only if—though for Hardt and Negri it sometimes appears to be merely a question of when—the Spinozist multitude comes to understand and embrace its own irreducibly multiple nature might the spell of cognitive capitalism finally be broken, and the commons at last restored to its rightful collective ownership.

In spite of their frighteningly detailed critical analysis of global capitalism’s overwhelming power, Hardt and Negri remain stubbornly optimistic about this utopian destiny. At the same time, they are notoriously vague when it comes down to how exactly such a revolutionary transformation is supposed to take place. They speak blithely of an impending “exodus from capitalism,”19 while attempting to resurrect love as “an essential concept for philosophy and politics.”20 In his book Common Ground, Jeremy Gilbert tackles this issue head on, helpfully simplifying some of the key terms introduced by many theoretical heavyweights, including dynamic duos such as Hardt and Negri, Laclau and Mouffe, and Deleuze and Guattari. Neoliberal doctrine, Gilbert argues, has resulted in a generalized war of all against all, as competitive individualism becomes the one and only yardstick for all forms of social relations. He draws on what Marx described as one of the central contradictions of capitalism, “its tendency to socialize production and its tendency to individualize and privatize consumption.”21 Under global capitalism and its allegedly participatory culture, this results in a fundamental ambivalence that undermines any meaningful kind of democracy:

Neoliberalism must ensure that this ambivalence is lived, at least by strategically crucial constituencies, as exciting, amusing, liberating, and desirable; and by other constituencies it must at least be experienced as unavoidable, unchangeable, a fact of life. But in all cases it must be experienced as confirming the basic assumption that competitive and individualized social relations are normal, desirable, and inevitable, as the various modulations of capitalist ideology have all done since the seventeenth century. Today, the key challenge for radical democratic forces is surely to activate this ambivalence in a different way, to enable it to be experienced as the condition of possibility of another world, in which the creative potential of the collective is realized beyond the limits set by capital accumulation and individual competition.22

When Gilbert sketches out some of the ways in which this ambivalence might indeed be activated, he draws on the crucial distinction Raymond Williams once made between alternative and oppositional tendencies in capitalist culture.23 He emphasizes that most of the contemporary forms of collaborative and participatory culture celebrated by many

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