Matter, Affect, AntiNormativity

Front matter

ranscript | Culture & Theory

Caroline Braunmiihl Matter, Affect, AntiNormativity

Culture & Theory | Volume 270

Contents

1 ‘Matter/Mind The Persistence of Hierarchical Opposition in Karen Barad's Agential Realism

2 _ Ontology/Epistemology Guarding Against Collapsing (Their) Difference or Producing a Dichotomy Or: Between and Beyond Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Karen Barad and Dennis Bruin ING) 42:4: sn nn 59

3 = Affect/Discourse A Chiastic Relationship

Conclusion

I have argued that Barad’s tendency - at least intermittently - to dilute the distinction between matter and mind (along with that between animate and inanimate matter), or to color such distinctions in normatively negative terms, falls short of accomplishing what is needed in order to overcome the hierarchical character of the dualisms of subject vs. object and, by extension, of matter vs. mind. Agential realism fails to challenge the hierarchical conceptual arrangement based on which matter historically has been construed as inferior to mind or the human subject. It does not tackle the devaluation of passivity which has been problematically associated with matter or objects more readily than with mind or subjects. If we want to disentangle these notions from the hierarchizing thrust which they acquire when framed in terms of the subject/object dualism, we need to target the reified character of the active/passive opposition which accounts for the inferiorization of both ‘objects’ and ‘matter’.

As I have suggested, we can do so by reconceptualizing subjectivity in non-hierarchizing terms. There would be no need, then, to abandon the distinctions either between subjects and objects or between mind and matter in order to extricate these notions from hierarchical thinking and its implication in unegalitarian social orders. Moreover, the abandonment of either of these distinctions would not necessarily achieve that goal. On the contrary, as I have argued, effacing or blurring distinctions does not necessarily eliminate the hierarchical framing that binary oppositions tend to entail. As noted above, Barad’s strategy of highlighting the agentive role of all matter comes at the cost of continuing the devaluation of passivity. As a result, the ethical rationale for moving beyond the dichotomy between mind and matter in the first place remains obscure: What is to be gained by this undertaking if the underlying hierarchy is left intact?

In line with Gunnarsson’s argument elucidated earlier, I contend that reconceptualizing matter and mind in non-hierarchizing, non-dualistic ways might involve exploring other ways of relating these terms to one another than either opposing or mutually assimilating them. Arguably, Barad opts for the latter possibility in highlighting matter’s and mind’s shared agentive role. However, this may obscure or elide important differences between the senses in which various forms of matter and mind, respectively, might be agentive. For instance, it is not clear that all matter is agentive in a sense associated with an ability to be held accountable. Even if matter were accountable, there remains the problem of how we conceive of such accountability and whether we are using this term in the same sense we do in referring to adult human beings as accountable. We must consider that there may be quite different senses of the terms ‘agency’ and ‘accountability’ at work in these respective contexts. Rather than eliding the differences between these, as a corollary of eliding the distinction between mind and matter, I suggest that a more promising strategy would move beyond a dualistic framing of this distinction by opening up different meanings of ‘activity’ as well as ‘passivity’ in contexts involving different forms of matter and mind."

11 For instance, subject formation and its imbrication with material supports would seem to involve passivity and activity on either side — both the side of the emerging subject and that of “technologies, structures, institutions” (and much else) that forms part of the “conditions of emergence” of a subject (Butler 2015b, 14). As Butler puts it, “[a] support must support, and so both be and act” (Butler 2015b, 14; emphasis in the original). Likewise, she writes of the “localized field of impressionability” that is the emerging subject that it is “[a]cted on, animated, and acting; addressed, animated, and addressing;

Overall, I highlight the risk of negating or understating differences which is involved in striving to overcome dualism by emphasizing sameness or similarity. There is a reductionism entailed in this, which Gunnarsson (2013) has pointed out. Moreover, from an ethical perspective, this could be an assimilatory move that may well underestimate power differentials in the rather different senses of ‘agency’.’” Considering adult human agency as qualitatively different from other kinds of agency may mean marking human privilege rather than a fictive human superiority. Such privilege is easily erased from view by the new materialist emphasis upon likeness or similarity (between human and non-human, culture and nature, animate and inanimate) at the cost of giving due attention to specificity and difference.

touched, animated, and now sensing. These triads are partially sequential and partially chiasmic” (Butler 2015b, 14-15). Yet the simultaneous involvement of activity and passivity on both sides of this connection does not necessarily mean that inanimate supports, such as the materials with which a baby is cleaned, fed, etc., are either active (crying, smiling, etc.) or passive (impressionable) in the same sense as either the baby or its caretakers are.

12 This is illustrated by the neglect of such power differentials, and of different degrees of mutual engagement, in the following statements by Barad: “Humans’ and ‘brittlestars’ learn about and co-constitute each other through

a variety of brittlestar-human intra-actions” (2007, 381-382). “As we entertain

the possibilities for forming partnerships with brittlestars and other organisms

for biomimetic projects, we are co-constituting ourselves into assemblages that

‘mimic’ (but do not replicate) the entanglements of the objects we study and

the tools that we make” (2007, 383).

2 Ontology/Epistemology Guarding Against Collapsing (Their) Difference or Producing a Dichotomy Or: Between and Beyond Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Karen Barad and Dennis Bruining

In 2005 Clare Hemmings published a critique of certain writings related to the “ontological turn” in the journal Cultural Studies. According to her, some cultural theorists — such as Brian Massumi and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - tend to construct earlier poststructuralist theorizing as overwhelmingly ‘negative’ and totalizing in its view of power as an all-pervasive constituent of sociality. As a supposed remedy against what they portray as the socially determinist bias of earlier poststructuralisms, these authors according to Hemmings celebrate affect as “the new cutting edge” (Hemmings 2005, 548 [Abstract]) in a way that, as she argues, tends to severe affect from sociality. Authors associated with the recent turn to affect “emphasize the unexpected, the singular, or indeed the quirky, over the generally applicable, where the latter becomes associated with the pessimism of social determinist perspectives, and the former with the hope of freedom from social constraint” (Hemmings 2005, 550).

What is important for my purposes here is that Hemmings charges the writers I have mentioned with producing almost a duality between existing poststructuralist theory and what they propose as the way forward - a dichotomy in which ‘epistemology’ and ‘ontology’ are polarized against one another. Thus, she writes: “Part of what makes critical theory so uninventive for Sedgwick is its privileging of the epistemological, since a relentless attention to the structures of truth and knowledge obscures our experience of those structures. She advocates instead a reparative return to the ontological and intersubjective, to the surprising and enlivening texture of individuality and community” (Hemmings 2005, 553). Hemmings polemicizes: “the ‘problem of epistemology’ only materializes in the moment that it is chronologically and intellectually separated from ontology. Ontology thus resolves the problem its advocates invent” (2005, 557). Further, she argues that “[plositing affect as a ‘way out’ requires that poststructuralist epistemology have ignored embodiment, investment and emotion” (2005, 556-557; emphasis in the original). This is not the case, as Hemmings insists, by reference to postcolonial theorists, amongst others (2005, 558). Yet, as she maintains, their work needs to be omitted from accounts of the supposedly miserable state of Cultural Studies in order for affect studies to be positioned as singular in its attention to the body and the affective. In this way, “affective rewriting flattens out poststructuralist inquiry by ignoring the counterhegemonic contributions of postcolonial and feminist theorists, only thereby positioning affect as ‘the answer’ to contemporary problems of cultural theory” (2005, 548 [Abstract]).

While I disagree with Hemmings to the extent that, in my view, affectivity has indeed been neglected in much early poststructuralist theorizing — especially in classical instances of such theorizing, such as Michel Foucaults work - I want to take up Hemmings’ critical observations as to a recent tendency to produce a dichotomy between ontology and epistemology. It is thus the ontological turn that I am concerned with in this chapter, to the extent that it can be distinguished from (much as it is related to) the affective turn, which I will address in detail in chapter 3.

One irony of the recent turn from the epistemological emphasis of twentieth-century poststructuralism to the ontological emphasis associated with the widespread turn to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy within progressive cultural and social analysis is that it risks being oblivious to a critique of Deleuze (along with Foucault) which Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak articulated in her seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, as early on as in the 1980s. I want to return to this essay, along with further early work by Spivak, as a way of placing in perspective ‘the ontological turn’ in its neglect of ‘epistemology’ - as much as any inverse move. Commenting upon a published conversation between Deleuze and Foucault (1980), held in 1972, Spivak in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” chided both writers for “an unquestioned valorization of the oppressed as subject” (1988a, 274; see also Spivak 1988a, 278). As one example of what she wished to problematize, she mentioned Foucault’s remark that “the masses know perfectly well, clearly’ [...] they know far better than [the intellectual, G.C.S.] and they certainly say it very well” (cited in Spivak 1988a, 274; emphasis in the original). She comments: “What happens to the critique of the sovereign subject in these pronouncements?” (Spivak 1988a, 274), adding: “The banality of leftist intellectuals’ list of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed; representing them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent” (1988a, 275).

In my reading, Spivak in the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” posits that for intellectuals situated in the academies of the global North to make utterances such as the one just cited is to disavow their own role in representing the subaltern. This is to abdicate, as I understand Spivak, a responsibility which she attributes to intellectuals so positioned, of producing discourses that self-consciously attend to global power differentials and to their own positions within global hierarchies (see Spivak 1988a, 279-280). She thus seems to advocate for a strategy of representation whereby intellectuals represent other subjects — especially subaltern subjects - explicitly in their own name, thus acknowledging their own mediating role, and their inescapable power of representation, as intellectuals.

The link between these two forms of politics with primarily epistemological vs. primarily ontological concerns is implicitly made by Spivak in the same essay when, critiquing a statement by Deleuze according to which “[rleality is what actually happens in a factory, in a school, in baracks, in a prison, in a police station” (cited in Spivak 1988a, 275), she asserts that “[this foreclosing of the necessity of the difficult task of counterhegemonic ideological production] has helped positivist empiricism - the justifying foundation of advanced capitalist neocolonialism - to define its own arena as ‘concrete experience’, ‘what m actually happens” (Spivak 1988a, 275). I read Spivak as positing by this statement that an empiricist insistence that we have unmediated access to an ontological ‘nature of things’ is complicit with (neo-)colonial discourses in virtue of its dismissal of the epistemological notion of mediation. I take it that what she means by this amounts to the discourse-theoretical point that proclamations to the effect that ‘the facts speak for themselves’, rather than being inescapably enmeshed in and, indeed, rendered subject to perception in the first place by discourses — in other words, by their constitution in terms of a normatively loaded (and hence, power-charged) conceptual frame - disavow the inextricable link between knowledge and power. Thus she insists in the same essay that: “Representation has not withered away.” (1988a, 308)

Whether one states that ‘reality is what actually happens’ or makes a claim to the effect that ‘the oppressed know exactly what they are doing and saying (see Spivak 1988a, 278-279): in either case the enunciating subject is in fact producing a particular theoretical rendering of ‘reality’ and of other subjects, respectively. But the mediating character of the construction concerned risks being obscured through the appeal made by each of these statements to a supposed ontological given. Thus, the very assertion that ‘[the masses, C.B.] know far better than [the intellectual, G.C.S.] entails a specific rendering of subjectivity that not only disavows the intellectual’s mediating role, but also posits that subjects (or at least ‘the masses’) are self-transparent (see also Birla 2010, 90-92). As Spivak has indicated elsewhere, the latter assumption is not necessarily a sign of respect. On the contrary, as she points out in an interview:

“If one looks at the history of post-Enlightenment theory, the major problem has been the problem of autobiography: How subjective structures can, in fact, give objective truth. During these same centuries, the Native Informant [...], his stuff was unquestioningly treated as the objective evidence for the founding of so-called sciences like ethnography, ethno-linguistics, comparative religion, and so on. So that, once again, the theoretical problems only relate to the person who knows. The person who knows has all of the problems of selfhood. The person who is known, somehow seems not to have a problematic self” (1990, 66; emphasis in the original).

The risk of neglecting epistemological concerns is, as I read Spivak, that those dimensions of power relations which are entailed in knowledge production - including all academic work - are understated, if not obscured. To be sure, post-Deleuzian ontology or at least Deleuze’s own ontology is not epistemologically naive. As Todd May reconstructs Deleuze’s stance on the matter, practicing ontology is self-consciously to create the world in novel ways rather than solely to represent what there is (2005, 15-23). Yet, the political effect of Deleuzian empiricism - a “transcendental empiricism” (Patton 2000, 40) - may be said to amount to much the same, as is highlighted by Spivak’s critique of Deleuze to the effect that statements such as ‘reality is what actually happens’ write the constituting subject (or, more precisely, the discourses in terms of which the subject is constituted) out of the ontology he or she produces.

This becomes especially problematic in my view when Deleuze, as much as certain followers of his, romanticizes those whom he associates with the category of the minoritarian - from prisoners (see Deleuze in Deleuze/Foucault 1980, passim) and migrants (Hardt/Negri, see below) through to animals (critically: Haraway 2008, 27-30) - as spearheads of revolutionary change. At an abstract level, this tendency is exemplified by the following statement, made by Deleuze during the conversation with Foucault which Spivak comments upon in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”:

“This is why the notion of reform is so stupid and hypocritical. Either reforms are designed by people who claim to be representative, who make a profession of speaking for others, and they lead to a division of power, to a distribution of this new power which is consequently increased by a double repression; or they arise from the complaints and demands of those concerned. This latter instance is no longer a reform but revolutionary action that questions (expressing the full force of its partiality) the totality of power and the hierarchy that maintains it” (in Deleuze/Foucault 1980, 208-209; emphasis added).

The claim that as soon as ‘those concerned’ speak for themselves, their actions and discourses will necessarily be revolutionary in thrust - rather than potentially ‘reformist’, as Deleuze implies here, or as we might also put it: rather than potentially reproducing hegemonic discourses at least in part — this claim is extremely generalizing. I, for one, find it patronizing to glorify resisting subjects in this way.

I feel the same way about the manner in which Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt - two current theorists who draw strongly upon Deleuzian philosophy - romanticize the poor and, especially, migrants as subjects of resistance. They assert that the poor, in general, and migrants, in particular - two categories which they treat as superimposable, ignoring the intersectionality of relations of domination - not only form part of the “multitude” but are particularly representative of it in virtue of their “wealth, productivity, and commonality” (Hardt/Negri 2004, 136). The poor as well as migrants come across as an avant-garde of sorts when Hardt and Negri write: “In the inferno of poverty and the odyssey of migration we have already begun to see emerge some of the outlines of the figure of the multitude” (2004, 138); a multitude which their work is bent on calling into being. In this context they assert that: “Migrants may often travel emptyhanded in conditions of extreme poverty, but even then they are full of knowledges, languages, skills, and creative capacities: each migrant brings with him or her an entire world” (2004, 133). Who doesn’t bring with him or her an entire world? Everyone does, and so this statement seems to me to engage in an idealization which romanticizes migrants as a class in a way that is devoid of substantive content. When Hardt and Negri state that “the immigrants invest the entire society with their subversive desires” (2004, 134), I find it appropriate to juxtapose this assertion with the following observation by bell hooks concerning a certain postmodern, exoticist romanticization and eroticization of ‘the primitive’ that, in U.S. mainstream culture, had established itself in the late twentieth century.

This quotation is from her essay “Eating the Other”, first published in 1992: “The contemporary crises of identity in the west, especially as experienced by white youth, are eased when the ‘primitive’ is recouped via a focus on diversity and pluralism which suggests the Other can provide life-sustaining alternatives” (hooks 2006, 369). Hooks in this text identifies as such the notion “that nonwhite people [have] more life experience” (2006, 368), arguing with reference to hegemonic, white subjects that “[gletting a bit of the Other” is “considered a ritual of transcendence, a movement out into a world of difference that would transform, an acceptable rite of passage” (2006, 368) with the objective “to be changed in some way by the encounter” (2006, 368). As she explains: “Whereas mournful imperialist nostalgia constitutes the betrayed and abandoned world of the Other as an accumulation of lack and loss, contemporary longing for the ‘primitive’ is expressed by the projection onto the Other of a sense of plenty, bounty, a field of dreams” (2006, 369). In other words, the notion of immigrants’ ‘subversive desires’ in Hardt’s and Negri’s text may well be read as a displacement of desire for ‘the Other’ - be it an exhaustively political kind of desire, or a kind that carries additional connotations - invested by the author-subjects in ‘immigrants’, who are thereby reduced to a projection screen. I want to stress, then, the colonizing thrust of Negri’s and Hardt’s rhetoric, as quoted above. It resonates with Deleuze’s idealization of ‘those concerned’, i.e., of subjects engaged in resisting their own oppression (see above). Hardt’s and Negri’s rhetoric regarding the ‘richness’ of migrants, and the “subversive desires” which they attribute to ‘immigrants’ as a homogenized class, is no less patronizing. It reinscribes racialized discourse — which (as clarified by hooks) is no less problematic when it comes in an idealizing, exoticizing guise than it is when it is overtly devaluing.

Encarnacion Gutiérrez Rodriguez aptly phrases the more general point I want to make in regard to Negri and Hardt when she critiques them, along with some of their followers, for defining the empirical faces of resistance out of existence through the abstract character of their concept of a ‘multitude’:

“A multitude which does not pose the concrete questions pertaining to material distribution, to the aporias between North and South, the gendered subalterns, the underprivileged queers, fails to recognize [the speakers’, C.B.] own possible positions of hegemonic speech, qua intellectuals or academics of the West, as a structural moment in the constitution of the multitude” (2007, 137; transl. C.B.; emphasis in the original).

In summary, practicing ontology or a theorization of (social) reality - especially when this occurs without any simultaneous attention to questions of epistemology or the politics of knowledge - bears the risk of facilitating the production of colonialist effects in virtue of purporting to capture a truth or reality ‘beyond discourse’, which is to disavow (whether explicitly or implicitly) the constitutive role of discourses; including one’s own.

Ontology versus epistemology? Onto-epistem-ology?

As can be gleaned from the above statement by Gutiérrez Rodriguez, some postcolonial poststructuralisms (in particular) have never been purely about an epistemological or discursive perspective. Among the best-known postcolonial critics of the late twentieth century - Homi K. Bhabha, Edward Said and Spivak - the latter, in particular, has put deconstruction to rather materialist uses: From the 1980s onwards, her work barely, if ever left questions of ontology wholly to the side, implicated as they are in analyses of (global) social relations. After all, Spivak once called herself a “practical deconstructivist feminist

Marxist” (as cited by her interviewer; see Spivak 1990, 133). Her eclectic way of articulating materialist with deconstructive critique bears out

Hemmings’ point that it would flatten out poststructuralism to reduce it to a pursuit of epistemological questions in isolation from ontological ones.

So how can we relate ontological and epistemological concerns to each other in less reductive ways? It is on this question that I want to focus in the remainder of this chapter. My central thesis in doing so - by way of juxtaposing the examples of Negri and Hardt as well as Karen Barad with some theses propounded by Spivak during the early phase of her work - is that the latter situated itself at an equal remove from, on the one hand, dichotomizing epistemology vs. ontology against each other and, on the other hand, from any attempt to reconcile epistemological with ontological concerns in an overarching theoretical framework. Spivak in my reading, at the time at least, treated epistemic and ontic aspects of sociality as being mutually imbricated yet irreducible to one another and, more precisely, as existing in mutual tension. I contrast this view as I reconstruct it favorably with, firstly, Negri’s and Hardt’s polarization of deconstruction and ontology against each other and, secondly, Barad’s project of fusing epistemology with ontology. My basis for reconstructing Spivak’s position during the 1980s is the collection of interviews with her that appeared in 1990 under the title The Post-Colonial Critic.

Consider how Spivak frames the relationship between textuality and “facr or life or even ‘practice” in the following passage (from which I omit some parts) in one of those interviews:

“As far as | understand it, the notion of textuality should be related to the notion of the worlding of a world [...] Textuality in its own way marks the place where the production of discourse [...] escapes the person or collectivity that engages in practice [...]. From this point of view, what a notion of textuality in general does is to see that what is defined over against ‘The Text’ as ‘fact’ or ‘life’ or even ‘practice’ is to an extent worlded in a certain way so that practice can take place. [...] It allows a check on the inevitable power dispersal within practice because it notices that the privileging of practice is in fact no less dangerous than the vanguardism of theory. When one says ‘writing’, it means this kind of structuring of the limits of the power of practice, knowing that what is beyond practice is always organizing practice” (1990, 1-2).

As I read this passage, it is not possible according to Spivak at the same time to engage in a given practice and to fully comprehend how it is constituted in specific ways that have a textual dimension - in virtue, for instance, of the practice in question basing itself in certain presuppositions of which the subject concerned, whether individual or collective, is not fully aware. The implicit ontologies entailed in our practices are discursively constituted, then, and Spivak treats the discursive dimension of practices in such a way as to accentuate its fictional and, hence, in a certain sense arbitrary character. Arbitrary, as I would suggest, in the sense that possible alternative renderings of “facr or ‘life’ or even ‘practice” - as formulated by her in the above quotation - are excluded by whichever version of them is singled out, and by the political trajectory that this has in any one instance.

That such exclusions are constitutive of discourse is one of the central tenets of deconstruction in my understanding - including forms of deconstruction which, as in some of Spivak’s early work, are rerouted in the direction of social theory and, as such, of ontology. Social theory cannot avoid producing ontologies, whether explicitly or implicitly, given that any assertion concerning ‘society’ or ‘history’ makes for an ontological claim; that is, for a claim that ontologizes as given or ‘real’ the discursive objects with reference to which it makes its assertions. Practicing social theory and analysis with a deconstructive edge in my view means, first and foremost, attending to the exclusions which are entailed in assertions as to ‘fact’ or truth‘, whether such assertions feature as part of scholarly work or in other kinds of practice. Deconstruction in the sort of textual analyses of social relations which Spivak has produced from early on in her career, with a focus upon social relations as configured and enacted in other scholarly work (e.g. 1988a; 1988b; 1988c), can serve as a critical corrective and counterpart, then, to other kinds of political practice, including the production of social analysis and theory of more materialist kinds. In line with this view, Spivak has stated:

“(T]he irreducible but impossible task is to preserve the discontinuities within the discourses of feminism, Marxism and deconstruction. [...] If | have learned anything it is that one must not go in the direction of a Unification Church, which is too deeply marked by the colonialist influence, creating global solutions that are coherent. On the other hand, it seems to me that one must also avoid as much as possible, in the interests of practical effectiveness, a sort of continuist definition of the differences, so that all you get is hostility” (1990, 15).

In the interview from which this quotation is taken, Spivak proceeds to give examples of what she means by this, stemming from divergent locations in the theoretical spectrum of left-wing politics of the 1980s, when this interview was held: “[T]he slogan ‘Marxist is sexist’ bears this hostility, not understanding that it is a method that is used in very different ways” (1990, 15). As another example of a “continuist definition of the differences” between various theories, she parodies the critique according to which “[o]f course deconstruction [...] is only textualist, it is only esoteric, concerned with self-aggrandizement, nihilist, etc.” (1990, 15). And Spivak concludes her overall observation by stating: “To preserve these discontinuities [...] rather than either wanting to look for an elegant coherence or producing a continuist discourse which will then result in hostility. I think that is what I want to do” (1990, 15).

Rather than either play competing approaches against each other, deciding that one must be entirely superior, on the one hand or, on the other, seeking to reconcile them in an overarching perspective, Spivak, in accordance with this statement, advocates deploying different theories in such as way that they bring each other to productive crisis (1990, 110-111). That is certainly what she may be said to be doing with a view to Marxism as a primarily ontological perspective and deconstruction as a primarily epistemological one (e.g. Spivak 1988a, esp. 280).

I want to address two cases in point as to what I consider to be unproductive about seeking either entirely to reconcile ontologically and epistemologically accentuated theoretical perspectives or playing them against each other as mutually exclusive, as Hemmings charges has recently occurred in Cultural Studies. I wish to do so in order to concretize what is at stake in this discussion. Negri and Hardt, too, have polarized both scholarly projects against each other, declaring deconstruction passé:

“(T]he deconstructive phase of critical thought, which from Heidegger and Adorno to Derrida provided a powerful instrument for the exit from modernity, has lost its effectiveness. It is now a closed parenthesis and leaves us faced with a new task: constructing, in the non-place, a new place; constructing ontologically new determinations of the human, of living — a powerful artificiality of being. Donna Haraway’s cyborg fable, which resides at the ambiguous boundary between human, animal, and machine, introduces us today, much more effectively than deconstruction, to these new terrains of possibility” (2001, 217-218).

In line with the analysis I presented earlier, I view Negri’s and Hardt’s dismissal of deconstruction as historically obsolete, and their one-sided commitment to constructing new ontologies in its stead, as being related to what previously I had argued forms a rather un-self-conscious celebration of ‘minor’ subjects on their part - whose resistance they declare to be substantively autonomous (Hardt/Negri 2001, e.g. XV, 43, 124) in much the way Deleuze, in one of the quotations given earlier, celebrates those who speak on their own behalf as inherently revolutionary in outlook. As I have argued, deconstruction focuses the critic’s attention upon the textual and, hence, the ‘arbitrary’, fictional dimension of all practice and sharpens our awareness of what exclusions are entailed in any one discursive move. Ideally, this should foster self-consciousness on the analyst’s part as to the dimensions of power entailed in the relations of representation in which she is herself implicated in virtue of writing and publishing. In contrast, Hardt and Negri would seem to be ontologizing the analysis they present of ‘Empire’ and ‘the multitude’ wholeheartedly, treating it as the one way of conceiving of our global present. This is to cover over, rather than to cultivate awareness of, the critic’s own positionality and politics, and hence, of her own implication in the power relations she analyzes or potentially excludes from analysis.