Mark Driscoll, “Looting the Theory Commons: Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth”

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth. Cambridge: Belknap

A few months ago a graduate student came to see me to discuss her section on postcolonial studies for her Ph.D. exams. Talking about the ways the Japanese colonial past continues to affect everyday life in South Korea, she reflected that, “this is what Hardt and Negri call the coloniality of power.” Taken aback, I said that she must have missed a citation or two and lightly scolded her that “coloniality of power” was a phrase post-Eurocentric scholars would identify not with European theory of the sort espoused by Antonio Negri, but with Latin American intellectuals such as the Peruvian Anibal Quijano, the Mexican Enrique Dussel, and the Argentine Walter Mignolo. I found myself surprisingly indignant, explaining that much of Hardt and Negri’s previous work—in their historicist mode of “identifying the tendency”—was generally opposed to the insistence by such Latin American subalternists that the colonial past continues to impact crucial aspects of our contemporary present, albeit on the new political terrain of democratic politics and pluralist institutions. Wondering how she had made such a connection, I went right to my unopened copy of Commonwealth when I got home that night.

As Michael Hardt and I are in a study group together and have mutual friends, I was at first relieved not to find any signs of theory looting after my hasty CSI (crime scene investigation) of Parts I (“Republic”) and II (“Modernity”) of Commonwealth. Indeed, the proximity of my UNC, Chapel Hill to Duke University where Hardt teaches (and where Antonio Negri appears virtually via videoconference on occasion) must have led my graduate student and her peers to assume that much of what is important in contemporary critical theory emanates from nearby Duke, the home of Italian autonomia in the Anglophone world. However, my relief only lasted through that initial speed-read. Returning to Commonwealth a few days later, my eyes stopped at a peculiar phrase, “the coloniality of biopower.” It appears as a section heading several pages into Part II, “Modernity (and the Landscapes of Altermodernity),” and builds on their earlier interpretation and appropriation of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. What they seem to mean by the neologism “coloniality of biopower” (hereafter, COB) is that modern power works on subordinated populations in ways structurally similar to the ways in which colonial power dominated indigenous peoples. Fair enough, I thought; let’s see how Hardt and Negri distinguish their COB neologism from the source concept in Latin American criticism.

Coloniality of power (COP), together with the correlate notion of “coloniality,” was originally deployed by Anibal Quijano in the early 1990s to designate the apparatuses of hegemonic power that first emerged during the modern period, the era of colonialism, whose long durée stretches from the conquest of the Americas to the present.¹ In the hands of Quijano and Dussel, to name only two, COP consolidates a power matrix that infiltrates the domains of political administration, social production, private life, and general epistemological world-view. The modern forms these practical domains have taken are the nation-state, capitalism, private property, the heterosexist nuclear family, and Eurocentrism. Different from the more familiar strain of Anglophone postcolonial theory, which tends to emphasize the fractured and filtered influence of the colonial past, Latin American COP insists that the material and ideological ciphers of modern colonialism continue to hegemonize the ways in which sexuality, race, labor, and humans’ relation to nature are lived and epistemologically grasped. In this sense, COP refers to a crucial structuring process in the world system that articulates peripheral nation-states in the global South to the modus operandi of the Euro-American North, resulting in a surprising homogeneity of race, gender, and labor hierarchies in North and South. Even in a postcolonial world, power remains colonial when it maintains the force to impose one Euro-American regime onto the rest of the world. Only through the dramatic overthrow of COP by decolonial thought and practice, Latin American subalternists argue, can the epistemic and material violence of coloniality be overcome. H & N’s concept of COB is, at first glance, a decoding of COP followed by a recoding of it through their loose rendering of Foucault, which I will discuss below. However, as I moved twenty pages or so beyond their invocation of “coloniality of biopower,” my CSI sensors came across the source phrase “coloniality of power” on page 103, with no citation. It appears later in the same chapter titled “Altermodernity,” once again without a citation. Somewhat agitated, I rechecked the footnotes in both places and found no citation—the theory commons have been looted.

The substantive “coloniality” appears throughout the two chapters in Commonwealth where coloniality of power/biopower is deployed. Beginning on the page immediately after their introduction of COB, “coloniality” is shorthand for the coloniality of power/biopower, appearing on almost every subsequent page until we reach 103, when coloniality of power is first expropriated and deployed. Although it might seem like reasonable shorthand for the cumbersome COB, it is also used in exactly this way by Latin American theorists, perhaps most significantly by Hardt’s critic and colleague, Walter Mignolo (Local Histories/Global Designs). In other words, when H & N introduce their reformatted notion of COB, it’s difficult not to see it as a kind of camouflage for the looting of Latin American critical thought; the proof of this can be found in the fact that their COB neologism is largely abandoned after the first few pages and replaced by the unsourced phrases COP and “coloniality,” now appropriated as their own theoretical property. This operation was apparently what convinced my graduate student that the phrase originated in the private enclosures of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

What’s important in this ex/appropriation is that not only the expression, but the substance of Latin American critique has been theoryjacked. Whereas in their earlier work H & N configure colonial forms of power/knowledge as progressively overcome by the real subsumption of postmodern forms of rule, burying coloniality safely in the past without a trace in the present, in Commonwealth forms of coloniality continue to impact power hierarchies. Using a modernity vs. anti-modernity binary opposition, they write in their introduction of COB, “Antimodernity is held under control in the power relation of modernity not only through external forms of subjugation—from the slave master’s lash and the conquistador’s sword to capitalist society’s police and prison—but also and more important through internal mechanisms of subjectification” (77). Whereas in Empire their historicist theory of political rule (where colonial mercantilism is transcended by industrial capitalism, which is subsequently transcended by postmodern capitalism) largely prevents them from seeing the ways in which different and contradictory forms of rule can coexist in the same chronotope, in Commonwealth the plagiarizing of Latin American theory helps them configure the slavemaster’s lash as a homologue of contemporary prison structures, not as a linear, developmental sequence.

The substance of COP becomes an important vehicle to solve the problem of the tendency, the one acknowledged weakness in Italian autonomia. This is particularly intriguing in that Latin American subalternists were among the first to critique the vanguardism and Eurocentrism of Empire, attacking it as the newest version of Eurocentric theory focused exclusively on metropolitan centers while largely ignoring peripheral situations in the global South. The swift reduction of postcolonial theory to Homi Bhabha allows H & N in Empire to construe postcolonial thought tout court not as a critical enterprise more or less concerned with locating colonial-like structures of domination stubbornly residing in democratic, postcolonial situations, but as something both irrelevant in its flawed hermeneutic insistence on reading aspects of the past in the present and, downloading Arif Dirlik’s broadside against the culturalism of Anglophone postcolonial theory, complicit with and supportive of multicultural, postmodern capitalism.

Important Latin American critics have for two decades largely ignored the move to designate novel forms of political, cultural, and economic rule with the signifier “postmodern,” and instead have coined the phrase “modernidad/colonialidad” to underscore the different ways in which the colonial past remains present in contemporary forms of power. Although it remains largely invisible to the dominant strains of Anglophone theory and criticism, for post-Eurocentric scholars and activists “modernity-coloniality” has become an identifiable concept originating in Latin America that works to marginalize much of the Euro-American insistence on the radical newness of contemporary power. Modernity-coloniality research groups appeared in Mexico City, Quito, and in Durham (Duke) and Chapel Hill, North Carolina where Mignolo and the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar were the co-organizers of a group that I was involved with for several years. Michael Hardt attended at least two of their events.

The politico-theoretical intervention of Latin American modernity-coloniality builds on a variety of Latin American-based theories and practices: liberation theology of the 1960s; debates in Latin American philosophy and social science around ideas of liberation philosophy and autonomous social science centered on people like Dussel, Rodolpho Kusch, and Darcy Ribiero; dependency theory; and, in the US, the Latin American Subaltern Studies group.² Modernity-coloniality researchers also find inspiration in thinking as different as African philosophy, South Asian subaltern studies, and Chicana feminist theory. However, as Escobar writes in a recent piece on the modernity-coloniality program, “its main driving force . . . is a continued reflection on Latin American cultural and political reality, including the subaltern knowledge of exploited and oppressed social groups” (180). In the Duke/UNC group, much of the focus of the modernity-coloniality paradigm so far has been on the problem and potential of indigeneity, thought through the prism of race and place. However, there’s a refreshing absence of codes of the romantic, noble savage in the group’s thinking of indigeneity; the Indian is read in a non-essentialized way, together with other raced and placed subjects in Latin American sites—blacks, whites, creoles, Asians, peasants, and non-human actors. Scholars of modernity-coloniality disregard notions of essence and of the centering of existence—embedded in specific ecological, sociocultural, and economic systems–and instead engage with the singularity of each situation. The ethics of encountering singular situations demands a constantly shifting epistemic framework on the part of the engaged researcher, what Walter Mignolo calls un paradigma otro.

The way I understand this is that modernity-coloniality should neither be configured as a theoretical master narrative (like Marxism, Foucaultianism, or Italian autonomia) that grounds the proper identity of the researcher, nor as the next higher stage in the linear history of modern thought. Rather, the modernity-coloniality framework locates its own inquiry in the historical material specificity of each situation, necessarily at the limit or border of established systems of thought. As un paradigma otro, modernity-coloniality implies the decentering of the identity of the researcher in hir engagement with a specific situation. There can be no approaching a situation from the safe confines of an established system of thought, as each case should produce a singular theoretical code, or novel “other paradigm.” What Mignolo calls “border thinking” is the stretching of an established paradigm to the breaking point as it interacts and intersects with the lively dynamism of an historico-political situation. Understood in this way, the feedback loop inherent in the modernity-coloniality framework mutually constitutes both the situation and the epistemology of the participant researcher, decentering both. Modernity-coloniality is gradually emerging as the main heir to the important Latin American contributions of dependency theory, liberation theology/philosophy, and participatory action research.

Astoundingly–given Michael Hardt’s connection with Latin American modernity-coloniality criticism (a heretical member, Alberto Moreiras, taught in Hardt’s Department of Literature for over a decade; Mignolo is a central person in the humanities at Duke; Escobar is Distinguished University Professor twenty minutes away at UNC, Chapel Hill; and the important Latin American subaltern journal Nepantla was housed at Duke for several years)–the phrase “modernity-coloniality” also appears in Commonwealth with no citation of Quijano, Dussel, or anyone else for that matter. Moreover, its deployment by H & N repeats the same ex/appropriation operation of COP in that they seem to mask the plagiarizing of modernity-coloniality by simply appending an extra signifier to modernity-coloniality—”race.” But before doing so, they want their readers to know they own the copyright on thinking modernity and coloniality together: “Earlier we said that without coloniality there is no modernity, and here we can see that race plays a similarly constitutive role. The three together function as a complex—modernity, coloniality, racism—with each serving as a necessary support for the others” (74). They said that without coloniality there is no modernity; not Mignolo, Dussel, Quijano, or any of the modernity-coloniality research groups. After claiming the modernity–coloniality code as their own private property, H & N don’t use the phrase in its recognizable form as connected by hyphens or dashes. However, as was the case with COP, the pretense is dropped after just a few pages; beginning on page 90 they deploy modernity-coloniality in one of the standard forms used by Latin American critics.³ The theory commons has been looted again.

As post-Eurocentric readers have no doubt already registered, even the recoded “modernity-coloniality-racism” is a standard extrapolation for Latin American critics, especially Walter Mignolo (The Idea of Latin America 88). It’s frustrating that theorists heretofore unwilling to grant much political agency to race (Empire unwittingly supported the “post-race” or “race blind” ideology of white liberal rule in the global North) would claim credit for introducing race into discussions of modernity’s imbrication with colonialism. However, having said that, couldn’t we step back a moment and, giving them the benefit of the doubt, concede that Latin American modernity-coloniality is sufficiently well-known in Anglophone critical theory circles that there is therefore no need to cite it? Each reader will have to answer this question for him or herself. But even if that were the case—and I, for one, don’t think modernity-coloniality has a salient presence in Euro-US theory circles—we might contrast the absence of citations and acknowledgement in the examples of Latin American critical theory with examples from European male theorists like Badiou, Zizek, and Agamben, where not only the primary sources are cited, but secondary works are acknowledged as well. It seems to me that in these cases of looting the theory commons, H & N implicitly rely on the Eurocentrism of their readers, assuming (and reproducing) ignorance of work done by Latin American subalternists, to pass off COP, coloniality, and modernity/coloniality as their own intellectual property.

I should add here that it’s not totally correct to claim that H & N ignore Latin America-based theorists. They draw attention to Spanish language scholars who use and cite H & N’s work: “a group of contemporary Bolivian scholars . . . use the term ‘multitude-form,’ in contrast to the old class-form, to name the internally differentiated struggles of altermodernity” (110). Praising Latin American scholars, like the Bolivian sociologist Alvaro Garcia Linera, who employ H & N’s own multitude logo—”these contemporary scholars understand it [multitude] as the protagonist of a coherent political project”—allows them to claim that their own theory of the multitude is superior for analyzing the specificity of Latin American society than, say, the insights of the most influential theorist of Latin America’s hybrid sociedad abigarrada, René Zavaleta.

Limiting their discussion of contemporary Latin American theorists to those who deferentially cite them and their work seems to embolden H & N to take even more from Latin American theory. Their argument that the ravages of European modernity granted a productive and positive dynamism to largely static indigenous societies in the (genocidal) Conquista seems homologous with the implicit notion that only Latin American theory that comes into contact with their own theory is worth discussing. If it doesn’t, like the examples offered above it stands a chance of being expropriated. In my opinion, this is what happens when, in a real breakthrough in their thinking in a chapter called “Biopolitical Reason,” they introduce their idea of “multiple ontologies.” Invoking Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, they write that “some contemporary anthropologists, pursuing a path parallel to ours, arrive at a similar conclusion about the role of the common in an alternative, biopolitical rationality, which goes beyond the division between nature and culture” (123). Briefly describing Viveiros de Castro’s work on the Amerindians of the Brazilian Amazon (published first in 1986, followed by an English translation in 1992), H & N write that, distinct from modern philosophy’s positing of “one nature and many cultures, here there is one culture (all are in some sense human) but many natures (occupying different worlds). Viveiros de Castro thus discovers, in contrast to the ‘multiculturalism’ of modern philosophy, an Amerindian ‘multinaturalism’” (123).

Although their admirably wide reading takes them into many different areas, I was struck by this invocation of an obscure Latin American anthropologist whose main fieldwork from the late 1970s and early 1980s would appear to be outside of their intellectual purview. Then a friend reminded me that the young Argentinian anthropologist Mario Blaser was at UNC on a two-year post-doc and had presented his work both at UNC, Chapel Hill (once at a modernity-coloniality group meeting) and at Duke on indigenous groups in Brazil—building explicitly on Viveiros de Castro—and their “relational ontologies.” At that time, Blaser was developing this notion into what he started calling the “multiple ontologies” of the Amerindians in the Amazon. Although Blaser had only published two pieces when he presented his work on Viveiros de Castro at Duke and UNC in 2007 and 2008, he was finishing the draft of his exciting book Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond (Duke University Press, 2010). In other words, Blaser’s work was circulating around Duke University for several years, both publicly and privately.

I’m pausing on this because H & N’s apparent expropriation of the concept of multiple ontologies allows them to break from the ontological unicity featured in Empire and Multitude, where humans were basically “the same” on the plane of being/becoming. In contrast, in Commonwealth, living things are construed as ontologically distinct, which helps H & N move beyond the easy critique of identity politics present in their earlier work, where identity was configured as epiphenomenal and derived from one shared ontological substance. The expropriated notion of “multiple ontologies” allows them to take more seriously political claims based on race and sexuality. Although these claims are still largely dismissed by H & N in Commonwealth, they have the potential to contribute to the commons when fixed being (gay, black, etc.) is rethought as transformative becoming. Clearly, H & N dedicated a good deal of time in the last few years to rethinking the ways in which the narrow insistence on identifying the tendency had constrained their thinking on race and sexuality, and I wholeheartedly applaud this. Their new thinking should more sufficiently acknowledge its genesis in the theory commons.

Appropriating the Theory Proper

In addition to expropriating lesser-known theory, Commonwealth privatizes the theory commons in other ways. One way is to disregard the singularity/specificity of a major theme in a European thinker’s body of work and articulate it as part of its own property. Arguably, this happens first with Alain Badiou’s theory of the event. The notions of “event” and “events” are prominent in Commonwealth whereas they are not as prevalent in Empire and Multitude. However, because Badiou has emerged as a central philosophical figure in Anglophone critical thought since the publication of Multitude in 2004, it reads as if H & N feel a fratricidal need to marginalize him and, while doing so, appropriate his most important insight. They accomplish this in a fairly surreptitious way: by concocting a Foucaultian notion of the event, with no textual support from Foucault’s oeuvre. This subsequently allows them to counter Badiou’s conservative “retrospective theory of the event” with the revolutionary “link between freedom and power that Foucault emphasizes from within the event” (60).

What is for me the most significant disregard for the specificity of a thinker’s work, followed by an appropriation, is the text’s treatment of Foucault himself. Foucault’s crucial notion of biopolitics qualifies as what Roland Barthes calls a “signifier without brakes,” in that it never stops at any particular signified. Although “biopolitics” was settling into some kind of consensual understanding in Anglophone critical theory around the time of Empire—the power to create, administer, and maintain (faire vivre) the life of a designated population by modern medicine and other welfare-state institutions, together with killing or leaving for dead (laisser mourir) undesirable populations within the same body politic—, the publication of Foucault’s Naissance de la Biopolitique in French in 2004 and in English in 2008 unsettled the previous understanding of it. Although one of the first invocations in English of biopower appeared in History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 in relation to the Nazi maintenance of the lives (faire vivre) of select populations of Germans while killing Jews (laisser mourir), the 2004 publication of Naissance de la Biopolitique—what appeared to be the most complete elaboration of biopolitics—complicates and opposes the earlier sense. While the Nazis are shown to epitomize the exercise of biopower in the 1975 work, in Feb. 1979 the Nazis are construed as the “field of adversity” against which the biopolitical considerations of German neo-liberals are constructed.

In my reading, the key to understanding this shift is to be found in the lectures Foucault gave in 1977-78, published in English in 2007 as Security, Territory, Population (Driscoll 13-16). There Foucault clearly delineates a new form of “non-disciplinary” power that appears more or less as an historical sequence following disciplinary powers’ intrusion into the very capillaries of human deportment. Opposed to the production of docile bodies and orthopedic subjects in disciplinary rule, non-disciplinary power withdraws from the social field and redirects its attention to populations. But in focusing its attention on populations, biopolitical or non-disciplinary power isn’t concerned with all subjects, only with those subjects it selects for enhancement (faire vivre). Non-disciplinary power is unconcerned about subjects not chosen for enhancement; its mode is a liberal one of laissez faire (Foucault, Security, Territory, Population 66-74) The connection with his musings on biopolitics two years previously in Society Must be Defended lies with the semantic shift from laisser mourir to laissez faire. Foucault returns to thinking about biopolitics two years after the lectures that made up Society, but now the emphasis on killing or “letting groups die off” (laisser mourir) gives way to a prescient insight that emergent neoliberal governmentality is nonchalant with respect to much of individual deportment—it is principled in its laissez faire-ing of subjects. This abandonment of many subjects (and parts of all others) by hegemonic power in the 1978-79 lectures remains to be fully thought through by Foucault scholars.

To approach the problem of the historical configuring of biopolitics, we would do well to recall that much of Foucault’s writing in the 1970s was designed to invert common assumptions of critical thought in Western Europe. His genealogical machine transvalued the understanding of “sexuality,” “power,” and “truth” and released them from their Frankfurt School and Sartrean confines. Why haven’t theorists considered that this is what Foucault is trying to do with his analysis of neoliberalism in Naissance de la Biopolitique? In my reading, neoliberalism isn’t construed as something more horrible than Nazism by Foucault—as some Negri followers have been arguing recently–, but is construed as a regime of biopolitical rule in which some subjects all the time and all subjects some of the time are laissez faired and liberated from the carceral confines of disciplinary power. Although leftist humanities scholars freed from the need for empirical validation frequently invoke the short 1990 essay by Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” to solve the problem of what comes after disciplinary power (one of the reasons why my social scientist friends stop listening at this point), evidence generated from Foucault’s texts points to something very different: as much as he can within the protocols of his genealogical mode, he is affirming aspects of neoliberal governmentality. And why wouldn’t he? He flaunts his anti-Marxism in several places in The Birth of Biopolitics, especially where he has the notorious free market ideologue Gary Becker speak parts of Marx’s theory of value (223-226). Since some of Foucault’s published work in volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality and the later lectures uncovers mystics, discredited philosophers like the Cynics, minor subjects, and heretical communities committed to experimenting with technologies of the self as far away as possible from hegemonic power centers, why wouldn’t Foucault guardedly affirm a form of power that is, at least in theory, not concerned with policing or disciplining marginal subjects but in laissez faire-ing them?

Whatever the conclusion of this brief engagement with Foucault’s texts, it is a veritable close reading when compared with the extraordinary rendition of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics by Hardt and Negri. Their refusal to engage ethically with the specificity of biopolitics allows them to simply invent an opposition in Foucault between biopower and biopolitics, as in the following passage from Multitude:

earlier we spoke of “biopower” to explain how the current war regime not only threatens us with death but also rules over life, producing and reproducing all aspects of society. Now we will shift from biopower to biopolitical production. . . . Biopower stands above society, transcendent, as a sovereign authority and imposes its order. Biopolitical production, in contrast, is immanent to society and creates social relationships and forms through collaborative forms of labor.

(94-95)

H & N do not justify this distinction with evidence from Foucault, who tends to use biopower and biopolitics interchangeably. What’s happening here?

The designation of contemporary power in Empire follows from Negri’s groundbreaking engagement with Spinoza in the late 1970s and 1980s. Beginning with the Savage Anomaly (1981) and concluding with Insurgencies (1992), Negri expands on the distinction in Spinoza between potentia (creative, revolutionary power) and potestas (dead sovereign authority). Locating this binary in Machiavelli and Hobbes as well, Negri finds a way to designate resistance in Euro-American societies that have been entirely subsumed by capital. Potentia belongs with the ontological power of the multitude, while Empire hobbles along propped up by ontic potestas. H & N’s appropriation of Foucault’s biopolitics may be read as a hipper upgrade of Negri’s old discovery: biopower=potestas while biopolitics=potentia. However, they’ve managed to appropriate as their own intellectual property arguably the most important notion in contemporary critical thought—biopolitics. This is not to deny H & N’s right to engage critically and creatively with contemporary thought, which is something they do very well. However, the engagement with Foucault regarding his notion of biopolitics seems to me to be more about consolidating the philosophical identity of Antonio Negri than it is about freeing thought to do different kinds of political work.

My Own Private Commonwealth

The kind of appropriation of Badiou and Foucault happens to others as well, but in the interest of space, I move on to the last of the three modes of privatizing the theory commons that I find in Commonwealth—excessive self-citation. One of H & N’s major themes in Commonwealth is the overcoming of identity regimes that are inextricably linked to property and that work against the commons. Blacks, queers, the poor, and indigenous people are urged to give up fixed identities as a contribution to the vertiginous utopia of becoming-common. The injunction to sacrifice fixed identity as a necessary step in reclaiming the commons should, at the very least, inspire a demonstration of some version of self-critique by the authors of Commonwealth. Have interactions with other singularities pushed H & N to identify as something radically other? How have conflictual antagonisms with other theorists impelled them to transform their thinking? Surprisingly, I haven’t been able to locate any admission of error or theoretical inadequacy in Multitude or in Commonwealth. In fact, large sections of Multitude are given over to showing how wrong the critics of Empire were, and, in some sense, how wrong the post- 9/11 geopolitical world was for not adhering to their master narrative of it in Empire. Even when their readings of important theoretical or political concepts have changed considerably in the decade spanning Empire and Commonwealth (for example, their dismissal of world systems theory in Empire has changed considerably and for the better in Commonwealth), we don’t get any sense of how this has happened—their thinking has apparently always already evolved. Over and against their call for the transformative process of all identitarian being, we get the strong sense that their being as theorists hasn’t mutated at all—fixed being dominates the flux of becoming in H & N’s own identity formation.

H & N’s concern for their own private intellectual property can be seen in the forty-two self-citations in the footnotes, encompassing a veritable curriculum vitae of Antonio Negri’s work over the last fifteen years. In addition to the many references to their previous work in the body of the text, the forty-two self-citations reveal a kind of panic over identity, linking several of the major points in Commonwealth not to other singularities in a theory multitude, but to themselves. The effect is to fortify their own identities as master theorists and to refuse what they insist everyone else commit to: the flux of becoming other. Apparently, Being is for them and becoming is for everyone else. I add that a book called Commonwealth should not sold by a corporate-university press but should be available (even in sections) online for free.

As I suggest above, one of the strengths of Commonwealth is that it pluralizes ontology, arguing through Viveiros de Castro (or, seemingly, Mario Blaser’s reading of de Castro) that being is multiple. At the level of geopolitics, H & N use Saskia Sassen to theorize the ways in which the local, the national, and the global are constantly interlocked and interchanged. Again, unconcerned with registering how their own thinking has changed on this topic, they posit in different contexts the multiplicity of substance, whether it be natural, political or techno-material. Yet in Commonwealth they refuse to apply this multiplicity of substance to the real of globality. Their insistence on plurality could logically lead them to consider something like the trinity of common/public/private as a similar kind of interlocked substance, where subjectivity would have to be thought as mutually determined by the three social realms. The possibility for political change would have to come at an interstitial limit somewhere within these three realms, as Ernesto Laclau has argued in a somewhat different context. Thought in this way, there would necessarily be more public thinking and acting not determined exclusively by the tendentialized commons. Although I personally like the many interesting claims they make about the commons—and it needs to be stated clearly that they have moved critical thinking forward in terms of the philosophy of the commons—they conclude by restricting their analysis to this realm alone. As someone who works at an increasingly downsized public university, I would say the political struggle right now for leftist professoriat should focus on expanding the shrinking public in the face of local, national, and global attacks on it.⁴ Leaping over the realm of the public into some utopian commons seems like dangerous romanticism from this perspective. Moreover, new activist groups like UK Uncut and US Uncut have had some success in arguing for the centrality of the public over and against the attack on it by privatizing agendas of free market politicians. Some of their success should be attributed to refusing the utopianism of an idealized notion of the common.

To conclude, I’m willing to admit that my sensitivity to the problems in Commonwealth is a sign that this dude is still abiding in the Republic of Property. Yes, I’ve invested in the realm of the private as well as in political commitments to the public and philosophical commitments to the commons. Before I give up my private pleasures and my duties to the public, and give myself over to the de-territorializing flux of becoming-common, I want some honest accounting of the distinct contents of each of the three realms. I hope it is fair to ask the relatively privileged CEOs of contemporary cultural theory like Hardt and Negri to be more reflexive about the pleasures and dangers of all three realms. If they continue to refuse to respect alterity and singularity in the theory commons, I for one am unwilling to link with them in any multitude, even at the level of a theory multitude. At least in the realm of the public, there is still a price to be paid for looting.

Mark Driscoll is an Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of two books on East Asian cultural and intellectual history published with Duke University Press, and has published articles in Social Text, Cultural Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.

I thank Arturo Escobar, Eunice Sahle, Diane Nelson, Michal Osterweil, and Federico Luisetti for helping me think through this piece.

1. See “Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina,” Anuario Mariateguiano 9 (1997): 113-121 and “Coloniality of Power, Ethnocentrism, and Latin America,” NEPANTLA 1.3 (2000): 533-580.

2. Writing even this superficially about modernity-coloniality would have been impossible without conversations with Arturo Escobar and Walter Mignolo.

3. Modernity/coloniality and modernity-coloniality seem to be used interchangeably by Latin American scholars.

4. On this see Christopher Newfield’s superb intervention.

Works Cited

Driscoll, Mark. Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895-1945. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Print.

Escobar, Arturo. “‘World and Knowledges Otherwise’: The Latin American modernity/coloniality Research Program.” Cultural Studies 21.2-3 (2007): 179-210. Print.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. Trans. Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave, 2008. Print.

———. Security, Territory, Population. Trans. Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave, 2007. Print.

Gordon, Lewis. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude: war and democracy in the age of Empire. New York: Penguin Group, 2004. Print.

Laclau, Ernesto. New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time. London: Verso, 1990. Print.

Quijano, Anibal. “Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina.” Anuario Mariateguiano 9 (1997): 113-121. Print.

———. “Coloniality of Power, Ethnocentrism, and Latin America.” NEPANTLA 1.3 (2000): 533-580. Print.

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