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Persian Empire
Antonio Negri in Iran, 4–6 January 2005, House
of Artists and Centre for Dialogue Among Civilizations, Tehran; 7 January 2005,
Isfahan
What exactly does Antonio Negri have to say to Iran? Politically and
economically distanced from the standpoint of the US and its allies, Iran has
produced its own quite singular, yet strangely familiar, take on the
contemporary intersection of politics and philosophy. Leading politicians
translate Kant and quote Plato; hyper-conservative mullahs look to Heidegger for
anti-technological inspiration; students turn to Deleuze and Foucault for
micropolitical forms of cultural resistance; Bakhtin, Benjamin and Adorno speak
to others of their own uneasy modernity. After the suppression of several
Marxist and Marxist-Islamist parties in the 1980s and a subsequent period of
postmodern malaise among intellectuals (with Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard in
ascendancy), there is now a new thirst for radical thought. Governmental
reformists attempted parliamentary reorganization and the reconciliation of
Islam and democracy under the shadow of Karl Popper, but this is now widely
regarded as a failed project. Following a steady stream of recent philosophical
visitors – Rorty, Habermas, Ricoeur – will Negri prove an appropriate guide for
a country which is in Condoleeza Rice’s recent terms an ‘outpost of tyranny’,
and as such most definitely outside of what America (though not Negri)
understands by Empire?
With the 1979 revolution still within living and cultural memory for many,
there is, perhaps understandably, widespread suspicion of classical Marxist or
revolutionary solutions. During one of the sessions, a middle-aged lecturer
whispered in Negri’s ear that he was a Trotskyist, whilst another professor felt
free to hail openly the death of Marxism and sing the praises of the free
market. The obvious severity of the Iranian theocratic state, even as the
government repeatedly applies, and fails, to join the WTO, might appear to
scupper Negri’s globalizing analysis from the outset. Indeed, much of the
discussion over the somewhat gruelling four-day lecture series focused on
precisely this question: how much does the analysis of Empire matter to a
country in which it is primarily the state, and not new transnational forms of
power, that shapes the everyday experience of politics? Negri’s attempt to
replace the analysis of the working class with an all-inclusive multitudinous
new proletariat is a bemusing, if intriguing, proposition for many in Iran, who
perhaps see little of relevance in his ‘communicative, productive’ model of mass
political agency to what is, in many ways, a society constrained, at virtually
all levels, by a ubiquitous, if internally riven, state.
Of course, Negri was not there to discuss the Iranian case in particular.
Nevertheless, elements of Negri’s work might well appeal to different political
tendencies: his anti-capitalism to the religious hard right, his perceived
anti-Americanism to the conservatives, the emphasis on communication to liberals
and his revolutionary rhetoric to the few remaining Marxists. The question
during the lecture series thus became: how are the elements of Negri’s project –
immaterial labour, the analysis of Empire, biopolitics, non-parliamentary
democracy – to be united in a way that makes sense in the Iranian context?
Two hundred people, including families, journalists and students, arrived for
the first day under the banner ‘Spinoza and Democracy’. While Iranian speakers
(Ramin Jahanbegloo, Morteza Qassempour) presented the case for Spinoza as an
eminently liberal and secular or even ecological thinker, pointing to a
progressivist understanding of politics, Negri talked instead of the need to
read Spinoza as a thinker of ‘absolute democracy’ whose critique of the
theological-political apparatus is tantamount to a destruction of all
transcendence and hierarchy. Echoing Spinoza’s argument that a theocratic
government will necessarily perish because, as a rule based on fear and sad
passions, it breeds dissent and sedition, Negri perhaps came close to voicing a
welcome heresy. He also spent much time outlining the arguments of the recent
Multitude, where, faithful to Spinoza’s Political Treatise, democracy is argued
to form the fundamental tendency of every society, which every other political
formation necessarily corrupts.
When asked about the current state of progressive politics in Europe, Negri
spoke passionately against existing ‘democracies’, claiming that the
institutional Left must be destroyed if a Spinozan concept of politics is to
emerge: the democracy of multitude against the democracy of the one (whether
understood as the monarch, the state, the nation, the people or the party). But
again this concept of democracy from below proved problematic in a country that
has the lowest universal voting age in the world – fifteen – yet whose
democratic desires are caught between slow or sterile governmental reform and
the prospective of Western democracy ‘from above’. It is also impossible to
ignore the Iranian experience of revolution – conceived in the first place
precisely as coming ‘from below’ – and the manner in which it was all too
quickly captured by repressive and reactionary factions. Many, it seems, put
their faith in the long slow march of modernization, driven by the vast and
technologically astute youth (the result of a post-revolutionary population boom
in the 1980s). If there is to be a new Iranian revolution from below, it is
unlikely to take the form of a plebeian carnival or quasi-Biblical ‘exodus’.
The second and third days (concerning the concepts of ‘globalization’ and
‘radicalism’, respectively) produced some interesting, rather trenchant
responses, particularly considering that Empire has not yet been translated into
Persian. It became clear that there is some disagreement among translators as to
how to render certain central concepts, particularly ‘multitude’, though most of
the audience read French or English. Again the question was posed: what does it
mean to maintain a concept of radicalism that has no frontal relation to the
constraints of the existing order? Morad Farhadpour, in particular, pressed
Negri on his attempt to bypass sovereignty in all guises, referring to Schmitt
and Agamben in support of his argument that all politics must, at least
initially, have a relation to the state, and that radical politics for Iran
would not resemble an exodus from the state, but a gap within or distance from
the state. After dismissing this line of questioning as a kind of ‘mysticism’,
and rejecting the idea that true struggle ever takes place at the level of the
state, Negri was also sceptical of any celebration of micropolitics – although
one could argue that part of his broader project attempts to reverse Deleuze and
Guattari’s horror at the excessively communicative elements of capitalism into
the potential for a kind of connective and futuristic communism.
Referring to recent social movements and political clashes, such as Genoa,
Negri spoke about the importance of ‘the common’, the forms of direct democracy
carried out by a ‘new proletariat’, and the production of new forms of
cooperative existence. This latter point, related to the concept of immaterial
labour and the exploitation of communicative capacity in general, has an
interesting resonance in Iran, with its sudden massive proliferation of
web-based networks (blogs, instant messaging, information-exchange sites such as
orkut). There is some discussion about imposing an Iran-wide ‘intranet’ to
counter some of the ‘pernicious influences’ of the World Wide Web, but it is
clear that this would jeopardize the simultaneous and opposing government desire
for increased economic exchange. Besides, several of the reformist mullahs
currently write popular, if frequently disparaged, blogs of their own.
However, this kind of immaterial labour – the ‘informatization’ of Iran –
remains lopsided. It is not in the workplaces that information flows and
communicative capacities are plundered, but on the outside, in the private
realm. It is not at all clear that the boundaries between intellectual activity,
political action and labour have really dissolved, as Negri’s analysis presumes.
The technological knowledge possessed by the Iranian middle classes serves
little purpose in this heavily bureaucratic world, which is why one blogger, who
also works as the translator for a state ministry of science, can speak of a
‘double logic of production’. This separation of power, communication and labour
is not without its problems. Even if their disseminatory potential outstrips
that of newspapers (which are all too frequently shut down), what if blogs are
just one tool in a larger strategy of bypassing politics altogether?
In a country with a giant nationalized oil industry, a fragile Islamic
welfare state, and a deeply corrupt form of state capitalism, it seems that
Iran’s youth, rather than its economy, is increasingly plugged into the circuits
of Empire, not least because massive numbers leave each year to work and study
abroad. The Iranian state, on the other hand, appears to be on the wrong side of
the new imperialism, rather than inside or outside of Empire as such. The
difficulty of articulating the dimensions of Negri’s univocal vision with the
schizophrenic fragments of a complex nation mean that his presence in Iran,
though very welcome, was oddly tangential to its most pressing concerns.
Nina Power
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