Commonwealth by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (review)

Hardt and Negri, a literary theorist and political theorist, respectively, attempt to complete in Commonwealth what they began more than ten years ago with the publishing of Empire, rethinking the conditions and possibilities for democratic political theory and practice. While their project is ultimately creative, Hardt and Negri acknowledge that, in the case of the democratic experiment, some disassembly is required. First goes the concept of sovereignty and, with it, that peculiar notion of the people. The institutions of family, corporation, and nation (what they call corrupt versions of love) all go, too. Then, Hardt and Negri's replacements for these institutions are assembled from a political project founded on love, rooted in the commons, and expressed through the movement of the multitude, their name for an emergent global citizenry. If in Empire the authors intuited the possibilities for a new field of action, then Commonwealth asserts the objective development of that field.

Scholars of rhetoric&public affairs will find that Hardt and Negri's work fits more comfortably on the latter side of the ampersand. Still, readers of this journal, regardless of political tradition, will find in Hardt and Negri's sweeping analysis that the first side of the ampersand is only apparently missing. First, despite a preference for French Theory (and Negri's own European identity), the book reads surprisingly well in the vein of American radicalism, a genealogy that is perhaps more familiar and friendly to scholars of public address. Hardt and Negri understand the American democratic experience as an essential component to creating the commonwealth, making a transition from current American public address studies to a more global focus a surprisingly natural move.

Second, with no signs of the field's fervor for Foucault abating, many scholars will find Hardt and Negri's clarification of the biopolitical and its relationship to biopower very useful as it points out directions for invigorating a theory of power in rhetorical studies. For traditional public address studies, whose objects of study are the subjects of power (either those who hold it or those who wish to hold it), the concept of power is murky. Hardt and Negri's analysis helps clarify the nature of speech as an expression of power, not by arguing "everything is power" (the cousin to "it's all rhetoric") but by clarifying its specific operations. For example, the authors' positioning of resistance as anterior to power forces us to think differently about the rhetorical situation: "Power can be exercised only over free subjects, and thus the resistance of those subjects is not really posterior to power but an expression of their freedom, which is prior" (234). The agent, a figure essential to much of traditional public address, is very much active in Hardt and Negri's theory. Such a notion should go a long way toward responding to critiques that Foucault's theory of power is too totalizing, too constraining, and too hostile to rhetoric.

Third, this book will be particularly instructive for a burgeoning interest by some rhetoricians in the study of the affects. Although never explicitly stated by Hardt and Negri, their analysis provides ways of understanding the affective dimensions of rhetoric as participating in that final and often overlooked canon of rhetoric, delivery. Enterprising scholars will find ways to reconnect bodies and rhetoric (through the canon of delivery) in Hardt and Negri's theorizing, suggesting that the way bodies constantly get in the way for rhetoricians need not always be the case.

Commonwealth begins with a detailed analysis of the contemporary mode of production and the political landscape it makes possible. Hardt and Negri base their argument on the claim that a new mode of production has gained hegemonic status, if not actual majority status. Taking as their departure Marx's analysis of the production of material goods, Hardt and Negri derive their argument from an analysis of immaterial production, or the more useful notion of biopolitical production, "characterized by creativity—creativity as an expression...