Theoria

The third sentence of Insurgencies reads as follows:

In other words, constituent power has been considered not only as an all-powerful and expansive principle capable of producing the constutitional norms of any juridical system, but also as the subject of this production — an activity equally powerful and expansive.

The first part (‘has been’…) is mostly easy enough to parse and interpret: constituent power is a principle of immance that brings juridical orders into being (i.e., summons, creates and constitutes constitutions) — no doubt what are supposed to have seen in Iraq yesterday; or at least part of that process. The second part (‘but also’…) is less clear. Constituent power is also “the subject of this production” and being a ‘subject of this production’ is “an activity equally powerful and expansive” as the former; i.e., the principle of immance. The problem I’m have parsing is as follows:

The ‘subject of this production’ is somewhat ambiguous. Does Negri mean that consituent power is the force (‘has been’) and the agent (‘but also’) or does he mean that ‘the subject of this production’ is seen as the product of the process of constituting a constitution; i.e., citizens, subjects, slaves, or any other way of being under a consitution?

We need to back up here, because the preceeding sentences have not shed much light on the situation. The first sentence reads, “To speak of constituent power is to speak of democracy”. This, of course, does not mean that ‘constituent power=democracy’, that they are identical and the same — i.e., a ‘democratic republic’ and a ‘constituent republic’ are not the same. But, to speak of one entails speaking of the other. (Negri, however, does not claim that “To speak of democracy is to speak of consituent power”. This is certainly significant.) The next sentence tells us that the history of these two concepts (democracy and constituent power) has increasingly intertwined the two concepts to the extent that we can’t see beyond them or between them, “they have become more and more superimposed”. (Presumably, his book is an attempt to de-superimpose them.) And now we turn to the sentence with which we began: “In other words…” and he goes on to tell us ‘has been’ and ‘but also’.

Now, we could, on the one hand, read it as follows: constituent power = ‘has been’ while democracy = ‘but also’. But this seems less than satisfying (at least at 12:57AM on Saturday night). Democracy is ‘the subject of production’? But what production? Is democracy an agent or a product? It doesn’t really make sense to speak in either way.

The rest of the paragraph isn’t much help:

From this standpoint ['has been' and 'but also'], constituent power tends to become identified with the very concept of politics as it concept [sic] is understood in a democratic society. To acknowledge constituent power as a constitutional and juridical principle, we must see it not simply as producing constitutional norms and structuring constitutional powers but primarily as a subject that regulates democratic politics.

Hardly much help at all! So, ‘from this standpoint’ that is our present (“the twentieth century”) we see a chain of equivalences: constituent power = democracy = ‘has been’ and ‘but also’ = politics. (The last term is highly suspicious: politics hasn’t been anything but procedure for decades.) But, we must not see it ‘simply as producing consitutional norms’ (i.e., ‘has been’) nor as ‘structuring constituted powers’ (i.e., ‘but also’), but ‘primarily as a subject that regulates democratic politics’.

So, ‘from this standpoint’, constituent power is ‘primarily a subject that regulates democratic politics’. I’m not following… The ‘but also’ is the ‘subject of this production’, but constituent power is ‘a subject that regulates democratic politics’. What is the relation between the two?