Theoria

My last post on this topic (“Any Ideas”) looked at the first paragraph of Insurgencies where Negri sets up his problematic. In brief, Negri is concerned with investigating the genealogy of the ‘crisis’ of constituent power. The crisis of constituent power is most fully revealed in liberal democracy where, on the one hand, constituent power and democracy “have become more and more superimposed” (1) and, on the other hand, has resulted in two general attempts to resolve this case of mistaken identity.

Thus, Negri differentiates between the response of ‘juridical theory’ and ‘constitutionalism’. The problem, ‘from this standpoint’ (i.e., of liberalism in all its forms) is that constituent power comes to be seen as the both the exceptional moment in which the order is constituted (the Revolution limited in time and space as a singular event) and as an exceptional moment within the daily affairs of the order once constituted (thus, constituent becomes an effect of itself). This latter form is seen in plebiscites, referenda, and general elections — all of which are limited in time and space according to rules set forth by the constitution.

Liberalism, as Negri understands it, attempts to contain, trap, and limit constituent power. Liberalism, for Negri, finds its fullest expression in the United States’ realization of a mixed constitution (which, of course, is an ancient idea). The mixed constitution is “the medium of inequality, and therefore it is a nondemocratic paradigm” (11). We find the theoretical defense of the modern mixed constitution in various places — Montesquieu, de Tocqueville, and the Federalist debates.

(For those who haven’t bothered wasting the time studying the history of typologies of government — and it is understandable that one has not because it can be pretty boring — the classical problem of political philosophy (=idealism) is to discover the ideal form of government. It more or less quickly became apparant that there was not a single best form of government because the ideal could never map on to the real: the empirical conditions of the state would always block any perfection. Thus, perfection of the regime came to be defined relative to the regime type — oops! I’m slipping in to Straussian language; apologies! — which would thus mean that there were three possible ideal types of government on both the good and the bad side. Ignoring the various definitions, it became apparent that there were three basic forms: the one, the few and the many. From Plato to Aristotle to Polybius, the problem became one of defining the essence of each type and, of course, the mechanism through which a good form became decadent and transformed into a bad form. The ultimate secret would, therefore, be to discover how to make the absolutely perfect regime. Polybius provided the solution: the way to counter the excesses of each regime type would be to combine the best elements of each into a ‘mixed consitution’. Thus, a single regime type would be able to play off the one, the few and the many against each other. Note: no philosopher of any serious stature ever thought that the many could govern and govern well — this is a thoroughly modern idea and one that is always suppressed.

We can thus turn to Montesquieu, who in the single longest chapter of his enormous Spirit of the Laws tells us about a strange form of government he found in England during his travels: an actually existing mixed constitution. This would later — if we believe de Tocqueville, even if he didn’t endorse it himself — find its fullest realization in the United States. Without belabouring an already too-long aside, with the United States we are confronted with a new a form of government. Here is a really existing mixed consitution represented in, respectively, the President, the Senate and the House of Representatives, equivalent to, respectively, the king, the aristocracy, and the people. Mediating relations between each is a complex set checks and balances, most fully realized in their veto powers. But, presenting the most difficult part for the theory of mixed constitution is the Supreme Court; the final arbiters. Anyway, back to Negri.)

The point Negri is making is that ‘limited government’ should actually be read as ‘limited democracy’. The mixed constitution is always a limit:

In constrast, the paradigm of constituent power is that of a force that bursts apart, breaks, interrupts, unhinges any preexisting equilibrium and any possibly continuity. Constituent power is tied to the notion of democracy as absolute power (11).

But, the democratic revolutions of modernity have operated under the sign of ‘popular sovereignty’. If sovereignty, as a juridical theory, is opposed to democracy, how are we to think constituent power? What happened to these revolutions? The answer takes a twisted path and is never fully answered. Negri evokes — and I think evokes is the correct term — the Thermidor:

Even though constituent power is all-powerful, it nonetheless has to be limited temporally, defined, and deployed as an extraordinary power. The time of constituent power, a time characterized by a formidable capacity of acceleration — the time of the event and of the generalization of singularity — has to be closed, treated, reduced in juridical categories, and restrained in the administrative routine. Perhaps this imperative to transform constituent power into extraordinary power, to crush it against the event, to shut it in a factuality revealed only by the law, was never as anxiously felt as during the French Revolution. Constituent power as all-embracing power is in fact the revolution itself. ‘Citizens, the revolution is determined by the principles that began it. The constitution is founded on the sacred rights of property, equality and freedom [liberté]. The revolution is over,” proclaimed Napoleon with inimitable, ironic arrogance, because to claim that constituent power is over is pure logical nonsense. It is clear, however, that that revolution and that constituent power could be made legal only in the form of the Thermidor (2).

But, Negri never really tells us where this apparatus of capture arises from. Instead, he changes the topic. And, perhaps, this is his answer: the Thermidor introduces sovereignty as the basis of the political order: it is no longer constituent power that constituted the order, but rather sovereignty summoned constituent power to constitute sovereignty. Sovereignty and not constituent power becomes the prime mover.

However, this is exactly what liberalism needs. It requires sovereignty to mediate the crisis between the agent and the act (which, in constituent power are united as ‘absolute process’, that is to say, the ‘absolute form of government, democracy’). We can’t, thus, look to the liberal solution to the problem to show us the truth of sovereignty. We need to look somewhere else.

Negri, following Deleuze and Foucault (but not only, of course), the truth of sovereignty is fascism. Fascism is not an other of liberalism. It is not a perversion of liberalism or of capitalism. Rather, fascism is liberalism taken to its logical extreme. Fascism is the truth of liberalism:

Everything, in sum, sets constituent power and sovereignty in opposition, even the absolute character that both categories lay claim to: the absoluteness of sovereignty is a totalitarian concept, whereas that of constituent power is the absoluteness of democratic government (13).

But, Negri, like Deleuze and Foucault, can’t speak about fascism; they can only speak against fascism. What is this Thermidor? Where does it come from? How do we, as Foucault puts it, ‘combat the fascism in our heads’? Why do we have a democratic and a fascist imaginary?