Critical Response I, pp. 368-73 The Rod of the Forest Warden: A Response to Timothy Brennan Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Critical Response II, pp. 374-78 The Magician's Wand: A Rejoinder to Hardt and Negri Timothy Brennan
---
The article opens:
***
The Futurists: A group of small schoolboys who escaped from a Jesuit college, created a small ruckus in the nearby woods, and were brought back under the rod of the forest warden.
Antonio Gramsci (1929)1
What is the predicament of cultural theory today? In posing this question, I do not wish to imply either that the moment of theory has passed or that the energies of various theoretical movements in the post-World War II period have been totally sapped. I want to risk a more direct and therefore perhaps more contentious position: namely, that theory has become a code word for relatively predictable positions in the humanities and related social sciences, most of which turn on the ideas of social transformation, historical agency, the disposition of selfhood (however understood), and the heterogeneity of culturesall posed in the context of a critique of Enlightenment thought. But to the extent that such ideas have become routine in their very disruptiveness (or the other way around), our most vaunted theoretical figures today may well resemble the generation of Futurists whose pretensions to revolutionary and avant-garde originality Gramsci lampoons in the above epigraph. ****
Brennan concludes his reply:
****
As far as historical repetition goes, whether or not Hardt and Negri call themselves communists is of little concern to me. They imply that I attempt to police the term, but the term is theirs, not mine, and whatever playful meaning they wish to give it is their prerogative. My point was only to remark how curious it is that precisely those who deem historical communism defunct, betrayed, or misbegotten obsessively return to it in order to repossess it. Their very target becomes their mantle -- a psychological impasse that demands more attention, as others have remarked as well.
There are other issues to be taken up, debated, contravened, and, yes, even conceded. But sometimes one party has to convince another simply of its existence. If my essay has done that, then perhaps the camps divergently represented can begin to conduct the hard talk necessary for a "real exchange" (p. 369). In the meantime, _Empire_'s popularity presents us with a dilemma. Before his death, Pierre Bourdieu observed that neoliberalism had stormed into the ideological scene by proclaiming a revolution that was in fact a restoration. The dilemma is that _Empire_ does as well. ****