Sarah Snider
posted 29 August 2007

'Let us not forget that behind philosophy lies history, the history, in this case, of the bourgeoisie' (p207).

I have not read Empire. Negri's and Hardt's ‘Communist Manifesto for the 21st century’ – freely downloadable – remains in the margins of my digital bookshelf. Call me a bad theorist. Call me neoliberal capitalism. Call me what you like. I have not read Empire.

I have not read Descartes' The World, the Treatise on Light, the Treatise on Man, Dioptrics or even Principles of Philosophy. In truth, my readings of the Discourse on the Method and even the Meditations have been partial at best. The greater part of the Cartesian texts, these foundational nodes of bourgeois thought, conjure but vague notions of epistemology, God, Latin and geometry. Call me a bad philosopher. Call me pseudo-francophile. Call me flux. I have not read Descartes.

But I read Political Descartes in its entirety. Call me a liar. Call me pop. Call me… commissioned. I read it because it provides, in both content and methodology, a set of guidelines for the social, political and economic contextualization of an idea. Ideas are not, says Negri, innocent: they are not to be fought for or against without a full understanding of the complexities and contingencies of surrounding – and often generative – power relations and political motivations. Ideas are not armies, though they can be soldiers, forever reporting to the commanding officers of class, gender, ethnicity, oil…

If Descartes opened up a split between existence and experience, Negri is mending the consequent split between philosophy and politics. To this effect, Negri picks up on Descartes’ originary thread of the bourgeois project and its failure, ‘which is specified metaphysically to the extent that it is founded historically’ (p99, my italics). Lending both meaning and direction to the collective work of Descartes, this also supplies the sense of wholeness and continuity necessary for its thorough deconstruction. What we have, then, is genealogy.

Negri commences his logical demonstration with a brief introduction to Descartes’ methodology. Arguing against a neo-Kantian interpretation of the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Negri extrapolates Descartes’ methodological structuration to a metaphysical level. At the same time, he plants it firmly in a ‘cultural milieu’ and examines the ‘ideal circuits’ within which it was fostered and matured (p69). Discussing contextual social, economic and political factors, Negri shows how these elements of the cultural horizon form ‘the ideological horizon that presides over the conquest of the world by a new class’ (p74). The nascent bourgeoisie, says Negri, ‘regards general equivalence as the precondition for its own advance, for the general interchangeableness of roles, and for the possibility of the destruction of all obstacles to its own growth. Finally, it puts forth the revolutionary absoluteness of its own task in the totalitarian form of the project’ (p74). As a member of the robins, the vanguard of the bourgeoisie, Descartes is posited as ‘political’ precisely because it is the political determinants of the time – the ‘political moment’ – which lends his philosophical, religious and scientific work meaning.

Manoeuvring between high philosophical critique and pedagogical historiography, Negri adopts a dualist tone – I sense some parallels here – when relating Descartes’ situation within a Hegelian open ontology. Referring to the failure of the bourgeoisie to fix the civic passion that characterises its culture through political and institutional means, Negri outlines the bourgeois crisis:

Should we be surprised then that for the bourgeoisie the search for security takes the place of earlier hopes? That, confronted with the crisis provoked by its own development, the bourgeoisie responds by disavowing the more extreme consequences of what it had hoped for, demanding instead assurances about what it already achieved? This is the grave and definitive crisis of the third decade of the 1600s – the recognition of the end of a revolutionary epoch, the inversion of this tendency, and a conjecture that cumulatively gathers together each moment of the crisis so as to fix it in the very structure of the century. Here the experience of the end of the Renaissance world is realised in collective terms as a sense of separation which is experienced and borne as historical destiny. (pp117-18)

This tension between the awareness of the crisis of the Renaissance and a humanist nostalgia is what springs Descartes from the libertine trap. His solution to the bourgeois crisis, then, is a dualism that allows for the development of a meaningful world. Unable to solve the crisis metaphysically, Descartes turns to the pragmatic, the technical – he turns to science.

After conscientious expositions of the different branches of Descartes’ work, Negri delves into the philosophy of the conjecture: ‘The conversion of history into metaphysics, the rupture of the metaphysical world of the Renaissance through the consciousness of the historical crisis of freedom’s process of realisation…’ (p148). Descartes’ real is ultimately defined as separation; the world is inverted. In order to move beyond this doubt, says Negri, Descartes develops his methodology based on metaphysics. This methodology becomes a structural feature of the bourgeoisie, providing a way forward where before there was but an impasse:

What world will bourgeois virtue glimpse?…What space will it be able to occupy?…The bourgeois retains the social form of his existence – an existence based on manufacture and methodologically articulated. Up until yesterday, the conquest of truth inhered in method. Method was a way to read the articulations of reality, the structure of the world. But what will method achieve today? Will it rend the veil of mystified being so as to grasp that fragment of truth which, despite everything, is constituted by the indubitable social existence of the bourgeoisie? This is what method must do. (p153)

Method becomes ideology.

Removing the I, that kernel of metaphysical doubt, and establishing a relationship between man and the world, becomes Descartes’ methodological impetus. Negri points to how his dualism retains an implicit awareness of the hegemony of the bourgeois form of social existence, and how this can be translated into an imposition on the state’s mode of producing and existing. The seeds of the revolution are sown:

This is the history of the bourgeoisie’s humanist revolution, of its defeat in the 1500s; of the conjuncture of the twenties and the dramatic tone that it confers on the spirit of the epoch; of a social class which, though defeated and isolated from political power, nevertheless exists and grows, condemned to a war of position but aware of the ineluctable character of its own emergence. Looking closely, this situation can even be said to represent a fundamental element in the historical definition of the bourgeoisie as a class: a class forever separated from the capacity to be revolutionary, to possess the world, and stuck in an existence which nevertheless constitutes a perennial, indefinite attempt to regain unity. Descartes’s thought establishes itself in this situation: its meaning and universality probably consists in this predicament. (pp207-08)

But why such a hefty tome? Genealogical work is never over; there is always a compromise to be made between telling the truth and exposing the lies. Negri’s postface sums up the project pretty concretely: 1) every metaphysics is in some way a political, temporal ontology; 2) philosophical thought exists within a continuity and an ideology; 3) different genealogies are possible within the consideration of a philosophical stance; and 4) historical political ontological work is key to reassessing the present.

In essence, this is a step toward subduing all reactionary ideology. Perhaps this thorough examination of the work of Descartes will someday join the canon of Cartesian criticism footnoted so rigorously by Negri, but my guess is that its publication in Verso’s Radical Thinkers series is a much more appropriate final resting place for the first Marxist critique of Descartes. Interesting for its biographical material and philosophical exegesis, Negri’s argumentation reaches back to the foundations of Western philosophy in order to shake them, delivering on the Marxist mantra that ideas are always already social.