Michael Hardt - Quotes

Toni and I don't want to write what is to be done, because it seems to us quite inappropriate for the two of us in a philosophical register to try to propose the course of action. That's not the right way to do it. We're not the right ones to do it. No one in that position is in the right place to do it. Where that should be done is collectively in movements, and that's where I think it is done.
Hardt, Michael.

The exhaustion of the rule of the one and the formation of the multitude are only possible today for the first time. The “always-already” is meant to refer to the virtual existence of multitude. But I wonder if there really have been earlier attempts to produce multitude or rather if only today in retrospect we can read our history in those terms. Maybe it's something like that line of Marx in the Introduction to the Grundrisse about the anatomy of the human preceding the anatomy of the ape.
Hardt, Michael.

It seems to me that the young activists that I’ve met in North America, Europe and elsewhere all understand the important relationship between affect and activism. They recognize that an important aspect of political activism is the joy of struggle itself, the joy of political activism and the joy of communities that are constructed through political activism.
Hardt, Michael and Micah M. White (Interviewer). "The Politics of Youth: Interview with Michael Hardt." In: Adbusters. No. 82. February 26, 2009.

My hope for the Obama presidency is that we will be able to focus on struggles that really designate a better world. That does not mean utopian aspirations for the Obama presidency, but rather utopian aspirations for the kind of struggles that can be born under, and sometimes against, an Obama administration.
Hardt, Michael and Micah M. White (Interviewer). "The Politics of Youth: Interview with Michael Hardt." In: Adbusters. No. 82. February 26, 2009.

Part of the effort of that third of the book is to try to articulate how the problem is not only Bush. And the problem is not only the US war on terror. That is much larger…. one needs to think about war as a kind of obstacle that opposes to political projects or alternatives, as something that is much broader, that does unfortunately include military repression but also is a broader political and social obstacle. One of the things that we are trying to confront in that first chapter and then came back to it later and I think is one of those things that we don’t yet understand or have an answer to, is the problem of the relationship between force of violence and political activism.
Hardt, Michael and Dimitris Gourdoukis (Interviewer). "For the Love of the Multitude." In: The T-Machine. August 9, 2008.

I think what one has to recognize when trying to understand the global system of repression is how this military elements only function when being embedded within, and collaborating with, force of power in various other fields. And I think that even in the thinking of the US military, it can be very instructive to read the things produced by the advisors to the military instructors, a little bit like reading the diary of a psycho killer, you know, its disturbing but at the same time its interesting to see how they think.
Hardt, Michael and Dimitris Gourdoukis (Interviewer). "For the Love of the Multitude." In: The T-Machine. August 9, 2008.

Networks of course, they don’t even have to have a center to have a hierarchy. To the extent at which the Empire doesn’t have a center, and I think there are some ways in which it does and some ways in which it doesn’t, to the extent that it doesn’t, it doesn’t mean at all that it doesn’t have a hierarchy. It's a hierarchy that functions in a different way.
Hardt, Michael and Dimitris Gourdoukis (Interviewer). "For the Love of the Multitude." In: The T-Machine. August 9, 2008.

In fact one of the most important it seems to me Deleuze and Guattari’s idea that's central for us here is that, when we think of the multitude as formed by an assemblage of singularities, now I sound like Deleuze and Guattari, and the most important thing is that these singularities are not fixed identities, they are always and each becoming different. And they are always and each multiplicities.
Hardt, Michael and Dimitris Gourdoukis (Interviewer). "For the Love of the Multitude." In: The T-Machine. August 9, 2008.

Sometimes I realize I don’t understand what I am saying. You know when you try to work out an argument.
Hardt, Michael and Dimitris Gourdoukis (Interviewer). "For the Love of the Multitude." In: The T-Machine. August 9, 2008.

I’ve been very involved, as I was coming to political consciousness, with the Italian notion of autonomy and that movements from the 70’s in Italy, and so I was interested during the last years that I was traveling in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and each time meeting with activists that their primary term is autonomy, I mean like the picateros in Brazil or the Zapatistas in Mexico, and each timed I asked them “where does this idea of autonomy come from?” and they said “it comes from our own experience, from what we doing”, and I believe them.
Hardt, Michael and Dimitris Gourdoukis (Interviewer). "For the Love of the Multitude." In: The T-Machine. August 9, 2008.

I like phrasing things in formulas, so the formula is that multitude equals singularity plus cooperation - or autonomy plus association.
Hardt, Michael and Nate Hawthorne (Interviewer). "Emergency. Interview with Michael Hardt." In: Greenpepper Magazine. October 2006.

I can understand how you might want to abandon the concept of democracy. I mean, George Bush gets on television and talks about going to war to protect and restore democracy. So I can see how you might want to say let's not use that word anymore.
Hardt, Michael and Nate Hawthorne (Interviewer). "Emergency. Interview with Michael Hardt." In: Greenpepper Magazine. October 2006.

That's right but today, production (the factory itself) is more loquacious. There's an increased proximity between the political and the economic. The talents needed at work are the talents used in politics.
Hardt, Michael and Nate Hawthorne (Interviewer). "Emergency. Interview with Michael Hardt." In: Greenpepper Magazine. October 2006.

I love that pairing of emergence and emergency. I wish I had more to say about it. In some ways it's a reformulation of some arguments about crisis, that crisis is provoked rather than the product of objective contradictions.
Hardt, Michael and Nate Hawthorne (Interviewer). "Emergency. Interview with Michael Hardt." In: Greenpepper Magazine. October 2006.

The crises faced by Bush signal not only the errors of his Administration but the end of imperialism itself--and the emergence of new, more dangerous forces.
Hardt, Michael. "From Imperialism to Empire." In: The Nation. July 13, 2006. (English).

Imperialism is no longer an adequate concept for understanding global power and domination, and clinging to it can blind us to the new forms of power emerging today.
Hardt, Michael. "From Imperialism to Empire." In: The Nation. July 13, 2006. (English).

Not all of what the factory worker does while in the factory is directly productive of capital. There is authorized and unauthorized time off, and there are a thousand tiny subterfuges, and then there is sometimes coordinated sabotage and revolt. I think it is in general terms the same for all of us in capitalist society. Remember, of course, that the capital that we are producing is not just commodities – they are really only a midpoint in the process. The capital produced is primarily a social relation. So we need to try to understand how in all social life-time, as you say, through innumerable activities we are producing and reproducing the social relation that is capital. Of course, there is time off in this process, there are a thousand tiny subterfuges that we invent, and sometimes we manage to mount coordinated sabotage and revolt. My notion is that all this goes on from the inside, if my topological imagination makes sense to you. Our exodus or our nomadism is one that never leaves that inside, and yet nonetheless manages to mount an opposition and pose an alternative.
Michael Hardt. "Autopsy Interview with Michael Hardt." in: Autopsy. January 2005.

I think, both intellectually and personally, Félix Guattari is the real mediator. Félix brought groups of different people together. He seemed to have that organizational ability. Also intellectually, when he made Deleuze think in a more inventive way, Félix seemed to be a great facilitator.
Michael Hardt. "The Collaborator and the Multitude: An Interview with Michael Hardt." in: The Minnesota Review. 61-62, 2004.

Rather than solidarity, it is kind of a process of education that has to go on. In the North American movements there is a lot of sympathy and recognition of injustices in the world, but relatively little, understandably, real understanding of what life is like for different people, what it is like to do politics there. And that's, I think, the kind of experience that is really transformative.
Hardt, Michael and Benjamin Dangl (Interviewer). "An Interview with Michael Hardt." In: Dissident Voice. April 20, 2004.

We seem doomed to historical repetition. In fact, there is a surplus of ghosts from the past wandering through our current scene. The difficulty is to cast out the false specters and see which great historical events and figures are really being repeated today.
Hardt, Michael. "The Second Empire, or The Eighteenth Brumaire of George W. Bush." In: The Symptom. Issue 4, Spring 2003. (English).

While Bush son plays the young Bonaparte, then, the United Nations and the European nation-states, particularly France and Germany, find themselves in the position of the 19th century French bourgeois parliamentary parties, insisting on multilateralism against the unilateralism of the Emperor. This is the real historical repetition.Every historical repetition, however, comes with a difference, and it is not merely that the first event has the weight of a tragic creative transformation whereas the second presents a grotesque masquerade. The coup d'Etat of Bush son resembles that of the father in that both of them seek to concentrate greater power in the hands of the United States.
Hardt, Michael. "The Second Empire, or The Eighteenth Brumaire of George W. Bush." In: The Symptom. Issue 4, Spring 2003. (English).

Rather than opposing the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre to the World Economic Forum in New York, it is more revealing to imagine it as the distant offspring of the historic Bandung Conference that took place in Indonesia in 1955.
Hardt, Michael. "Porto Alegre - Today's Bandung?" In: The New Left Review. 2003. (English).

The various movements across the globe cannot simply connect to each other as they are, but must rather be transformed by the encounter through a kind of mutual adequation.
Hardt, Michael. "Porto Alegre - Today's Bandung?" In: The New Left Review. 2003. (English).

Like the Forum itself, the multitude in the movements is always overflowing, excessive and unknowable. It is certainly important then, on the one hand, to recognize the differences that divide the activists and politicians gathered at Porto Alegre. It would be a mistake, on the other hand, to try to read the division according to the traditional model of ideological conflict between opposing sides. Political struggle in the age of network movements no longer works that way.
Hardt, Michael. "Porto Alegre - Today's Bandung?" In: The New Left Review. 2003. (English).

Our basic hypothesis, then, is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. "Marx's Mole is Dead! Globalisation and Communication." In: Eurozine. February 13, 2002. (English).

The ancient Roman Empire was a mixed constitution, according to Polybius, in that it brought together in a single constitution all three primary forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy ... In any case, a theory of mixed constitution allows us to recognise all of these powers within one coherent global constitution, but does not force us to claim that these forces are uniform or univocal.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. "Marx's Mole is Dead! Globalisation and Communication." In: Eurozine. February 13, 2002. (English).

Imperialism was really an extension of the sovereignty of the European nation states beyond their own boundaries.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. "Marx's Mole is Dead! Globalisation and Communication." In: Eurozine. February 13, 2002. (English).

Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colours of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. "Marx's Mole is Dead! Globalisation and Communication." In: Eurozine. February 13, 2002. (English).

The concept of Empire presents itself not as a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. "Marx's Mole is Dead! Globalisation and Communication." In: Eurozine. February 13, 2002. (English).

The relationship between Italian politics and French philosophy is an interesting one, specifically the relationship between the Italian tradition of operaismo andautonomia ...Operaismo takes this as its fundamental axiom: the struggles of the working class precede and prefigure the successive re-structurations of capital.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. "Marx's Mole is Dead! Globalisation and Communication." In: Eurozine. February 13, 2002. (English).

Rather, proletarian internationalism was anti-nationalist, and hence supranational and global. Workers of the world unite! - not on the basis of national identities but directly through common needs and desires, without regard to borders and boundaries.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. "Marx's Mole is Dead! Globalisation and Communication." In: Eurozine. February 13, 2002. (English).

For a cycle to form the recipients of the news must be able to "translate" the events into their own language, recognise the struggles as their own and thus add a link to the chain. Rather than thinking of the struggles as relating to each other like links in a chain, it might be better to conceive of them as communicating like a virus that modulates its form to find in each context an adequate host.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. "Marx's Mole is Dead! Globalisation and Communication." In: Eurozine. February 13, 2002. (English).

There is nothing dialectical nor teleological about this anticipation and prefiguration of capitalist development by the mass struggles. On the contrary, the struggles themselves a are demonstrations of the creativity of desire, utopias of lived experience, the workings of historicity as potentiality - in short, the struggles are the naked reality of the res gestae. A teleology of sorts is constructed only after the fact, post festum.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. "Marx's Mole is Dead! Globalisation and Communication." In: Eurozine. February 13, 2002. (English).

It is not a matter of pretending that we are powerful when we are not, but rather recognising the power we really have; the power that created the contemporary world and can create another.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. "Marx's Mole is Dead! Globalisation and Communication." In: Eurozine. February 13, 2002. (English).

I have always been partial to arguments that give precise dates to mark broad historical shifts : modernity began, for example, on some specific day in 1865 when Manet painted his "Olympia" or on the day in 1791 when black slaves rose up against French authority in Haiti.
Hardt, Michael. "Sovereignty." In: Theory & Event. Volume 5, Issue 4, 2001. (English).

Historical shifts are not locatable in this way; any time you try to put your finger on the moment of change it slips away into the broad sweeps of history. The gesture toward dates is a useful tool for approaching the larger movements in process.
Hardt, Michael. "Sovereignty." In: Theory & Event. Volume 5, Issue 4, 2001. (English).

With the decline of national sovereignty there is ever less distinction between inside and outside — and therefore there is the tendency toward the formation of a global space of sovereignty that has no outside.
Hardt, Michael. "Sovereignty." In: Theory & Event. Volume 5, Issue 4, 2001. (English).

The only path to long-term security is instead democracy, now democracy conceived not only on the national but the global plane. Inventing the forms and mechanisms of such democracy is an enormous challenge, but the recent events have underlined its urgency.
Hardt, Michael. "Sovereignty." In: Theory & Event. Volume 5, Issue 4, 2001. (English).

Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule - in short, a new form of sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press. 2000. Paperback, 478 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0674006712.

Today we increasingly think like computers.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press. 2000. Paperback, 478 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0674006712.

It is now a closed paranthesis {deconstruction} and leaves us faced with a new task: constructing, in the non-place, a new place; constructing ontologically new determinations of the human, of living - a powerful artificiality of being. Donna Haraway's cyborg fable, which resides at the ambiguous boundary between human, animal, and machine, introduces us today, much more effectively than deconstruction, to these new terrains of possibility - but we should remember that this is a fable and nothing more.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press. 2000. Paperback, 478 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0674006712.

The concept of Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire's rule has no limits.
Hardt, Michael (together with Antonio Negri). Empire. 2004.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press. 2000. Paperback, 478 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0674006712.

The passage to Empire emerges from the twilight of modern sovereignty. In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries and barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press. 2000. Paperback, 478 pages, Language English,06712. ISBN: 06740

First and foremost, then, the concept of Empire posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really that rules over the entire 'civilized' world. No territorial boundaries limit its reign.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press. 2000. Paperback, 478 pages, Language English,06712. ISBN: 06740

The rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depths of the social world. Empire not only manages a territory and a population but also creates the very world it inhabits. It not only regulates human interactions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature. The object of its rule is social life in its entirety, and thus Empire presents the paradigmatic form of biopower.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press. 2000. Paperback, 478 pages, Language English,06712. ISBN: 06740

Finally, although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace - a perpetual and universal peace outside of history. The Empire we are faced with wields enormous powers of oppression and destruction, but that fact should not make us nostalgic in any way for the old forms of domination. The passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the force of liberation.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press. 2000. Paperback, 478 pages, Language English,06712. ISBN: 06740

Globalization, of course, is not one thing, and the multiple processes that we recognize as globalization are not unified or univocal. Our political task, we will argue, is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press. 2000. Paperback, 478 pages, Language English,06712. ISBN: 06740

We do not have any models to offer for this event. Only the multitude through its practical experimentation will offer the models and determine when and how the possible becomes real.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press. 2000. Paperback, 478 pages, Language English,06712. ISBN: 06740

Affective labor is itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities.
Hardt, Michael. "Affective Labor." In: Boundary 2. Vol. 26, No. 2, Summer 1999. (English).

More importantly, society was gradually industrialized even to the point of transforming human relations and human nature. Society became a factory.
Hardt, Michael. "Affective Labor." In: Boundary 2. Vol. 26, No. 2, Summer 1999. (English).

Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves.
Hardt, Michael. "Affective Labor." In: Boundary 2. Vol. 26, No. 2, Summer 1999. (English).

The labor is immaterial, even if it is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible: a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion - even a sense of connectedness or community. Categories such as "in-person" services or services of proximity are often used to identify this kind of labor, but what is essential to it, its in-person aspect, is really the creation and manipulation of affect.
Hardt, Michael. "Affective Labor." In: Boundary 2. Vol. 26, No. 2, Summer 1999. (English).

By biopower, I understand the potential of affective labor. Biopower is the power of the creation of life; it is the production of collective subjectivities, sociality and society itself ... What is created in the networks of affective labor is a form of life.
Hardt, Michael. "Affective Labor." In: Boundary 2. Vol. 26, No. 2, Summer 1999. (English).

Prison time is the obvious form of punishment in our world. Freedom, that is, the control of our time, is conceived as the keystone, the most coveted possession in modern society, equal to all.
Hardt, Michael. "Prison Time." In: Yale French Studies. No. 91, 1997. (English).

The concrete crime is abstracted, multiplied by a mysterious variable and then made concrete against punishment, in a precise quantity of time.
Hardt, Michael. "Prison Time." In: Yale French Studies. No. 91, 1997. (English).

The question of the organization or constitution of the world, however, of the being of becoming, pushes Deleuze to pose these ontological issues in ethical terms. Nietzsche allows him to transpose the results of ontological speculation to an ethical horizon, to the field of forces, of sense and value, where the positive movement of being becomes the affirmation of being. The thematic of power in Nietzsche provides the theoretical passage that links Bergsonian ontology to an ethics of active expression. Spinoza covers this same passage and extends it to practice: just as Nietzsche posed the affirmation of speculation, Spinoza poses the affirmation of practice, or joy, at the center of ontology. Deleuze argues that Spinoza's is an ontological conception of practice; Spinoza conceives practice, that is, as constitutive of being.
Hardt, Michael. "The Art of Organization: Foundations of a Political Ontology." in: Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri. 1990.