Another World is Possible: Or, the Logic of Empire?

I’m going to continue my series of logical profiles with Adam Kotsko, author of the soon-to-be-released Zizek and Theology. Adam recently talked about the fortunes of Hardt and Negri’s social theory, and I’ll take reopening that discussion as an opportunity to unseal a thought I had about Empire about five years ago (although when I explain, I expect some people will understand why I never got around to offering it up). Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ll be talking about modal logic in this post: people unfamiliar with the rudiments of possible-world models for modal languages can find out about them in the third installment of my series on Montague Grammar. The “simplest” modal logic is called K, for Saul Kripke; it’s not that he discovered it, but that it naturally “falls out” from the structure of Kripke models for normal modal logics (those closed under the rules of modus ponens and “Necessitation”). The K axiom looks like this:

□(p->q) -> (□p -> □q)

In English, that reads “if it is necessarily so that p implies q, then if it is necessarily so that p it is necessarily so that q”: it expresses the principle that the necessity operator distributes over the material conditional. This axiom is valid for any normal modal frame: although different “accessibility relations” give different modal logics, the K axiom is a part of every normal modal logic. It generally isn’t regarded as being very interesting by itself, but “back in the day” I wondered whether it might not have some applicability to Hardt and Negri’s model of social life. How could this possibly be? Well, modal logics can express a number of different “intensional” concepts: in this case, I’m going to treat the necessity operator as a deontic (logic of permission and obligation) operator and as an epistemic (logic of belief and knowledge) operator.

As a deontic logic, K says if we are obligated to treat one state of affairs as consequent upon another then an obligation to bring about the antecedent state of affairs implies an obligation to bring about the consequent state of affairs. I think there’s a certain point to viewing that as a valid metaprinciple of social normativity, one which is rather consonant with Hardt and Negri’s approach to extra-governmental normativity deriving from the legal postivist Hans Kelsen. When elements traditionally concentrated in state power have recombined on a supranational level and diffused throughout social formations, the question of what is to be done as a citizen of the world order becomes rather complicated. But whatever obligations we have as workers, intellectuals, city-dwellers or fellow-men, perhaps they cannot but be subject (and us with them) to this basic principle that conditional obligation (honoring a social norm however particular or universal) implies conditional obligations (following through when the antecedent condition occurs). But there’s more: we can reformulate the K axiom in terms of possibility (the dual to necessity) as:

◊(p v q) -> (◊p v ◊q)

That’s “if it is possible that p or q, then it is possible that p or it is possible that q”, and it’s an interesting way to view the doxastic consequences of Negri and Hardt’s analysis, reading the possibility operator as “it is believed that”. When they happen (as opposed to when they get talked about and dissected), social trends are really kind of disjunctive: nobody’s exactly sure what they’re about, because in the nascent stage they exist at they could really be about a couple of different things. But if we have a possible social dichotomy (between conservative and progressive, atheist and Christian, town and country, etc.) relevant to assessing the trend we’re licensed to take the individual disjuncts as disjunctively believable, which enables us to use the form of inference known as “disjunctive syllogism”, where if “p or q” is true and we can prove a proposition from either we’re (classically) entitled to assert it outright.

Okay, if my credentials as a cod mathematical sociologist were in question they aren’t any more, but what’s the connection to Empire? Hardt and Negri celebrate the growth of new constellations of social power; and in this they are following Foucault’s insistence that the experiments and control of the disciplinary apparatus positively created the space of modern life, rather than being mere shackles to be thrown off. But if the multitude is going to be navigating by way of tacit “negotiated orders”, what they are able to reasonably believe about the social world they are operating in is going to be exceptionally fragmentary and prone to change. Back then I would think of emerging cultural tropes, interactional patterns, and political arrangements as “K-pulses”, where people were automatically reasoning along these lines. (This all probably had something to do with knowing a woman named K., who was very stimulating along a number of axes — lots of statements were “K-valid” that other people might handle differently.)

I guess being on top of things, or trying to, has always been like that; but I thought that Hardt and Negri’s enthusiasm was perhaps ill-placed because of a historical sequence that occurred to me. There was of course the Holy Roman Empire, which many viewed as neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire, but it was followed by the German Empire, which implemented efficient bureaucracy in conjunction with political repression, and it seemed to me for a while that was followed by Empire — the Nazi regime, the character of which perhaps has to be viewed as a seriously defective and perennially tempting response to modernity rather than a visitation of diabolical evil. The Nazis had no real values of any kind, even nationalistic ones: renaming Berlin “Germania” wouldn’t have been much of an expression of Deutschtum. They were in love with technology and science, and those medieval anachronisms for the people and ancient bacchanales for the elite which mass production and mass media made simultaneously possible.

Perhaps that was a little bit the dream of a spirit-seer; I was certainly seeing spirits at the time. But expecting that technological progress and social change are failure-proof indices of social justice shouldn’t be axiomatic.