Michael Hardt Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 5 of 7
Let's move to this collaboration. The two of you wrote a book called Empire, which is published by the Harvard University Press, and which has become a kind of an intellectual best-seller. It's been translated into twenty-two languages, you told me. Before we start talking about the book (and I want to talk you through some of the central ideas), why do you think the book has such an impact? Beyond [just] sales, it's a book that people either agree or disagree with very strongly.
One never knows these things, but one idea I have is that the book is not terribly original, and I mean that in a good way. I don't mean that as any kind of modesty. I think that truly original books don't get read. Truly original books, no one can understand. What we're saying is something that's not exactly obvious, but people are already thinking, so that its being formulated relatively coherently [is the] best we can do. I assume that that's what happens, and now I'm not just talking about our book, but books in general that have a certain kind of intellectual success. They're books that people are ready for.
Another thing that I assume has this sort of effect, and this comes back to what you were saying earlier about interdisciplinarity: on the one hand, we think that one can't address the kind of problem we're trying to address in this book -- global power structures, etc. -- from a single discipline. Like, if you look at it only from an economic perspective, you will get a very partial view; from a political perspective, cultural, etc. In fact, it might be a little bit like that story about the blind men and the elephant. But if you put the various parts together you can actually get a picture of a whole.
On the other hand, what happens at the same time is that our work within the book, and in our work in general, recognizes a variety of fields that don't usually coordinate with each other. We try to bring [those] into relationship with each other and show how they can profit from each other. For instance, and this is just a for instance, this is one way to summarize the book: we recognize in a variety of different social fields, but also in a variety of different disciplines, [that] there are a variety of theories of historical transition that happened, let's say, between 1968 and 1973, or maybe between '68 and 1989, etc. In international relations, one might talk about the end of colonial regimes and the development of a postcolonial world order. In economic terms, one talks about the shift in labor practice from labor in the dominant countries focused on the factory, towards a postindustrial society. In economic terms, again, about regimes of accumulation that have shifted, modernist into postmodernism and cultural theory.
So by taking these various shifts that actually coincide, more or less, historically, lining them all up together, we propose a much more developed paradigm shift. That's really what the book is about, about this shift that, in fact, is coordinated in economic-political-cultural-social terms in the way they unevenly mesh together. And one can see how we've entered a new era and the terms of it by looking at it simultaneously from these various perspectives.
How did you [carry out] this collaboration? We'll get to the ideas in a minute. Did each of you write different parts? Did you each struggle with the other's parts? Did you constant rewrites? Give us a sense, because as you've just suggested, it's a comprehensive work covering many disciplines and building on two very different experiences of the two authors, actually, in some ways.
Yes, that's one of the fun things about collaborating. Part of the process is giving each other reading lists, or giving each other books, and so becoming expert in the specializations of the other person. He's constantly giving me things to read about German legal thought. And I like it, and I love it and everything, but his primary training was in legal theory, or state theory as they call it in Italy. And particularly in Italy, German legal thought of the early twentieth century was key, and so that is a lot of my training in our collaboration.
On other hand, what's called postcolonial studies, various notions about multicultural notions that are very common in the U.S., are very new in France and Italy. So having him read things about race studies in the U.S., about postcoloniality or postcolonial theory, in general, are things that are completely new to him. So part of it goes that way.
But the material process you asked about. First, we sit down at a table together and make outlines. Often that goes on for a long time, very detailed outlines. Then we split up and make first drafts of specific parts. He writes in Italian and I write in English. Then we switch and rewrite each other's things. I translate into English when I rewrite his Italian. Since he still works on a manual typewriter, he cuts up my pieces, adds them in the middle. Finally it ends up in English, but in the end we generally can't tell who wrote what, or even who had which idea. There's a back and forth.
There's also something interesting about the writing. I think this is true with anyone who writes collaboratively. When we write together, even when I'm drafting something or he is drafting something, I [think I'm] writing in his voice, and he writes thinking he's in my voice, but that neither of us actually does that. Both of us write in a third voice, which is neither one of us.
Or at least it comes out in a third voice ...
That's what I mean, it comes out as kind of a third voice, which is a strange voice, it's not [either one or the other]. Mine is full of exclamation points and enthusiasm, and ...
What are his languages besides Italian?
French.
French, yes.
He [also] reads German and English easily.
I'm going to have you talk about Empire in one minute, what exactly it is, but one final question here along this line, and that is, when was the book written, exactly? There are two historical markers here, the Gulf War and the Kosovo War. [Was it] between that period, is that what I read?
Right, we did write that in the preface. We got the idea, actually, watching the footage of the Gulf War on TV, saying to each other that this is something different, and that we need to find a way to account for it. I assume we wrote it through the early nineties, although he left France and went back to prison in Italy in the summer of '97, at which point I finished the book for another year, I suppose. We turned it in to [Harvard University] Press in '98; it came out in 2000.
Next page: The Ideas of Empire
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