Organizing Encounters and Generating Events

El Kilombo & Michael Hardt in Conversation

LESSONS IN EMPIRE

El Kilombo: So much has been said about the concept of Empire since the publication of
your book with Toni Negri, how would you summarize the importance of this concept for
political action today?

Michael Hardt: One of the problems some people seemed to have with the concept of
Empire was that is poses a difficulty for organizing. In other words, it seems that the
notion that the emerging global order is organized not by a single imperialist state, or
even by a small group of dominant nation states, but rather by a wide network of
collaborating powers, including the dominant nation states of course, but also major
corporations, supranational institutions, NGOs, etc. - that hypothesis of Empire, that there
was no single center to global power, seems from a certain perspective to make
organizing and protest impossible. In other words, you can protest but there is nobody
home. Now, already the globalization movements from the late 1990s and early 2000s
were addressing this new situation. In fact, the way I see the various examples of summit-
hopping from that period as trying to articulate that theory of Empire: they recognized
that it’s not just the US that’s in control of global order (if you did think that, you should
be protesting in front of the White House every week), but rather the protests were an
attempt to identify the new enemy through a of series of experimentations: with the IMF
and the World Bank, the G8, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, that these were all
revealing nodes in the network of the new global command. The problem of course that
everyone realized at the time and that is even more pressing today is summit-hopping is
only organized around these events and doesn’t leave us with anything else. Today when
we’re faced once again with confronting the new global order, which is not simply
dictated by the US or by the White House, we have to address this problem again, of how
to organize when the powers we’re facing are multiple and dispersed. And how to do it
in such a way that leaves us with lasting organizations.

EK: From our perspective the first thing that the discussion around the notion of Empire
has accomplished is bring us back to the very basic idea that there is no struggle against
capitalism as such, that one must always take time to define the parameters of what the
struggle is today. You must always begin by conducting a survey of sorts to understand
what’s happening now so that we can act accordingly, it’s never enough to simply
denounce capitalism and its relation to imperialism as if these phenomena and their
relations were timeless.
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MH: I agree that we can’t just reject capital as such at an abstract level, that we have to
recognize or invent concrete instances for resistance and struggle. But how does having
to think Empire force you or allow you to recognize the concrete situation?

EK: For example, the givenness of inter-imperialist competition, or imperialism as the

functioning parameters of capitalism were for a long time a simple given. But today we
have to go back, and the concept of Empire gives us the capacity to at least open the
discussion and say, if we’re not dealing with that situation, what is the situation that
we’re dealing with today? It helps us to remember that we must always keep asking this
question.

MH: It’s not the nature of what were calling Empire that forces this; it’s the notion that
you have to rethink constantly the conditions of capital, and therefore the conditions of
struggle. So whether you agree with our notion of Empire or not, maybe that part doesn’t
matter, its just having to recognize that in capitalist relations and command something is
new.

EK: Although it matters in the sense that reanalyzing the conditions and the tactics of
struggle require a new analysis. So we were using the example of imperialism, where we
still have anti-imperialist struggles because some motions, some particular gestures, look
like imperialist gestures, but in fact are not. This is where the conceptual innovation
makes quite a difference.

MH: Right. If you’re fighting against an old form of enemies, you risk not only being
ineffective but even reinforcing them.

EK: Exactly. We also feel that the concept of Empire has had a second positive effect on
the U.S. political scene; political agency in U.S. based activism has tended to be
displaced onto subjects in the “third world.” The concept of Empire, this massive
dispersal of capitalist networks which exceeds any given nation-state, forces us to
question this displacement and instead attempt to place ourselves at the center, or at
least within possibilities for political action, to imagine ourselves both as subjects of
capitalist impositions as well as agents of possible change. It really puts an end to that
bad habit of displacing our agency.

MH: To add to that, I wonder if it is the same thing to say that what we have to recognize
is that the need for activism in the US is becoming more like the need for activism
elsewhere, so in that way too, US exceptionalism is also coming to an end. Part of the
exceptionalism was manifested by those practices of a politics of guilt and displacement,
making our political actions not about us but only about people elsewhere.

PROTEST AND REVOLUTION

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EK: This recognition is important in determining the possibilities and limitations for
protest politics in the US, such as the upcoming demonstrations against the Republican
and Democratic National Conventions this summer. For us, it is first important to clarify
what these protest events should not be about. We need to disinvest from making
demands toward political parties and the State, because the problems we are facing run
much deeper than the party system – which from our perspective is now a product of
media simulation and the spectacularization of politics. In that sense, we shouldn’t be
waging protest as a plea or appeal to these parties, or as an appeal to the media. It is
through media spectacle that the politics of the politicians is legitimated: through the
circulation of images, the polling of ‘public opinion,’ political partnerships with civil
society, and the permission and even encouragement of “dissent” which supposedly
signals a healthy democracy. The imagery of public protest in and of itself doesn’t
challenge this schema, but can in fact play an integral role in this game of simulation
that has replaced representation (as limited as this concept already is) as the substance
of electoral politics.

This shouldn’t suggest, however, that there is nothing to be gained through the
organization of these protests. If the focus is not outward and upward – aimed at the
politicians, the parties, the media – but is oriented inward, for and among those of us
struggling against capitalism in a multiplicity of ways, these gatherings can become
productive spaces of encounter. By this we mean the meeting and exchanging of
struggles, getting to know people, projects, and organizations with which we might
otherwise never connect. Yet these extraordinary encounters in and of themselves are not
sufficient for establishing an alternative to our current situation. The space of protest is a
temporary one, and the type of encounter it can provide is all too brief. However, it
would be a mistake to falsely oppose the brevity of such encounters with the constancy of
organizations. A careful examination of these protests will always show the prior
existence of extensive organization, while all organizational efforts necessarily come
about through a series of unplanned encounters. Therefore, rather than oppose these
phenomena or fix them into a model of supercession (i.e., from protest to organization),
what we need is a politics that opens each to the other in a constant relation of mutual
regeneration – as the continuous articulation, embodiment, and renewal of our own
collective political desires. The potential of the events planned for the summer lies
exactly in the opportunity to enact this other kind of politics.

MH: I am little worried about cutting off the notion of revolt… I agree with making
primary the encounters of the process of organization, but that doesn’t prohibit,
functioning secondarily, making demands on the state, demands on the Democratic Party,
demanding a living wage from the city, or calling on any number of political powers,
even organizing our own spectacles for the media. What present organizing is moving
against is a primacy of spectacle and a primacy of demands, and even a primacy of
indignation. It doesn’t seem to me the right way to think about it to refuse those, but
rather subordinating those to the organizing practice.

EK: We believe that what is needed is a form of organizational force independent of

those structures. We’re not saying “never spectacle and never demands” in a
transcendental way, but only that we think at this particular moment, participating in the
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spectacle empties all meaning from the act, and requires that you evacuate any other
platform to stand on. We’re discussing the relation between a movement and its demands
of state institutions, and in short what we’re trying to get at is that in order to be able to
have this discussion we have to build a movement first.

MH: But what the spectacle is, is really just allowing people to see in the dominant media
that some of us don’t agree – that we don’t agree with the electoral process, that we don’t
agree with the party platform, etc. Even when that objection isn’t given any content by
the media, but just appears as people who are against, I still think it can have great effect.

It might seem like I’m contradicting myself, to first propose this idea of Empire, and then
to advocate making these kinds of demands on the political powers and the US
government but that’s exactly how I think we need to act in this context, without
believing that they are sovereign powers, without believing that they can determine their
own fate, we still have to constantly make demands on them, in particular to open more
spaces for ourselves to act autonomously. So I agree with you on the priority of
organizational relationships, but I think that we could maintain a secondary mission also,
of expressing our indignation and rage and hatred of the powers that be. I’m only worried
that your exclusive focus on organization might cut off those necessary functions.

EK: Just to clarify, we’re not trying to avoid discussion with these institutions or these
parties for the sake of revolutionary purity. That would be ridiculous. But we still need to
have a discussion about the effectivity of political action towards reform. So we have to
constantly question the effectivity of the way demands are posed and the tie of
organizational structure to those forms of demands. For example, the effective provision
of education by the autonomous communities of Chiapas has had way more of an impact
on Mexican nation policy on education than if the Zapatistas had gone to the national
government and made demands that there should be educational reform, because in a
way, the national government is then forced to attempt to occupy that issue by addressing
the underlying demand. Or, another example, the Black Panther Party here in the US
didn’t say, “we want a national breakfast program,” instead, they built a breakfast
program that fed tens of thousand of children. J. Edgar Hoover identified these programs
as the greatest weapon in the hands of the Panthers and subsequently the federal
government stepped in to create free breakfast programs in public schools. The same
thing took place with the Panthers’ sickle cell anemia project.

MH: So it is more a question of what forms of organization are best for gaining reforms,
the effectiveness of political action in that sense, because, after all, any real reforms are
oriented toward revolution. In Italy recently, some of the most successful political
activity has been really broad, “multitudinous” organizing campaigns against large public
works, which are bad for the environment and bad for the local residents, and then most
recently the most inspiring struggle has been against the expansion of a U.S. military base
in Vicenza. And I would say the actual object of these struggles – stopping the expansion
of the base for instance – is itself important, but it turns out to be secondarily important
compared to the lasting organization that’s been built in Vicenza, of the different groups
that came together that hadn’t been working together before but discovered new

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possibilities for organization. So I wouldn’t say that stopping the base doesn’t matter, its
important, even if it is secondary to the connections and the new forms of organization
that have emerged and the construction of a model for organizing that is being repeated
elsewhere.

EK: So, in a way we’re back to where we began, saying that that these protests are
important to the extent that they provide us all a base for constructing encounters and
new organizational forms But it still might be useful for us to distinguish the effectiveness
of achieving reforms from the goal or intent of reform; so if we establish an autonomous
institution, and that causes a certain response or some kind of reform, then it has been an
effective action, but reform was never the goal. So it is still important from our
perspective to maintain a distinction between organizations that set out for reforms, and
organizations that achieve reforms.

MH: You can tell the difference between the two by the fact that in that in the first model,
once the reform is achieved, everybody goes home and never sees each other again; while
in the other model, the achievement of the reform is just one step in a much larger
process that continues on.

EK: Absolutely, and nobody should deny the importance of achieving those reforms, so in
a way we’re saying the same thing; and for us what is most urgent right now is building
the organizational power that gives us the power to force useful reforms.

A NEW CYCLE OF STRUGGLE: EVENT AND ENCOUNTER

MH: At this point then, it might be helpful to situate the challenges for organizing today
in the context of the recent cycle of struggles that have now come to an end. It seems to
me that we lived through an incredibly productive and innovative cycle of struggles that
lasted from the mid-1990s until about 2003, which was oriented toward questions of
globalization, especially in North America and Europe; and the power of it was precisely
its diversity in organization and in agendas. In other words, it was not required that the
movements unify under a single leadership or support even a common agenda. Rather the
strength was precisely in the networks of groups, organized autonomously, cooperating
together. But throughout that period, everyone in the movements recognized at least two
limitations. One limitation was primarily geographical, which was that the movements in
North America and Europe were oriented towards global issues but never managed,
despite numerous attempts, adequately to extend outside of the global north. The second
limitation was that organizations were centered on protest and therefore oriented toward a
kind of summit-hopping, and therefore there was a lack of an institutionalization of
movements. That movement came to a kind of forced end with the war on terror and the
need to combat the second Bush administration, but these movements – anti-war, anti-
Bush, in 2003 and 2004 – though of course necessary, destroyed the multiplicity of the
organizing of the previous era. Because, by necessity it seemed, they required a single
central agenda, and a unified organizational technique; and partly as a consequence all
the excitement and innovation dropped out of the movements. Today we’re at the

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 In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement & Movements
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beginning of a third cycle of struggles that in some ways can pick up where the
globalization protest movements left off, but maybe now we’re in a position now to
address its limitations better. Last summer’s events at the G-8 summit in Germany near
Rostock were a good start. Maybe the RNC and DNC events can continue this.

EK: Perhaps one place we might want to begin this discussion of moving toward a new
cycle of struggle is what we referred to above as the necessary interplay, or mutual
regeneration, of protest and organization. From our perspective, this would provide a
way for the new cycle of struggles to move beyond a certain impasse that has formed
within the alterglobalization movements – between on the one hand, organizational
models that tout effectivity but don’t allow for difference, and on the other, the
randomness of encounters that don’t allow for the development and consistency of new
collective habits.

In El Kilombo, we feel that moving beyond this impasse implies the construction of
permanent spaces of encounter, where no single subject (immigrant, student, industrial
worker) is believed to be the principal agent of change, but rather where encounters
across subjective positions allows for the creation of new collective habits. That is, this
form of organization is capable not only of acting to provide for basic needs, but also of
producing itself as a new collective subject (a community). In contrast to the vacuous
“grassroots” rhetoric used by non-profits, we have to be careful to note here that
community never pre-exists this process of self-constitution; and creating a community is
not simply the process of recognizing people as they are, but rather acting collectively on
who we want to become. Therefore, we need to reclaim this capacity for ourselves, to
generate and sustain community, to exercise power collectively, to realize projects of
autonomy and self-determination. We need the organizational consistency and structure
to deal with real-life problems and be open to new desires, so we can move beyond the
politics of the politicians and the paralyzing spectacle. If we look at the Latin American
movements, for example, it becomes clear that only the ones that have been able to make
this leap toward what you call ”institutionalization” have remained vibrant and effective
and they have in many ways avoided the pitfalls that have tended to trap us here in the
North.

MH: I love the way you use the notion of encounter, and it seems to me you’re actually
talking about two theories of encounter. There is one notion of encounter that functions in
the event; in other words, at a protest movement there are new connections that are made
that open up towards the future and towards different kinds of organizing; let’s call this
the event encounter. Then there’s another kind of encounter you’re talking about which
has to do with continuity and what I think of as the construction of institutions. So this is
an encounter that’s repeatable and this kind of encounter makes clear how your notion of
community is different from the traditional notion of community. I think you’re right to
find the idea of community creepy, and this notion of the encounter allows you to draw it
away from these organic, fixed, identitarian, even familial notions, and allows you to
bring community back to the common. What this second kind of encounter is about is a
kind of institution of the common, in a way drawing out or developing our common
powers that we find through our repeated engagement with each other.

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Coordinator: Team Colors Publisher: The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
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EK: Shifting to this second kind of encounter seems to be a particularly difficult task now,
because within Empire politics has been delinked from a specific mode of spatialized
power – the nation-state – and as such, we are struggling to define the new parameters
for the practice of politics and organization. We need a new map for understanding the
territorial and spatial dimensions of power, a cartography that allows us to see how
empire functions as an extremely spatially intense form of exploitation. The struggle to
remove the producers of metropolitan forms of cooperation is most literally a struggle to
displace them to the periphery of global cities, leaving behind remnants of their collective
habits and practices for the enjoyment of others. We would like to be really concrete
about this: we believe this is exactly what the issue of gentrification and the current
foreclosure crisis are actually about. In the United States, this has taken the form of the
largest transfer of wealth from families of color to banks, brokers, and investment firms
in history; specifically, $164 billion - $213 billion over the past eight years. This
scrambling of the geography has made it difficult to remember that all political practice
necessitates spatialization, and therefore requires a struggle over territory.

Having said that, we have to recognize that although the struggle for territory is
necessary, it is never sufficient. The aim of our struggle is not simply the control of
territory, but rather the effective deployment of space as the necessary conduit for the
production of collective habits which make possible a whole series of new social
relations. (Perhaps rather than territory, it would make more sense to talk about
“habitat.”) Therefore, in reality there is no such thing as a struggle against
gentrification, there can only be the defense and organizing of territory as a tactical
move in the struggle to dismantle Empire.

MH: So, on the one hand we were talking about the importance of the event, such as the
protest event, when we make new connections and expand our networks – an extensive
development – and now, on the other hand, you are emphasizing the need to create
lasting institutions, like El Kilombo, through a kind of intensive development.

EK: Yes, because we’re dealing with two kind of events – first is the question of
unexpected events, and then there is the question of trying to appropriate the means of
producing/precipitating events.

MH: The second kind of encounter, though, the intense repeated engagement with each
other, I don’t know if I’d want to call it an event.

EK: Don’t you think that the production of difference that would create the common is an
event?

MH: Well, does it happen once or does it happen everyday, continually in our interaction
with each other? What do you consider the “event” of El Kilombo? It seems
counterintuitive to talk about habituation as event.

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EK: By habituation, though, we don’t mean repetition. So it is habituation yes, but the
habituation of encounter – the habituation of innovation.

MH: So one is a punctual dividing line of before and after, and then the other identifies
the event with creativity and making that isn’t temporally isolated but is a duration, a
procession of instances or a constant process of creation. So the question might be, why
call it an event anymore?

EK: Because that highlights the innovation involved in it – despite the fact that it happens
everyday, it is new every time. The event of Kilombo is the territory that becomes
inhabited and habitual. But we should also be very clear about this point, we’re not
talking about localism or turning inward, but creating a collective body and terrain that
allows us to act with and in relation to others. It gives us the means to act and interact
more effectively and more cooperatively, not just within and among ourselves but in
relation to other communities - opening in fact more surfaces of struggle, not fewer. This
is why we need practices and habits and collective ways of inhabiting our territory that
keep it open to more and more connections.

MH: And that brings us back to what can be useful in the RNC and DNC actions later
this summer, not only to show our dissent but also for the opportunity to open up and
make more connections with other singularities. That is an extensive work that
complements the intensive work of inhabiting the territory, as you say.

Holding together these two kinds of encounter, these two kinds of events, may be one
way of thinking how we can take this new cycle of struggles beyond the limitations of the
previous ones.

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