The Politics of Joy

The Collaborator and the Multitude: An Interview with Michael Hardt. Hardt, along with Toni Negri, has written the most influential political book of the last 30 years, Empire (the follow-up, Multitude, was out in August). I'm fascinated by their work because I think they're trying to create a language for political action in an age of networks and information. But they also have this wonderful sub-theme about love and pleasure being part of a citizen's identity - very play-ethic oriented. Hardt explains here:

I started becoming interested in politics as an undergraduate, but I was repulsed by the political atmosphere, which seemed to me mostly an atmosphere of moralism and abnegation—a search for purity, but a search that meant we should feel guilty for the privileges we have and try to avoid them. Or we should maintain a kind of purity by not watching violent movies, eating certain things and not others. In Central America, a lot of the activists coming from Europe and North America were driven by guilt and acting for the good of others. But I learned from the Central Americans that there was another kind of activism which was not about our guilt but about our joy. It was not about going and doing politics because I need to give up something in order to help others—I'm getting something out of it. One group thought, I'm here to help them. The other group thought, I'm here so that they can teach me how to live better.

Helping others is not even in tension with making my life better. All of that is part of the same thing. To make the world better, I don't need to give up things, I need to gain things. I need to gain a more joyful life.... I remember thinking about politics, rather than as an ascetic redistribution, as a collective project for the increase of joy. The younger generation of activists today seems to have learned this. If one traces the transformations of activism in the U.S., ACT UP and Queer Nation were a real hinge, making demonstrations fun, making them funny, great slogans. The relationship between a demonstration and a party becomes quite confused.

Q: Or even a carnival.

Hardt: Right. The whole talk now about movement as carnival is perfect for this. It may not be the only way of conducting politics, but it's the only politics I want. That might be an adequate definition of love: a politics of joy.