Harvard University Press Blog

Michael Hardt on The Common in Copenhagen

HUP author Michael Hardt, who, along with his co-author Antonio Negri, has transformed over the past ten years our conception of what it means to live in a "globalized" world, has just returned from Copenhagen, where he was able to observe the goings-on around the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference from a different angle than the one usually adopted in news reports that focus on the official wrangling inside the conference center. Below is his report on the power dynamics he witnessed between the various tiers of concerned parties that gathered both inside and outside the event grounds during that hectic and exhilarating week.

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The Common in Copenhagen

By Michael Hardt

The common is quickly becoming the primary terrain of political struggle in the age of globalization. I have just returned from Copenhagen, where during the past two weeks the COP15 UN Climate Summit has been the scene of intense negotiations over the management of the common. Primarily at stake is how and to what extent we will share the common wealth in this world and also how we will counter the destructive forms of the common that threaten our societies and forms of life on earth.

When I say that the common is centrally in play in the processes of globalization I refer on the one hand to the land, the forests, the sea, the atmosphere—in short, something like what was traditionally called the commons. On the other hand, the common also names a range of results of human production and creativity, such as ideas, images, code, knowledges, information, and affects. The question of climate change refers primarily to the first of these but the relation between these two notions of the common was also an important factor in Copenhagen. I will return to this briefly below.

Once we conceive of the Copenhagen summit as a struggle over the management of the common, it is useful to separate this struggle into two relatively separate scenes. One scene took place inside the official meetings at the Bella Conference Center, where admission was strictly limited to government representatives, approved NGOs, some journalists, and other select participants. I spent most of my time, however, at the second scene, outside the official meetings, among social movements and activists, whose presence represented an important encounter between the activist traditions focused on environmentalism and those relating to the various aspects of globalization.

The official meetings were the stage for a series of intense, high-level negotiations about the form and hierarchies of the emerging structures of global governance that Antonio Negri and I refer to as Empire. It is even more clear today than ten years ago, when we starting thinking in these terms, that no single nation-state, like the United States or China, can "go it alone" and rule the global system. Any attempts at unilateralism are now doomed to failure. Instead we saw at Copenhagen an example of how the emerging structures of global governance are being constructed within and among three distinct tiers.

"Literature that has a particular resonance with someone has a vibrant, living quality": An interview with Stefanie Posavec

When the affordable-original-print site 20x200 featured a piece based on The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, we were both seduced and intrigued. Who was this Stefanie Posavec, and how had she transformed Benjamin’s most famous essay into an organic form (tree? anemone?) with spreading multi-colored branches?  Happily, Posavec, a London-based book designer for Penguin UK, proved willing to answer our questions via e-mail, and to share some images of the progression of the work, interspersed below.  
The finished product
Q: Do you have an idea of what a visualization will look like before you begin your work, or does it evolve as your analysis progresses?
A: I have an idea of what the visualisation will look like up to a point: I keep experimenting with the data and try to see whether the shapes that I have in my head are feasible using this data set. Sometimes I have an idea in my mind, yet, when the data is actually gathered for this visual, I realise that the graphic that I was so fixed upon actually is impossible to create with the given data, which is part of the process, I suppose. Often I try to use forms to visualise the text that not only represent the data but also become a visual metaphor for some of the themes found within the text. For example, the Literary Organism method of visualising text, while merely a simple tree structure, was meant to look like a living and breathing organic being. I wanted to communicate how literature that has a particular resonance with someone has a vibrant, living quality. Also, comparing text and organisms works neatly as both are cellular in that they are complex structures produced of smaller and smaller components.

First image

Q: How did you choose "Work of Art" as a subject?

A: I worked with 20x200 for the selection of this essay. It was the first time that I ever read this essay, to be honest! Normally I either pick my favourite, most influential books to analyse or work with text that influences and inspires other people and use the project to understand their reasons for this love of the text.

Second image

Redefining classics for the 21st century

We usually treat ancient Greece as a closed system, a discrete, limited set of texts with more or less established meanings. But a new generation of classicists, steeped in the insights afforded by contemporary theory, are beginning to show how that view cannot hold as much water as it once did. Shaking off the stuffy image traditionally attached to interpretations of ancient Greece, Page duBois here presents a series of case studies that explode the boundaries of what is still referred to as “classics.” In Out of Athens: The New Ancient Greeks, duBois, Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, shakes our conventional hierarchies of analysis by situating Athens not at the center of the Hellenic world, but as one set of voices among many, part of a web of connections that stretches from Vedic India to ancient China to the polyglot city of Alexandria. In encouraging us to think of the ancient Greeks as part of a universe rather than the universe itself, duBois expands the range of inquiry in a once-hidebound discipline across space and time, showing how an engagement with contemporary theory—reading Athenian tragedy and the poetry of Sappho alongside the works of Judith Butler and Alain Badiou—can illuminate the ways in which classical antiquity reaches into our own time. With Out of Athens, duBois has mapped an ambitious agenda for a new generation of classicists and shown us how rethinking our perspectives can make the oldest civilizations new once again.

||| Out of Athens: The New Ancient Greeks

NLHA Bookstore Display Contest -- results are in

A while back we announced a contest whereby bookstores could create a display inspired by the now-much-lauded A New Literary of America, and we'd pick the winner and showcase it on the blog. Realizing that a coveted mention on the university press blog to end all university press blogs might not be enough to entice everyone, we decided to offer as a prize the world's most versatile gift -- US dollars, five hundred of them. The winner also gets a framed, limited-edition color silkscreen of Chuck Sperry’s cover for the Twentieth Anniversary Edition of Marcus’ Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, signed by the artist. Two runners-up get copies of the poster as well. And now, the results are in.

WINNER:

57th Street Books in Chicago assembled a menagerie of tomes from NLHA contributors paired with the works they discussed in the book, complimented by a visual theme incorporating maps of the US and the pastel color scheme utilized in the book's cover design. Behold:

RUNNER-UP:

Skylight Books in Los Angeles, California, who made explicit the lines of connection between the NHLA and the works it addresses -- with ribbon! Witness:

RUNNER-UP:

Village Books of Bellingham, Washington built on the theme of building -- a country whose idea of itself was built as we went along, and a display whose architectural merits, complete with stacked cubes and hanging transparencies, stand unparalleled. Consider:

Many congratulations to our winners and many thanks to all those who submitted, an illustrious list that includes the Harvard Book Store of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sam Weller's Bookstore of Salt Lake City, Utah, Books and Company of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, Vroman's Bookstore of Pasadena, California, Chaucer's Books of Santa Barbara, California, Penn Book Center of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, University Press Books of Berkeley, California, and The Booksmith of San Francisco, California. Those of you lucky enough to have an independent store in your area know that it's more than a place to buy and sell hunks of wood pulp -- as Clay Shirky explained in a recent article, bookstores, in their guise as social hubs, provide a whole range of services for their communities for which they are rarely remunerated, and without which those communities become poorer, barer places. Think of them as oases for the thoughtful, and keep them in mind this holiday season.