This is your captain speaking. Political counter-voice in a postpolitical era
Gijs van Oenen
Amsterdam, August 6, 2002

Abstract
Usual parameters of freedom of speech and democracy may largely be in working order, but nevertheless the experience seems widespread that it is increasingly difficult to articulate counter-voices in the contemporary political arena with its networked, globalizing structure. In their book Empire, Hardt and Negri even conclude that, in our post-imperialist world in which there is no longer any ‘outside’, such voices are now irredeemably lost. I contest this assertion by showing how hybrid speech, especially as it is articulated in the (Latin American) genre of the testimonio. Through a particular way of evoking and hiding ‘secrets’, such speech manages to incorporate a ‘cultural proviso’ that resists easy assimilation into hegemonic discourse. Finding counter-voices thus implies finding new forms of testimonio. Ironically, Empire itself turns out to fit this bill very well.

Keywords
political speech, Hardt, Negri, Empire, liberation theology, hybridity, testimonio, constitutional secrets
 
This article addresses the topic of political speech, albeit in a way unusual for political theory. It is not concerned with the legal parameters of the freedom of speech; neither does it concern democratic entitlements, in a formal or in a substantial sense. It is interested, in a way, in the issue of inclusion and exclusion, but in a quite radicalized sense. Its central concern is not which groups are somehow excluded from participation in the democratic process of political argument. Rather, it asks whether the whole idea of a purposive government and of critical citizens, conducting a meaningful exchange of voice and counter-voice between them, is not at odds with our present-day experience of politics and of governance. The feeling seems quite widely shared that political opposition somehow cannot find a proper voice – a feeling that certainly has been amplified by the events of 9-11 and their aftermath. Although it is true that, in reaction to the events, rights have been curtailed and that some democratic mechanisms have been cut short, this is not my main concern, at least not in this article. Rather, I want to ask how political theory can account for the feeling that, although most democratic mechanisms are still up and running and most rights still are secure, it is increasingly difficult to articulate political counter-voices.
In this article, I want to articulate and analyze this change in ‘feeling’ towards political speech. My main point of reference here will be Michael Hardt’s and Toni Negri’s much-discussed Empire. This book radically exchanges the traditional, self-assured parameters of the dominant political discourse by other, more diffuse, and less comforting forcefields that, according to its authors, characterize the exercise of power and authority in contemporary global network societies.
	Although I do not share Empire’s concrete political analysis, I do appreciate it as a form of cultural philosophy, albeit an unusual and poorly understood form. The book offers valuable insights when we understand, or rather translate, it as an articulation of some crucial contemporary experiences of domination, governance, and resistance (§2). Such a cultural perspective emphasizes the question how local, idiosyncratic political experiences can still be articulated, expressed and discussed in dominant speech or discourse – whichever discourse that happens to be. Unlike Hardt and Negri, I find that authority can still be ‘addressed’, whether in dissent or assent, albeit that such addressing needs special, in some sense poetical means, in order to bring its message across. 
	Resistance then becomes a form of linguistic struggle, more especially the art of hybrid speaking. Such a way of speaking expresses a demand for what we might call a ‘cultural proviso’ vis-à-vis the dominant culture (§3). A good example of such hybrid speech forms the testimonio, a genre that arose in the context of Latin-American literature and cultural studies. In particular, I discuss the discussion around the testimonio by Rigoberta Menchú, the young Maya woman who received the Nobel peace prize for her testimonio concerning political oppression of Maya people and their culture in Guatemala (§4). Different from Hardt and Negri, I conclude that a meaningful dialectic of authoritative speech and counter-speech, that is to say speech that can join the dominant (liberal, democratic, western/northern) discourse while still retaining cultural otherness and critical potential is still possible. This requires an ambiguous type of speech that enables both writers and readers to resist the process of destroying or assimilating hybridity. Ironically, Empire itself is best understood as such an ambiguous cultural protest, that is to say, as a new form of testimonio (§5).

1. The decay of political counter-speech

“This is your captain speaking”. Hearing this announcement through the intercom used to be a reassuring experience. Someone is in charge; everything is under control. The captain, or the government, watches out over us; passengers, or citizens, can sit back and relax. These comforting certainties, however, have evaporated quickly in recent times. In general, of course, governments simply are less in control than they used to be. They have to compete with a host of formal and informal organizations, such as NGO’s, the IMF or the World Bank. Globalization and information technology have extended and speeded up processes of communication, establishing networks of control on which governments have little grip. Political government is less secure than it used to be.
	However, the terrorist attacks of 9-11 have introduced a new dimension to these forms of political insecurity. Symbolically, this is represented by the message that the comforting message “This is your captain speaking”, on one of the terror flights of September 11, was in fact relayed by one of the hijackers, who stealthily had taken over control of the airplane. Of course, since then security measures have been strengthened, laws have been ‘toughened’, the powers of law enforcement agencies have been increased, and the president of the United States even has created an entirely new department of national security. But such measures cannot obscure the deep truth of which the hijacker’s deception was in a sense just a symptom: the voice of political authority nowadays sounds shrill and uncomfortable. Its messages get lost on its distrustful or preoccupied citizens, who also find it increasingly difficult to find ways to effectively voice their discontent.
Although of course political authority and dissenting political voices are inevitably each other’s opponents, at least they used to be ‘on speaking terms’. One addressed the other and somehow they exchanged views, if not always in the form of proper argument or discourse. However, the importance of speech and conviction for political authority seems to be in rapid decline. One particular event in the terrorist attacks of September 11 made this particularly clear – although we should note that it is a symptom, rather than a cause of the problem. Before that date, hijackers could always somehow be negotiated with; however minimal, there always was some possibility for speech and counter-speech. The Al Qaeda hijackers, however, did not post demands, nor did they issue any statements. They just carried out attacks. Their only message, “this is your captain speaking”, was of course a cynical lie, but simultaneously it contained an unsettling sense of truth about contemporary political authority. In some important sense it is true that we have no real idea who the real political authority is. Moreover, it is normal, rather than exceptional, that we take the speech of political authority as being routine messages, relayed to comfort or reassure us, rather than engage us in serious discussion or controversy. Up to an (important) point, political speech is actually meant to fall on deaf ears. 
	Not just in airborne states of exception, but in regular life on earth as well, doubt is settling on the potential and the importance of political speech. Administrators often talk about democracy and the voice of the people, but their natural interest lies in pre-empting serious opposition through the timely ‘polling’ of the population. The population, in turn, shows little interest in politics, in the sense of contributing to the informed discussion that drives public opinion formation. They tend to identify mainly with issues concerning their own material wellbeing, although at times they are willing to let themselves be swayed by political rhetoric on ‘values’ and ‘morality’.
In a skeptical mood, we might feel that both politicians and citizens are nowadays mostly engaged in making noise. In a more constructive sense, we may say that politics – as interplay between government and citizens - becomes more theatrical, aesthetic, and quasi-utopical. Not by coincidence, the most lively forms of political expression in contemporary political culture can be found in the – by now almost ritual – confrontations between western leaders of government and business, and demonstrators against globalization (or at any rate, the present form of globalization). Intense and theatrical exchanges take place at these confrontations, although not much of it takes the form of argument, from either side. Despite this lack of argument or of regulated discussion, or perhaps even because of this, many people feel that something essential takes place in these exchanges. It proves difficult, however, to give adequate expression to this feeling. 
Hardt and Negri’s book Empire has quickly gained cult status, probably because it succeeded better than the mainstream analyses in political theory to express this feeling, and the anxiety that forms part of it. It focuses on the perceived distance between ordinary people trying to find ways to bear the weight of common life, and systems of power that frustrate them in their attempts. Can these authoritative systems still speak to common people, or be spoken to, in a meaningful way? Does their authority still have the form that mainstream political analysis attribute to it? Does it still make sense to give ‘voice’ to the people (‘freedom of speech!’), when all particularist claims and criticism are liable to be assimilated, forthwith, into the hegemonial system called ‘Empire’? Who can still stand up to its assimilative powers?
‘Empire’ is not an easy concept to catch, perhaps precisely because of its power to incorporate and assimilate everything it encounters, making it literally a ‘catch-all’ concept. It refers to a radicalized form of capitalism and/or imperialism, a form that became necessary once these systems had destroyed or assimilated the last remnants of an ‘outside’. It should be conceived as ‘a universal republic, a network of powers and counterpowers structured in a boundless and inclusive architecture’ (p.166-167). Different from traditional imperialism, Empire extends and consolidates the model of network power, supporting ‘the globalization of productive networks’. Contingency, mobility, and flexibility constitute its real power (p.200). To produce and maintain this power, however, it ‘deploys a powerful police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves who threaten its order’ (p.20). Worse, it is parasitical in the sense that it is ‘a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude’ (p.62). It is in a sense nothing but an economy of control.
History, for Hardt and Negri, is to be conceived as the succession of ways in which ‘the multitude’ is formed or ‘adapted’ literally as a function of the development of sovereign power; in other words, a form of class struggle with only one class which fights the amorphous power responsible for its constitution, government, and exploitation. Admittedly, it was always a problem for traditional marxism (and communism as well) to explain what political relations would actually express, once the struggle with the dominating power had been won. For Hardt and Negri, politics simply is the seemingly eternal struggle with the unfathomable power constituting us and dominating our life. They call this an ‘immanent’ view on politics, an oxymoronic conception of what we might call postpolitical politics. Keeping checks on the power(s) that be, through democratic processes or otherwise, or even challenging it through less ruly forms of resistance, is no longer on the Empire agenda. As Carl Schmitt proposed, politics is about resisting an enemy – but under our present circumstances we seem unable to establish either the identity or the locus of the enemy with any degree of certainty or conviction.
Such an analysis proposes a radical solution to the problem posed by the phrase ”This is your captain speaking”: there no longer is a captain speaking to us, and anyway authority has nothing to tell us. Speaking to us at present is ‘Empire’, an amorphous and ever expanding world-encompassing economic, social, and cultural system that is not answerable to any captain, nor is it in fact responsive to any natural language. Partly for this reason, we as citizens are losing our voice. We do not know whom to address. Even if we would know, we would be lost for a language to register our dissent.
However different they may be, Habermas’s theory of communicative action, Foucault’s genealogy of disciplinary society, and even Derrida’s deconstruction of authority all still identify issues like normalization and exclusion as the most important political problem. At least in that sense, they all belong to the category of normative political theory. Empire, in contrast, primarily offers - or advocates - a new style of political thinking and (above all) feeling. It is no longer concerned either with the exclusion of otherness, or with forms of resistance against assimilation by dominant discourse. Hardt and Negri in fact reject normative political thinking, because they feel that all known strategies of resistance are already ‘outflanked’ by the strategies of power (p.138), just like modern corporate culture is able to immediately transform opposing forces, whether they be moderate or radical, into updates of effective management strategies. Instead of ‘divide and conquer’, we are now being governed through the strategies of ‘incorporate, differentiate, manage’ (p.201).
This sweeping view of the end of all normative political views might easily lead to desperation. Not for Hardt and Negri, however; to paraphrase the fin-de-siècle phrase, they find the situation desperate, but not alarming. In traditional anarchist mode, they consider a call to resist authority unnecessary, because the rejection of authority is ‘natural’. Because resistance cannot occupy a critical outsiders position, it has to turn ‘inside out’. ‘If there is no longer a place that can be recognized as outside, we must be against in every place. This being-against becomes the essential key to every active political position in the world (...). Here we see once again the republican principle in the very first instance: desertion, exodus, and nomadism. Whereas in the disciplinary era sabotage was the fundamental notion of resistance, in the era of imperial control it may be desertion.’ (p.211-212) Partly for this reason, according to Hardt and Negri we should aspire to ‘mondial citizenship’ (p.400). Not to express our maturity or responsibility, as Kant would have it, but for the more negative, Spinozist reason that we cannot be denied either the right to move, or the right to remain, wherever and whenever we feel to exercise it. 
Their exotic (or perhaps quixotic) notion of resistance renders Hardt’s and Negri’s political perspective problematic. Being counter-establishment, or even subscribing to the Public Enemy political message (‘You’ve gotta fight the powers that be!’), does not equal rejecting or fighting authority – both in the sense that such an attitude may be a mere aesthetical, or even cynical, gesture, and in the sense that political rebellion may well arise even without this attitude. The first point is probably the objection raised most often against Hardt and Negri (as well as against many other ‘postmodernist’ or ‘cultural studies’ views on politics). The notion that ‘resistance is everywhere’, evoked earlier by Michel Foucault, is normatively powerless – what to think for instance of resistance against democracy, or the rule of law? After all, these can just as well be considered ‘regimes of power’ to be contested, as the history of communism, fascism, and authoritariansim attest to. Political authority, even if functioning as part of ‘Empire’, may of course very well support valuable social and political goals, instead of merely being oppressive (whatever that means). The second point is a moral-psychological one. Studies in moral psychology for instance show that people can accept repression or submission for a long time, but are likely to rebel only when they feel to be treated unfairly or unjustly. In another vocabulary, they suffer not from oppression ‘as such’, but from the feeling that their person, or their contribution to society, is not sufficiently appreciated, or recognized. Therefore, even if Empire’s diagnosis were correct, its proposed therapy probably would not follow. 
Empire thus fails to provide a convincing connection between social experience and political action. It is therefore understandable that a classical left-liberal critic like Alan Wolfe calls the book a ‘lazy person’s guide to revolution’. Still, I feel the book has value even without such a connection, albeit that this value is to be found in another register than that favored by the authors themselves. Even if it expresses itself in a very different kind of vocabulary, and situates itself in a very different kind of tradition, I think Empire is most profitably understood as a form of ‘cultural studies’. 
This change of perspective is similar to that recommended by Axel Honneth with regard to the question how to appreciate the Dialektik der Aufklärung from a present-day perspective. Just like Empire, the famous book by Horkheimer and Adorno strikes present-day readers simultaneously as very convincing and very implausible. As Honneth explains, it is already difficult enough for any serious critical analysis of social injustice to explain whether its criterion for injustice is based on a hermeneutical or a rationalist point of view. In the case of the Dialektik der Aufklärung, the even more difficult claim needs to be substantiated that society is based on a false representation of the good life. Given contemporary value pluralism, and the lack of consensus on what human nature consists in, such a claim cannot rationally convince. Nevertheless, Honneth argues, they can be presented in such a way that they strike us as an adequate form of ‘therapeutical self-criticism’. Rather like a flash of lightning, they present us with a shrill, sharp-etched, sobering view of our present society. Or, as Honneth puts it, they provide a ‘pathology diagnosis’ – a normative judgment on society that is not so much rationally justified as ‘intentionally evoked’. 
This, it seems to me, is the most promising way to approach the analysis unfolded in Empire. It may not convince us, but it does somehow strike us. It contains some important criticism about the way we are governed nowadays, and the kind of political experiences this produces. But even if Empire avails itself of the vocabulary of political theory, its diagnosis is not best understood in terms of this discipline. Rather, we should interpret it as a form of cultural criticism which challenges the ways in which dominant forms of political theory make certain experiences of political oppression or suffering fit the mold of dominant, liberal theory, thereby robbing these experiences of their voice and their authority.

2.  Empire and liberation theology 

We can make a first step towards the ‘culturalization’ of Empire (and the clarification of ‘Empire’) through the work of Manuel Castells, whose trilogy The information age analyzes comparable structures and experiences from a different, sociological point of view. Like Hardt and Negri, Castells finds that the new capitalist order now does without clearly identifiable actors. For the first time in history, the basic framework of economic organization lacks a collective or individual subject – a framework that in Hardt and Negri’s politico-ontological view is presented as ‘Empire’, while in Castells’s sociological-communicative perspective it appears as the network. Similarly, Castells does not oppose ‘imperial control’ to ‘the multitude’, but instead juxtaposes ‘the interacting’ to ‘the interacted’: the interacting are those who are able to assemble their own ‘multidirectional circuits of communication’, while the interacted can only choose from a restricted menu of prepackaged choices (p.371). 
The second part of Castell’s trilogy, The power of identity, implies a shift of perspective from objective, socio-economic analysis to a concern with individual experience and identity formation. He emphasizes, as does for instance Richard Sennett, that only the ‘interacting’ elite is able to organize their process of identity formation in the form of  ‘reflexively organized life-planning’, as Anthony Giddens has called it. Other identities can no longer find an anchor in civil society, ‘because there is no longer continuity between the logic of power-making in the global network and the logic of association and representation in specific societies and cultures’ (p.11). The search for representation therefore takes place ‘in the reconstruction of defensive identities around communal principles’; most social action ‘becomes organized in the opposition between unidentified flows and secluded identities’ (id.). In this logic, it is inevitable that identity politics ‘grows from communal resistance’ (id.). 
Instead of moving beyond identity politics, the network society thus gives new meaning and relevance to identity politics, as witnessed in such phenomena as religious fundamentalism, nationalism, and ethnic identification (p.12). Like Hardt and Negri, Castells does not conceive moslim fundamentalism as traditionalist (p.16). Such an identity is not formed through a return to tradition, but rather by ‘working on traditional materials in the formation of a new godly, communal world, where deprived masses and disaffected intellectuals may reconstruct meaning in a global alternative to the exclusionary global order’ (p.20). Furthermore, ‘through the negation of exclusion, even in the extreme form of self-sacrifice, a new Islamic identity emerges in the historical process of building the umma, the communal heaven for the true believers’ (id.) 
It seems to me that Empire underwrites and exemplifies both the diagnosis and the implications of Castells’ account. It diagnoses the networked nature of today’s global hegemonic institutions, while simultaneously itself constituting a theological-philosophical protest against it. Near the end of the book, Hardt and Negri openly refer to Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, albeit that the suffering masses nowadays dwell ‘on the imperial surfaces that lack both God the Father and transcendence’ (p.396). Besides from globalization, the masses suffer from an unspecified ‘corruption’ or degeneration, formulated hypergenerally as a ‘rupture of any determinate ontological relation (p.201-202). Hardt and Negri’s answer here is ‘immanent labor’, the teleology of the masses consisting in ‘the possibility of directing technologies and production toward its own joy and its own increase of power.’ (p.396).
In his review, Alan Wolfe rightly calls this ‘a postmodern twist on Augustine, nevertheless showing some surprise as to this ‘material mythology of reason’. He sees it as an idiosyncratic, religious turn in an otherwise anarchist discourse that, for now, unfortunately leaves the masses in the dark as to how and when joy and power will noticeably increase for them. Indeed the pretentious, activist rhetoric of Empire is difficult to reconcile with the pious idea of the purity of the mass of the believers, or the workers, or the ‘interacted’. However, it fits very well the tradition of radical religious liberation thinking, albeit phrased in a different vocabulary. We may therefore call Empire the first manifestation of a leninist liberation theology. 
Liberation theology takes as its starting point a critical reflection on the violent experience of domination: one form of subjectivity that forces itself upon others, claiming universal validity. The ‘liberation philosophy’ of the Argentinian philosopher Enrique Dussel, for example, articulates such a perspective. Dussel finds support in the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas on the one hand, and insights from marxism and postcolonialism on the other. Dussel agrees with Marx that labor power is being transformed as well as exploited by capitalism; still, he finds that ‘labor factors’ like labor power and soil retain an element of ‘exteriority’ within the capitalist system. They are thus imprinted with a double ‘signature’: marginalized, yet not assimilated. Moreover, Dussel points out the persistent Eurocentrism, or perhaps we should say north/west-centrism, behind much political theorizing, including much critical and postmodern theory. On the one hand, Dussel’s Latin-Americanism accords well with Empire’s analysis in the description of the experience of capitalism as the process of formation and direction of ‘the masses’ by anonymous dominant powers that simultaneously assimilate and marginalize them. But on the other hand, Dussel calls to move beyond Eurocentrism, in the sense of taking local designs and local histories seriously as a critique of the ‘the coloniality of power’ and as a basis for what Walter Mignolo calls the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ – or, translated to our subject matter, the ‘geopolitics of speech’. When the system of capitalism or imperialism has acquired and maintained its power, at least in part, by ‘drowning out’ the voices of the other or of otherness, the ‘restoration’ of these voices may provide ways to critically assess the functioning of this system. The element of ‘exteriority’ or ‘otherness’ still serves to interrogate the dominant order, challenging it to investigate and question its self-confidently assimilationalist tendency.

3. The art of hybrid speech and the cultural proviso

A nice example of the problem at hand are the species of the Borg in the Star Trek series: a life form in which organical and mechanical life have been forged together, cyborgian style, to constitute a merciless imperialist machine. Whenever in the galaxy they encounter other species, the Borg broadcast the same message: ‘Prepare to be assimilated. Resistance is futile!’. Assimilation is indeed the appropriate concept: the Borg defy, or rather ‘sublate’, other species by integrating them into their own metabolism. Only useful knowledge and capacities are retained, and circulated through the Borg collective; culture, emotion, and individuality are vented, as useless waste products. 
Hardt and Negri rightly reminds us that the ‘offer’ extended by the Borg is rhetorical and their threat thus ironical, as we have already accepted it. We are already being digested by – take your pick – the Borg, the United States, capitalism, imperialism, network society. They are all metonymia for a system that promises, and needs, everlasting expansion and assimilation, conceived as proxies for freedom and equality. 
Still, we find ourselves drawn towards the crew of the Enterprise, the underdog from Earth, because we desire culture, emotion, and individuality. We sympathize with them – not so much with the resoluteness of their captain, as with the ambiguity and ambivalence of the minority of mestizo’s among the crew, hybrid personalities ever in search of a bearable dialectic of their human and alien sides. They ‘endure’ the assimilation by dominant cultures (the Borg, the Federation, Empire, imperialism); that is to say, they do not reject it out of hand, but just as well they fight to retain their cultural idiosyncrasy. They have to live with the experience of continuously being in assimilation, ‘even as they speak’, as Judith Butler might say. As a consequence, they are necessarily engaged in a form of ‘linguistic struggle’, which we might call the art of hybrid speaking.
Hybrid expression as form of linguistic struggle implies not so much resisting a dominant language as such, as resisting dominance through this language. Such linguistic struggle can very literally concern the rehabilitation of one’s own, marginalized language, through its deliberate and provocative use in ‘inappropriate’ contexts. A well-known example is the francophone part of Québec, that feels dominated by the English language and demands linguistic equality, or better, a linguistic ‘status aparte’. Still more pressing are cases that do not involve, like Canada, a struggle between two former colonist languages, but rather a postcolonial linguistic confrontation. The ‘nomen est omen’ of  Latin America is a case in point: the Latin languages dominate local languages, but are themselves marginal with regard to the northern, Anglo-American linguistic culture. 
A graphic illustration of the latter type of conflict is provided by Ariel Dorfman’s autobiography. A language professor as well as a writer (perhaps best known from his stage play Death and the Maiden), Dorfman was born in Buenos Aires as a child of Russian emigrants. A variety of political antagonisms forced him to migrate several times between Latin America (especially Chile) and the United States. His autobiography, simultaneously published in English and Spanish, forms an expression of hybridity par excellence. Dorfman understands himself quite literally as a hybrid; a product of a continuous and inevitable struggle between languages and cultures. He is unable to feel at home either in the powerful lingua franca of U.S. English, or in his native Spanish. Actually, even the perspectives of dominance and subordination themselves frequently shifted, following personal and political changes in his life, resulting in a ‘multiple, complex in-between person’, someone ‘who is shared by two equal languages’.
More generally, as a cultural strategy, hybridity takes advantage of the potentialities, complexities, and perplexities that even dominant languages contain in ample measure. Deconstruction, as a linguistic strategy, follows a similar track: resistance through rhetoric, by moving words, or even letters within words, around in unexpected ways, thereby dislodging established dominant practices of meaning.
Hybridity thus entails not a rejection of the lingua franca, but rather a claim to speak it in one’s own voice or one’s own tongue – literally have it reverberate with idiosyncratic meanings, implications, and deconstructions. Paraphrasing John Locke, we might call this a ‘cultural proviso’. Just as Locke attached the proviso of leaving ‘enough and as good’ for others when accumulating private property, minorities may legitimately expect that colonization or assimilation by the dominant language leaves ‘enough and as good’ room for their own way of speaking. True, the problematic nature of Locke’s demand here becomes more explicit than in the context of the fantasized state of nature with its natural abundance. As Hardt and Negri rightly observe, imperial sovereignty was based on the presupposition that there is always some open space left, somewhere (p.166). But in the world as we know it, every dominant form of self-expression or self-realization has implications for room left for others, such as mestizoculturality. 
Hybrid speakers must therefore actively attempt to create this space for themselves, within or around dominant discourse. The Argentine-Mexican writer Nestor García Canclini has thus described the typical mobility that hybridity implies as ‘strategies of entering and leaving modernity’: a sophisticated ability to either join, or be excused from, the dominant (linguistic) system. Such hybrid mobility is also, and perhaps even above all, necessary in places where apparently friction need not arise. For instance, in cases where dominant and ‘subaltern’ perspectives overlap. Naturally, many non-western or non-dominant cultures value symbols or practices associated with the western, dominant worldview. Such as jeans, or Coca Cola, on a personal level; or human rights and democracy, on a collective level. But western culture is sometimes a little bit too eager to claim and defend such achievements as ‘uniquely’ or ‘typically’ western. The liberating call of, for instance, human right then quickly acquires the shrill sound of a western mandate.
Equally important however are the ambiguous feelings and experiences that inevitably accompany both hybrid speaking and attempts to interpret it. Both are attempts at mutual understanding that already have frustration woven into their fabric, so to speak – which is exactly what contributes much to their social and cultural value. In a sense we can find this thought already in Ludwig Wittgenstein, when we understand him as a precursor of the ‘linguistic turn’. Wittgenstein’s linguistic ethics served to sensitize us ‘to the amplitude of the real, to the mysterious dimensions of linguistic experience’, which hopefully will empower us to resist the temptation to melt the many differentiated forms of linguistic expression down into one universal, dominant currency.
In Walter Mignolo’s words, we could characterize hybrid speaking as a linguistic lifeform for a transnational world – an educational and epistemological project [that] rests on the critique of reason, of disciplinary structures, and cultures of scholarship complicitous with national and imperial languages’. He speaks of a ‘bilanguaging love’, love for being between languages, love for the disarticulation of the colonial language and for the subaltern ones, love for the impurity of national languages, and love as the necessary corrective to the “generosity” of hegemonic power that institutionalizes violence’. 
Hardt and Negri reject hybridity, as a strategically motivated cultural counter-current, because they feel the open space needed to enable such a practice no longer exists. They consider hybridity powerless as well as ambiguous, an ‘empty gesture’ (p. 215). They prefer, as I discussed above, spontaneous resistance to authority. Such resistance is, however, by its nature erratic and unfocused. Moreover, it is ‘deaf’ – to the temptations of the dominant languages, as well as to those of the cultural idiosyncrasies of subaltern or local languages. As a response, I want to describe an experience and a practice of resistance that consciously engages, and deals with, these temptations. This is the experience and the practice of the testimonio: a form of socio-politically motivated hybrid speaking that is explicitly aimed against dominant culture, both in the form of its subject (the speaker) as in that of its object (the text).

4. The testimonio as the voice of the undercurrent

The testimonio, as a literary strategy, can be seen as the subaltern and hybrid counterpart of an aesthetics of existence. Such aesthetics entail personal, idiosyncratic expressions of identity within the hegemonic linguistic culture. Their goal is not so much to resist social and culture hegemony outright, as to frustrate and dislodge it, through an unorthodox and particular way of participation or expression. The testimonio is personal, in the sense that it constitutes an ‘eye witness report’, with its typical concomitant mixture of authenticity, engagement, emotional and perceptual bias and subjective coloration. But its idiosyncrasy is collective, rather than individual, expressing and testifying what happened to a whole ethnic group, culture, or nation, rather than to a single individual. The subaltern experience provides the testimonio with the character (a real poststructuralist might say: the ‘positionality’) of a ‘poetics of defense’, rather than being an aesthetic of liberal marginality.
In the Latin-American context, the genre of the testimonio can be considered a continuation of a development that started with the sudden breakthrough into the dominant North-Western literary canon, in the late sixties and early seventies, of writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar en Mario Vargas Llosa. This recognition, however, included a negative complement – or, as a psychoanalytically inspired political philosopher like Slavoj Zizek might say, an ‘obscene supplement’. It implies an act of ‘reading north by south’ – Neil Larsen’s poignant characterization of the pan-american version of orientalism. It is therefore ‘an act of self-authorization via spiritual and vicarious participation in a larger, emancipatory process taking place in the South’ (p.7). At the same time, the process was ‘self-authorizing’, both in the sense that it imposed northern/western criteria for canonization, and in the sense that it highlighted the literary, not the social or political, dimension of the texts. This is all the more important, given the fact that in the Latin-American context, literary texts often, and almost inevitably, carry strong political connotations.
Partly in reaction to this new form of ‘exploitation’, multiculturalists in the humanities and literary studies attempted to forge a closer link between literature and socio-political context. However, this encouraged political correctness, that is to say, the view that the subaltern status of an author positively affects the quality of his or her writing. This merely constitutes a reversal, instead of a rejection, of the principle of self-authorization: the other is used instrumentally, for the purposes of self-constitution and self-confirmation.
Compared with the ‘magical realism’ of the sixties and seventies, the genre of the testimonio represents social and political reality more directly; and in a more straightforwardly critical fashion – more or less like Wittgenstein, and ‘ordinary language philosophy in general’, aimed to re-insert philosophy in the context of common speech. As well, the testimonio does not suffer from the rigidity of multicultural, or political, correctness. In its rejection of ‘high culture’, fictionality and strategic-political action, the testimonio is more closely connected to Enrique Dussel’s liberation theology and to Emmanuel Levinas’ postmodern ethics than to, say, literary criticism or marxism. 
	The best-known example of the testimonio is probably Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (published in English under the rather flat title: ‘I, Rigoberta Menchú: an Indian woman in Guatemala’; a stronger translation would be: ‘My name is Rigoberta Menchú and thus rose my awareness’). This is the self-told narrative of a young Maya woman in Guatemala in the eighties, whose family suffered heavily under the violence either committed or condoned by the government. Menchú, who was then twenty-three years old, was one of the few representatives of the subaltern (Maya) culture who was willing and able to testify about her own experiences, and that of her people, in the Spanish language – which was after all the language of the imperialist oppressors. Her fame rose quickly and she became a well-known spokesperson for subaltern groups. In 1992 she was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (not by coincidence exactly 500 years after Columbus first set sights on America). 
	The question how to write a testimonio, and even more importantly, how to read it, has direct relevance for my consideration of the issue of ‘hybrid speech’. The problem resembles Theodor Adorno’s notion of ‘negative dialectics’: it is exactly the (‘well-intentioned’) attempt at full understanding that threatens to destroy the particularity of its object. The post-Hegelian consignment here is ‘not to reinclose itself in a self-congratulation of the performative but, rather, interpret and enact itself as an opening up such that the newly identified activity “cannot stay with itself”’. John Beverley has argued correctly (and Hardt and Negri will agree) that the ‘study’ of subaltern texts is a paradoxical activity, because the discourse and the institution in which this study is carried out are themselves complicit in the social construction of subalternity. We should therefore ask how the realization of such ‘complicity’ can be articulated without falling prey to either ethical politicization or aesthetical depoliticization.
The beginning of an answer can be found in increased attention to the unpredictable, and thus frustrating and unsettling way in which elements or traces of what we might call ‘subalterity’ (subalternity plus alterity) turn up in the language of the testimonio. Respecting the other in his singularity, Werner Hamacher writes in a deconstructivist critique of multiculturalism, means ‘respecting this other ever otherwise and thus not in the chimeric unity of its ideal but in its possibilities, in its multiplicity, not by a rule, but in its unregulatability’. The normative dimension of ‘subalterary’ speech then becomes even stronger and more structurally located in its marginality.
In a way this implies the return of an aspect of magical realism in the notion of subalternatiy: an inkling of the indomitable, intangible and – we might even say – enchanting character of this particular type of speech. Doris Sommer has rightly drawn attention to the importance of unfathomable, or ‘secret’  elements in testimonio’s like that of Rigoberta Menchú. Menchú herself also emphatically hinted that she kept secrets, secrets that were however impossible to reveal. Such an ‘unspeakable’ dimension of experience we can also find in the stories of Holocaust survivors. According to Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, we can find in their testimonies, even if they are not wholly factually correct, ‘an essential part of historical truth’ – especially in that which they do not speak about, in other words in their silences. Their stories do not just testify to empirical historical facts, but to the very secret of survival and of resistance to extermination’.
The testimonio is thus not fatally affected, or tainted, by factual errors; omissions can even constitute a confirmation or reinforcement of the facts and experiences that do get stated explicitly. In that sense, testimonios partly depend on belief, or faith. This concerns, however,  faith not as something metaphysical or ontological, but as a form of suspicion institutionalized in the practice of reading, especially the reading of subaltern texts – suspicion aimed against one’s own assimilative powers and tendencies, that are ever ready to affect the integrity of both the narrator and the story narrated. Faith here concerns the insight that keeping secrets, or at least professing to do so, may serve as a way to resist totalitarian tendencies, in a sense that we find with both Levinas and Dussel: that which cannot be synthesized or assimilated represents ethical value. That which both attracts and repels readers from the West/North in the testimonio is precisely this ‘secret’ ethical element that resists totalization, in a political context, as well as homogenization, in a cultural context, and assimilation, in a social context.

5. ‘If you can read this text, you are too close.’ How keeping secrets can save cultural lives

Alright, but did Rigoberta really keep secrets? Or did she rather ‘keep’ omissions and deceptions? In other words, shouldn’t the silences and omissions in her testimony rather be explained as attempts to cover up inconsistencies, or even deliberate falsehoods, in her construction of local history? The latter charge was made a few years ago by David Stoll, a maverick anthropologist who had done field research on Menchú’s story in Guatemala. His 1998 book Rigoberta Menchú and the story of all poor Guatemalans documented many minor, and quite a few major omissions and misrepresentations in Menchú’s testimonio. For example, although her village had indeed been destroyed, the perpetrators apparently had not been the regular government army, but a rival Maya clan. Her claims to have enjoyed just a few years of formal education, and to have been employed as a lowly servant, seemed unfounded. And in other respects also, Stoll charged, Menchú has ‘adapted’ her account of historical facts to the ideological mission of the guerilla movement she had afterwards joined.
	Unsurprisingly, Stoll’s criticism led to a heated controversy over the nature and the status of the testimonio. On the one hand, it can scarcely be denied that Menchú’s account contained some deliberate, propagandistically motivated distortions. On the other hand, such distortions could be seen as a legitimate, and perhaps even necessary ploy for the purpose of articulating subaltern experience to the benefit of a larger public. After all, nobody, not even David Stoll, questioned the main thrust of Menchú’s narrative; its social-cultural message was broadly accepted and appreciated, as her Nobel award of course also testified.
Whichever side one is on in the Menchú/Stoll controversy, Stoll’s intervention has noticeably changed the atmosphere of the discussion. The testimony is now in danger of losing its magic. Its specific rhetorical hold over readers and listeners, even if they are willing and motivated to be engaged by it, cannot be as strong as it used to be; the conviction it creates somehow not as forceful. The testimonio’s ‘rhetorical particularism’, as Doris Sommer calls it, may lose its unsettling, erratic, and frustrating capabilities; in Hamacher’s words, the inspiration ‘to respect the other ever otherwise’.
Still, this does not necessarily leave it incapacitated or defunct. True, serious academic discourse should always be willing to take criticism like David Stoll’s seriously. Silences and omissions should be critically questioned and evaluated. But simultaneously, such academic discourse should be ready to acknowledge and appreciate that another type of silences and omissions may exist, ‘secrets’ that do not stand for misrepresentations but rather for that which cannot or should not be represented. 
I agree with Doris Sommer that the testimonio’s ‘art of keeping secrets’ does not refer to actually existing secrets, or to falsifications. Rather, it refers to a willingness in the audience, or the reader, to suspend his or her disbelief in the existence or non-existence of secrets. That is to say, to suspend disbelief in the existence of experiences that cannot be represented, translated, or incorporated into the dominant discourse. Using a slightly different vocabulary, we may say that the ‘understanding’, or ‘resonance’, between dominant and subaltern discourse can be brought about only through a ‘constitutive loss’. What is lost, however, is not strictly speaking some ‘authentic’ experience for which no translation exists; rather, it is a loss that comes into existence only through the attempt of translation of experiences. 
From a Lacanian-psychoanalytic perspective, such as that of Slavoj Žižek, that which cannot be represented or assimilated is called “the Real”, to be understood not simply as ‘some pre-symbolic natural substance but, rather, the mythical part-organ standing for what is lost when the pre-symbolic substance is symbolized.’ Symbolization thus always produces its own secrets. Although such secrets are thus not ‘real’ in the common, ‘empirical’ sense of the term, they are ‘real’ in the lacanian sense. I have no objection to such a lacanian translation. However, my account aims to add a local-historical dimension to the typical ‘structural’ account of psychoanalysis, showing in more detail how the ‘real’, or secrets, are produced, brought into play, and above all ‘kept into play’ in specific historical circumstances of domination and resistance.
This amounts to something that Homi Bhabha has called a ‘poetics of identification’: a way of speaking that articulates the hybrid nature of cultural difference. Like the ‘politics of recognition’, such a poetics holds that cultural otherness must find articulation in dominant discourse. But unlike the recognition view, the poetics of identification insists that such otherness is not already ‘in place’. Rather, it has to be brought ‘in play’. Žižek illustrates this point very well in a discussion of Schumann’s piano piece Humoresque, showing how it is exactly the non-existing vocal line, the ‘innere Stimme’ that Schumann wrote out in the score but that is not performed, that carries along the two quite separate piano lines of which the piece – seemingly – exists. 
Bonnie Honig provides us with an application of a comparable idea in her analysis of the the relation between political authority and the people, inventively calling it ‘the art of poorly keeping secrets’.. This duplicitous ‘art’ consists in authority pretending to have access to constitutional secrets, and the public pretending to accept this pretense. When this understanding breaks down, literally nothing more remains to be said. The space it created for voices to make themselves heard, suddenly vaporizes. The difficult part of ‘keeping the secret’ is not the literal non-revealing of something hidden, nor is it the keeping of the secret that there is no secret. Rather, it is the willingness to mutually engage in ‘variations, but not on a theme’, to use Žižek’s characterization of the Schumann piece.
How, we should finally ask, does this affect Empire’s argument concerning the possibility of political counter-speech? Hardt and Negri, as we saw, announced emphatically their loss of faith in the strategy of cultural hybridity, as a means of criticizing power and giving voice to subaltern experiences. On the other hand, they just as emphatically confirm another kind of faith, that in the ‘material mythology of reason’ (p.396). They define this mythology very broadly and abstractly, as being constructed ‘in the languages, technologies, and all the means that constitute the world of life’, or as ‘the symbolic and imaginative articulation that allows the ontology of the multitude to express itself as activity and consciousness’.
	Why, then, withhold faith from the practice of the testimonio, especially as it could be seen as a concrete form of ‘material mythology of reason’ – material in its reference to historical practices of domination and personal experiences of suffering, mythological in its requirement of the mutual suspension of disbelief, the ‘art of poorly keeping secrets’. The ‘material’ aspect has a double political edge. It articulates both personal and collective experiences of oppression and resistance. But just as well, it contests the systematic distinction between ‘personal’ experiences on the one hand, and ‘collective’ experiences on the other hand, as being itself a political issue. In that sense, the testimonio fits a long tradition of emancipatory resistance. 
	The mythological aspect is of course the more controversial one. It requires a double ‘suspension of disbelief’. First, it dilutes the distinction between factual history and narrative. Without suggesting that we simply conflate the two and deny any real difference, it seems fair to say that the two are at least difficult to disentangle. As another form of testimonio culture, the truth commissions such as operative in South Africa, may show, ‘speaking the truth’ always has both a descriptive and an expressive dimension. In other words, truth cannot be separated from narrative form. It is not just that narratives serve to establish truth; it is just as well the case that truth serves to enable narratives. 
	Finally,  crucial for the enabling of narratives are  the ‘reading strategies’ I discussed, the deliberate attempts to prevent assimilation by ‘reading north by south’. We might feel, like Hardt and Negri do, that capitalist management strategies, whether those of multinational companies or global financial organizations, always tend to promote assimilation. The conclusion, however, should not be that reading strategies to resist this assimilation are impossible, or exhausted. Rather, the conclusion should be that the effectiveness of these strategies is always temporary. Just as capitalism, or Empire, always adapts, the counter-strategies themselves must adapt.
This implies we must search for new forms of testimonio. And, of course, corresponding new ways of reading or listening, that manage to suspend disbelief and enable the performance of hybridity to continue. In my view, instead of convincingly showing that we are irredeemably beyond such strategies, the value of Empire ironically lies exactly in being itself an example of such a strategy. Empire is best viewed neither as the fourth volume of Das Kapital, nor as a systematic treatise of politics or of philosophy, or as a form of anarchist rebellion, but as a new form of testimonio. Its argument does not convince, but its particular combination of style and content is evocative, and even alarming. It mobilizes more than it analyzes, due to the combination of Empire’s omnipresence and promise, however abstractly formulated, of redemption. It is seductive in its resistance to capitalist hegemony, but also repellent in its insistence on leninist tactics and customs. It makes grand observations and stakes exaggerated claims, but, like Theodor Adorno has said about psychoanalysis, its truth may reside precisely in its exaggerations. Likewise, Empire’s truth resides more in the unsettling effects it has on its readers than in the validity of its political or philosophical argument. 
	But how about secrets? Does Empire not explicitly deny the existence and even the possibility of secrets? In that case, how can we read it – or rather, how can it resist our reading –like a testimonio? Here again an insight from Žižek’s analysis of Schumann’s Humoresque is relevant. In a later fragment in the piece, the same two actually played melodic lines are repeated, but the absent, third melody is now left out of the score. What is thus absent here, as Žižek remarks, is absence itself; the actually played notes are deprived only of what is not there, of their constitutive lack (p.203). In a quite similar way, Empire emphasizes the absence of hybridity. But it is exactly this strong insistence on the absence of absence that raises our curiosity concerning what might, or must be lacking. The explicitness of the message that hybridity has become extinct serves to alert its readers to its importance perhaps even more than an explicit plea for hybridity could have done. Even if the claim that we are beyond hybridity is true, that would not take anything away from its importance. In a paradoxical way, Empire’s disavowal of hybridity calls upon us exactly to suspend our disbelief in its possibility.

Conclusion

In many ways, politics is about speech. Therefore, we should be alarmed by the experience that it is nowadays increasingly difficult to articulate and ‘register’ counter-voices, even when – or in fact particularly when – the classical parameters of freedom of speech apparently still are in working order. Democracy and rights are not abridged in any systematic or pervasive sense – although some of the post-911 measures should certainly give us pause. Still many people feel that somehow their voice is not heared properly by the powers that be – whether it be disgruntled right-wing voters who look for neo-authoritarian alternatives, or left-wing reformers frustrated by capitalist resilience. Bien étonné de se trouver ensemble, they share the feeling that their voice is lost on political authority.
	As a matter of practical political reform, this may call for alternative electoral systems, further extension of democratic freedoms, or whatever other measures to re-kindle citizenship enthousiasm, depending on the particular political system concerned. I have tried to go one step further, however, and address another, deeper – and therefore also more speculative – level of political discontent, or anxiety. Mainstream political theory seems unsufficiently sensitive to this feeling of powerlessness – while on the other hand most analyses from cultural studies, deconstructionist or postmodern philosophy seem overbroad, and unhelpfully aestheticized. In reply, I have tried to translate some of the more pertinent concerns as voiced from the latter perspective into terms that will hopefully seem more relevant to the former. 
	Against many commentators from both the progressive and the conservative end of the political spectrum, I hold that political political theory can neglect the criticism articulated in Hardt and Negri’s work Empire only at its own peril. However, we should understand these authors different from their own self-perception – we should understand them better than they understand themselves, as the famous hermeneutical phrase goes. Following a lead by Axel Honneth, I suggested first that we see Empire primarily as a diagnosis of the pathology of modern, post-imperialist society – albeit not a systematic, normative one, but rather an impressionistic and exaggerated one. Second, Empire’s way of speaking also shows a ‘family likeness’ with liberation theology, in its quasi-religious account of how the masses suffer from capitalist assimilation and marginalization. 
	These considerations re-directed the search for the articulation of political (counter-)voice, which I take to be the main theme of Empire, towards the art of hybrid speech. As a living example of how a ‘cultural proviso’ can be incorporated into such political (counter)speech, I discussed the practice of the testimonio, especially the case of Rigoberta Menchú. Here, the cultural proviso materializes primarily in the form of ‘secrets’ – textual constituents that resist assimilation, or ‘digestion’, by readers from dominant cultures. Such secrets may not be ‘real’ in the usual sense of the term; they are ‘real’, however, in the sense of standing for the lacanian ‘constitutive void’, the ‘kernel of jouissance’ that is impossible to assimilate.
The search for political counter-voice thus instigates a search for new forms of testimonio. Ironically, Empire may serve as a spirited example. By reading Hardt and Negri ‘against themselves’, their book appears as a promising example of a testimonio: rather than engaging in systematic political theory, it is a text that testifies, evokes, and incites. It speaks to us in a way that is both engaging, and hard to swallow. It calls on faith, envisages liberation, and incites revolution; it evokes inassimilable secrets by vehemently denying their existence. Hardt and Negri have thus found an authentic political voice, even though they do not understand their own way of speaking very well.

Notes