Randi Koppen

In their book Commonwealth from 2009, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri look forward to a commonwealth of the future, a true democracy of the multitude; reconceptualized forms of sociality and conviviality; a new culture and new modes of life, whose realization will require nothing less than “anthropological transformation.” While this new democracy is yet to come, for Hardt and Negri it has antecedents in a partially submerged history of altermodernity: a critical tradition in political modernism that proposes different alternatives to capitalist modernity while attempting to circumvent the negative dialectic of modernity/antimodernity. The “altermodern” propositions of three social commentators of the interwar years – Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin and Leonard Woolf – can be considered in light of this history. Each wrote in utopian terms of a society resembling Hardt and Negri’s democracy of the multitude, yet with distinct conceptualizations of the multitude-form and of the productivity (the productive or creative force) by means of which the desired transformation was meant to occur. These theoretical and political differences came to a head in Woolf and Benjamin’s historical materialist critique of Bergson in the years leading up to the Second World War. For Hardt and Negri, Benjamin has an obvious place in the submerged terrain of altermodernity; they draw on his concept of poverty for one of the two terms—poverty and love—that would be functional to building a common world. The position of Bergson in this tradition, however, is more precarious, and Hardt and Negri would undoubtedly protest at any designation of his work as “altermodern.” Yet the recent scholarly attempts to revive Bergson as “our contemporary” do so precisely with the rationale that he offers a critical alternative to capitalist modernity and the politics of modernism that allows us to move beyond a current impasse in post-modern political critique. The Benjamin scholar Claire Blencowe engages with such readings when she points to lines of continuity and convergence between Bergson and Benjamin, arguing that Benjamin makes a “direct and critical contribution to the contemporary attempt to deploy Bergsonism in political critique and to render vitalism sociological.” Like Blencowe, I am interested in the conjunctions between Benjamin and Bergson’s utopian projects, a perspective that can be meaningfully extended to take in the thought of the political theorist, commentator, and activist Leonard Woolf. The least well known of our three “altermoderns,” his work, too, has been subject to renewed interest in recent years, in part for the same reasons that motivate the current interest in Bergson: his critique of the oppressive structures and politics of modernity and his idealist propositions for global frameworks of collaboration and peace. Reading these “altermodern” propositions together, I contend, brings into renewed focus an area of convergence but also the lines of an urgent historical debate that continues to resonate as recent scholarship, while seeking to ground Bergson’s affective ethics in history, continues to sidestep the questions that Benjamin and Woolf’s historical, materialist critique brought out with considerable clarity. It should be noted that my objective in this article is not to rehearse a familiar critique of Bergson as “reactionary” or “antimodern” but, as I have indicated, to revisit a point in time when different “altermodernities” were in the balance in a critical debate centered on the social and economic power relationships that defined modernity and modern societies and on the possibilities for personal and collective transformation that might be activated in a situation of urgent political challenges. Thinking about this historical juncture allows us to reflect on some abiding tensions in our present relations with modernity and ultimately on what is at stake in a politics of revivalism and return seeking to resurrect and reanimate old political concepts.