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No. 41 / Family Planning

Destroying Family
INTERVIEW
Michael Hardt, Delia Duong Ba Wendel

DELIA DUONG BA WENDEL

I’d like to start, quite simply, by asking: what is wrong with our
world, Michael? Can you identify some of the dominant forces
that shape our lives?

MICHAEL HARDT
When Toni Negri and I were writing Empire, we were most
concerned with the role of the nation-state. Our observation was
that the United States was no longer able to rule the world
unilaterally. This is not restricted to the United States; no nation-
state today will be able to shape the global environment the way
they had previously. The decline in nation-state sovereignty does
not mean that sovereignty as such has declined, however. Instead,
a new, global form of sovereignty is composed of national and
supranational organizations, corporations, and states, which are
united under a single logic of rule. This is what we call Empire. It
works to control and regulate economic and social life, but its
power has no territorial center; it is a deterritorializing apparatus of
rule with no geographical boundaries.

We published Empire in 2000, and at that time, it seemed no longer

useful to read the world as divided by different nation-states, or by
First, Second, Third Worlds, or by north/south, or even by
center/periphery. That doesnít mean, of course, that every place in
the world is the same. It means, instead, that the divisions have
changed.

DDBW
What is the nature of these divisions?

MH
I’m thinking about divisions in terms of labor and power. For
example, in the 19th century, it was common to say that Britain
was the workshop of the world because manufacturing occurred
there, and the cotton for that industry was grown in Egypt or
South Asia. Today, the divisions of labor and power are more
mixed.

These conditions force us to read some phenomena, like the

family, as having similar forms and challenges in different
geographical zones. Looking at forms of family and other social
institutions in the dominated and subordinated parts of the world,
we can recognize common modes of control and common
possibilities.

DDBW
Whereas Empire represents a global power structure, driven in
large part by the logics of global capital, you and Toni have taken
care to emphasize that social institutions have a central role in
these transformations. Social institutions have roles in managing
people and our relationships, and these roles can be further
articulated through the prison, the factory, the school, and, the
family.
The notion of family seems critically important to your and Toni’s
theory of contemporary social conditions. What mechanisms of
control, governing, or structuring are specific to the family?

MH
I primarily think about the family as it is formed in the modern
capitalist era as a site of reproduction. We might say that the site
of this reproduction is the home, and that as a social institution the
family has several defining characteristics.

One is its antisocial nature. The saying “blood is thicker than

water” is quite telling in this regard, suggesting that one’s primary
bonds and relationships are delimited by the family. Hence, the
family is an antisocial mechanism in that it isolates us from others.
For example, a friend was recently hospitalized in the intensive-
care unit. When another friend and I went to visit her, the nurse
asked, Oh, are you family? And we responded, No, no, no, we’re
much closer than that. The hospital was operating on the idea that
family would be the primary bond that excludes others. So
exclusion is one of the characteristics of the modern family, by
which we really mean the family in the capitalist era, defined as the
site of social reproduction.

A second aspect of family is its hierarchical nature. We see this in

the gendered division of labor within the family, which is
remarkably persistent despite the successes of feminist struggles.
This gendered division of labor, of course, takes different forms in
different parts of the world. But the hierarchical natures of both
gender roles and parent-child relationships are intrinsic to families
in general, and are reproduced in a larger social world.

The family is also a vehicle of social repression. Often, familial

bonds are the stand-ins for all other possible bonds. People talk
about teacher-student relationships in familial terms, or a notion of
a band of brothers, or even the political concept of sisterhood.
There seems to be a poverty of imagination on how we can define
relationships.

DDBW
It seems that the types of hierarchies and power relationships that
you mention are reproduced by the family and are the essence of
all types of power relationships, both vertical and horizontal, that
we have within larger social institutions or larger scales of social
interaction. For example, we can see patriarchy as a foundational
form of vertical relationships, or kinship as the essential structure
for horizontal power relationships.

MH
Aha, that’s interesting.

DDBW
Is the family, in your view, a minimalist form of the types of power
relationships we see throughout society?

MH
What you said reminds me of the debates among feminist theorists
from the 1970s and 1980s about whether patriarchy or capitalism
came first. Is patriarchy created by capitalism? Or is capitalism—
because patriarchy is older—subordinate to it? Or should we
instead think of a dual system that maintains the autonomy of both
patriarchy and capitalism interacting with each other?

I think it would be a mistake to say that the family is an

I think it would be a mistake to say that the family is an
epiphenomenon created by capital (or something else); or the
opposite, that the family is the cradle of all other hierarchical
relationships. Rather, there is a social archipelago of institutions
that resonate with each other, and the family is one of those
islands. The archipelago metaphor is nice because social
institutions—the school, the military, the factory—function as
islands. Each has its own rules. But also, they resonate with one
another and reinforce one another.

DDBW
In your writings you’ve referred to families, corporations, and
nations as “social terrains.” Could you describe what a social
terrain is, and how this category establishes connections between
families, corporations, and nations? Is a social terrain different
from a social archipelago?

MH
The nation-state, the corporation, and the family all promise a kind
of belonging and sharing and equality. And even a form of love.
It’s easier probably to see that with the nation-state and the family.
But I would say that this is possible in corporations, too. These
social terrains promise an experience of the “common,” of
belonging, sharing, and equality. At the same time, each of these
institutions undermines these values and gives us exactly the
opposite: hierarchy, exclusion.

But even though we call them social terrains, they’re not really
limited spatially and institutionally; one should refer to the nation,
corporation, and family also as discourses and sets of practices.

DDBW
I’d like to return to your earlier use of the word “home.” Do you
see a distinction between a home and a house, particularly as it
relates to your critique of family? Are there, in your view, specific
spaces associated with families and with the types of power
structures and relationships that families reproduce?

MH
I’m attracted by the history of architectural experiments that
challenge some aspects of the family—to open its antisocial
nature, to extend beyond the nuclear family, and to challenge its
internally hierarchical nature. Charles Fourier’s phalanstére and the
kitchenless house inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman are
examples of spatial experimentation to overcome the restricting
nature of the family.

When you mention the difference between house and home, my

thought is that the home is often used as an expression of the
“common.” In emphasizing the closed and hierarchical natures of
the family, I do not wish to minimize the experiences of love and
sharing that are defined by home. But it is in fact because the
notion of the home promises equal bonds and sharing that it
seems crucial to highlight and criticize the ways that the family, by
its very nature, either corrupts or fails to deliver on those promises.

So there’s a minimal and a maximal way of saying this. The minimal

way is to say that you love your mother and that you love your
brother. But if those are the only people you love, if that’s the only
context in which you share things in common with people, that
would be a disappointment. So it’s the limited nature of the
promise of family that’s the problem.
 But there’s also a maximal, or a more systemic way of saying this:
a lot of the promises of home turn out to be the opposite. The
home promises to be a haven of safety. But really, the home is the
site of some of the worst violence. Women are not safe at home.
There are different kinds of violence that can be identified as
physical and psychic violence. The insistence on the
heteronormative nature of family is itself a kind of violence.

DDBW
You’re speaking of the home and the family as having a dual
nature—conducive to both love and violence. This brings to mind
the importance of scale to forging commonality and care, or
effecting violence. The scale of the family or the home would seem
to produce a limitation on these relationships or the nature of
them.

MH
Within the family or in a monastic order, or in a commune, it’s
easier to imagine sharing equally. But recognizing this doesn’t
blunt my ambition for organizing and mobilizing people in
democratic structures at a larger scale. I assume that you’re
thinking of how the smaller scale might function as a model for, or
a stepping stone toward, creating larger-scale forms of
commonality.

DDBW
I am also thinking about how a home can function as a kind of
sanctuary from things outside of one’s control—from the violence
in the world. Iím thinking of a photograph of a couple dancing in
Soweto, South Africa, during apartheid.

MH
I can see home being thought of as a sanctuary. My hesitation is
that when we think of home as being defined by the family, it often
doesnít function as a sanctuary from violence. It instead is an
instrument of violence.
Plan of a kitchenless apartment house, from Bradford C.
Peck, The World a Department Store: A Story of Life
Under a Cooperative System, 1990. DDBW
I’d like to shift back to the family as a site of social reproduction.
As you frame it, the family is a social institution that establishes
norms for how individuals engage with others, reproducing social,
political, economic orders. In Empire, you and Toni suggest that
the nature of contemporary social institutions has changed and
that this has affected the nature of subjectivity. What kinds of
changes were you referring to?

MH
Previously, different social institutions had their own logic, and
functioned within their own walls, as a kind of archipelago, as I
said earlier. When you were at work you obeyed the rules of the
factory. When you were at home, you obeyed the rules of
patriarchy. When you were at school, you obeyed the rules of the
schoolmaster.

But more recently, the different logics of these institutions have

been mixing. The walls between the institutions are breaking down,
as Gilles Deleuze puts it. The logic of the prison—of surveillance—
has now spread throughout society. Not only by way of cameras
in the bank and on the street—you’re also being observed through
the data you produce. The logic of the family has transformed
the data you produce. The logic of the family has transformed
similarly; its patriarchal control over reproductive activities is
seeping outside of the family and becoming generalized
throughout society.

DDBW
Can the family be reformed? If so, how might it transform to locate
or activate the kinds of love or interaction that are more beneficial
to togetherness and equality?

MH
My inclination is that the family has to be destroyed, and not
reconstructed or redefined through alternative family models.
People talk about constructing queer families, meaning not only
having different love relationships, but also different friendship
networks that fulfill the function that family was supposed to fill.
The emphasis is on lasting bonds, the sharing of resources, and
cooperating. Thinking about alternative families and destroying the
existing notion of family may amount to the same thing. The
distinction between the two may just be rhetorical, but perhaps the
most important difference is in their practical effects; it would be
unfortunate if the alternative family turned out to be the same as
the traditional family.

DDBW
The same in terms of their exclusionary practices?

MH
In terms of both their exclusionary practices and their internally
hierarchical nature. I’m attracted to Walt Whitman’s idea of “love
of the stranger.” It seems like a good antidote to the poisons of
the corrupted notion that you can only love ones like you and near
you. Love of the same is the most horrible thing politically; it is the
basis of white supremacy. Love can have horrible political effects.
So we need mechanisms for breaking it out of its closed and
homogeneous nature.

DDBW
Your writings suggest that love might be taking the place of the
family as a core social organizing force. What is it about love that
seems more redeemable than family?

MH
I think we must disentangle love from the family and from the
nation and try to make something different of it. In one sense,
there’s a dominant cultural conception that love is closed within
the family. In another sense, the properly political notion of love is
that of the nation. Since both of these end up turning love into
something that is both closed and hierarchical, love needs to be
reconstructed in a different key. It’s not that we need to create a
new love by fiat. Rather, we should recognize the forms of the
common, the forms of social sharing and bonds, that we already
have.

DDBW
Although we have, thus far, been discussing social institutions, the
individual has a critical role in your writings. So how do individuals
learn to love differently? How do they develop autonomy from
preexisting norms? How do they exercise their right to refuse? I
suppose I am asking how individuals become the “multitude.”

MH
 MH
One of the things that I’m attracted to about the conception of
love, in contrast to friendship, is that in love we lose ourselves.
Love has a transformative power. And so, if you go in as an
individual, you come out as something different. It doesn’t mean
that you’re transformed into something homogeneous or a mass
or something that is identical to others. It doesn’t mean—and this
is something that both at a political scale and on a personal scale
seems revolting to me—that in love you become one. Rather, I
think that the transformative power of love is an activation of all of
the differences that compose you as an individual. Through love,
these differences come together and compose relationships. I’m
thinking of it musically—they compose a stable refrain.

DDBW
So love must be held by individuals in order to have larger social
ramifications.

MH
I move back and forth between the small, intimate scale and the
large, sociopolitical scale. I suppose I can do so because I assume
that they have a relation. At the intimate level, one loves another as
an individual. You yourself are composed of many different
elements—and so is the other person. And some of the elements
of you are put into a relationship with the other. I’m trying to think
of a way in which love doesn’t function only at the level of
individual.

DDBW
We’ve talked a bit about families as institutions, about individuals,
and about love’s interactive nature. But in your work, the city and
its physical and social infrastructure have always been crucial to
defining the “common” and “commonwealth.”

MH
We’re taught to think about a world in spatial terms as being
divided between public and private. By “public” I mean what’s
controlled and regulated by the state, and by “private” I refer to
that which is under the control of private property. The “common”
is what tries to break that exclusive division. The common is that
which is neither public nor private. And it’s probably easiest to
approach this in spatial terms, by thinking about the city.

One of the beautiful things about the series of encampments at

occupations starting in 2011 was the way that they tried to
transform parts of cities into common space. This happened in
Tahrir Square in Cairo, Taksim Square/Gezi Park in Istanbul, and
also in Oakland, New York, and elsewhere. Many of them arose, in
part, as protests against privatization.

In Istanbul the proposed transformation of the city’s central public

park into a shopping mall was the impetus for the beginning of the
protest. Activists didn’t oppose privatization in order to make the
space public (controlled by the state). Rather, they insisted that
access to the space should be equal and open. These different
encampments also tried, with varying success, to experiment with
forms of democratic decision making about space.

One of their primary political aspirations was to rescue the city

from public and private and make it something different—make the
space of the city into the common. That’s what the discourse
about the “right to the city” is partly about. Making the city ours.

That’s at least one way of approaching the common: to

 That’s at least one way of approaching the common: to
understand it as neither private property nor public property. And
when I say “public,” I mean controlled and regulated by the state.

DDBW
And when you say “private,” you mean controlled by anyone from
a corporation to a family?

MH
Right. I mean: under a regime of private property, where there is a
monopoly over decision making.

DDBW
In Commonwealth, at the end of a chapter on the city, when
you’re describing the common, you write something like, the city is
where the multitude is finding its home. It just comes to mind now
Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, April 8, 2011.
that we’re talking about the private and the public and the
common. Of course, this is partly metaphoric, but I’m wondering:
what is it about the city as opposed to the family or the home that
is fitting for this concept of the common, for the radical
alternatives of the multitude? What is especially homelike about
the city, such that it establishes conditions for the types of
transformations that you envision?

MH
A city in many respects is a reservoir of the common—a reservoir
of what we have together produced. I’m thinking of the city of
course as much more than the built environment—as the
construction of social and cultural relationships that constitute a
neighborhood and that constitute a city. So the city is, in that
sense, a product of all of our common interactions. That shared
past and those relationships make it homelike. What the city
promises, more than the family, is an expansive set of continued
social relations. It operates against the closure of the family. The
city is primarily social in that respect.

To say that the city has the potential for expansive social relations,
one has to recognize, too, how the cities we have are horribly
unequal and exclusive. But I would say—and this is what Toni and I
mentioned in Commonwealth—that the city is in some sense
becoming a primary site of resistance and struggle in the same
way that, in a previous era, the factory was a site of production
and exploitation, and also the primary site of struggle. So rather
than see the city as utopian or ideal, the city is the site on which
inequality and exclusion can be fought.
 Michael Hardt teaches at Duke University. He is coauthor, with Antonio
Negri, of the Empire trilogy (Empire, 2010; Multitude, 2004; and
Commonwealth, 2011) and Declaration (2012). He currently serves as editor
of South Atlantic Quarterly.

Delia Duong Ba Wendel is a PhD candidate in Architectural History and

Theory and Cultural Geography at Harvard University. Her research concerns
the ways in which communities rebuild and recover from conflict and
disaster, focusing on Central Africa. She is coeditor, with Fallon Samuels
Aidoo of Spatializing Politics: Essays on Power and Place (2015).

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