EMPIRE

E M P I R E

Michael Hardt

Antonio Negri

H A R V A R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2000

http://avaxho.me/blogs/ChrisRedfield

Copyright ᭧ 2000 by the President and Fellows ofHarvard College

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States ofAmerica

First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hardt, Michael.

Empire / Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-674-25121-0 (cloth)

ISBN 0-674-00671-2 (pbk.)

1. Imperialism.

I. Negri, Antonio, 1933–

.

II. Title.

JC359.H279

2000

325Ј.32Ј09045—dc21

99-39619

Fourth printing, 2001

Every tool is a weapon ifyou hold it right.

Ani DiFranco

Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for

comes about in spite oftheir defeat, and then it turns out not to be

what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant

under another name.

William Morris

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

We would like to thank the friends and colleagues

who read parts ofthis manuscript and from whose comments we

benefited: Robert Adelman, E

´ tienne Balibar, Denis Berger, Yann

Moulier Boutang, Tom Conley, ArifDirlik, Luciano Ferrari-

Bravo, David Harvey, Fred Jameson, Rebecca Karl, Wahneema

Lubiano, Saree Makdisi, Christian Marazzi, Valentin Mudimbe,

Judith Revel, Ken Surin, Christine Thorsteinsson, Jean-Marie

Vincent, Paolo Virno, Lindsay Waters, and Kathi Weeks.

The quote by Ani DiFranco on page v is from ‘‘My IQ,’’

copyright ᭧ 1993 Righteous Babe Music, all rights reserved, and

is used by permission.

C O N T E N T S

Preface

xi

PART 1

The Political Constitution ofthe Present

1

1.1 World Order

3

1.2 Biopolitical Production

22

1.3 Alternatives within Empire

42

PART 2

Passages ofSovereignty

67

2.1 Two Europes, Two Modernities

69

2.2 Sovereignty ofthe Nation-State

93

2.3 The Dialectics ofColonial Sovereignty

114

2.4 Symptoms ofPassage

137

2.5 Network Power: U.S. Sovereignty and the New Empire

160

2.6 Imperial Sovereignty

183

INTERMEZZO: COUNTER-EMPIRE

205

PART 3

Passages ofProduction

219

3.1 The Limits ofImperialism

221

3.2 Disciplinary Governability

240

3.3 Resistance, Crisis, Transformation

260

3.4 Postmodernization, or The Informatization of Production

280

3.5 Mixed Constitution

304

3.6 Capitalist Sovereignty, or Administering the Global

Society ofControl

325

x

C O N T E N T S

PART 4

The Decline and Fall ofEmpire

351

4.1 Virtualities

353

4.2 Generation and Corruption

370

4.3 The Multitude against Empire

393

Notes

415

Index

473

P R E F A C E

Empire is materializing before our very eyes. Over the

past several decades, as colonial regimes were overthrown and then

precipitously after the Soviet barriers to the capitalist world market

finally collapsed, we have witnessed an irresistible and irreversible

globalization ofeconomic and cultural exchanges. Along with the

global market and global circuits ofproduction has emerged a global

order, a new logic and structure ofrule—in short, a new form of

sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates

these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.

Many argue that the globalization ofcapitalist production and

exchange means that economic relations have become more autono-

mous from political controls, and consequently that political sover-

eignty has declined. Some celebrate this new era as the liberation

ofthe capitalist economy from the restrictions and distortions that

political forces have imposed on it; others lament it as the closing

ofthe institutional channels through which workers and citizens

can influence or contest the cold logic ofcapitalist profit. It is

certainly true that, in step with the processes ofglobalization, the

sovereignty of nation-states, while still effective, has progressively

declined. The primary factors of production and exchange—

money, technology, people, and goods—move with increasing ease

across national boundaries; hence the nation-state has less and less

power to regulate these flows and impose its authority over the

economy. Even the most dominant nation-states should no longer

be thought ofas supreme and sovereign authorities, either outside

or even within their own borders. The decline in sovereignty of nation-

states, however, does not mean that sovereignty as such has declined. 1

xii

P R E F A C E

Throughout the contemporary transformations, political controls,

state functions, and regulatory mechanisms have continued to rule

the realm ofeconomic and social production and exchange. Our

basic hypothesis is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed

ofa series ofnational and supranational organisms united under a

single logic ofrule. This new global form ofsovereignty is what

we call Empire.

The declining sovereignty ofnation-states and their increasing

inability to regulate economic and cultural exchanges is in fact one

ofthe primary symptoms ofthe coming ofEmpire. The sovereignty

ofthe nation-state was the cornerstone ofthe imperialisms that

European powers constructed throughout the modern era. By ‘‘Em-

pire,’’ however, we understand something altogether different from

‘‘imperialism.’’ The boundaries defined by the modern system of

nation-states were fundamental to European colonialism and eco-

nomic expansion: the territorial boundaries ofthe nation delimited

the center ofpower from which rule was exerted over external

foreign territories through a system of channels and barriers that

alternately facilitated and obstructed the flows of production and

circulation. Imperialism was really an extension ofthe sovereignty

ofthe European nation-states beyond their own boundaries. Even-

tually nearly all the world’s territories could be parceled out and

the entire world map could be coded in European colors: red for

British territory, blue for French, green for Portuguese, and so

forth. Wherever modern sovereignty took root, it constructed a

Leviathan that overarched its social domain and imposed hierarchical

territorial boundaries, both to police the purity ofits own identity

and to exclude all that was other.

The passage to Empire emerges from the twilight of modern

sovereignty. In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no terri-

torial center ofpower and does not rely on fixed boundaries or

barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus ofrule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open,

expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hier-

archies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks ofcom-

P R E F A C E

xiii

mand. The distinct national colors ofthe imperialist map ofthe

world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.

The transformation of the modern imperialist geography of

the globe and the realization ofthe world market signal a passage

within the capitalist mode ofproduction. Most significant, the

spatial divisions ofthe three Worlds (First, Second, and Third) have

been scrambled so that we continually find the First World in the

Third, the Third in the First, and the Second almost nowhere at

all. Capital seems to be faced with a smooth world—or really, a

world defined by new and complex regimes of differentiation and

homogenization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The

construction ofthe paths and limits ofthese new global flows has

been accompanied by a transformation of the dominant productive

processes themselves, with the result that the role ofindustrial factory

labor has been reduced and priority given instead to communicative,

cooperative, and affective labor. In the postmodernization of the

global economy, the creation ofwealth tends ever more toward

what we will call biopolitical production, the production ofsocial

life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural

increasingly overlap and invest one another.

Many locate the ultimate authority that rules over the processes

ofglobalization and the new world order in the United States.

Proponents praise the United States as the world leader and sole

superpower, and detractors denounce it as an imperialist oppressor.

Both these views rest on the assumption that the United States has

simply donned the mantle ofglobal power that the European nations

have now let fall. If the nineteenth century was a British century,

then the twentieth century has been an American century; or really,

ifmodernity was European, then postmodernity is American. The

most damning charge critics can level, then, is that the United

States is repeating the practices ofold European imperialists, while

proponents celebrate the United States as a more efficient and more

benevolent world leader, getting right what the Europeans got

wrong. Our basic hypothesis, however, that a new imperial form

ofsovereignty has emerged, contradicts both these views. The United

xiv

P R E F A C E

States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project. Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in the way modern European nations were.

The United States does indeed occupy a privileged position

in Empire, but this privilege derives not from its similarities to the

old European imperialist powers, but from its differences. These

differences can be recognized most clearly by focusing on the prop-

erly imperial (not imperialist) foundations of the United States

constitution, where by ‘‘constitution’’ we mean both the formal

constitution, the written document along with its various amend-

ments and legal apparatuses, and the material constitution, that is, the continuous formation and re-formation of the composition of social

forces. Thomas Jefferson, the authors of the Federalist, and the other ideological founders of the United States were all inspired by the

ancient imperial model; they believed they were creating on the

other side ofthe Atlantic a new Empire with open, expanding

frontiers, where power would be effectively distributed in networks.

This imperial idea has survived and matured throughout the history

ofthe United States constitution and has emerged now on a global

scale in its fully realized form.

We should emphasize that we use ‘‘Empire’’ here not as a

metaphor, which would require demonstration ofthe resemblances

between today’s world order and the Empires ofRome, China,

the Americas, and so forth, but rather as a concept, which calls

primarily for a theoretical approach.2 The concept ofEmpire is

characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire’s rule

has no limits. First and foremost, then, the concept of Empire posits

a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really

that rules over the entire ‘‘civilized’’ world. No territorial boundaries

limit its reign. Second, the concept ofEmpire presents itselfnot as

a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order

that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state

of affairs for eternity. From the perspective of Empire, this is the

way things will always be and the way they were always meant to

be. In other words, Empire presents its rule not as a transitory

P R E F A C E

xv

moment in the movement ofhistory, but as a regime with no

temporal boundaries and in this sense outside ofhistory or at the

end ofhistory. Third, the rule ofEmpire operates on all registers

ofthe social order extending down to the depths ofthe social

world. Empire not only manages a territory and a population but

also creates the very world it inhabits. It not only regulates human

interactions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature. The

object ofits rule is social life in its entirety, and thus Empire presents

the paradigmatic form of biopower. Finally, although the practice

ofEmpire is continually bathed in blood, the concept ofEmpire

is always dedicated to peace—a perpetual and universal peace out-

side ofhistory.

The Empire we are faced with wields enormous powers of

oppression and destruction, but that fact should not make us nostal-

gic in any way for the old forms of domination. The passage to

Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to

the forces of liberation. Globalization, of course, is not one thing,

and the multiple processes that we recognize as globalization are

not unified or univocal. Our political task, we will argue, is not

simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect

them toward new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that

sustain Empire are also capable ofautonomously constructing a

counter-Empire, an alternative political organization ofglobal flows

and exchanges. The struggles to contest and subvert Empire, as

well as those to construct a real alternative, will thus take place on

the imperial terrain itself—indeed, such new struggles have already

begun to emerge. Through these struggles and many more like

them, the multitude will have to invent new democratic forms and

a new constituent power that will one day take us through and

beyond Empire.

The genealogy we follow in our analysis of the passage from

imperialism to Empire will be first European and then Euro-

American, not because we believe that these regions are the exclu-

sive or privileged source ofnew ideas and historical innovation,

but simply because this was the dominant geographical path along

xvi

P R E F A C E

which the concepts and practices that animate today’s Empire devel-

oped—in step, as we will argue, with the development ofthe

capitalist mode ofproduction.3 Whereas the genealogy ofEmpire

is in this sense Eurocentric, however, its present powers are not

limited to any region. Logics ofrule that in some sense originated

in Europe and the United States now invest practices ofdomination

throughout the globe. More important, the forces that contest

Empire and effectively prefigure an alternative global society are

themselves not limited to any geographical region. The geography

ofthese alternative powers, the new cartography, is still waiting to be

written—or really, it is being written today through the resistances,

struggles, and desires ofthe multitude.

In writing this book we have tried to the best ofour

abilities to employ a broadly interdisciplinary approach.4 Our argu-

ment aims to be equally philosophical and historical, cultural and

economic, political and anthropological. In part, our object ofstudy

demands this broad interdisciplinarity, since in Empire the bound-

aries that might previously have justified narrow disciplinary ap-

proaches are increasingly breaking down. In the imperial world

the economist, for example, needs a basic knowledge of cultural

production to understand the economy, and likewise the cultural

critic needs a basic knowledge ofeconomic processes to understand

culture. That is a requirement that our project demands. What we

hope to have contributed in this book is a general theoretical

framework and a toolbox of concepts for theorizing and acting in

and against Empire.5

Like most large books, this one can be read in many different

ways: front to back, back to front, in pieces, in a hopscotch pattern,

or through correspondences. The sections ofPart 1 introduce the

general problematic ofEmpire. In the central portion ofthe book,

Parts 2 and 3, we tell the story ofthe passage from modernity to

postmodernity, or really from imperialism to Empire. Part 2 narrates

the passage primarily from the standpoint ofthe history ofideas

and culture from the early modern period to the present. The red

P R E F A C E

xvii

thread that runs throughout this part is the genealogy ofthe concept

ofsovereignty. Part 3 narrates the same passage from the standpoint

ofproduction, whereby production is understood in a very broad

sense, ranging from economic production to the production of

subjectivity. This narrative spans a shorter period and focuses primar-

ily on the transformations of capitalist production from the late

nineteenth century to the present. The internal structures ofParts

2 and 3 thus correspond: the first sections ofeach treat the modern,

imperialist phase; the middle sections deal with the mechanisms of

passage; and the final sections analyze our postmodern, imperial

world.

We structured the book this way in order to emphasize the

importance ofthe shift from the realm ofideas to that ofproduction.

The Intermezzo between Parts 2 and 3 functions as a hinge that

articulates the movement from one standpoint to the other. We

intend this shift of standpoint to function something like the mo-

ment in Capital when Marx invites us to leave the noisy sphere of

exchange and descend into the hidden abode ofproduction. The

realm ofproduction is where social inequalities are clearly revealed

and, moreover, where the most effective resistances and alternatives

to the power ofEmpire arise. In Part 4 we thus try to identify

these alternatives that today are tracing the lines ofa movement

beyond Empire.

This book was begun well after the end of the Persian

GulfWar and completed well before the beginning ofthe war in

Kosovo. The reader should thus situate the argument at the midpoint

between those two signal events in the construction ofEmpire.

PART 1

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N

O F T H E P R E S E N T

1.1

W O R L D O R D E R

Capitalism only triumphs when it becomes identified with the state,

when it is the state.

Fernand Braudel

They make slaughter and they call it peace.

Tacitus

The problematic ofEmpire is determined in the first

place by one simple fact: that there is world order. This order is

expressed as a juridical formation. Our initial task, then, is to grasp

the constitution ofthe order being formed today. We should rule

out from the outset, however, two common conceptions of this

order that reside on opposing limits ofthe spectrum: first, the notion

that the present order somehow rises up spontaneously out ofthe

interactions ofradically heterogeneous global forces, as ifthis order

were a harmonious concert orchestrated by the natural and neutral

hidden hand ofthe world market; and second, the idea that order

is dictated by a single power and a single center ofrationality

transcendent to global forces, guiding the various phases of historical development according to its conscious and all-seeing plan, something like a conspiracy theory ofglobalization.1

United Nations

Before investigating the constitution of Empire in juridical terms,

we must analyze in some detail the constitutional processes that

have come to define the central juridical categories, and in particular

4

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

give careful attention to the process of the long transition from the

sovereign right ofnation-states (and the international right that

followed from it) to the first postmodern global figures of imperial

right. As a first approximation one can think ofthis as the genealogy

ofjuridical forms that led to, and now leads beyond, the suprana-

tional role ofthe United Nations and its various affiliated institu-

tions.

It is widely recognized that the notion ofinternational order

that European modernity continually proposed and reproposed, at

least since the Peace ofWestphalia, is now in crisis.2 It has in fact

always been in crisis, and this crisis has been one ofthe motors that

has continuously pushed toward Empire. Perhaps this notion of

international order and its crisis should be dated from the time of

the Napoleonic Wars, as some scholars claim, or perhaps the origin

should be located in the Congress ofVienna and the establishment

ofthe Holy Alliance.3 In any case, there can be no doubt that by

the time ofthe First World War and the birth ofthe League of

Nations, a notion ofinternational order along with its crisis had

been definitively established. The birth ofthe United Nations at

the end ofthe Second World War merely reinitiated, consolidated,

and extended this developing international juridical order that was

first European but progressively became completely global. The

United Nations, in effect, can be regarded as the culmination of

this entire constitutive process, a culmination that both reveals the

limitations ofthe notion of international order and points beyond

it toward a new notion of global order. One could certainly analyze the U.N. juridical structure in purely negative terms and dwell on

the declining power ofnation-states in the international context,

but one should also recognize that the notion ofright defined by

the U.N. Charter also points toward a new positive source of

juridical production, effective on a global scale—a new center of

normative production that can play a sovereign juridical role. The

U.N. functions as a hinge in the genealogy from international

to global juridical structures. On the one hand, the entire U.N.

conceptual structure is predicated on the recognition and legitima-

W O R L D O R D E R

5

tion ofthe sovereignty ofindividual states, and it is thus planted

squarely within the old framework of international right defined

by pacts and treaties. On the other hand, however, this process of

legitimation is effective only insofar as it transfers sovereign right

to a real supranational center. It is not our intention here to criticize or lament the serious (and at times tragic) inadequacies ofthis

process; indeed, we are interested in the United Nations and the

project ofinternational order not as an end in itself, but rather as

a real historical lever that pushed forward the transition toward a

properly global system. It is precisely the inadequacies ofthe process,

then, that make it effective.

To look more closely at this transition in juridical terms, it is

useful to read the work ofHans Kelsen, one ofthe central intellectual

figures behind the formation of the United Nations. As early as the

1910s and 1920s, Kelsen proposed that the international juridical

system be conceived as the supreme source ofevery national juridical

formation and constitution. Kelsen arrived at this proposal through

his analyses ofthe formal dynamics ofthe particular orderings of

states. The limits ofthe nation-state, he claimed, posed an insur-

mountable obstacle to the realization ofthe idea ofright. For Kelsen,

the partial ordering ofthe domestic law ofnation-states led back

necessarily to the universality and objectivity ofthe international

ordering. The latter is not only logical but also ethical, for it would

put an end to conflicts between states ofunequal power and affirm

instead an equality that is the principle ofreal international commu-

nity. Behind the formal sequence that Kelsen described, then, there

was a real and substantial drive ofEnlightenment modernization.

Kelsen sought, in Kantian fashion, a notion of right that could

become an ‘‘organization ofhumanity and [would] therefore be

one with the supreme ethical idea.’’4 He wanted to get beyond the

logic ofpower in international relations so that ‘‘the particular states

could be regarded juridically as entities ofequal rank’’ and thus a

‘‘world and universal state’’ could be formed, organized as a ‘‘univer-

sal community superior to the particular states, enveloping them

all within itself.’’5

6

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

It was only fitting, then, that Kelsen would later have the

privilege ofattending the meetings in San Francisco that founded

the United Nations and seeing his theoretical hypothesis realized.

For him the United Nations organized a rational idea.6 It gave legs

to an idea of the spirit; it proposed a real base of effectiveness for

a transcendental schema ofthe validity ofright situated above the

nation-state. The validity and efficacy of right could now be united

in the supreme juridical source, and under these conditions Kelsen’s

notion ofa fundamental norm could finally be realized.

Kelsen conceived the formal construction and validity of the

system as independent from the material structure that organizes it,

but in reality the structure must somehow exist and be organized

materially. How can the system actually be constructed? This is the

point at which Kelsen’s thought ceases to be ofany use to us: it

remains merely a fantastic utopia. The transition we wish to study

consists precisely in this gap between the formal conception that

grounds the validity ofthe juridical process in a supranational source

and the material realization ofthis conception. The lif

e ofthe

United Nations, from its foundation to the end of the cold war, has

been a long history ofideas, compromises, and limited experiences

oriented more or less toward the construction ofsuch a supranational

ordering. The aporias ofthis process are obvious, and there is no

need for us to describe them in detail here. Certainly the United

Nations’ domination ofthe general framework ofthe supranational

project between 1945 and 1989 led to some ofthe most perverse

theoretical and practical consequences. And yet, all this was not

enough to block the constitutionalization ofa supranational power.7

In the ambiguous experiences ofthe United Nations, the juridical

concept ofEmpire began to take shape.

The theoretical responses to this constitutionalization ofa

supranational world power, however, have been entirely inade-

quate. Instead ofrecognizing what was really new about these

supranational processes, the vast majority ofjuridical theorists merely

tried to resurrect anachronistic models to apply to the new problems.

To a large extent, in fact, the models that had presided over the

W O R L D O R D E R

7

birth ofthe nation-state were simply dusted offand reproposed as

interpretive schema for reading the construction of a supranational

power. The ‘‘domestic analogy’’ thus became the fundamental meth-

odological tool in the analysis ofinternational and supranational

forms of order.8 Two lines ofthought have been particularly active

during this transition, and as a kind ofshorthand we can conceive

ofthem as resurrections ofthe Hobbesian and the Lockean ideolo-

gies that in another era dominated the European conceptions of

the sovereign state.

The Hobbesian variant focuses primarily on the transfer of the

title ofsovereignty and conceives the constitution ofthe supra-

national sovereign entity as a contractual agreement grounded on

the convergence ofpreexisting state subjects.9 A new transcendent

power, ‘‘tertium super partes,’’ primarily concentrated in the hands

ofthe military (the one that rules over life and death, the Hobbesian

‘‘God on earth’’), is, according to this school, the only means capable

ofconstituting a secure international system and thus ofovercoming

the anarchy that sovereign states necessarily produce.10 By contrast,

according to the Lockean variant, the same process is projected in

more decentralized, pluralistic terms. In this framework, just when

the transfer toward a supranational center is accomplished, networks

of local and constitutionally effective counterpowers rise up to

contest and/or support the new figure ofpower. Rather than global

security, then, what is proposed here is a global constitutionalism,

or really this amounts to a project ofovercoming state imperatives

by constituting a global civil society. These slogans are meant to evoke the values ofglobalism that would infuse the new international

order, or really the new transnational democracy.11 Whereas the

Hobbesian hypothesis emphasizes the contractual process that gives

rise to a new unitary and transcendental supranational power, the

Lockean hypothesis focuses on the counterpowers that animate the

constitutive process and support the supranational power. In both

cases, however, the new global power is presented merely in analogy

with the classical conception ofthe national sovereign power of

states. Rather than recognizing the new nature ofimperial power,

8

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

the two hypotheses simply insist on the old inherited forms of state

constitution: a monarchic form in the Hobbesian case, a liberal

form in the Lockean.

Although, given the conditions in which these theories were

formulated (during the cold war, when the United Nations only

limped forward in the best of times), we must recognize the great

foresight of these theorists, we also have to point out that they

cannot account for the real novelty of the historical processes we

are witnessing today.12 In this regard these theories can and do

become harmful, because they do not recognize the accelerated

rhythm, the violence, and the necessity with which the new imperial

paradigm operates. What they do not understand is that imperial sover-

eignty marks a paradigm shift. Paradoxically (but it is really not that paradoxical), only Kelsen’s conception poses the real problem, even

ifhis conception is limited to a strictly formalist point ofview.

What political power already exists or can be created, he asks, that

is adequate to a globalization ofeconomic and social relations?

What juridical source, what fundamental norm, and what command

can support a new order and avoid the impending descent into

global disorder?

TheConstitution of Empire

Many contemporary theorists are reluctant to recognize the global-

ization ofcapitalist production and its world market as a fundamen-

tally new situation and a significant historical shift. The theorists

associated with the world-systems perspective, for example, argue

that from its inception, capitalism has always functioned as a world

economy, and therefore those who clamor about the novelty of its

globalization today have only misunderstood its history.13 Certainly,

it is important to emphasize both capitalism’s continuous founda-

tional relationship to (or at least a tendency toward) the world

market and capitalism’s expanding cycles ofdevelopment; but

proper attention to the ab origine universal or universalizing dimensions ofcapitalist development should not blind us to the rupture

or shift in contemporary capitalist production and global relations

W O R L D O R D E R

9

of power. We believe that this shift makes perfectly clear and possible

today the capitalist project to bring together economic power and

political power, to realize, in other words, a properly capitalist

order. In constitutional terms, the processes ofglobalization are no

longer merely a fact but also a source of juridical definitions that

tends to project a single supranational figure ofpolitical power.

Other theorists are reluctant to recognize a major shift in global

power relations because they see that the dominant capitalist nation-

states have continued to exercise imperialist domination over the

other nations and regions ofthe globe. From this perspective, the

contemporary tendencies toward Empire would represent not a

fundamentally new phenomenon but simply a perfecting of imperi-

alism.14 Without underestimating these real and important lines of

continuity, however, we think it is important to note that what

used to be conflict or competition among several imperialist powers

has in important respects been replaced by the idea ofa single power

that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and

treats them under one common notion ofright that is decidedly

postcolonial and postimperialist. This is really the point ofdeparture

for our study of Empire: a new notion of right, or rather, a new

inscription ofauthority and a new design ofthe production of

norms and legal instruments ofcoercion that guarantee contracts

and resolve conflicts.

We should point out here that we accord special attention to

the juridical figures ofthe constitution ofEmpire at the beginning

ofour study not out ofany specialized disciplinary interest—as if

right or law in itself, as an agent of regulation, were capable of

representing the social world in its totality—but rather because they

provide a good index ofthe processes ofimperial constitution. New

juridical figures reveal a first view ofthe tendency toward the

centralized and unitary regulation ofboth the world market and

global power relations, with all the difficulties presented by such a

project. Juridical transformations effectively point toward changes

in the material constitution ofworld power and order. The transition

we are witnessing today from traditional international law, which

10

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

was defined by contracts and treaties, to the definition and constitu-

tion ofa new sovereign, supranational world power (and thus

to an imperial notion ofright), however incomplete, gives us a

framework in which to read the totalizing social processes of Empire.

In effect, the juridical transformation functions as a symptom of

the modifications ofthe material biopolitical constitution ofour

societies. These changes regard not only international law and inter-

national relations but also the internal power relations ofeach

country. While studying and critiquing the new forms of interna-

tional and supranational law, then, we will at the same time be

pushed to the heart ofthe political theory ofEmpire, where the

problem ofsupranational sovereignty, its source oflegitimacy, and

its exercise bring into focus political, cultural, and finally ontologi-

cal problems.

To approach the juridical concept ofEmpire, we might look

first at the genealogy ofthe concept, which will give us some

preliminary terms for our investigation. The concept comes down

to us through a long, primarily European tradition, which goes

back at least to ancient Rome, whereby the juridico-political figure

ofEmpire was closely linked to the Christian origins ofEuropean

civilizations. There the concept ofEmpire united juridical categories

and universal ethical values, making them work together as an

organic whole. This union has continuously functioned within the

concept, whatever the vicissitudes ofthe history ofEmpire. Every

juridical system is in some way a crystallization ofa specific set of

values, because ethics is part ofthe materiality ofevery juridical

foundation, but Empire—and in particular the Roman tradition of

imperial right—is peculiar in that it pushes the coincidence and

universality ofthe ethical and the juridical to the extreme: in Empire

there is peace, in Empire there is the guarantee ofjustice for all

peoples. The concept ofEmpire is presented as a global concert

under the direction ofa single conductor, a unitary power that

maintains the social peace and produces its ethical truths. And in

order to achieve these ends, the single power is given the necessary

force to conduct, when necessary, ‘‘just wars’’ at the borders against

the barbarians and internally against the rebellious.15

W O R L D O R D E R

11

From the beginning, then, Empire sets in motion an ethico-

political dynamic that lies at the heart ofits juridical concept. This

juridical concept involves two fundamental tendencies: first, the

notion ofa right that is affirmed in the construction ofa new order

that envelops the entire space ofwhat it considers civilization,

a boundless, universal space; and second, a notion ofright that

encompasses all time within its ethical foundation. Empire exhausts

historical time, suspends history, and summons the past and future

within its own ethical order. In other words, Empire presents its

order as permanent, eternal, and necessary.

In the Germanic-Roman tradition that thrived throughout

the Middle Ages, these two notions ofright went hand in hand.16

Beginning in the Renaissance, however, with the triumph ofsecu-

larism, these two notions were separated and each developed inde-

pendently. On the one hand, there emerged in modern European

political thought a conception ofinternational right, and on the

other, there developed utopias of‘‘perpetual peace.’’ In the first

case, the order that the Roman Empire had promised was sought,

long after its fall, through a treaty mechanism that would construct

an international order among sovereign states by operating analo-

gously to the contractual mechanisms that guaranteed order within

the nation-state and its civil society. Thinkers from Grotius to

Puffendorf theorized this process in formal terms. In the second case,

the idea of‘‘perpetual peace’’ continually reappeared throughout

modern Europe, from Bernadin de Saint Pierre to Immanuel Kant.

This idea was presented as an ideal ofreason, a ‘‘light’’ that had to

criticize and also unite right and ethicality, a presupposed transcen-

dental ofthe juridical system and ideal schema ofreason and eth-

ics. The fundamental alternative between these two notions ran

throughout all ofEuropean modernity, including the two great

ideologies that defined its mature phase: the liberal ideology that

rests on the peaceful concert of juridical forces and its supersession

in the market; and the socialist ideology that focuses on international

unity through the organization ofstruggles and the supersession

ofright.

Would it be correct to claim, then, that these two different

developments ofthe notion ofright that persisted side by side

12

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

through the centuries ofmodernity tend today toward being united

and presented as a single category? We suspect that this is indeed

the case, and that in postmodernity the notion ofright should be

understood again in terms ofthe concept ofEmpire. And yet, since

a large part ofour investigation will turn around this question,

leading us toward doubts and perplexities, it does not seem a good

idea to jump so quickly to a definitive conclusion, even ifhere we

are limiting ourselves only to the analysis ofthe notion ofright.

We can already recognize, however, some important symptoms of

the rebirth ofthe concept ofEmpire—symptoms that function like

logical provocations arising on the terrain ofhistory that theory

cannot ignore.

One symptom, for example, is the renewed interest in and

effectiveness of the concept of bellum justum, or ‘‘just war.’’ This concept, which was organically linked to the ancient imperial orders

and whose rich and complex genealogy goes back to the biblical

tradition, has begun to reappear recently as a central narrative of

political discussions, particularly in the wake ofthe GulfWar.17

Traditionally the concept rests primarily on the idea that when a

state finds itselfconfronted with a threat ofaggression that can

endanger its territorial integrity or political independence, it has a

jus ad bellum (right to make war).18 There is certainly something

troubling in this renewed focus on the concept of bellum justum,

which modernity, or rather modern secularism, had worked so hard

to expunge from the medieval tradition. The traditional concept

ofjust war involves the banalization ofwar and the celebration of

it as an ethical instrument, both ofwhich were ideas that modern

political thought and the international community ofnation-states

had resolutely refused. These two traditional characteristics have

reappeared in our postmodern world: on the one hand, war is

reduced to the status ofpolice action, and on the other, the new

power that can legitimately exercise ethical functions through war

is sacralized.

Far from merely repeating ancient or medieval notions, how-

ever, today’s concept presents some truly fundamental innovations.

W O R L D O R D E R

13

Just war is no longer in any sense an activity ofdefense or resistance,

as it was, for example, in the Christian tradition from Saint Augustine

to the scholastics ofthe Counter-Reformation, as a necessity ofthe

‘‘worldly city’’ to guarantee its own survival. It has become rather

an activity that is justified in itself. Two distinct elements are com-

bined in this concept ofjust war: first, the legitimacy ofthe military

apparatus insofar as it is ethically grounded, and second, the effec-

tiveness ofmilitary action to achieve the desired order and peace.

The synthesis ofthese two elements may indeed be a key factor

determining the foundation and the new tradition of Empire. Today

the enemy, just like the war itself, comes to be at once banalized

(reduced to an object ofroutine police repression) and absolutized

(as the Enemy, an absolute threat to the ethical order). The Gulf

War gave us perhaps the first fully articulated example of this new

epistemology ofthe concept.19 The resurrection ofthe concept of

just war may be only a symptom ofthe emergence ofEmpire, but

what a suggestive and powerful one!

The Model of Imperial Authority

We must avoid defining the passage to Empire in purely negative

terms, in terms ofwhat it is not, as for example is done when one

says: the new paradigm is defined by the definitive decline ofthe

sovereign nation-states, by the deregulation ofinternational markets,

by the end ofantagonistic conflict among state subjects, and so

forth. If the new paradigm were to consist simply in this, then

its consequences would be truly anarchic. Power, however—and

Michel Foucault was not the only one to teach us this—fears

and despises a vacuum. The new paradigm functions already in

completely positive terms—and it could not be otherwise.

The new paradigm is both system and hierarchy, centralized

construction ofnorms and far-reaching production oflegitimacy,

spread out over world space. It is configured ab initio as a dynamic and flexible systemic structure that is articulated horizontally. We

conceive the structure in a kind ofintellectual shorthand as a hybrid

ofNiklas Luhmann’s systems theory and John Rawls’s theory of

14

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

justice.20 Some call this situation ‘‘governance without government’’

to indicate the structural logic, at times imperceptible but always

and increasingly effective, that sweeps all actors within the order

ofthe whole.21 The systemic totality has a dominant position in

the global order, breaking resolutely with every previous dialectic

and developing an integration ofactors that seems linear and sponta-

neous. At the same time, however, the effectiveness of the consensus

under a supreme authority ofthe ordering appears ever more clearly.

All conflicts, all crises, and all dissensions effectively push forward

the process ofintegration and by the same measure call for more

central authority. Peace, equilibrium, and the cessation ofconflict

are the values toward which everything is directed. The develop-

ment ofthe global system (and ofimperial right in the first place)

seems to be the development ofa machine that imposes procedures

ofcontinual contractualization that lead to systemic equilibria—a

machine that creates a continuous call for authority. The machine

seems to predetermine the exercise ofauthority and action across

the entire social space. Every movement is fixed and can seek its

own designated place only within the system itself, in the hierarchical

relationship accorded to it. This preconstituted movement defines

the reality ofthe process ofthe imperial constitutionalization of

world order—the new paradigm.

This imperial paradigm is qualitatively different from the vari-

ous attempts in the period oftransition to define a project of

international order.22 Whereas the previous, transitional perspectives

focused attention on the legitimating dynamics that would lead

toward the new order, in the new paradigm it is as ifthe new order

were already constituted. The conceptual inseparability ofthe title

and exercise of power is affirmed from the outset, as the effective

a priori ofthe system. The imperfect coincidence, or better the

ever-present temporal and spatial disjunctions between the new

central power and the field ofapplication ofits regulation, do not

lead to crises or paralysis but merely force the system to minimize

and overcome them. In short, the paradigm shift is defined, at

least initially, by the recognition that only an established power,

W O R L D O R D E R

15

overdetermined with respect to and relatively autonomous from

the sovereign nation-states, is capable offunctioning as the center

of the new world order, exercising over it an effective regulation

and, when necessary, coercion.

It follows that, as Kelsen wanted, but only as a paradoxical

effect of his utopia, a sort of juridical positivism also dominates the

formation of a new juridical ordering.23 The capacity to form a

system is, in effect, presupposed by the real process of its formation.

Moreover, the process offormation, and the subjects that act in it,

are attracted in advance toward the positively defined vortex ofthe

center, and this attraction becomes irresistible, not only in the name

ofthe capacity ofthe center to exercise force, but also in the name

of the formal power, which resides in the center, to frame and

systematize the totality. Once again we find a hybrid ofLuhmann

and Rawls, but even before them we have Kelsen, that utopian

and thus involuntary and contradictory discoverer ofthe soul of

imperial right!

Once again, the ancient notions ofEmpire help us articulate

better the nature ofthis world order in formation. As Thucydides,

Livy, and Tacitus all teach us (along with Machiavelli commenting

on their work), Empire is formed not on the basis of force itself

but on the basis ofthe capacity to present force as being in the

service ofright and peace. All interventions ofthe imperial armies

are solicited by one or more ofthe parties involved in an already

existing conflict. Empire is not born ofits own will but rather it

is called into being and constituted on the basis ofits capacity to resolve conflicts. Empire is formed and its intervention becomes

juridically legitimate only when it is already inserted into the chain

ofinternational consensuses aimed at resolving existing conflicts.

To return to Machiavelli, the expansion ofEmpire is rooted in the

internal trajectory ofthe conflicts it is meant to resolve.24 The first

task ofEmpire, then, is to enlarge the realm ofthe consensuses that

support its own power.

The ancient model gives us a first approximation, but we need

to go well beyond it to articulate the terms ofthe global model of

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T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

authority operating today. Juridical positivism and natural right

theories, contractualism and institutional realism, formalism and

systematism can each describe some aspect ofit. Juridical positivism

can emphasize the necessity for a strong power to exist at the center

ofthe normative process; natural right theories can highlight the

values of peace and equilibrium that the imperial process offers;

contractualism can foreground the formation of consensus; realism

can bring to light the formative processes of the institutions adequate

to the new dimensions ofconsensus and authority; and formalism

can give logical support to what systematism justifies and organizes

functionally, emphasizing the totalizing character of the process.

What juridical model, however, grasps all these characteristics of

the new supranational order?

In first attempting a definition, we would do well to recognize

that the dynamics and articulations ofthe new supranational juridical

order correspond strongly to the new characteristics that have come

to define internal orderings in the passage from modernity to post-

modernity.25 We should recognize this correspondence (perhaps in

Kelsen’s manner, and certainly in a realistic mode) not so much as

a ‘‘domestic analogy’’ for the international system, but rather as a

‘‘supranational analogy’’ for the domestic legal system. The primary

characteristics ofboth systems involve hegemony over juridical

practices, such as procedure, prevention, and address. Normativity,

sanction, and repression follow from these and are formed within the

procedural developments. The reason for the relative (but effective)

coincidence ofthe new functioning ofdomestic law and suprana-

tional law derives first of all from the fact that they operate on the

same terrain, namely, the terrain ofcrisis. As Carl Schmitt has taught

us, however, crisis on the terrain ofthe application oflaw should

focus our attention on the ‘‘exception’’ operative in the moment

ofits production.26 Domestic and supranational law are both defined

by their exceptionality.

The function of exception here is very important. In order

to take control ofand dominate such a completely fluid situation,

it is necessary to grant the intervening authority (1) the capacity to

W O R L D O R D E R

17

define, every time in an exceptional way, the demands ofinterven-

tion; and (2) the capacity to set in motion the forces and instruments

that in various ways can be applied to the diversity and the plurality

ofthe arrangements in crisis. Here, therefore, is born, in the name

ofthe exceptionality ofthe intervention, a form ofright that is

really a right of the police. The formation of a new right is inscribed in the deployment ofprevention, repression, and rhetorical force

aimed at the reconstruction ofsocial equilibrium: all this is proper

to the activity ofthe police. We can thus recognize the initial and

implicit source ofimperial right in terms ofpolice action and the

capacity ofthe police to create and maintain order. The legitimacy

ofthe imperial ordering supports the exercise ofpolice power, while

at the same time the activity ofglobal police force demonstrates the

real effectiveness of the imperial ordering. The juridical power to

rule over the exception and the capacity to deploy police force

are thus two initial coordinates that define the imperial model

ofauthority.

Universal Values

We might well ask at this point, however, should we still use the

juridical term ‘‘right’’ in this context? How can we call right (and

specifically imperial right) a series oftechniques that, founded on

a state ofpermanent exception and the power ofthe police, reduces

right and law to a question of pure effectiveness? In order to address

these questions, we should first look more closely at the process of

imperial constitution that we are witnessing today. We should

emphasize from the start that its reality is demonstrated not only

by the transformations of international law it brings about, but also

by the changes it effects in the administrative law of individual

societies and nation-states, or really in the administrative law of

cosmopolitical society.27 Through its contemporary transformation

ofsupranational law, the imperial process ofconstitution tends either

directly or indirectly to penetrate and reconfigure the domestic

law ofthe nation-states, and thus supranational law powerf

ully

overdetermines domestic law.

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T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

Perhaps the most significant symptom ofthis transformation

is the development ofthe so-called right of intervention. 28 This is commonly conceived as the right or duty ofthe dominant subjects

ofthe world order to intervene in the territories ofother subjects

in the interest ofpreventing or resolving humanitarian problems,

guaranteeing accords, and imposing peace. The right ofintervention

figured prominently among the panoply ofinstruments accorded

the United Nations by its Charter for maintaining international

order, but the contemporary reconfiguration ofthis right represents

a qualitative leap. No longer, as under the old international ordering,

do individual sovereign states or the supranational (U.N.) power

intervene only to ensure or impose the application ofvoluntarily

engaged international accords. Now supranational subjects that are

legitimated not by right but by consensus intervene in the name

ofany type ofemergency and superior ethical principles. What

stands behind this intervention is not just a permanent state of

emergency and exception, but a permanent state ofemergency and

exception justified by the appeal to essential values of justice. In other words, the right ofthe police is legitimated by universal values.29

Should we assume that since this new right ofintervention

functions primarily toward the goal of resolving urgent human

problems, its legitimacy is therefore founded on universal values?

Should we read this movement as a process that, on the basis of

the fluctuating elements ofthe historical framework, sets in motion

a constitutive machine driven by universal forces of justice and

peace? Are we thus in a situation very close to the traditional

definition ofEmpire, the one promulgated in the ancient Roman-

Christian imaginary?

It would be going too far to respond affirmatively to these

questions at this early stage in our investigation. The definition of

the developing imperial power as a science ofthe police that is

founded on a practice of just war to address continually arising

emergencies is probably correct but still completely insufficient. As

we have seen, the phenomenological determinations ofthe new

global order exist in a profoundly fluctuating situation that could

W O R L D O R D E R

19

also be characterized correctly in terms ofcrisis and war. How can

we reconcile the legitimation ofthis order through prevention and

policing with the fact that crisis and war themselves demonstrate

the very questionable genesis and legitimacy ofthis concept of

justice? As we have already noted, these techniques and others like

them indicate that what we are witnessing is a process ofthe material

constitution ofthe new planetary order, the consolidation ofits

administrative machine, and the production ofnew hierarchies of

command over global space. Who will decide on the definitions

ofjustice and order across the expanse ofthis totality in the course

ofits process ofconstitution? Who will be able to define the concept

ofpeace? Who will be able to unify the process ofsuspending

history and call this suspension just? Around these questions the

problematic ofEmpire is completely open, not closed.

At this point, the problem ofthe new juridical apparatus is

presented to us in its most immediate figure: a global order, a justice,

and a right that are still virtual but nonetheless apply actually to us.

We are forced increasingly to feel that we are participants in this

development, and we are called upon to be responsible for what

it becomes in this framework. Our citizenship, just like our ethical

responsibility, is situated within these new dimensions—our power

and our impotence are measured here. We could say, in Kantian

fashion, that our internal moral disposition, when it is confronted

with and tested in the social order, tends to be determined by the

ethical, political, and juridical categories ofEmpire. Or we could

say that the external morality ofevery human being and citizen is

by now commensurable only in the framework of Empire. This

new framework forces us to confront a series of explosive aporias,

because in this new juridical and institutional world being formed

our ideas and practices ofjustice and our means ofhope are thrown

into question. The means ofthe private and individual apprehension

ofvalues are dissolved: with the appearance ofEmpire, we are

confronted no longer with the local mediations of the universal

but with a concrete universal itself. The domesticity of values, the

shelters behind which they presented their moral substance, the

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T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

limits that protect against the invading exteriority—all that disap-

pears. We are all forced to confront absolute questions and radical

alternatives. In Empire, ethics, morality, and justice are cast into

new dimensions.

Throughout the course ofour research we have found our-

selves confronted with a classic problematic of political philosophy:

the decline and fall of Empire.30 It may seem paradoxical that we

address this topos at the beginning, at the same time that we treat

the initial construction ofEmpire; but the becoming ofEmpire is

actually realized on the basis ofthe same conditions that characterize

its decadence and decline. Empire is emerging today as the center

that supports the globalization ofproductive networks and casts its

widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within

its world order—and yet at the same time it deploys a powerful

police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves

who threaten its order. The power ofEmpire appears to be subordi-

nated to the fluctuations oflocal power dynamics and to the shifting,

partial juridical orderings that attempt, but never fully succeed, to

lead back to a state ofnormalcy in the name ofthe ‘‘exceptionality’’

ofthe administrative procedures. These characteristics, however,

were precisely those that defined ancient Rome in its decadence

and that tormented so many ofits Enlightenment admirers. We

should not expect that the complexity ofthe processes that construct

the new imperial relationship ofright be resolved. On the contrary,

the processes are and will remain contradictory. The question of

the definition ofjustice and peace will find no real resolution; the

force of the new imperial constitution will not be embodied in a

consensus that is articulated in the multitude. The terms ofthe

juridical proposal ofEmpire are completely indeterminate, even

though they are nonetheless concrete. Empire is born and shows

itselfas crisis. Should we conceive this as an Empire ofdecadence,

then, in the terms Montesquieu and Gibbon described? Or is it more

properly understood in classical terms as an Empire ofcorruption?

Here we should understand corruption first ofall not only in

moral terms but also in juridical and political terms, because accord-

W O R L D O R D E R

21

ing to Montesquieu and Gibbon, when the different forms of gov-

ernment are not firmly established in the republic, the cycle of

corruption is ineluctably set in motion and the community is torn

apart.31 Second, we should understand corruption also in metaphysi-

cal terms: where the entity and essence, effectiveness and value, do

not find common satisfaction, there develops not generation but

corruption.32 These are some ofthe fundamental axes ofEmpire

that we will return to later at length.

Allow us, in conclusion, one final analogy that refers to the

birth ofChristianity in Europe and its expansion during the decline

ofthe Roman Empire. In this process an enormous potential of

subjectivity was constructed and consolidated in terms ofthe proph-

ecy ofa world to come, a chiliastic project. This new subjectivity

offered an absolute alternative to the spirit of imperial right—a new

ontological basis. From this perspective, Empire was accepted as

the ‘‘maturity ofthe times’’ and the unity ofthe entire known

civilization, but it was challenged in its totality by a completely

different ethical and ontological axis. In the same way today, given

that the limits and unresolvable problems ofthe new imperial right

are fixed, theory and practice can go beyond them, finding once

again an ontological basis ofantagonism—within Empire, but also

against and beyond Empire, at the same level oftotality.

1.2

B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N

The ‘‘police’’ appears as an administration heading the state, to-

gether with the judiciary, the army, and the exchequer. True. Yet

in fact, it embraces everything else. Turquet says so: ‘‘It branches

out into all ofthe people’s conditions, everything they do or under-

take. Its field comprises the judiciary, finance, and the army.’’ The

police includes everything.

Michel Foucault

From the juridical perspective we have been able to

glimpse some ofthe elements ofthe ideal genesis ofEmpire, but

from that perspective alone it would be difficult if not impossible

to understand how the imperial machine is actually set in motion.

Juridical concepts and juridical systems always refer to something

other than themselves. Through the evolution and exercise ofright,

they point toward the material condition that defines their purchase

on social reality. Our analysis must now descend to the level of

that materiality and investigate there the material transformation of

the paradigm ofrule. We need to discover the means and forces

ofthe production ofsocial reality along with the subjectivities that

animate it.

Biopower in the Society of Control

In many respects, the work ofMichel Foucault has prepared the

terrain for such an investigation of the material functioning of

imperial rule. First ofall, Foucault’s work allows us to recognize a

historical, epochal passage in social forms from disciplinary society to B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N

23

the society of control. 1 Disciplinary society is that society in which social command is constructed through a diffuse network of dispositifs

or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and pro-

ductive practices. Putting this society to work and ensuring obedi-

ence to its rule and its mechanisms ofinclusion and/or exclusion

are accomplished through disciplinary institutions (the prison, the

factory, the asylum, the hospital, the university, the school, and so

forth) that structure the social terrain and present logics adequate

to the ‘‘reason’’ of discipline. Disciplinary power rules in effect

by structuring the parameters and limits ofthought and practice,

sanctioning and prescribing normal and/or deviant behaviors.

Foucault generally refers to the ancien re´gime and the classical age

ofFrench civilization to illustrate the emergence ofdisciplinarity,

but more generally we could say that the entire first phase of

capitalist accumulation (in Europe and elsewhere) was conducted

under this paradigm ofpower. We should understand the society

ofcontrol, in contrast, as that society (which develops at the far

edge ofmodernity and opens toward the postmodern) in which

mechanisms ofcommand become ever more ‘‘democratic,’’ ever

more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains

and bodies ofthe citizens. The behaviors ofsocial integration and

exclusion proper to rule are thus increasingly interiorized within

the subjects themselves. Power is now exercised through machines

that directly organize the brains (in communication systems, infor-

mation networks, etc.) and bodies (in welfare systems, monitored

activities, etc.) toward a state ofautonomous alienation from the

sense of life and the desire for creativity. The society of control

might thus be characterized by an intensification and generalization

ofthe normalizing apparatuses ofdisciplinarity that internally ani-

mate our common and daily practices, but in contrast to discipline,

this control extends well outside the structured sites ofsocial institu-

tions through flexible and fluctuating networks.

Second, Foucault’s work allows us to recognize the biopolitical

nature ofthe new paradigm ofpower.2 Biopower is a form of power

that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, 24

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

absorbing it, and rearticulating it. Power can achieve an effective

command over the entire life of the population only when it be-

comes an integral, vital function that every individual embraces and

reactivates ofhis or her own accord. As Foucault says, ‘‘Life has

now become . . . an object ofpower.’’3 The highest function of

this power is to invest life through and through, and its primary

task is to administer life. Biopower thus refers to a situation in

which what is directly at stake in power is the production and

reproduction of life itself.

These two lines ofFoucault’s work dovetail with each other

in the sense that only the society ofcontrol is able to adopt the

biopolitical context as its exclusive terrain ofreference. In the passage from disciplinary society to the society of control, a new paradigm

ofpower is realized which is defined by the technologies that

recognize society as the realm ofbiopower. In disciplinary society

the effects of biopolitical technologies were still partial in the sense

that disciplining developed according to relatively closed, geometri-

cal, and quantitative logics. Disciplinarity fixed individuals within

institutions but did not succeed in consuming them completely in

the rhythm ofproductive practices and productive socialization; it

did not reach the point ofpermeating entirely the consciousnesses

and bodies ofindividuals, the point oftreating and organizing them

in the totality oftheir activities. In disciplinary society, then, the

relationship between power and the individual remained a static one:

the disciplinary invasion ofpower corresponded to the resistance of

the individual. By contrast, when power becomes entirely biopoliti-

cal, the whole social body is comprised by power’s machine and

developed in its virtuality. This relationship is open, qualitative,

and affective. Society, subsumed within a power that reaches down

to the ganglia ofthe social structure and its processes ofdevelopment,

reacts like a single body. Power is thus expressed as a control that

extends throughout the depths ofthe consciousnesses and bodies

ofthe population—and at the same time across the entirety of

social relations.4

In this passage from disciplinary society to the society of con-

trol, then, one could say that the increasingly intense relationship

B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N

25

ofmutual implication ofall social forces that capitalism has pursued

throughout its development has now been fully realized. Marx

recognized something similar in what he called the passage from

the formal subsumption to the real subsumption of labor under

capital,5 and later the Frankfurt School philosophers analyzed a

closely related passage ofthe subsumption ofculture (and social

relations) under the totalitarian figure ofthe state, or really within

the perverse dialectic ofEnlightenment.6 The passage we are refer-

ring to, however, is fundamentally different in that instead of focus-

ing on the unidimensionality ofthe process described by Marx and

reformulated and extended by the Frankfurt School, the Foucaul-

dian passage deals fundamentally with the paradox of plurality and

multiplicity—and Deleuze and Guattari develop this perspective

even more clearly.7 The analysis ofthe real subsumption, when this

is understood as investing not only the economic or only the cultural

dimension ofsociety but rather the social bios itself, and when it is attentive to the modalities ofdisciplinarity and/or control, disrupts

the linear and totalitarian figure ofcapitalist development. Civil

society is absorbed in the state, but the consequence ofthis is an

explosion ofthe elements that were previously coordinated and

mediated in civil society. Resistances are no longer marginal but

active in the center ofa society that opens up in networks; the

individual points are singularized in a thousand plateaus. What

Foucault constructed implicitly (and Deleuze and Guattari made

explicit) is therefore the paradox of a power that, while it unifies

and envelops within itselfevery element ofsocial life (thus losing

its capacity effectively to mediate different social forces), at that

very moment reveals a new context, a new milieu ofmaximum

plurality and uncontainable singularization—a milieu ofthe event.8

These conceptions ofthe society ofcontrol and biopower

both describe central aspects ofthe concept ofEmpire. The concept

ofEmpire is the framework in which the new omniversality of

subjects has to be understood, and it is the end to which the new

paradigm ofpower is leading. Here a veritable chasm opens up

between the various old theoretical frameworks of international

law (in either its contractual and/or U.N. form) and the new reality

26

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

ofimperial law. All the intermediary elements ofthe process have

in fact fallen aside, so that the legitimacy of the international order

can no longer be constructed through mediations but must rather

be grasped immediately in all its diversity. We have already acknowl-

edged this fact from the juridical perspective. We saw, in effect,

that when the new notion ofright emerges in the context of

globalization and presents itselfas capable oftreating the universal,

planetary sphere as a single, systemic set, it must assume an immediate

prerequisite (acting in a state ofexception) and an adequate, plastic,

and constitutive technology (the techniques ofthe police).

Even though the state ofexception and police technologies

constitute the solid nucleus and the central element ofthe new

imperial right, however, this new regime has nothing to do with

the juridical arts ofdictatorship or totalitarianism that in other times

and with such great fanfare were so thoroughly described by many

(in fact too many!) authors.9 On the contrary, the rule oflaw

continues to play a central role in the context ofthe contemporary

passage: right remains effective and (precisely by means of the state

ofexception and police techniques) becomes procedure. This is

a radical transformation that reveals the unmediated relationship

between power and subjectivities, and hence demonstrates both the

impossibility of‘‘prior’’ mediations and the uncontainable temporal

variability ofthe event.10 Throughout the unbounded global spaces,

to the depths of the biopolitical world, and confronting an unfore-

seeable temporality—these are the determinations on which the

new supranational right must be defined. Here is where the concept

ofEmpire must struggle to establish itself, where it must prove its

effectiveness, and hence where the machine must be set in motion.

From this point ofview, the biopolitical context ofthe new

paradigm is completely central to our analysis. This is what presents

power with an alternative, not only between obedience and disobe-

dience, or between formal political participation and refusal, but

also along the entire range oflife and death, wealth and poverty,

production and social reproduction, and so forth. Given the great

difficulties the new notion of right has in representing this dimension

B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N

27

ofthe power ofEmpire, and given its inability to touch biopower

concretely in all its material aspects, imperial right can at best only

partially represent the underlying design ofthe new constitution

ofworld order, and cannot really grasp the motor that sets it in

motion. Our analysis must focus its attention rather on the productive

dimension ofbiopower.11

TheProduction of Life

The question ofproduction in relation to biopower and the society

ofcontrol, however, reveals a real weakness ofthe work ofthe

authors from whom we have borrowed these notions. We should

clarify, then, the ‘‘vital’’ or biopolitical dimensions of Foucault’s

work in relation to the dynamics ofproduction. Foucault argued

in several works in the mid-1970s that one cannot understand the

passage from the ‘‘sovereign’’ state of the ancien re´gime to the

modern ‘‘disciplinary’’ state without taking into account how the

biopolitical context was progressively put at the service ofcapitalist

accumulation: ‘‘The control ofsociety over individuals is not con-

ducted only through consciousness or ideology, but also in the

body and with the body. For capitalist society biopolitics is what

is most important, the biological, the somatic, the corporeal.’’12

One ofthe central objectives ofhis research strategy in this

period was to go beyond the versions ofhistorical materialism,

including several variants ofMarxist theory, that considered the

problem ofpower and social reproduction on a superstructural level

separate from the real, base level of production. Foucault thus

attempted to bring the problem ofsocial reproduction and all the

elements ofthe so-called superstructure back to within the material,

fundamental structure and define this terrain not only in economic

terms but also in cultural, corporeal, and subjective ones. We can

thus understand how Foucault’s conception ofthe social whole was

perfected and realized when in a subsequent phase of his work he

uncovered the emerging outlines ofthe society ofcontrol as a figure

ofpower active throughout the entire biopolitics ofsociety. It

does not seem, however, that Foucault—even when he powerfully

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T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

grasped the biopolitical horizon ofsociety and defined it as a field

ofimmanence—ever succeeded in pulling his thought away from

that structuralist epistemology that guided his research from the

beginning. By structuralist epistemology here we mean the reinven-

tion ofa functionalist analysis in the realm ofthe human sciences,

a method that effectively sacrifices the dynamic of the system, the

creative temporality ofits movements, and the ontological substance

ofcultural and social reproduction.13 In fact, if at this point we

were to ask Foucault who or what drives the system, or rather,

who is the ‘‘bios,’’ his response would be ineffable, or nothing at

all. What Foucault fails to grasp finally are the real dynamics of

production in biopolitical society.14

By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari present us with a properly

poststructuralist understanding ofbiopower that renews materialist

thought and grounds itselfsolidly in the question ofthe production

ofsocial being. Their work demystifies structuralism and all the

philosophical, sociological, and political conceptions that make the

fixity of the epistemological frame an ineluctable point of reference.

They focus our attention clearly on the ontological substance of

social production. Machines produce. The constant functioning of

social machines in their various apparatuses and assemblages pro-

duces the world along with the subjects and objects that constitute

it. Deleuze and Guattari, however, seem to be able to conceive

positively only the tendencies toward continuous movement and

absolute flows, and thus in their thought, too, the creative elements

and the radical ontology ofthe production ofthe social remain

insubstantial and impotent. Deleuze and Guattari discover the pro-

ductivity ofsocial reproduction (creative production, production

of values, social relations, affects, becomings), but manage to articu-

late it only superficially and ephemerally, as a chaotic, indeterminate

horizon marked by the ungraspable event.15

We can better grasp the relationship between social production

and biopower in the work ofa group ofcontemporary Italian

Marxist authors who recognize the biopolitical dimension in terms

ofthe new nature ofproductive labor and its living development

B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N

29

in society, using terms such as ‘‘mass intellectuality,’’ ‘‘immaterial

labor,’’ and the Marxian concept of‘‘general intellect.’’16 These

analyses set off from two coordinated research projects. The first

consists in the analysis ofthe recent transformations ofproductive

labor and its tendency to become increasingly immaterial. The

central role previously occupied by the labor power ofmass factory

workers in the production ofsurplus value is today increasingly

filled by intellectual, immaterial, and communicative labor power.

It is thus necessary to develop a new political theory ofvalue that

can pose the problem ofthis new capitalist accumulation ofvalue

at the center ofthe mechanism ofexploitation (and thus, perhaps,

at the center ofpotential revolt). The second, and consequent,

research project developed by this school consists in the analysis of

the immediately social and communicative dimension ofliving labor

in contemporary capitalist society, and thus poses insistently the

problem ofthe new figures ofsubjectivity, in both their exploitation

and their revolutionary potential. The immediately social dimension

ofthe exploitation ofliving immaterial labor immerses labor in all

the relational elements that define the social but also at the same

time activate the critical elements that develop the potential of

insubordination and revolt through the entire set oflaboring prac-

tices. After a new theory ofvalue, then, a new theory ofsubjectivity

must be formulated that operates primarily through knowledge,

communication, and language.

These analyses have thus reestablished the importance ofpro-

duction within the biopolitical process ofthe social constitution,

but they have also in certain respects isolated it—by grasping it in

a pure form, refining it on the ideal plane. They have acted as if

discovering the new forms of productive forces—immaterial labor,

massified intellectual labor, the labor of‘‘general intellect’’—were

enough to grasp concretely the dynamic and creative relationship

between material production and social reproduction. When they

reinsert production into the biopolitical context, they present it

almost exclusively on the horizon oflanguage and communication.

One ofthe most serious shortcomings has thus been the tendency

30

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

among these authors to treat the new laboring practices in biopoliti-

cal society only in their intellectual and incorporeal aspects. The productivity ofbodies and the value ofaffect, however, are absolutely central in this context. We will elaborate the three primary

aspects ofimmaterial labor in the contemporary economy: the

communicative labor ofindustrial production that has newly be-

come linked in informational networks, the interactive labor of

symbolic analysis and problem solving, and the labor ofthe produc-

tion and manipulation of affects (see Section 3.4). This third aspect,

with its focus on the productivity of the corporeal, the somatic, is

an extremely important element in the contemporary networks of

biopolitical production. The work ofthis school and its analysis

ofgeneral intellect, then, certainly marks a step forward, but its

conceptual framework remains too pure, almost angelic. In the final

analysis, these new conceptions too only scratch the surface of the

productive dynamic ofthe new theoretical f

ramework ofbio-

power.17

Our task, then, is to build on these partially successful attempts

to recognize the potential ofbiopolitical production. Precisely by

bringing together coherently the different defining characteristics

ofthe biopolitical context that we have described up to this point,

and leading them back to the ontology ofproduction, we will be

able to identify the new figure of the collective biopolitical body,

which may nonetheless remain as contradictory as it is paradoxical.

This body becomes structure not by negating the originary produc-

tive force that animates it but by recognizing it; it becomes language

(both scientific language and social language) because it is a multi-

tude ofsingular and determinate bodies that seek relation. It is thus

both production and reproduction, structure and superstructure,

because it is life in the fullest sense and politics in the proper sense.

Our analysis has to descend into the jungle ofproductive and

conflictual determinations that the collective biopolitical body offers

us.18 The context ofour analysis thus has to be the very unfolding

oflife itself, the process ofthe constitution ofthe world, ofhistory.

The analysis must be proposed not through ideal forms but within

the dense complex ofexperience.

B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N

31

Corporations and Communication

In asking ourselves how the political and sovereign elements ofthe

imperial machine come to be constituted, we find that there is no

need to limit our analysis to or even focus it on the established

supranational regulatory institutions. The U.N. organizations, along

with the great multi- and transnational finance and trade agencies

(the IMF, the World Bank, the GATT, and so forth), all become

relevant in the perspective ofthe supranational juridical constitution

only when they are considered within the dynamic ofthe biopoliti-

cal production ofworld order. The function they had in the old

international order, we should emphasize, is not what now gives

legitimacy to these organizations. What legitimates them now is

rather their newly possible function in the symbology of the imperial

order. Outside of the new framework, these institutions are inef-

fectual. At best, the old institutional framework contributes to

the formation and education of the administrative personnel of the

imperial machine, the ‘‘dressage’’ ofa new imperial eĺite.

The huge transnational corporations construct the fundamental

connective fabric of the biopolitical world in certain important

respects. Capital has indeed always been organized with a view

toward the entire global sphere, but only in the second halfofthe

twentieth century did multinational and transnational industrial and

financial corporations really begin to structure global territories

biopolitically. Some claim that these corporations have merely come

to occupy the place that was held by the various national colonialist

and imperialist systems in earlier phases ofcapitalist development,

from nineteenth-century European imperialism to the Fordist phase

ofdevelopment in the twentieth century.19 This is in part true, but

that place itselfhas been substantially transformed by the new reality

ofcapitalism. The activities ofcorporations are no longer defined

by the imposition ofabstract command and the organization of

simple theft and unequal exchange. Rather, they directly structure

and articulate territories and populations. They tend to make nation-

states merely instruments to record the flows ofthe commodities,

monies, and populations that they set in motion. The transnational

corporations directly distribute labor power over various markets,

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T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

functionally allocate resources, and organize hierarchically the vari-

ous sectors ofworld production. The complex apparatus that selects

investments and directs financial and monetary maneuvers deter-

mines the new geography ofthe world market, or really the new

biopolitical structuring ofthe world.20

The most complete figure ofthis world is presented from the

monetary perspective. From here we can see a horizon ofvalues

and a machine ofdistribution, a mechanism ofaccumulation and

a means ofcirculation, a power and a language. There is nothing,

no ‘‘naked life,’’ no external standpoint, that can be posed outside

this field permeated by money; nothing escapes money. Production

and reproduction are dressed in monetary clothing. In fact, on the

global stage, every biopolitical figure appears dressed in monetary

garb. ‘‘Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!’’21

The great industrial and financial powers thus produce not

only commodities but also subjectivities. They produce agentic

subjectivities within the biopolitical context: they produce needs,

social relations, bodies, and minds—which is to say, they produce

producers.22 In the biopolitical sphere, life is made to work for

production and production is made to work for life. It is a great

hive in which the queen bee continuously oversees production and

reproduction. The deeper the analysis goes, the more it finds at

increasing levels ofintensity the interlinking assemblages ofinter-

active relationships.23

One site where we should locate the biopolitical production

oforder is in the immaterial nexuses ofthe production oflanguage,

communication, and the symbolic that are developed by the com-

munications industries.24 The development ofcommunications net-

works has an organic relationship to the emergence ofthe new

world order—it is, in other words, effect and cause, product and

producer. Communication not only expresses but also organizes

the movement ofglobalization. It organizes the movement by multi-

plying and structuring interconnections through networks. It ex-

presses the movement and controls the sense and direction ofthe

imaginary that runs throughout these communicative connections;

B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N

33

in other words, the imaginary is guided and channeled within the

communicative machine. What the theories ofpower ofmodernity

were forced to consider transcendent, that is, external to productive

and social relations, is here formed inside, immanent to the produc-

tive and social relations. Mediation is absorbed within the productive

machine. The political synthesis ofsocial space is fixed in the space

ofcommunication. This is why communications industries have

assumed such a central position. They not only organize production

on a new scale and impose a new structure adequate to global space,

but also make its justification immanent. Power, as it produces,

organizes; as it organizes, it speaks and expresses itselfas authority.

Language, as it communicates, produces commodities but moreover

creates subjectivities, puts them in relation, and orders them. The

communications industries integrate the imaginary and the symbolic

within the biopolitical fabric, not merely putting them at the service

ofpower but actually integrating them into its very functioning.25

At this point we can begin to address the question ofthe

legitimation ofthe new world order. Its legitimation is not born of the previously existing international accords nor ofthe functioning

ofthe first, embryonic supranational organizations, which were

themselves created through treaties based on international law. The

legitimation ofthe imperial machine is born at least in part ofthe

communications industries, that is, ofthe transformation ofthe new

mode ofproduction into a machine. It is a subject that produces

its own image ofauthority. This is a form oflegitimation that rests

on nothing outside itselfand is reproposed ceaselessly by developing

its own languages ofself-validation.

One further consequence should be treated on the basis of

these premises. Ifcommunication is one ofthe hegemonic sectors

ofproduction and acts over the entire biopolitical field, then we

must consider communication and the biopolitical context coexis-

tent. This takes us well beyond the old terrain as Ju¨rgen Habermas

described it, for example. In fact, when Habermas developed the

concept ofcommunicative action, demonstrating so powerfully its

productive form and the ontological consequences deriving from

34

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

that, he still relied on a standpoint outside these effects of globaliza-

tion, a standpoint of life and truth that could oppose the informa-

tional colonization ofbeing.26 The imperial machine, however,

demonstrates that this external standpoint no longer exists. On

the contrary, communicative production and the construction of

imperial legitimation march hand in hand and can no longer be

separated. The machine is self-validating, autopoietic—that is, sys-

temic. It constructs social fabrics that evacuate or render ineffective

any contradiction; it creates situations in which, before coercively

neutralizing difference, seem to absorb it in an insignificant play of

self-generating and self-regulating equilibria. As we have argued

elsewhere, any juridical theory that addresses the conditions of

postmodernity has to take into account this specifically communica-

tive definition ofsocial production.27 The imperial machine lives

by producing a context ofequilibria and/or reducing complexities,

pretending to put forward a project of universal citizenship and

toward this end intensifying the effectiveness of its intervention

over every element ofthe communicative relationship, all the while

dissolving identity and history in a completely postmodernist fash-

ion.28 Contrary to the way many postmodernist accounts would

have it, however, the imperial machine, far from eliminating master

narratives, actually produces and reproduces them (ideological mas-

ter narratives in particular) in order to validate and celebrate its

own power.29 In this coincidence ofproduction through language,

the linguistic production ofreality, and the language ofself

-

validation resides a fundamental key to understanding the effective-

ness, validity, and legitimation ofimperial right.

Intervention

This new framework of legitimacy includes new forms and new

articulations of the exercise of legitimate force. During its formation, the new power must demonstrate the effectiveness of its force at

the same time that the bases ofits legitimation are being constructed.

In fact, the legitimacy of the new power is in part based directly

on the effectiveness of its use of force.

B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N

35

The way the effectiveness of the new power is demonstrated

has nothing to do with the old international order that is slowly

dying away; nor has it much use for the instruments the old order

left behind. The deployments of the imperial machine are defined

by a whole series ofnew characteristics, such as the unbounded

terrain ofits activities, the singularization and symbolic localization

ofits actions, and the connection ofrepressive action to all the

aspects ofthe biopolitical structure ofsociety. For lack ofa better

term we continue to call these ‘‘interventions.’’ This is merely a

terminological and not a conceptual deficiency, for these are not

really interventions into independent juridical territories but rather

actions within a unified world by the ruling structure ofproduction

and communication. In effect, intervention has been internalized

and universalized. In the previous section we referred to both the

structural means ofintervention that involve the deployments of

monetary mechanisms and financial maneuvers over the transna-

tional field ofinterdependent productive regimes and interventions

in the field of communication and their effects on the legitimation

ofthe system. Here we want to investigate the new f

orms of

intervention that involve the exercise ofphysical force on the part

ofthe imperial machine over its global territories. The enemies that

Empire opposes today may present more ofan ideological threat

than a military challenge, but nonetheless the power ofEmpire

exercised through force and all the deployments that guarantee its

effectiveness are already very advanced technologically and solidly

consolidated politically.30

The arsenal of legitimate force for imperial intervention is

indeed already vast, and should include not only military interven-

tion but also other forms such as moral intervention and juridical

intervention. In fact, the Empire’s powers of intervention might

be best understood as beginning not directly with its weapons of

lethal force but rather with its moral instruments. What we are

calling moral intervention is practiced today by a variety ofbodies,

including the news media and religious organizations, but the most

important may be some ofthe so-called non-governmental organi-

36

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

zations (NGOs), which, precisely because they are not run directly

by governments, are assumed to act on the basis ofethical or moral

imperatives. The term refers to a wide variety of groups, but we

are referring here principally to the global, regional, and local organi-

zations that are dedicated to reliefwork and the protection ofhuman

rights, such as Amnesty International, Oxfam, and Me´decins sans

Frontières. Such humanitarian NGOs are in effect (even if this runs

counter to the intentions ofthe participants) some ofthe most

powerful pacific weapons of the new world order—the charitable

campaigns and the mendicant orders ofEmpire. These NGOs con-

duct ‘‘just wars’’ without arms, without violence, without borders.

Like the Dominicans in the late medieval period and the Jesuits at

the dawn ofmodernity, these groups strive to identify universal

needs and defend human rights. Through their language and their

action they first define the enemy as privation (in the hope of

preventing serious damage) and then recognize the enemy as sin.

It is hard not to be reminded here ofhow in Christian moral

theology evil is first posed as privation ofthe good and then sin is

defined as culpable negation ofthe good. Within this logical frame-

work it is not strange but rather all too natural that in their attempts

to respond to privation, these NGOs are led to denounce publicly

the sinners (or rather the Enemy in properly inquisitional terms);

nor is it strange that they leave to the ‘‘secular wing’’ the task of

actually addressing the problems. In this way, moral intervention

has become a frontline force of imperial intervention. In effect, this

intervention prefigures the state ofexception from below, and does

so without borders, armed with some of the most effective means

ofcommunication and oriented toward the symbolic production

ofthe Enemy. These NGOs are completely immersed in the bio-

political context ofthe constitution ofEmpire; they anticipate the

power ofits pacifying and productive intervention ofjustice. It

should thus come as no surprise that honest juridical theorists of

the old international school (such as Richard Falk) should be drawn

in by the fascination of these NGOs.31 The NGOs’ demonstration

ofthe new order as a peaceful biopolitical context seems to have

B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N

37

blinded these theorists to the brutal effects that moral intervention

produces as a prefiguration ofworld order.32

Moral intervention often serves as the first act that prepares the

stage for military intervention. In such cases, military deployment is

presented as an internationally sanctioned police action. Today

military intervention is progressively less a product ofdecisions that

arise out ofthe old international order or even U.N. structures.

More often it is dictated unilaterally by the United States, which

charges itselfwith the primary task and then subsequently asks its

allies to set in motion a process ofarmed containment and/or

repression ofthe current enemy ofEmpire. These enemies are

most often called terrorist, a crude conceptual and terminological

reduction that is rooted in a police mentality.

The relationship between prevention and repression is particu-

larly clear in the case ofintervention in ethnic conflicts. The conflicts

among ethnic groups and the consequent reenforcement of new

and/or resurrected ethnic identities effectively disrupt the old aggre-

gations based on national political lines. These conflicts make the

fabric of global relations more fluid and, by affirming new identities

and new localities, present a more malleable material for control.

In such cases repression can be articulated through preventive action

that constructs new relationships (which will eventually be consoli-

dated in peace but only after new wars) and new territorial and

political formations that are functional (or rather more functional,

better adaptable) to the constitution ofEmpire.33 A second example

ofrepression prepared through preventive action is the campaigns

against corporative business groups or ‘‘mafias,’’ particularly those

involved in the drug trade. The actual repression ofthese groups

may not be as important as criminalizing their activities and manag-

ing social alarm at their very existence in order to facilitate their

control. Even though controlling ‘‘ethnic terrorists’’ and ‘‘drug ma-

fias’’ may represent the center ofthe wide spectrum ofpolice control

on the part ofthe imperial power, this activity is nonetheless normal,

that is, systemic. The ‘‘just war’’ is effectively supported by the

‘‘moral police,’’ just as the validity ofimperial right and its legitimate

38

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

functioning is supported by the necessary and continuous exercise

ofpolice power.

It is clear that international or supranational courts are con-

strained to follow this lead. Armies and police anticipate the courts

and preconstitute the rules ofjustice that the courts must then apply.

The intensity ofthe moral principles to which the construction of

the new world order is entrusted cannot change the fact that this

is really an inversion ofthe conventional order ofconstitutional

logic. The active parties supporting the imperial constitution are

confident that when the construction ofEmpire is sufficiently ad-

vanced, the courts will be able to assume their leading role in the

definition ofjustice. For now, however, although international

courts do not have much power, public displays oftheir activities

are still very important. Eventually a new judicial function must be

formed that is adequate to the constitution of Empire. Courts will

have to be transformed gradually from an organ that simply decrees

sentences against the vanquished to a judicial body or system of

bodies that dictate and sanction the interrelation among the moral

order, the exercise ofpolice action, and the mechanism legitimating

imperial sovereignty.34

This kind ofcontinual intervention, then, which is both moral

and military, is really the logical form of the exercise of force that

follows from a paradigm of legitimation based on a state of perma-

nent exception and police action. Interventions are always excep-

tional even though they arise continually; they take the form of

police actions because they are aimed at maintaining an internal

order. In this way intervention is an effective mechanism that

through police deployments contributes directly to the construction

ofthe moral, normative, and institutional order ofEmpire.

Royal Prerogatives

What were traditionally called the royal prerogatives ofsovereignty

seem in effect to be repeated and even substantially renewed in the

construction ofEmpire. Ifwe were to remain within the conceptual

framework of classic domestic and international law, we might be

B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N

39

tempted to say that a supranational quasi-state is being formed. That

does not seem to us, however, an accurate characterization ofthe

situation. When the royal prerogatives ofmodern sovereignty re-

appear in Empire, they take on a completely different form. For

example, the sovereign function of deploying military forces was

carried out by the modern nation-states and is now conducted by

Empire, but, as we have seen, the justification for such deployments

now rests on a state ofpermanent exception, and the deployments

themselves take the form of police actions. Other royal prerogatives

such as carrying out justice and imposing taxes also have the same

kind ofliminal existence. We have already discussed the marginal

position ofjudicial authority in the constitutive process ofEmpire,

and one could also argue that imposing taxes occupies a marginal

position in that it is increasingly linked to specific and local urgen-

cies. In effect, one might say that the sovereignty of Empire itself

is realized at the margins, where borders are flexible and identities

are hybrid and fluid. It would be difficult to say which is more

important to Empire, the center or the margins. In fact, center

and margin seem continually to be shifting positions, fleeing any

determinate locations. We could even say that the process itselfis

virtual and that its power resides in the power ofthe virtual.

One could nonetheless object at this point that even while

being virtual and acting at the margins, the process ofconstructing

imperial sovereignty is in many respects very real! We certainly do

not mean to deny that fact. Our claim, rather, is that we are dealing

here with a special kind ofsovereignty—a discontinuous form of

sovereignty that should be considered liminal or marginal insofar

as it acts ‘‘in the final instance,’’ a sovereignty that locates its only

point ofreference in the definitive absoluteness ofthe power that

it can exercise. Empire thus appears in the form of a very high tech

machine: it is virtual, built to control the marginal event, and

organized to dominate and when necessary intervene in the break-

downs ofthe system (in line with the most advanced technologies

ofrobotic production). The virtuality and discontinuity ofimperial

sovereignty, however, do not minimize the effectiveness of its force;

40

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

on the contrary, those very characteristics serve to reinforce its

apparatus, demonstrating its effectiveness in the contemporary his-

torical context and its legitimate force to resolve world problems

in the final instance.

We are now in the position to address the question whether,

on the basis ofthese new biopolitical premises, the figure and the

life of Empire can today be grasped in terms of a juridical model.

We have already seen that this juridical model cannot be constituted

by the existing structures ofinternational law, even when under-

stood in terms ofthe most advanced developments ofthe United

Nations and the other great international organizations. Their elabo-

rations ofan international order could at the most be recognized

as a process oftransition toward the new imperial power. The

constitution ofEmpire is being formed neither on the basis ofany

contractual or treaty-based mechanism nor through any federative

source. The source ofimperial normativity is born ofa new machine,

a new economic-industrial-communicative machine—in short, a

globalized biopolitical machine. It thus seems clear that we must

look at something other than what has up until now constituted

the bases ofinternational order, something that does not rely on

the form of right that, in the most diverse traditions, was grounded

in the modern system ofsovereign nation-states. The impossibility,

however, ofgrasping the genesis ofEmpire and its virtual figure

with any ofthe old instruments ofjuridical theory, which were

deployed in the realist, institutionalist, positivist, or natural right

frameworks, should not force us to accept a cynical framework of

pure force or some such Machiavellian position. In the genesis of

Empire there is indeed a rationality at work that can be recognized

not so much in terms ofthe juridical tradition but more clearly in

the often hidden history of industrial management and the political

uses oftechnology. (We should not forget here too that proceeding

along these lines will reveal the fabric of class struggle and its

institutional effects, but we will treat that issue in the next section.)

This is a rationality that situates us at the heart ofbiopolitics and

biopolitical technologies.

B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N

41

Ifwe wanted to take up again Max Weber’s famous three-

part formula of the forms of legitimation of power, the qualitative

leap that Empire introduces into the definition would consist in

the unf

oreseeable mixture of(1) elements typical oftraditional

power, (2) an extension ofbureaucratic power that is adapted physi-

ologically to the biopolitical context, and (3) a rationality defined

by the ‘‘event’’ and by ‘‘charisma’’ that rises up as a power ofthe

singularization of the whole and of the effectiveness of imperial

interventions.35 The logic that characterizes this neo-Weberian per-

spective would be functional rather than mathematical, and rhizo-

matic and undulatory rather than inductive or deductive. It would

deal with the management oflinguistic sequences as sets ofmachinic

sequences ofdenotation and at the same time ofcreative, colloquial,

and irreducible innovation.

The fundamental object that the imperial relations of power

interpret is the productive force of the system, the new biopolitical

economic and institutional system. The imperial order is formed

not only on the basis ofits powers ofaccumulation and global

extension, but also on the basis ofits capacity to develop itselfmore

deeply, to be reborn, and to extend itselfthroughout the biopolitical

latticework ofworld society. The absoluteness ofimperial power

is the complementary term to its complete immanence to the onto-

logical machine ofproduction and reproduction, and thus to the

biopolitical context. Perhaps, finally, this cannot be represented by

a juridical order, but it nonetheless is an order, an order defined

by its virtuality, its dynamism, and its functional inconclusiveness.

The fundamental norm of legitimation will thus be established in

the depths ofthe machine, at the heart ofsocial production. Social

production and juridical legitimation should not be conceived as

primary and secondary forces nor as elements of the base and super-

structure, but should be understood rather in a state ofabsolute

parallelism and intermixture, coextensive throughout biopolitical

society. In Empire and its regime ofbiopower, economic produc-

tion and political constitution tend increasingly to coincide.

1.3

A L T E R N A T I V E S W I T H I N E M P I R E

Once embodied in the power ofthe workers’ councils, which must

internationally supplant all other power, the proletarian movement

becomes its own product, and this product is the producer itself.

The producer is its own end. Only then is the spectacular negation

oflife negated in turn.

Guy Debord

Now is the time offurnaces, and only light should be seen.

Jose´ Martı´

Flirting with Hegel, one could say that the construction

ofEmpire is good in itself but not for itself. 1 One ofthe most powerful operations ofthe modern imperialist power structures was to drive

wedges among the masses ofthe globe, dividing them into opposing

camps, or really a myriad ofconflicting parties. Segments ofthe

proletariat in the dominant countries were even led to believe that

their interests were tied exclusively to their national identity and

imperial destiny. The most significant instances ofrevolt and revolu-

tion against these modern power structures therefore were those

that posed the struggle against exploitation together with the struggle

against nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism. In these events

humanity appeared for a magical moment to be united by a common

desire for liberation, and we seemed to catch a glimpse of a future

when the modern mechanisms ofdomination would once and for

all be destroyed. The revolting masses, their desire for liberation,

their experiments to construct alternatives, and their instances of

A L T E R N A T I V E S W I T H I N E M P I R E

43

constituent power have all at their best moments pointed toward

the internationalization and globalization ofrelationships, beyond

the divisions ofnational, colonial, and imperialist rule. In our time

this desire that was set in motion by the multitude has been addressed

(in a strange and perverted but nonetheless real way) by the construc-

tion ofEmpire. One might even say that the construction ofEmpire

and its global networks is a response to the various struggles against the modern machines ofpower, and specifically to class struggle

driven by the multitude’s desire for liberation. The multitude called

Empire into being.

Saying that Empire is good in itself, however, does not mean

that it is good for itself. Although Empire may have played a role in putting an end to colonialism and imperialism, it nonetheless

constructs its own relationships ofpower based on exploitation that

are in many respects more brutal than those it destroyed. The end

ofthe dialectic ofmodernity has not resulted in the end ofthe

dialectic ofexploitation. Today nearly all ofhumanity is to some

degree absorbed within or subordinated to the networks ofcapitalist

exploitation. We see now an ever more extreme separation ofa

small minority that controls enormous wealth from multitudes that

live in poverty at the limit ofpowerlessness. The geographical and

racial lines ofoppression and exploitation that were established

during the era ofcolonialism and imperialism have in many respects

not declined but instead increased exponentially.

Despite recognizing all this, we insist on asserting that the

construction ofEmpire is a step forward in order to do away with

any nostalgia for the power structures that preceded it and refuse

any political strategy that involves returning to that old arrangement,

such as trying to resurrect the nation-state to protect against global

capital. We claim that Empire is better in the same way that Marx

insists that capitalism is better than the forms of society and modes

ofproduction that came before it. Marx’s view is grounded on a

healthy and lucid disgust for the parochial and rigid hierarchies that

preceded capitalist society as well as on a recognition that the

potential for liberation is increased in the new situation. In the

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T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

same way today we can see that Empire does away with the cruel

regimes ofmodern power and also increases the potential for liber-

ation.

We are well aware that in affirming this thesis we are swimming

against the current of our friends and comrades on the Left. In the

long decades ofthe current crisis ofthe communist, socialist, and

liberal Left that has followed the 1960s, a large portion of critical

thought, both in the dominant countries ofcapitalist development

and in the subordinated ones, has sought to recompose sites of

resistance that are founded on the identities of social subjects or

national and regional groups, often grounding political analysis on

the localization of struggles. Such arguments are sometimes constructed in terms of‘‘place-based’’ movements or politics, in which the

boundaries ofplace (conceived either as identity or as territory) are

posed against the undifferentiated and homogeneous space of global

networks.2 At other times such political arguments draw on the

long tradition ofLeftist nationalism in which (in the best cases) the

nation is conceived as the primary mechanism ofdefense against the

domination offoreign and/or global capital.3 Today the operative

syllogism at the heart ofthe various forms of‘‘local’’ Leftist strategy

seems to be entirely reactive: Ifcapitalist domination is becoming

ever more global, then our resistances to it must defend the local

and construct barriers to capital’s accelerating flows. From this per-

spective, the real globalization ofcapital and the constitution of

Empire must be considered signs ofdispossession and defeat.

We maintain, however, that today this localist position, al-

though we admire and respect the spirit ofsome ofits proponents,

is both false and damaging. It is false first of all because the problem

is poorly posed. In many characterizations the problem rests on a

false dichotomy between the global and the local, assuming that

the global entails homogenization and undifferentiated identity

whereas the local preserves heterogeneity and difference. Often

implicit in such arguments is the assumption that the differences of

the local are in some sense natural, or at least that their origin

remains beyond question. Local differences preexist the present

A L T E R N A T I V E S W I T H I N E M P I R E

45

scene and must be defended or protected against the intrusion of

globalization. It should come as no surprise, given such assumptions,

that many defenses ofthe local adopt the terminology oftraditional

ecology or even identify this ‘‘local’’ political project with the de-

fense of nature and biodiversity. This view can easily devolve into

a kind ofprimordialism that fixes and romanticizes social relations

and identities. What needs to be addressed, instead, is precisely the

production of locality, that is, the social machines that create and re-create the identities and differences that are understood as the local.4

The differences of locality are neither preexisting nor natural but

rather effects of a regime of production. Globality similarly should

not be understood in terms ofcultural, political, or economic homog-

enization. Globalization, like localization, should be understood instead as a regime ofthe production ofidentity and difference, or

really ofhomogenization and heterogenization. The better frame-

work, then, to designate the distinction between the global and

the local might refer to different networks of flows and obstacles

in which the local moment or perspective gives priority to the

reterritorializing barriers or boundaries and the global moment privi-

leges the mobility ofdeterritorializing flows. It is false, in any case,

to claim that we can (re)establish local identities that are in some

sense outside and protected against the global flows ofcapital and Empire.

This Leftist strategy of resistance to globalization and defense

oflocality is also damaging because in many cases what appear as

local identities are not autonomous or self-determining but actually

feed into and support the development of the capitalist imperial

machine. The globalization or deterritorialization operated by the

imperial machine is not in fact opposed to localization or reterritori-

alization, but rather sets in play mobile and modulating circuits of

differentiation and identification. The strategy of local resistance

misidentifies and thus masks the enemy. We are by no means

opposed to the globalization ofrelationships as such—in fact, as

we said, the strongest forces of Leftist internationalism have effec-

tively led this process. The enemy, rather, is a specific regime of

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T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

global relations that we call Empire. More important, this strategy

ofdefending the local is damaging because it obscures and even

negates the real alternatives and the potentials for liberation that

exist within Empire. We should be done once and for all with the

search for an outside, a standpoint that imagines a purity for our

politics. It is better both theoretically and practically to enter the

terrain ofEmpire and confront its homogenizing and heterogenizing

flows in all their complexity, grounding our analysis in the power

ofthe global multitude.

TheOntological Drama of theRes Gestae

The legacy ofmodernity is a legacy offratricidal wars, devastating

‘‘development,’’ cruel ‘‘civilization,’’ and previously unimagined vi-

olence. Erich Auerbach once wrote that tragedy is the only genre

that can properly claim realism in Western literature, and perhaps

this is true precisely because ofthe tragedy Western modernity has

imposed on the world.5 Concentration camps, nuclear weapons,

genocidal wars, slavery, apartheid: it is not difficult to enumerate

the various scenes ofthe tragedy. By insisting on the tragic character

ofmodernity, however, we certainly do not mean to follow the

‘‘tragic’’ philosophers ofEurope, from Schopenhauer to Heidegger,

who turn these real destructions into metaphysical narratives about

the negativity ofbeing, as ifthese actual tragedies were merely an

illusion, or rather as ifthey were our ultimate destiny! Modern

negativity is located not in any transcendent realm but in the hard

reality before us: the fields of patriotic battles in the First and Second

World Wars, from the killing fields at Verdun to the Nazi furnaces

and the swift annihilation of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

the carpet bombing ofVietnam and Cambodia, the massacres from

Se´tifand Soweto to Sabra and Shatila, and the list goes on and on.

There is no Job who can sustain such suffering! (And anyone who

starts compiling such a list quickly realizes how inadequate it is to

the quantity and quality ofthe tragedies.) Well, if that modernity

has come to an end, and ifthe modern nation-state that served as

the ineluctable condition for imperialist domination and innumera-

ble wars is disappearing from the world scene, then good riddance!

A L T E R N A T I V E S W I T H I N E M P I R E

47

We must cleanse ourselves ofany misplaced nostalgia for the belle

e´poque ofthat modernity.

We cannot be satisfied, however, with that political condem-

nation ofmodern power that relies on the historia rerum gestarum,

the objective history we have inherited. We need to consider also

the power ofthe res gestae, the power ofthe multitude to make

history that continues and is reconfigured today within Empire. It is a question oftransforming a necessity imposed on the multitude—a

necessity that was to a certain extent solicited by the multitude

itselfthroughout modernity as a line offlight from localized misery

and exploitation—into a condition ofpossibility ofliberation, a

new possibility on this new terrain ofhumanity.

This is when the ontological drama begins, when the curtain

goes up on a scene in which the development ofEmpire becomes

its own critique and its process ofconstruction becomes the process

ofits overturning. This drama is ontological in the sense that here,

in these processes, being is produced and reproduced. This drama

will have to be clarified and articulated much further as our study

proceeds, but we should insist right from the outset that this is not

simply another variant ofdialectical enlightenment. We are not

proposing the umpteenth version ofthe inevitable passage through

purgatory (here in the guise ofthe new imperial machine) in order

to offer a glimmer of hope for radiant futures. We are not repeating

the schema ofan ideal teleology that justifies any passage in the

name ofa promised end. On the contrary, our reasoning here is

based on two methodological approaches that are intended to be

nondialectical and absolutely immanent: the first is critical and deconstructive, aiming to subvert the hegemonic languages and social

structures and thereby reveal an alternative ontological basis that

resides in the creative and productive practices ofthe multitude;

the second is constructive and ethico-political, seeking to lead the processes ofthe production ofsubjectivity toward the constitution of

an effective social, political alternative, a new constituent power.6

Our critical approach addresses the need for a real ideological

and material deconstruction ofthe imperial order. In the postmod-

ern world, the ruling spectacle ofEmpire is constructed through a

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T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

variety ofself-legitimating discourses and structures. Long ago au-

thors as diverse as Lenin, Horkheimer and Adorno, and Debord

recognized this spectacle as the destiny oftriumphant capitalism.

Despite their important differences, such authors offer us real antici-

pations ofthe path ofcapitalist development.7 Our deconstruction

ofthis spectacle cannot be textual alone, but must seek continually

to focus its powers on the nature of events and the real determina-

tions ofthe imperial processes in motion today. The critical approach

is thus intended to bring to light the contradictions, cycles, and

crises ofthe process because in each ofthese moments the imagined

necessity ofthe historical development can open toward alternative

possibilities. In other words, the deconstruction ofthe historia rerum

gestarum, ofthe spectral reign ofglobalized capitalism, reveals the possibility ofalternative social organizations. This is perhaps as far

as we can go with the methodological scaffolding of a critical

and materialist deconstructionism—but this is already an enormous

contribution!8

This is where the first methodological approach has to pass the

baton to the second, the constructive and ethico-political approach.

Here we must delve into the ontological substrate ofthe concrete

alternatives continually pushed forward by the res gestae, the subjective forces acting in the historical context. What appears here is

not a new rationality but a new scenario of different rational acts—a

horizon ofactivities, resistances, wills, and desires that refuse the

hegemonic order, propose lines offlight, and forge alternative con-

stitutive itineraries. This real substrate, open to critique, revised by

the ethico-political approach, represents the real ontological referent

ofphilosophy, or really the field proper to a philosophy ofliberation.

This approach breaks methodologically with every philosophy of

history insofar as it refuses any deterministic conception of historical

development and any ‘‘rational’’ celebration ofthe result. It demon-

strates, on the contrary, how the historical event resides in potential-

ity. ‘‘It is not the two that recompose in one, but the one that

opens into two,’’ according to the beautiful anti-Confucian (and

anti-Platonic) formula of the Chinese revolutionaries.9 Philosophy

A L T E R N A T I V E S W I T H I N E M P I R E

49

is not the owl ofMinerva that takes flight after history has been

realized in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy

is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to

the event.

Refrains of the ‘‘Internationale’’

There was a time, not so long ago, when internationalism was a

key component ofproletarian struggles and progressive politics in

general. ‘‘The proletariat has no country,’’ or better, ‘‘the country

ofthe proletariat is the entire world.’’ The ‘‘Internationale’’ was the

hymn ofrevolutionaries, the song ofutopian futures. We should

note that the utopia expressed in these slogans is in fact not really

internationalist, ifby internationalist we understand a kind ofcon-

sensus among the various national identities that preserves their

differences but negotiates some limited agreement. Rather, proletar-

ian internationalism was antinationalist, and hence supranational

and global. Workers ofthe world unite!—not on the basis of

national identities but directly through common needs and desires,

without regard to borders and boundaries.

Internationalism was the will ofan active mass subject that

recognized that the nation-states were key agents ofcapitalist exploi-

tation and that the multitude was continually drafted to fight their

senseless wars—in short, that the nation-state was a political form

whose contradictions could not be subsumed and sublimated but

only destroyed. International solidarity was really a project for the

destruction ofthe nation-state and the construction ofa new global

community. This proletarian program stood behind the often am-

biguous tactical definitions that socialist and communist parties pro-

duced during the century oftheir hegemony over the proletariat.10

Ifthe nation-state was a central link in the chain ofdomination

and thus had to be destroyed, then the national proletariat had as a primary task destroying itselfinsofar as it was defined by the nation

and thus bringing international solidarity out ofthe prison in which

it had been trapped. International solidarity had to be recognized

not as an act ofcharity or altruism for the good ofothers, a noble

50

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

sacrifice for another national working class, but rather as proper to

and inseparable from each national proletariat’s own desire and

struggle for liberation. Proletarian internationalism constructed a

paradoxical and powerful political machine that pushed continually

beyond the boundaries and hierarchies ofthe nation-states and

posed utopian futures only on the global terrain.

Today we should all clearly recognize that the time ofsuch

proletarian internationalism is over. That does not negate the fact,

however, that the concept ofinternationalism really lived among

the masses and deposited a kind ofgeological stratum ofsuffering

and desire, a memory ofvictories and defeats, a residue ofideological

tensions and needs. Furthermore, the proletariat does in fact find

itselftoday not just international but (at least tendentially) global.

One might be tempted to say that proletarian internationalism actu-

ally ‘‘won’’ in light ofthe fact that the powers ofnation-states have

declined in the recent passage toward globalization and Empire,

but that would be a strange and ironic notion ofvictory. It is more

accurate to say, following the William Morris quotation that serves

as one of the epigraphs for this book, that what they fought for

came about despite their defeat.

The practice ofproletarian internationalism was expressed most

clearly in the international cycles ofstruggles. In this framework

the (national) general strike and insurrection against the (nation-)

state were only really conceivable as elements ofcommunication

among struggles and processes ofliberation on the internationalist

terrain. From Berlin to Moscow, from Paris to New Delhi, from

Algiers to Hanoi, from Shanghai to Jakarta, from Havana to New

York, struggles resonated with one another throughout the nine-

teenth and twentieth centuries. A cycle was constructed as news

ofa revolt was communicated and applied in each new context,

just as in an earlier era merchant ships carried the news ofslave revolt

from island to island around the Caribbean, igniting a stubborn string

offires that could not be quenched. For a cycle to f

orm, the

recipients ofthe news must be able to ‘‘translate’’ the events into

their own language, recognize the struggles as their own, and thus

A L T E R N A T I V E S W I T H I N E M P I R E

51

add a link to the chain. In some cases this ‘‘translation’’ is rather

elaborate: how Chinese intellectuals at the turn ofthe twentieth

century, for example, could hear of the anticolonial struggles in the

Philippines and Cuba and translate them into the terms oftheir

own revolutionary projects. In other cases it is much more direct:

how the factory council movement in Turin, Italy, was immediately

inspired by the news ofthe Bolshevik victory in Russia. Rather

than thinking ofthe struggles as relating to one another like links

in a chain, it might be better to conceive ofthem as communicating

like a virus that modulates its form to find in each context an

adequate host.

It would not be hard to map the periods ofextreme intensity

ofthese cycles. A first wave might be seen as beginning after 1848

with the political agitation ofthe First International, continuing in

the 1880s and 1890s with the formation of socialist political and

trade union organizations, and then rising to a peak after the Russian

revolution of1905 and the first international cycle ofanti-imperialist

struggles.11 A second wave arose after the Soviet revolution of 1917,

which was followed by an international progression of struggles

that could only be contained by fascisms on one side and reabsorbed

by the New Deal and antifascist fronts on the other. And finally there

was the wave ofstruggles that began with the Chinese revolution

and proceeded through the African and Latin American liberation

struggles to the explosions ofthe 1960s throughout the world.

These international cycles ofstruggles were the real motor

that drove the development ofthe institutions ofcapital and that

drove it in a process ofref

orm and restructuring.12 Proletarian,

anticolonial, and anti-imperialist internationalism, the struggle for

communism, which lived in all the most powerful insurrectional

events ofthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anticipated and

prefigured the processes ofthe globalization ofcapital and the

formation of Empire. In this way the formation of Empire is a

response to proletarian internationalism. There is nothing dialectical or teleological about this anticipation and prefiguration ofcapitalist

development by the mass struggles. On the contrary, the struggles

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T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

themselves are demonstrations ofthe creativity ofdesire, utopias

oflived experience, the workings ofhistoricity as potentiality—in

short, the struggles are the naked reality ofthe res gestae. A teleology of sorts is constructed only after the fact, post festum.

The struggles that preceded and prefigured globalization were

expressions ofthe force ofliving labor, which sought to liberate

itselffrom the rigid territorializing regimes imposed on it. As it

contests the dead labor accumulated against it, living labor always

seeks to break the fixed territorializing structures, the national orga-

nizations, and the political figures that keep it prisoner. With the

force of living labor, its restless activity, and its deterritorializing

desire, this process ofrupture throws open all the windows of

history. When one adopts the perspective ofthe activity ofthe

multitude, its production ofsubjectivity and desire, one can recog-

nize how globalization, insofar as it operates a real deterritorialization

ofthe previous structures ofexploitation and control, is really a

condition ofthe liberation ofthe multitude. But how can this

potential for liberation be realized today? Does that same uncontain-

able desire for freedom that broke and buried the nation-state and

that determined the transition toward Empire still live beneath

the ashes ofthe present, the ashes ofthe fire that consumed the

internationalist proletarian subject that was centered on the industrial

working class? What has come to stand in the place ofthat subject?

In what sense can we say that the ontological rooting ofa new

multitude has come to be a positive or alternative actor in the

articulation ofglobalization?

TheMoleand theSnake

We need to recognize that the very subject oflabor and revolt

has changed profoundly. The composition of the proletariat has

transformed and thus our understanding of it must too. In conceptual

terms we understand proletariat as a broad category that includes all those whose labor is directly or indirectly exploited by and subjected

to capitalist norms ofproduction and reproduction.13 In a previous

era the category ofthe proletariat centered on and was at times

A L T E R N A T I V E S W I T H I N E M P I R E

53

effectively subsumed under the industrial working class, whose paradigmatic figure was the male mass factory worker. That industrial

working class was often accorded the leading role over other figures

oflabor (such as peasant labor and reproductive labor) in both

economic analyses and political movements. Today that working

class has all but disappeared from view. It has not ceased to exist,

but it has been displaced from its privileged position in the capitalist

economy and its hegemonic position in the class composition of

the proletariat. The proletariat is not what it used to be, but that

does not mean it has vanished. It means, rather, that we are faced

once again with the analytical task ofunderstanding the new compo-

sition ofthe proletariat as a class.

The fact that under the category of proletariat we understand

all those exploited by and subject to capitalist domination should not indicate that the proletariat is a homogeneous or undifferentiated

unit. It is indeed cut through in various directions by differences

and stratifications. Some labor is waged, some is not; some labor

is restricted to within the factory walls, some is dispersed across the

unbounded social terrain; some labor is limited to eight hours a

day and forty hours a week, some expands to fill the entire time

oflife; some labor is accorded a minimal value, some is exalted to

the pinnacle ofthe capitalist economy. We will argue (in Section

3.4) that among the various figures ofproduction active today,

the figure ofimmaterial labor power (involved in communication,

cooperation, and the production and reproduction of affects) occu-

pies an increasingly central position in both the schema ofcapitalist

production and the composition ofthe proletariat. Our point here

is that all ofthese diverse forms oflabor are in some way subject

to capitalist discipline and capitalist relations ofproduction. This

fact of being within capital and sustaining capital is what defines

the proletariat as a class.

We need to look more concretely at the form of the struggles

in which this new proletariat expresses its desires and needs. In the

last half-century, and in particular in the two decades that stretched

from 1968 to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the restructuring and global

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T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

expansion ofcapitalist production have been accompanied by a

transformation ofproletarian struggles. As we said, the figure ofan

international cycle ofstruggles based on the communication and

translation ofthe common desires oflabor in revolt seems no longer

to exist. The fact that the cycle as the specific form of the assemblage

ofstruggles has vanished, however, does not simply open up to an

abyss. On the contrary, we can recognize powerful events on the

world scene that reveal the trace ofthe multitude’s refusal ofexploi-

tation and that signal a new kind ofproletarian solidarity and mili-

tancy.

Consider the most radical and powerful struggles of the final

years ofthe twentieth century: the Tiananmen Square events in

1989, the Intifada against Israeli state authority, the May 1992 revolt

in Los Angeles, the uprising in Chiapas that began in 1994, and

the series ofstrikes that paralyzed France in December 1995, and

those that crippled South Korea in 1996. Each ofthese struggles

was specific and based on immediate regional concerns in such a

way that they could in no respect be linked together as a globally

expanding chain ofrevolt. None ofthese events inspired a cycle

ofstruggles, because the desires and needs they expressed could not

be translated into different contexts. In other words, (potential)

revolutionaries in other parts ofthe world did not hear ofthe

events in Beijing, Nablus, Los Angeles, Chiapas, Paris, or Seoul

and immediately recognize them as their own struggles. Further-

more, these struggles not only fail to communicate to other contexts

but also lack even a local communication, and thus often have a

very briefduration where they are born, burning out in a flash. This

is certainly one ofthe central and most urgent political paradoxes of

our time: in our much celebrated age ofcommunication, struggles

have become all but incommunicable.

This paradox ofincommunicability makes it extremely difficult

to grasp and express the new power posed by the struggles that

have emerged. We ought to be able to recognize that what the

struggles have lost in extension, duration, and communicability they

have gained in intensity. We ought to be able to recognize that

A L T E R N A T I V E S W I T H I N E M P I R E

55

although all ofthese struggles f

ocused on their own local and

immediate circumstances, they all nonetheless posed problems of

supranational relevance, problems that are proper to the new figure

ofimperial capitalist regulation. In Los Angeles, for example, the

riots were fueled by local racial antagonisms and patterns of social

and economic exclusion that are in many respects particular to

that (post-)urban territory, but the events were also immediately

catapulted to a general level insofar as they expressed a refusal of

the post-Fordist regime ofsocial control. Like the Intifada in certain

respects, the Los Angeles riots demonstrated how the decline of

Fordist bargaining regimes and mechanisms ofsocial mediation has

made the management ofracially and socially diverse metropolitan

territories and populations so precarious. The looting ofcommodi-

ties and burning ofproperty were not just metaphors but the real

global condition ofthe mobility and volatility ofpost-Fordist social

mediations.14 In Chiapas, too, the insurrection focused primarily

on local concerns: problems ofexclusion and lack ofrepresentation

specific to Mexican society and the Mexican state, which have also

to a limited degree long been common to the racial hierarchies

throughout much ofLatin American. The Zapatista rebellion, how-

ever, was also immediately a struggle against the social regime

imposed by NAFTA and more generally the systematic exclusion

and subordination in the regional construction ofthe world mar-

ket.15 Finally, like those in Seoul, the massive strikes in Paris and

throughout France in late 1995 were aimed at specific local and

national labor issues (such as pensions, wages, and unemployment),

but the struggle was also immediately recognized as a clear contesta-

tion ofthe new social and economic construction ofEurope. The

French strikes called above all for a new notion of the public, a

new construction ofpublic space against the neoliberal mechanisms

ofprivatization that accompany more or less everywhere the project

ofcapitalist globalization.16 Perhaps precisely because all these strug-

gles are incommunicable and thus blocked from traveling horizon-

tally in the form of a cycle, they are forced instead to leap vertically

and touch immediately on the global level.

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We ought to be able to recognize that this is not the appearance

ofa new cycle ofinternationalist struggles, but rather the emergence

ofa new quality ofsocial movements. We ought to be able to

recognize, in other words, the fundamentally new characteristics

these struggles all present, despite their radical diversity. First, each

struggle, though firmly rooted in local conditions, leaps immediately

to the global level and attacks the imperial constitution in its general-

ity. Second, all the struggles destroy the traditional distinction be-

tween economic and political struggles. The struggles are at once

economic, political, and cultural—and hence they are biopolitical

struggles, struggles over the form of life. They are constituent strug-

gles, creating new public spaces and new forms of community.

We ought to be able to recognize all this, but it is not that

easy. We must admit, in fact, that even when trying to individuate

the real novelty ofthese situations, we are hampered by the nagging

impression that these struggles are always already old, outdated, and

anachronistic. The struggles at Tiananmen Square spoke a language

ofdemocracy that seemed long out offashion; the guitars, head-

bands, tents, and slogans all looked like a weak echo ofBerkeley

in the 1960s. The Los Angeles riots, too, seemed like an aftershock

ofthe earthquake ofracial conflicts that shook the United States

in the 1960s. The strikes in Paris and Seoul seemed to take us back

to the era ofthe mass factory worker, as ifthey were the last gasp

ofa dying working class. All these struggles, which pose really

new elements, appear from the beginning to be already old and

outdated—precisely because they cannot communicate, because

their languages cannot be translated. The struggles do not communi-

cate despite their being hypermediatized, on television, the Internet,

and every other imaginable medium. Once again we are confronted

by the paradox ofincommunicability.

We can certainly recognize real obstacles that block the com-

munication ofstruggles. One such obstacle is the absence ofa

recognition ofa common enemy against which the struggles are

directed. Beijing, Los Angeles, Nablus, Chiapas, Paris, Seoul: the

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57

the global order ofEmpire and seek a real alternative. Clarifying the

nature ofthe common enemy is thus an essential political task. A

second obstacle, which is really corollary to the first, is that there

is no common language ofstruggles that could ‘‘translate’’ the partic-

ular language ofeach into a cosmopolitan language. Struggles in

other parts ofthe world and even our own struggles seem to be

written in an incomprehensible foreign language. This too points

toward an important political task: to construct a new common

language that facilitates communication, as the languages of anti-

imperialism and proletarian internationalism did for the struggles

ofa previous era. Perhaps this needs to be a new type ofcommunica-

tion that functions not on the basis of resemblances but on the basis

of differences: a communication of singularities.

Recognizing a common enemy and inventing a common

language ofstruggles are certainly important political tasks, and we

will advance them as far as we can in this book, but our intuition

tells us that this line ofanalysis finally fails to grasp the real potential presented by the new struggles. Our intuition tells us, in other

words, that the model ofthe horizontal articulation ofstruggles in

a cycle is no longer adequate for recognizing the way in which

contemporary struggles achieve global significance. Such a model

in fact blinds us to their real new potential.

Marx tried to understand the continuity ofthe cycle ofprole-

tarian struggles that were emerging in nineteenth-century Europe

in terms ofa mole and its subterranean tunnels. Marx’s mole would

surface in times of open class conflict and then retreat underground

again—not to hibernate passively but to burrow its tunnels, moving

along with the times, pushing forward with history so that when

the time was right (1830, 1848, 1870), it would spring to the surface

again. ‘‘Well grubbed old mole!’’17 Well, we suspect that Marx’s old

mole has finally died. It seems to us, in fact, that in the contemporary

passage to Empire, the structured tunnels ofthe mole have been

replaced by the infinite undulations ofthe snake.18 The depths

ofthe modern world and its subterranean passageways have in

postmodernity all become superficial. Today’s struggles slither si-

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lently across these superficial, imperial landscapes. Perhaps the in-

communicability ofstruggles, the lack ofwell-structured, communi-

cating tunnels, is in fact a strength rather than a weakness—a strength

because all ofthe movements are immediately subversive in them-

selves and do not wait on any sort ofexternal aid or extension to

guarantee their effectiveness. Perhaps the more capital extends its

global networks ofproduction and control, the more powerful any

singular point ofrevolt can be. Simply by focusing their own powers,

concentrating their energies in a tense and compact coil, these

serpentine struggles strike directly at the highest articulations of

imperial order. Empire presents a superficial world, the virtual center

ofwhich can be accessed immediately from any point across the

surface. If these points were to constitute something like a new cycle

ofstruggles, it would be a cycle defined not by the communicative

extension ofthe struggles but rather by their singular emergence,

by the intensity that characterizes them one by one. In short, this

new phase is defined by the fact that these struggles do not link

horizontally, but each one leaps vertically, directly to the virtual

center ofEmpire.

From the point ofview ofthe revolutionary tradition, one

might object that the tactical successes ofrevolutionary actions

in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were all characterized

precisely by the capacity to blast open the weakest link ofthe imperialist chain, that this is the ABC ofrevolutionary dialectics, and thus

it would seem today that the situation is not very promising. It is

certainly true that the serpentine struggles we are witnessing today

do not provide any clear revolutionary tactics, or maybe they are

completely incomprehensible from the point ofview oftactics.

Faced as we are with a series ofintense subversive social movements

that attack the highest levels ofimperial organization, however, it

may be no longer useful to insist on the old distinction between

strategy and tactics. In the constitution ofEmpire there is no longer

an ‘‘outside’’ to power and thus no longer weak links—ifby weak

link we mean an external point where the articulations ofglobal

power are vulnerable.19 To achieve significance, every struggle must

attack at the heart ofEmpire, at its strength. That fact, however,

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59

does not give priority to any geographical regions, as ifonly social

movements in Washington, Geneva, or Tokyo could attack the

heart ofEmpire. On the contrary, the construction ofEmpire, and

the globalization ofeconomic and cultural relationships, means that

the virtual center ofEmpire can be attacked from any point. The

tactical preoccupations ofthe old revolutionary school are thus

completely irretrievable; the only strategy available to the struggles

is that ofa constituent counterpower that emerges from within

Empire.

Those who have difficulty accepting the novelty and revolu-

tionary potential ofthis situation from the perspective ofthe strug-

gles themselves might recognize it more easily from the perspective

ofimperial power, which is constrained to react to the struggles.

Even when these struggles become sites effectively closed to com-

munication, they are at the same time the maniacal focus of the

critical attention ofEmpire.20 They are educational lessons in the

classroom ofadministration and the chambers ofgovernment—

lessons that demand repressive instruments. The primary lesson is

that such events cannot be repeated ifthe processes ofcapitalist

globalization are to continue. These struggles, however, have their

own weight, their own specific intensity, and moreover they are

immanent to the procedures and developments ofimperial power.

They invest and sustain the processes ofglobalization themselves.

Imperial power whispers the names ofthe struggles in order to

charm them into passivity, to construct a mystified image ofthem,

but most important to discover which processes ofglobalization

are possible and which are not. In this contradictory and paradoxical

way the imperial processes ofglobalization assume these events,

recognizing them as both limits and opportunities to recalibrate

Empire’s own instruments. The processes ofglobalization would

not exist or would come to a halt ifthey were not continually both

frustrated and driven by these explosions of the multitude that touch

immediately on the highest levels ofimperial power.

Two-Headed Eagle

The emblem ofthe Austro-Hungarian Empire, an eagle with two

heads, might give an adequate initial representation ofthe contem-

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porary form of Empire. But whereas in the earlier emblem the

two heads looked outward to designate the relative autonomy and

peaceful coexistence of the respective territories, in our case the

two heads would have to be turned inward, each attacking the other.

The first head ofthe imperial eagle is a juridical structure and

a constituted power, constructed by the machine ofbiopolitical

command. The juridical process and the imperial machine are always

subject to contradictions and crises. Order and peace—the eminent

values that Empire proposes—can never be achieved but are none-

theless continually reproposed. The juridical process ofthe constitu-

tion ofEmpire lives this constant crisis that is considered (at least

by the most attentive theoreticians) the price ofits own develop-

ment. There is, however, always a surplus. Empire’s continual ex-

tension and constant pressure to adhere ever more closely to the

complexity and depth ofthe biopolitical realm force the imperial

machine when it seems to resolve one conflict continually to open

others. It tries to make them commensurate with its project, but

they emerge once again as incommensurable, with all the elements

ofthe new terrain mobile in space and flexible in time.

The other head ofthe imperial eagle is the plural multitude

ofproductive, creative subjectivities ofglobalization that have

learned to sail on this enormous sea. They are in perpetual motion

and they form constellations of singularities and events that impose

continual global reconfigurations on the system. This perpetual

motion can be geographical, but it can refer also to modulations

ofform and processes ofmixture and hybridization. The relationship

between ‘‘system’’ and ‘‘asystemic movements’’ cannot be flattened

onto any logic ofcorrespondence in this perpetually modulating

atopia.21 Even the asystemic elements produced by the new multi-

tude are in fact global forces that cannot have a commensurate

relationship, even an inverted one, with the system. Every insurrec-

tional event that erupts within the order ofthe imperial system

provokes a shock to the system in its entirety. From this perspective,

the institutional frame in which we live is characterized by its radical

contingency and precariousness, or really by the unforeseeability

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ofthe sequences of events—sequences that are always more briefor

more compact temporally and thus ever less controllable.22 It be-

comes ever more difficult for Empire to intervene in the unforesee-

able temporal sequences ofevents when they accelerate their tempo-

rality. The most relevant aspect that the struggles have demonstrated

may be sudden accelerations, often cumulative, that can become

virtually simultaneous, explosions that reveal a properly ontological

power and unforeseeable attack on the most central equilibria of

Empire.

Just as Empire in the spectacle ofits force continually deter-

mines systemic recompositions, so too new figures ofresistance are

composed through the sequences ofthe events ofstruggle. This is

another fundamental characteristic of the existence of the multitude

today, within Empire and against Empire. New figures ofstruggle and new subjectivities are produced in the conjuncture ofevents,

in the universal nomadism, in the general mixture and miscegena-

tion ofindividuals and populations, and in the technological meta-

morphoses ofthe imperial biopolitical machine. These new figures

and subjectivities are produced because, although the struggles are

indeed antisystemic, they are not posed merely against the imperial system—they are not simply negative forces. They also express,

nourish, and develop positively their own constituent projects; they

work toward the liberation ofliving labor, creating constellations

ofpowerful singularities. This constituent aspect ofthe movement

ofthe multitude, in its myriad faces, is really the positive terrain

ofthe historical construction ofEmpire. This is not a historicist

positivity but, on the contrary, a positivity ofthe res gestae ofthe multitude, an antagonistic and creative positivity. The deterritorializing power ofthe multitude is the productive force that sustains

Empire and at the same time the force that calls for and makes

necessary its destruction.

At this point, however, we should recognize that our metaphor

breaks down and that the two-headed eagle is not really an adequate

representation ofthe relationship between Empire and the multi-

tude, because it poses the two on the same level and thus does not

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recognize the real hierarchies and discontinuities that define their

relationship. From one perspective Empire stands clearly over the

multitude and subjects it to the rule ofits overarching machine, as

a new Leviathan. At the same time, however, from the perspective

ofsocial productivity and creativity, from what we have been calling

the ontological perspective, the hierarchy is reversed. The multi-

tude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire

is a mere apparatus ofcapture that lives only offthe vitality of

the multitude—as Marx would say, a vampire regime ofaccumu-

lated dead labor that survives only by sucking off the blood of

the living.

Once we adopt this ontological standpoint, we can return to

the juridical framework we investigated earlier and recognize the

reasons for the real deficit that plagues the transition from interna-

tional public law to the new public law ofEmpire, that is, the

new conception ofright that defines Empire. In other words, the

frustration and the continual instability suffered by imperial right

as it attempts to destroy the old values that served as reference points

for international public law (the nation-states, the international order

ofWestphalia, the United Nations, and so forth) along with the

so-called turbulence that accompanies this process are all symptoms

ofa properly ontological lack. As it constructs its supranational figure, power seems to be deprived ofany real ground beneath it, or rather,

it is lacking the motor that propels its movement. The rule ofthe

biopolitical imperial context should thus be seen in the first instance

as an empty machine, a spectacular machine, a parasitical machine.

A new sense ofbeing is imposed on the constitution ofEmpire

by the creative movement ofthe multitude, or really it is continually

present in this process as an alternative paradigm. It is internal to

Empire and pushes forward its constitution, not as a negative that

constructs a positive or any such dialectical resolution. Rather it

acts as an absolutely positive force that pushes the dominating power

toward an abstract and empty unification, to which it appears as

the distinct alternative. From this perspective, when the constituted

power ofEmpire appears merely as privation ofbeing and produc-

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tion, as a simple abstract and empty trace ofthe constituent power

ofthe multitude, then we will be able to recognize the real stand-

point ofour analysis. It is a standpoint that is both strategic and

tactical, when the two are no longer different.

P OLITICAL M ANIFESTO

In an extraordinary text written during his period of seclusion, Louis

Althusser reads Machiavelli and poses the quite reasonable question whether The Prince should be considered a revolutionary political manifesto.1 In order to address this question Althusser first tries to define the ‘‘manifesto form’’ as a specific genre of text by comparing the characteristics of The Prince with those of the paradigmatic political manifesto, Marx and Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party. He finds between these two documents an undeniable structural resemblance. In both texts the form of the argument consists of ‘‘a completely specific apparatus [ dispositif ] that establishes particular relationships between the discourse and its ‘object’ and between the discourse and its ‘subject’ ’’ (p. 55). In each case the political discourse is born from the productive relationship between the subject and the object, from the fact that this relationship is itself the very point of view of the res gestae, a self-constituting collective action aimed at its objective.

In short, clearly outside of the tradition of political science (either in its classical form, which was really the analysis of the forms of government, or in its contemporary form, which amounts to a science of management), the manifestos of Machiavelli and Marx-Engels define the political as the

movement of the multitude and they define the goal as the self-production of the subject. Here we have a materialist teleology.

Despite that important similarity, Althusser continues, the differences between the two manifestos are significant. The primary difference consists in the fact that, whereas in the Marx-Engels text the subject that defines the standpoint of the text (the modern proletariat) and the object (the communist party and communism) are conceived as co-present in such a

way that the growing organization of the former directly entails the creation of the latter, in the Machiavellian project there is an ineluctable distance between the subject (the multitude) and the object (the Prince and the free state). This distance leads Machiavelli in The Prince to search for a 64

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democratic apparatus capable of linking subject to object. In other words, whereas the Marx-Engels manifesto traces a linear and necessary causality, the Machiavellian text poses rather a project and a utopia. Althusser recognizes finally that both texts effectively bring the theoretical proposal to the level of praxis; both assume the present as empty for the future, ‘‘vide pour le futur’’ (p. 62), and in this open space they establish an immanent act of the subject that constitutes a new position of being.

Is this choice of the field of immanence, however, enough to define a

manifesto form that would be a mode of political discourse adequate to the insurgent subject of postmodernity? The postmodern situation is eminently paradoxical when it is considered from the biopolitical point of view—

understood, that is, as an uninterrupted circuit of life, production, and politics, globally dominated by the capitalist mode of production. On the one hand, in this situation all the forces of society tend to be activated as productive forces; but on the other hand, these same forces are submitted to a global domination that is continually more abstract and thus blind to the sense of the apparatuses of the reproduction of life. In postmodernity, the

‘‘end of history’’ is effectively imposed, but in such a way that at the same time paradoxically all the powers of humanity are called on to contribute to the global reproduction of labor, society, and life. In this framework, politics (when this is understood as administration and management) loses all its transparency. Through its institutional processes of normalization, power hides rather than reveals and interprets the relationships that characterize its control over society and life.

How can a revolutionary political discourse be reactivated in this

situation? How can it gain a new consistency and fill some eventual manifesto with a new materialist teleology? How can we construct an apparatus for bringing together the subject (the multitude) and the object (cosmopolitical liberation) within postmodernity? Clearly one cannot achieve this, even when assuming entirely the argument of the field of immanence, simply by following the indications offered by the Marx-Engels manifesto. In the cold placidness of postmodernity, what Marx and Engels saw as the co-presence of the productive subject and the process of liberation is utterly inconceivable.

And yet, from our postmodern perspective the terms of the Machiavellian manifesto seem to acquire a new contemporaneity. Straining the analogy

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65

with Machiavelli a little, we could pose the problem in this way: How can productive labor dispersed in various networks find a center? How can the material and immaterial production of the brains and bodies of the many construct a common sense and direction, or rather, how can the endeavor to bridge the distance between the formation of the multitude as subject and the constitution of a democratic political apparatus find its prince?

This analogy, however, is finally insufficient. There remains in Machi-

avelli’s prince a utopian condition that distances the project from the subject and that, despite the radical immanence of the method, confides the political function to a higher plane. In contrast, any postmodern liberation must be achieved within this world, on the plane of immanence, with no possibility of any even utopian outside. The form in which the political should be

expressed as subjectivity today is not at all clear. A solution to this problem would have to weave closer together the subject and the object of the project, pose them in a relationship of immanence still more profound than that

achieved by Machiavelli or Marx-Engels, in other words, pose them in a

process of self-production.

Perhaps we need to reinvent the notion of the materialist teleology

that Spinoza proclaimed at the dawn of modernity when he claimed that

the prophet produces its own people.2 Perhaps along with Spinoza we should recognize prophetic desire as irresistible, and all the more powerful the more it becomes identified with the multitude. It is not at all clear that this prophetic function can effectively address our political needs and sustain a potential manifesto of the postmodern revolution against Empire, but certain analogies and paradoxical coincidences do seem striking. For example,

whereas Machiavelli proposes that the project of constructing a new society from below requires ‘‘arms’’ and ‘‘money’’ and insists that we must look for them outside, Spinoza responds: Don’t we already posses them? Don’t the necessary weapons reside precisely within the creative and prophetic power of the multitude? Perhaps we, too, locating ourselves within the

revolutionary desire of postmodernity, can in turn respond: Don’t we already possess ‘‘arms’’ and ‘‘money’’? The kind of money that Machiavelli insists is necessary may in fact reside in the productivity of the multitude, the immediate actor of biopolitical production and reproduction. The kind of arms in question may be contained in the potential of the multitude to

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sabotage and destroy with its own productive force the parasitical order of postmodern command.

Today a manifesto, a political discourse, should aspire to fulfill a

Spinozist prophetic function, the function of an immanent desire that organizes the multitude. There is not finally here any determinism or utopia: this is rather a radical counterpower, ontologically grounded not on any

‘‘vide pour le futur’’ but on the actual activity of the multitude, its creation, production, and power—a materialist teleology.

PART 2

P A S S A G E S O F S O V E R E I G N T Y

2.1

T W O E U R O P E S , T W O M O D E R N I T I E S

Whether you affirm infallibility and deduce sovereignty from it or

pose sovereignty first and derive infallibility from that, you are

forced either way to recognize and sanction an absolute power.

And the same result is imposed whether it be through oppression of

governments or the reason ofphilosophers, whether you make the

people or the king sovereign.

Franc¸ois Guizot

In the early twentieth-century Vienna ofRobert Musil’s

novel The Man without Qualities, an enlightened aristocrat, Count

Leinsdorf, puzzles out the complexities of modernity but gets stuck

on a central paradox. ‘‘What I still don’t understand,’’ he says, ‘‘is

this: That people should love each other, and that it takes a firm

hand in government to make them do it, is nothing new. So why

should it suddenly be a case ofeither/or?’’1 For the philanthropists

ofMusil’s world there is a conflict at the center ofmodernity

between, on the one hand, the immanent forces of desire and

association, the love ofthe community, and on the other, the strong

hand ofan overarching authority that imposes and enforces an order

on the social field. This tension was to be resolved, or at least

mediated, by the sovereignty ofthe state, and yet it continually

resurfaces as a question of either/or: freedom or servitude, the

liberation ofdesire or its subjugation. Count Leinsdorflucidly iden-

tifies a contradiction that runs throughout European modernity and

resides at the heart ofthe modern concept ofsovereignty.

Tracing the emerging figure ofthe concept ofsovereignty

through various developments in modern European philosophy

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should allow us to recognize that Europe and modernity are neither

unitary nor pacific constructions, but rather from the beginning

were characterized by struggle, conflict, and crisis. We identify

three moments in the constitution ofEuropean modernity that

articulate the initial figure ofthe modern concept ofsovereignty:

first, the revolutionary discovery ofthe plane ofimmanence; second,

the reaction against these immanent forces and the crisis in the form

ofauthority; and third, the partial and temporary resolution ofthis

crisis in the formation ofthe modern state as a locus ofsovereignty

that transcends and mediates the plane ofimmanent f

orces. In

this progression European modernity itselfbecomes increasingly

inseparable from the principle of sovereignty. And yet, as Count

Leinsdorflaments, even at the height ofmodernity the original

tension continually breaks through in all its violence.

Modern sovereignty is a European concept in the sense that

it developed primarily in Europe in coordination with the evolution

of modernity itself. The concept functioned as the cornerstone of

the construction ofEurocentrism. Although modern sovereignty

emanated from Europe, however, it was born and developed in large

part through Europe’s relationship with its outside, and particularly

through its colonial project and the resistance ofthe colonized.

Modern sovereignty emerged, then, as the concept ofEuropean

reaction and European domination both within and outside its

borders. They are two coextensive and complementary faces of one

development: rule within Europe and European rule over the world.

TheRevolutionary Planeof Immanence

It all began with a revolution. In Europe, between 1200 and 1600,

across distances that only merchants and armies could travel and

only the invention ofthe printing press would later bring together,

something extraordinary happened. Humans declared themselves

masters oftheir own lives, producers ofcities and history, and

inventors ofheavens. They inherited a dualistic consciousness, a

hierarchical vision ofsociety, and a metaphysical idea ofscience;

but they handed down to future generations an experimental idea

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71

ofscience, a constituent conception ofhistory and cities, and they

posed being as an immanent terrain ofknowledge and action.

The thought ofthis initial period, born simultaneously in politics,

science, art, philosophy, and theology, demonstrates the radicality

ofthe forces at work in modernity.

The origins ofEuropean modernity are often characterized

as springing from a secularizing process that denied divine and

transcendent authority over worldly affairs. That process was cer-

tainly important, but in our view it was really only a symptom of

the primary event ofmodernity: the affirmation ofthe powers of

this world, the discovery ofthe plane ofimmanence. ‘‘Omne ens

habet aliquod esse proprium’’—every entity has a singular essence.2

Duns Scotus’ affirmation subverts the medieval conception of being

as an object ofanalogical, and thus dualistic, predication—a being

with one foot in this world and one in a transcendent realm. We

are at the beginning ofthe fourteenth century, in the midst of

the convulsions ofthe late Middle Ages. Duns Scotus tells his con-

temporaries that the confusion and decadence of the times can be

remedied only by recentering thought on the singularity ofbeing.

This singularity is not ephemeral nor accidental but ontological.

The strength of this affirmation and the effect it had on the thought

ofthe period were demonstrated by Dante Alighieri’s response to

it, thousands ofmiles away from Duns Scotus’ Britannic north.

This singular being is powerful, Dante wrote, in that it is the drive

to actualize ‘‘totam potentiam intellectus possibilis’’—all the power

ofthe possible intellect.3 At the scene ofthe birth ofEuropean

modernity, humanity discovered its power in the world and inte-

grated this dignity into a new consciousness ofreason and potenti-

ality.

In the fifteenth century, numerous authors demonstrated the

coherence and revolutionary originality ofthis new immanent onto-

logical knowledge. Let us simply cite three representative voices.

First, Nicholas ofCusa: ‘‘Speculation is a movement ofthe intellect

from quia est to quid est; and since quid est is infinitely distant from quia est, such a movement will never come to an end. And it is a

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very pleasurable movement, since it is the life itself of the intellect;

from this fact such movement finds its satisfaction, since its motion

does not generate fatigue but rather light and heat.’’4 Second, Pico

della Mirandola: ‘‘When you conceive ofGod as a living and

knowing being, make sure before all else that this knowledge and

this life are understood as free from every imperfection. Conceive

ofa knowledge that knows all and everything in a most perfect

manner; and add still that the knower knows all by itself, so there

is no need to search outside itself, which would make it imperfect.’’5

In this way Pico della Mirandola, rather than conceiving a distant,

transcendent God, makes the human mind into a divine machine

ofknowledge. Finally, Bovillus: ‘‘The one who was by nature

merely human [ homo] becomes, through the rich contribution of

art, doubly human, that is, homohomo. ’’6 Through its own powerful

arts and practices, humanity enriches and doubles itself, or really

raises itselfto a higher power: homohomo, humanity squared.

In those origins of modernity, then, knowledge shifted from

the transcendent plane to the immanent, and consequently, that

human knowledge became a doing, a practice oftransforming na-

ture. Sir Francis Bacon constructed a world in which ‘‘what has

been discovered in the arts and the sciences can now be reorganized

through usage, meditation, observation, argumentation . . . be-

cause it is good to treat the most distant realities and the occult

secrets ofnature through the introduction ofa better use and a

more perfect technique of the mind and the intellect.’’7 In this

process, Galileo Galilei maintains (and this will conclude our circle

de dignitate hominis), we have the possibility ofequaling divine

knowledge:

Taking the understanding to be intensive, insofar as that term

carries with it intensively, that is perfectly, several propositions,

I say that the human intellect understands some things so

perfectly and it has such absolute certainty of them that it equals

nature’s own understanding ofthem; those things include the

pure mathematical sciences, that is, geometry and arithmetic,

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73

about which the divine intellect knows infinitely more propo-

sitions since it knows them all, but ofthose few understood

by the human intellect I believe that its knowledge equals

divine knowledge in its objective certainty.8

What is revolutionary in this whole series ofphilosophical develop-

ments stretching from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries is

that the powers ofcreation that had previously been consigned

exclusively to the heavens are now brought down to earth. This

is the discovery ofthe fullness ofthe plane ofimmanence.

Just as in philosophy and science, in politics, too, humanity

reappropriated in this early period ofmodernity what medieval

transcendence had taken away from it. In the span of three or four

centuries, the process ofthe refoundation ofauthority on the basis

ofa human universal and through the action ofa multitude of

singularities was accomplished with great force, amid dreadful trage-

dies and heroic conquests. William ofOccam, for example, claimed

that the church is the multitude of the faithful—‘‘Ecclesia est multi-

tudo fidelium’’9—meaning that it is not superior to and distinct from

the community ofChristians but immanent to that community.

Marsilius ofPadua posed the same definition for the Republic: the

power ofthe Republic and the power ofits laws derive not from

superior principles but from the assembly of citizens.10 A new under-

standing ofpower and a new conception ofliberation were set in

motion: from Dante and the late medieval apologia of the ‘‘possible

intellect’’ to Thomas More and the celebration ofthe ‘‘immense

and inexplicable power’’ of natural life and labor as foundation for

the political arrangement; from the democracy of the Protestant

sects to Spinoza and his notion ofthe absoluteness ofthe democracy.

By the time we arrive at Spinoza, in fact, the horizon of immanence

and the horizon ofthe democratic political order coincide com-

pletely. The plane ofimmanence is the one on which the powers

ofsingularity are realized and the one on which the truth ofthe

new humanity is determined historically, technically, and politically.

For this very fact, because there cannot be any external mediation,

the singular is presented as the multitude.11

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Modernity’s beginnings were revolutionary, and the old order

was toppled by them. The constitution ofmodernity was not about

theory in isolation but about theoretical acts indissolubly tied to

mutations ofpractice and reality. Bodies and brains were fundamen-

tally transformed. This historical process of subjectivization was

revolutionary in the sense that it determined a paradigmatic and

irreversible change in the mode oflife ofthe multitude.

Modernity as Crisis

Modernity is not a unitary concept but rather appears in at least

two modes. The first mode is the one we have already defined, a

radical revolutionary process. This modernity destroys its relations

with the past and declares the immanence ofthe new paradigm of

the world and life. It develops knowledge and action as scientific

experimentation and defines a tendency toward a democratic poli-

tics, posing humanity and desire at the center ofhistory. From the

artisan to the astronomer, from the merchant to the politician, in

art as in religion, the material of existence is reformed by a new life.

This new emergence, however, created a war. How could

such a radical overturning not incite strong antagonism? How could

this revolution not determine a counterrevolution? There was in-

deed a counterrevolution in the proper sense ofthe term: a cultural,

philosophical, social, and political initiative that, since it could nei-

ther return to the past nor destroy the new forces, sought to domi-

nate and expropriate the force of the emerging movements and

dynamics. This is the second mode ofmodernity, constructed to

wage war against the new forces and establish an overarching power

to dominate them. It arose within the Renaissance revolution to

divert its direction, transplant the new image ofhumanity to a

transcendent plane, relativize the capacities ofscience to transform

the world, and above all oppose the reappropriation ofpower on

the part ofthe multitude. The second mode ofmodernity poses a

transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent

power, order against desire. The Renaissance thus ended in war—

religious, social, and civil war.

The European Renaissance, but above all the Italian Renais-

sance, with the splendid and perverse works that characterize it,

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75

was the site ofthe civil war over the realization ofmodernity.

When the Reformation spread throughout Europe, it was like a

second cyclone added to the first, repeating in the religious con-

sciousness ofthe masses the alternatives ofhumanist culture. The

civil war thus invested popular life and mingled with the most

intimate recesses ofhuman history. Class struggle moved across this

terrain, marshaling up in the genesis ofcapitalism the creativity of

the new mode oflaboring and the new order ofexploitation within

a logic that carries together signs ofboth progress and reaction. It

was a clash oftitans, like the one Michelangelo depicted on the

ceiling ofthe Sistine Chapel: the tragic conflict ofthe genesis

ofmodernity.

The revolution ofEuropean modernity ran into its Thermidor.

In the struggle for hegemony over the paradigm of modernity,

victory went to the second mode and the forces of order that sought

to neutralize the power ofthe revolution. Although it was not

possible to go back to the way things were, it was nonetheless

possible to reestablish ideologies ofcommand and authority, and

thus deploy a new transcendent power by playing on the anxiety

and fear ofthe masses, their desire to reduce the uncertainty oflife

and increase security. The revolution had to be stopped. Through-

out the sixteenth century, whenever the fruits of the revolution

appeared in all their splendor, the scene had to be painted in twilight

colors. The demand for peace became paramount—but which

peace? While the Thirty Years’ War in the heart ofEurope exempli-

fied in the most terrible forms the outlines of this irreversible crisis,

the consciousnesses, even the strongest and wisest, yielded to the

necessity ofthe Thermidor and the conditions ofthe miserable and

humiliating peace. Peace was a value that in a short stretch oftime

had lost the humanist, Erasmian connotations that had previously

made it the path oftransformation. Peace had become the miserable

condition ofsurvival, the extreme urgency ofescaping death. Peace

was marked simply by the fatigue of the struggle and the usury of

the passions. The Thermidor had won, the revolution was over.

The Thermidor ofthe revolution, however, did not close but

only perpetuated the crisis. Civil war did not come to an end but

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was absorbed within the concept ofmodernity. Modernity itself is

defined by crisis, a crisis that is born ofthe uninterrupted conflict between the immanent, constructive, creative forces and the transcendent power aimed at restoring order.12 This conflict is the key

to the concept of modernity, but it was effectively dominated and

held in check. The cultural and religious revolutions were forced

toward rigid and sometimes ferocious structures of containment.

In the seventeenth century, Europe became feudal again. The

counterreformist Catholic Church was the first and most effective

example ofthis reaction, because that church itselfearlier had been

rocked by an earthquake ofreform and revolutionary desire. The

Protestant churches and political orders were not far behind in

producing the order ofthe counterrevolution. Throughout Europe

the fires ofsuperstition were lit. And yet the movements ofrenewal

continued their work ofliberation at the base. Whereever spaces

were closed, movements turned to nomadism and exodus, carrying

with them the desire and hope ofan irrepressible experience.13

The internal conflict ofEuropean modernity was also reflected

simultaneously on a global scale as an external conflict. The develop-

ment ofRenaissance thought coincided both with the European

discovery ofthe Americas and with the beginnings ofEuropean

dominance over the rest ofthe world. Europe had discovered its

outside. ‘‘Ifthe period ofthe Renaissance marks a qualitative break

in the history ofhumanity,’’ writes Samir Amin, ‘‘it is precisely

because, from that time on, Europeans become conscious of the

idea that the conquest ofthe world by their civilization is henceforth

a possible objective . . . From this moment on, and not before,

Eurocentrism crystallizes.’’14 On the one hand, Renaissance human-

ism initiated a revolutionary notion ofhuman equality, ofsingularity

and community, cooperation and multitude, that resonated with

forces and desires extending horizontally across the globe, redoubled

by the discovery ofother populations and territories. On the other

hand, however, the same counterrevolutionary power that sought

to control the constituent and subversive forces within Europe also

began to realize the possibility and necessity ofsubordinating other

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77

populations to European domination. Eurocentrism was born as a

reaction to the potentiality ofa newfound human equality; it was

the counterrevolution on a global scale. Here too the second mode

ofmodernity gained the upper hand, but again not in a definitive

way. European modernity is from its beginnings a war on two

fronts. European mastery is always in crisis—and this is the very

same crisis that defines European modernity.

In the seventeenth century the concept ofmodernity as crisis

was definitively consolidated. The century began with the burning

ofGiordano Bruno at the stake, and it went on to see monstrous

civil wars break out in France and England, and above all it witnessed

the horrible spectacle ofthirty years ofGerman civil war. At the

same time, the European conquest ofthe Americas and the slaughter

and enslavement ofits native populations proceeded with ever-

increasing intensity. In the second halfofthe century, monarchic

absolutism seemed definitively to block the course offreedom in

the countries ofcontinental Europe. Absolutism sought to fix the

concept ofmodernity and strip it ofthe crisis that defines it through

the deployment ofa new armory oftranscendentals. At the same

time, outside ofEurope conquest slowly gave way to colonialism,

and the precarious search for gold, riches, and plunder was progres-

sively displaced by trade exclusives, stable forms of production, and

the African slave trade. The seventeenth century, however—and

this is what makes it so ambiguous—was a fragile, baroque century.

From the abysses ofthe social world always arose the memory of

what it tried to bury.

We can find testimony to this fact with one single but enor-

mous reference: Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence, which domi-

nated the latter halfofthe century ofEuropean thought. It is a

philosophy that renewed the splendors ofrevolutionary humanism,

putting humanity and nature in the position ofGod, transforming

the world into a territory ofpractice, and affirming the democracy

ofthe multitude as the absolute form ofpolitics. Spinoza considered

the idea ofdeath—that death that states and powers carried like a

weapon against the desire and hope ofliberation—merely a hostage

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used to blackmail the freedom of thought, and thus banned it from

his philosophy: ‘ A free man thinks about nothing less than of death,

and his knowledge is a meditation on life, not on death.’’15 That love

that the humanists considered the supreme form of the expression of

intelligence was posed by Spinoza as the only possible foundation

ofthe liberation ofsingularities and as the ethical cement ofcollec-

tive life. ‘‘There is nothing in nature which is contrary to this

intellectual Love, or which can take it away.’’16 In this crescendo

ofthought, Spinoza testified to the uninterrupted continuity ofthe

revolutionary program ofhumanism in the course ofthe seven-

teenth century.

The Transcendental Apparatus

The counterrevolutionary project to resolve the crisis ofmodernity

unfolded in the centuries of the Enlightenment.17 The primary task

ofthis Enlightenment was to dominate the idea ofimmanence

without reproducing the absolute dualism ofmedieval culture by

constructing a transcendental apparatus capable ofdisciplining a

multitude of formally free subjects. The ontological dualism of the

culture ofthe ancien re´gime had to be replaced by a functional

dualism, and the crisis ofmodernity had to be resolved by means

ofadequate mechanisms ofmediation. It was paramount to avoid the

multitude’s being understood, à la Spinoza, in a direct, immediate

relation with divinity and nature, as the ethical producer oflife and

the world. On the contrary, in every case mediation had to be

imposed on the complexity ofhuman relations. Philosophers dis-

puted where this mediation was situated and what metaphysical

level it occupied, but it was fundamental that in some way it be

defined as an ineluctable condition ofall human action, art, and

association. Hence the triad vis-cupiditas-amor (strength-desire-love) which constituted the productive matrix ofthe revolutionary

thought ofhumanism was opposed by a triad ofspecific mediations.

Nature and experience are unrecognizable except through the filter

of phenomena; human knowledge cannot be achieved except through

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79

except through the schematism of reason. What is at play is a form ofmediation, or really a reflexive folding back and a sort ofweak

transcendence, which relativizes experience and abolishes every

instance ofthe immediate and absolute in human life and history.

Why, however, is this relativity necessary? Why cannot knowledge

and will be allowed to claim themselves to be absolute? Because

every movement ofself-constitution ofthe multitude must yield

to a preconstituted order, and because claiming that humans could

immediately establish their freedom in being would be a subversive

delirium. This is the essential core ofthe ideological passage in which

the hegemonic concept ofEuropean modernity was constructed.

The first strategic masterpiece in this construction was accom-

plished by Rene´ Descartes. Although Descartes pretended to pursue

a new humanistic project ofknowledge, he really reestablished

transcendent order. When he posed reason as the exclusive terrain

of mediation between God and the world, he effectively reaffirmed

dualism as the defining feature of experience and thought. We

should be careful here. Mediation in Descartes is never well defined,

or really, ifwe stay close to the text, we find that mediation resides

mysteriously only in the will ofGod. Descartes’s cunning stratagem

consists primarily in this: When he addresses the centrality ofthought

in the transcendental function of mediation, he defines a sort of

residual ofdivine transcendence. Descartes claims that the logics of

mediation reside in thought and that God is very far from the scene,

but a new man such as Blaise Pascal is perfectly right to object that

this is just an example ofDescartes’s trickery.18 In fact, Descartes’s

God is very close: God is the guarantee that transcendental rule is

inscribed in consciousness and thought as necessary, universal, and

thus preconstituted:

Please do not hesitate to assert and proclaim everywhere that

it is God who has laid down these laws in nature just as a

king lays down laws in his kingdom. There is no single one

that we cannot understand ifour mind turns to consider it.

They are all inborn in our minds just as a king would imprint

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his laws on the hearts ofall his subjects ifhe had enough

power to do so. The greatness ofGod, on the other hand, is

something which we cannot comprehend even though we

know it. But the very fact that we judge it incomprehensible

makes us esteem it the more greatly; just as a king has more

majesty when he is less familiarly known by his subjects, pro-

vided ofcourse that they do not get the idea that they have

no king—they must know him enough to be in no doubt

about that.19

The realm ofpotentiality, which had been opened by the humanist

principle ofsubjectivity, is limited a priori by the imposition of

transcendent rule and order. Descartes surreptitiously reproposes

theology on the terrain that humanism had cleared, and its apparatus

is resolutely transcendental.

With Descartes we are at the beginning ofthe history ofthe

Enlightenment, or rather bourgeois ideology.20 The transcendental

apparatus he proposes is the distinctive trademark ofEuropean

Enlightenment thought. In both the empiricist and the idealist

currents, transcendentalism was the exclusive horizon ofideology,

and in the successive centuries nearly all the major currents of

philosophy would be drawn into this project. The symbiosis be-

tween intellectual labor and institutional, political, and scientific

rhetorics became absolute on this terrain, and every conceptual

formation came to be marked by it: the formalization of politics,

the instrumentalization ofscience and technique f

or profit, the

pacification ofsocial antagonisms. Certainly, in each ofthese fields

we find historically specific developments, but everything was al-

ways tied up with the line ofa grand narrative that European

modernity told about itself, a tale told in a transcendental dialect.21

In many respects the work ofImmanuel Kant stands at the

center ofthis development. Kant’s thought is enormously rich and

leads in numerous directions, but we are interested here primarily

in the line that crowns the transcendental principle as the apex of

European modernity. Kant manages to pose the subject at the center

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81

ofthe metaphysical horizon but at the same time control it by

means ofthe three operations we cited earlier: the emptying of

experience in phenomena, the reduction ofknowledge to intellec-

tual mediation, and the neutralization ofethical action in the sche-

matism ofreason. The mediation that Descartes invoked in his

reaffirmation of dualism is hypostatized by Kant, not in the divinity

but nonetheless in a pseudo-ontological critique—in an ordering

function ofconsciousness and an indistinct appetite ofthe will.

Humanity is the center ofthe universe, but this is not the humanity

that through art and action made itself homohomo. It is a humanity lost in experience, deluded in the pursuit ofthe ethical ideal. Kant

throws us back into the crisis ofmodernity with full awareness

when he poses the discovery ofthe subject itselfas crisis, but this

crisis is made into an apology ofthe transcendental as the unique

and exclusive horizon ofknowledge and action. The world becomes

an architecture ofideal forms, the only reality conceded to us.

Romanticism was never expressed so strongly as it is in Kant.

This is the leitmotifofKantian philosophy: the necessity ofthe

transcendental, the impossibility ofevery form ofimmediacy, the

exorcism ofevery vital figure in the apprehension and action of

being. From this perspective one should perhaps consider Arthur

Schopenhauer the most lucid reader ofKantianism and its Romantic

gesture. The fact that it is difficult if not impossible to reunite the

appearance ofthe thing with the thing itselfis precisely the curse

ofthis world ofpain and need. And this is therefore not a world

constructed in a way so that noble and high forces, forces that tend

to truth and light, can prosper.22 In other words, Schopenhauer

recognizes Kantianism as the definitive liquidation ofthe human-

ist revolution.

For this same reason Schopenhauer reacted even more vio-

lently against Hegel, calling him an ‘‘intellectual Caliban’’ to indicate

the barbarity ofhis thought.23 He found it intolerable that Hegel

would transform the pallid constitutive function of Kant’s transcen-

dental critique into a solid ontological figure with such violence.

This was indeed the destiny ofthe transcendental in the European

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ideology ofmodernity. Hegel revealed what was implicit f

rom

the beginning ofthe counterrevolutionary development: that the

liberation ofmodern humanity could only be a f

unction ofits

domination, that the immanent goal ofthe multitude is transformed

into the necessary and transcendent power ofthe state. It is true

that Hegel restores the horizon ofimmanence and takes away the

uncertainty ofknowledge, the irresolution ofaction, and the fideist

opening ofKantianism. The immanence Hegel restores, however,

is really a blind immanence in which the potentiality ofthe multitude

is denied and subsumed in the allegory ofthe divine order. The

crisis ofhumanism is transformed into a dialectical dramaturgy, and

in every scene the end is everything and the means are merely

ornamentation.

There is no longer anything that strives, desires, or loves;

the content ofpotentiality is blocked, controlled, hegemonized by

finality. Paradoxically, the analogical being ofthe medieval Christian

tradition is resurrected as a dialectical being. It is ironic that Schopen-

hauer would call Hegel a Caliban, the figure that was later held up

as a symbol ofthe resistance to European domination and the

affirmation ofnon-European desire. Hegel’s drama ofthe Other

and the conflict between master and slave, however, could not but

take place against the historical backdrop ofEuropean expansion

and the enslavement ofAfrican, American, and Asian peoples. It

is impossible, in other words, not to link both Hegel’s philosophical

recuperation ofthe Other within absolute Spirit and his universal

history leading from lesser peoples to its summit in Europe together

with the very real violence ofEuropean conquest and colonialism.

In short, Hegel’s history is not only a powerful attack on the

revolutionary plane ofimmanence but also a negation ofnon-

European desire.

Finally, with another act offorce, that ‘‘intellectual Caliban’’

inserted into the development ofmodernity the experience ofa

new conception oftemporality, and he showed this temporality to

be a dialectical teleology that is accomplished and arrives at its

end. The entire genetic design ofthe concept found an adequate

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83

representation in the conclusion ofthe process. Modernity was

complete, and there was no possibility ofgoing beyond it. It was

not by chance, then, that a further and definitive act of violence

defined the scene: the dialectic ofcrisis was pacified under the

domination ofthe state. Peace and justice reign once again: ‘‘The

state in and for itself is the ethical whole . . . It is essential to God’s march through the world that the state exist.’’24

Modern Sovereignty

The political solution offered by Hegel to the metaphysical drama

ofmodernity demonstrates the profound and intimate relationship

between modern European politics and metaphysics. Politics resides

at the center ofmetaphysics because modern European metaphysics

arose in response to the challenge ofthe liberated singularities and

the revolutionary constitution ofthe multitude. It functioned as an

essential weapon ofthe second mode ofmodernity insofar as it

provided a transcendent apparatus that could impose order on the

multitude and prevent it from organizing itself spontaneously and

expressing its creativity autonomously. The second mode ofmoder-

nity needed above all to guarantee its control over the new figures

ofsocial production both in Europe and in the colonial spaces in

order to rule and profit from the new forces that were transforming

nature. In politics, as in metaphysics, the dominant theme was thus

to eliminate the medieval form of transcendence, which only inhibits

production and consumption, while maintaining transcendence’s

effects of domination in a form adequate to the modes of association

and production ofthe new humanity. The center ofthe problem

ofmodernity was thus demonstrated in political philosophy, and

here was where the new form of mediation found its most adequate

response to the revolutionary forms of immanence: a transcendent

political apparatus.

Thomas Hobbes’s proposition ofan ultimate and absolute

sovereign ruler, a ‘‘God on earth,’’ plays a foundational role in the

modern construction ofa transcendent political apparatus. The first

moment ofHobbes’s logic is the assumption ofcivil war as the

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originary state ofhuman society, a generalized conflict among indi-

vidual actors. In a second moment, then, in order to guarantee

survival against the mortal dangers ofwar, humans must agree to

a pact that assigns to a leader the absolute right to act, or really the

absolute power to do all except take away the means ofhuman

survival and reproduction. ‘‘Seeing right reason is not existent, the

reason ofsome man, or men, must supply the place thereof; and

that man, or men, is he or they, that have the sovereign power.’’25

The fundamental passage is accomplished by a contract—a com-

pletely implicit contract, prior to all social action or choice—that

transfers every autonomous power of the multitude to a sovereign

power that stands above and rules it.

This transcendent political apparatus corresponds to the neces-

sary and ineluctable transcendent conditions that modern philoso-

phy posed at the pinnacle ofits development, in Kantian schematism

and Hegelian dialectics. According to Hobbes, the single wills of

the various individuals converge and are represented in the will of

the transcendent sovereign. Sovereignty is thus defined both by

transcendence and by representation, two concepts that the humanist tradition has posed as contradictory. On the one hand, the transcendence ofthe sovereign is founded not on an external theological

support but only on the immanent logic ofhuman relations. On

the other hand, the representation that functions to legitimate this

sovereign power also alienates it completely from the multitude of

subjects. Like Jean Bodin before him, Hobbes recognized that ‘‘the

main point ofsovereign majesty and absolute power consists of

giving the law to subjects in general without their consent,’’26 but

Hobbes manages to combine this notion with a contractual schema

ofrepresentation that legitimates the sovereign power a priori.

Here the concept ofmodern sovereignty is born in its state of

transcendental purity. The contract ofassociation is intrinsic to

and inseparable from the contract of subjugation. This theory of

sovereignty presents the first political solution to the crisis ofmo-

dernity.

In his own historical period, Hobbes’s theory ofsovereignty

was functional to the development of monarchic absolutism, but

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in fact its transcendental schema could be applied equally to various

forms of government: monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. As the

bourgeoisie rose to prominence, it seemed there was really no

alternative to this schema ofpower. It was not by chance, then,

that Rousseau’s democratic republicanism turned out to resemble

the Hobbesian model. Rousseau’s social contract guarantees that

the agreement among individual wills is developed and sublimated

in the construction ofa general will, and that the general will

proceeds from the alienation of the single wills toward the sover-

eignty ofthe state. As a model ofsovereignty, Rousseau’s ‘‘republi-

can absolute’’ is really no different from Hobbes’s ‘‘God on earth,’’

the monarchic absolute. ‘‘Properly understood, all ofthese clauses

[ofthe contract] come down to a single one, namely the total

alienation ofeach associate, with all his rights, to the whole commu-

nity.’’27 The other conditions that Rousseau prescribes for the defi-

nition ofsovereign power in the popular and democratic sense are

completely irrelevant in the face of the absolutism of the transcen-

dent foundation. Specifically, Rousseau’s notion of direct represen-

tation is distorted and ultimately overwhelmed by the representation

ofthe totality that is necessarily linked to it—and this is perfectly

compatible with the Hobbesian notion ofrepresentation. Hobbes

and Rousseau really only repeat the paradox that Jean Bodin had

already defined conceptually in the second halfofthe sixteenth

century. Sovereignty can properly be said to exist only in monarchy,

because only one can be sovereign. Iftwo or three or many were

to rule, there would be no sovereignty, because the sovereign cannot

be subject to the rule ofothers.28 Democratic, plural, or popular

political forms might be declared, but modern sovereignty really

has only one political figure: a single transcendent power.

There is at the base ofthe modern theory ofsovereignty,

however, a further very important element—a content that fills

and sustains the form of sovereign authority. This content is repre-

sented by capitalist development and the affirmation of the market

as the foundation of the values of social reproduction.29 Without

this content, which is always implicit, always working inside the

transcendental apparatus, the form of sovereignty would not have

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been able to survive in modernity, and European modernity would

not have been able to achieve a hegemonic position on a world

scale. As ArifDirlik has noted, Eurocentrism distinguished itself

from other ethnocentrisms (such as Sinocentrism) and rose to global

prominence principally because it was supported by the powers

ofcapital.30

European modernity is inseparable from capitalism. This cen-

tral relationship between the form and the content of modern

sovereignty is fully articulated in the work of Adam Smith. Smith

begins with a theory ofindustry that poses the contradiction between

private enrichment and public interest. A first synthesis ofthese

two levels is confided to the ‘‘invisible hand’’ ofthe market: the

capitalist ‘‘intends only his own gain,’’ but he is ‘‘led by an invisible

hand to promote an end which was no part ofhis intention.’’31

This first synthesis, however, is precarious and fleeting. Political

economy, considered a branch ofthe science ofthe administrator

and legislator, must go much further in conceiving the synthesis.

It must understand the ‘‘invisible hand’’ ofthe market as a product

ofpolitical economy itself, which is thus directed toward construct-

ing the conditions ofthe autonomy ofthe market: ‘‘All systems

either ofpreference or ofrestraint, therefore, being thus completely

taken away, the obvious and simple system ofnatural liberty estab-

lishes itselfofits own accord.’’32 In this case, too, however, the

synthesis is not at all guaranteed. In effect, a third passage is necessary.

What is needed is for the state, which is minimal but effective, to

make the well-being ofprivate individuals coincide with the public

interest, reducing all social functions and laboring activities to one

measure ofvalue. That this state intervenes or not is secondary;

what matters is that it give content to the mediation ofinterests

and represent the axis ofrationality ofthat mediation. The political

transcendental ofthe modern state is defined as an economic tran-

scendental. Smith’s theory ofvalue was the soul and substance of

the concept ofthe modern sovereign state.

In Hegel, the synthesis ofthe theory ofmodern sovereignty

and the theory ofvalue produced by capitalist political economy

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is finally realized, just as in his work there is a perfect realization

ofthe consciousness ofthe union ofthe absolutist and republican

aspects—that is, the Hobbesian and Rousseauian aspects—ofthe

theory ofmodern sovereignty.

In relation to the spheres ofcivil law [ Privatrecht] and private

welfare, the spheres of the family and civil society, the state

is on the one hand an external necessity and the higher power

to whose nature their laws and interests are subordinate and

on which they depend. But on the other hand, it is their

immanent end, and its strength consists in the unity ofits

universal and ultimate end with the particular interest ofindi-

viduals, in the fact that they have duties towards the state to

the same extent as they also have rights.33

The Hegelian relationship between particular and universal brings

together in adequate and functional terms the Hobbes-Rousseau

theory ofsovereignty and Smith’s theory ofvalue. Modern Euro-

pean sovereignty is capitalist sovereignty, a form of command that

overdetermines the relationship between individuality and univer-

sality as a function ofthe development ofcapital.

The Sovereignty Machine

When the synthesis ofsovereignty and capital is fully accomplished,

and the transcendence ofpower is completely transformed into a

transcendental exercise ofauthority, then sovereignty becomes a

political machine that rules across the entire society. Through the

workings ofthe sovereignty machine the multitude is in every

moment transformed into an ordered totality. We should play close

attention to this passage because here we can see clearly how the

transcendental schema is an ideology that functions concretely and

how different modern sovereignty is from that of the ancien re´gime.

In addition to being a political power against all external political

powers, a state against all other states, sovereignty is also a police

power. It must continually and extensively accomplish the miracle

ofthe subsumption ofsingularities in the totality, ofthe will ofall

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into the general will. Modern bureaucracy is the essential organ of

the transcendental—Hegel dixit. And even ifHegel exaggerates a

bit in his quasi-theological consecration ofthe body ofstate employ-

ees, at least he makes clear their central role in the effective function-

ing ofthe modern state. Bureaucracy operates the apparatus that

combines legality and organizational efficiency, title and the exercise

ofpower, politics and police. The transcendental theory ofmodern

sovereignty, thus reaching maturity, realizes a new ‘‘individual’’ by

absorbing society into power. Little by little, as the administration

develops, the relationship between society and power, between the

multitude and the sovereign state, is inverted so that now power

and the state produce society.

This passage in the history ofideas does indeed parallel the

development ofsocial history. It corresponds to the dislocation of

the organizational dynamic ofthe state from the terrain ofmedieval

hierarchy to that of modern discipline, from command to function.

Max Weber and Michel Foucault, to mention only the most illustri-

ous, have insisted at length on these metamorphoses in the sociologi-

cal figures ofpower. In the long transition from medieval to modern

society, the first form of the political regime was, as we have seen,

rooted in transcendence. Medieval society was organized according

to a hierarchical schema ofdegrees ofpower. This is what modernity

blew apart in the course ofits development. Foucault refers to this

transition as the passage from the paradigm of sovereignty to that

ofgovernmentality, where by sovereignty he means the transcen-

dence ofthe single point ofcommand above the social field, and

by governmentality he means the general economy ofdiscipline

that runs throughout society.34 We prefer to conceive of this as a

passage within the notion ofsovereignty, as a transition to a new

form of transcendence. Modernity replaced the traditional transcen-

dence ofcommand with the transcendence ofthe ordering function.

Arrangements ofdiscipline had begun to be formed already in the

classical age, but only in modernity did the disciplinary diagram

become the diagram ofadministration itself. Throughout this pas-

sage administration exerts a continuous, extensive, and tireless effort

T W O E U R O P E S , T W O M O D E R N I T I E S

89

to make the state always more intimate to social reality, and thus

produce and order social labor. The old theses, à la Tocqueville,

ofthe continuity ofadministrative bodies across dif

f

erent social

eras are thus profoundly revised when not completely discarded.

Foucault, however, goes still further to claim that the disciplinary

processes, which are put into practice by the administration, delve

so deeply into society that they manage to configure themselves as

apparatuses that take into account the collective biological dimen-

sion ofthe reproduction ofthe population. The realization of

modern sovereignty is the birth ofbiopower.35

Before Foucault, Max Weber also described the administrative

mechanisms involved in the formation of modern sovereignty.36

Whereas Foucault’s analysis is vast in its diachronic breadth, Weber’s

is powerful in its synchronic depth. With respect to our discussion

ofmodern sovereignty, Weber’s contribution is first ofall his claim

that the opening ofmodernity is defined as a scission—a creative

condition ofindividuals and the multitude against the process of

state reappropriation. State sovereignty is then defined as a regulation

ofthis relationship offorce. Modernity is above all marked by the

tension ofthe opposing f

orces. Every process oflegitimation is

regulated by this tension, and operates to block its capacity for

rupture and recuperate its creative initiative. The closure ofthe

crisis ofmodernity in a new sovereign power can be given in old

and quasi-naturalist forms, as is the case with traditional legitimation;

or rather, it can be given in sacred and innovative, irrationally

innovative, forms, as in charismatic legitimation; or finally, and this

is to a large extent the most effective form of late modernity, it

can be given in the form of administrative rationalization. The

analysis ofthese forms oflegitimation is Weber’s second relevant

contribution, which builds on the first, the recognition ofthe

dualism ofthe paradigm. The third relevant point is Weber’s treat-

ment ofthe procedural character ofthe transformation, the always

present and possible interweaving ofthe various forms oflegitima-

tion, and their continuous capacity to be extended and deepened

in the control ofsocial reality. From this follows a final paradox:

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ifon the one hand this process closes the crisis ofmodernity, on

the other hand it reopens it. The form ofthe process ofclosure is

as critical and conflictual as the genesis ofmodernity. In this respect

Weber’s work has the great merit to have completely destroyed

the self-satisfied and triumphant conception of the sovereignty of

the modern state that Hegel had produced.

Weber’s analysis was quickly taken up by the writers engaged

in the critique ofmodernity, from Heidegger and Lukaćs to Hork-

heimer and Adorno. They all recognized that Weber had revealed

the illusion ofmodernity, the illusion that the antagonistic dualism

that resides at the base ofmodernity could be subsumed in a unitary

synthesis investing all ofsociety and politics, including the produc-

tive forces and the relations of production. They recognized, finally,

that modern sovereignty had passed its peak and begun to wane.

As modernity declines, a new season is opened, and here we

find again that dramatic antithesis that was at the origins and basis

ofmodernity. Has anything really changed? The civil war has

erupted again in full force. The synthesis between the development

ofproductive forces and relations ofdomination seems once again

precarious and improbable. The desires ofthe multitude and its

antagonism to every form of domination drive it to divest itself

once again ofthe processes oflegitimation that support the sovereign

power. Certainly, no one would imagine this as a return ofthat

old world ofdesires that animated the first humanist revolution.

New subjectivities inhabit the new terrain; modernity and its capital-

ist relations have completely changed the scene in the course ofits

development. And yet something remains: there is a sense ofde´jà

vu when we see the reappearance ofthe struggles that have continu-

ally been passed down from those origins. The experience of the

revolution will be reborn after modernity, but within the new

conditions that modernity constructed in such a contradictory way.

Machiavelli’s return to origins seems to be combined with Nietz-

sche’s heroic eternal return. Everything is different and nothing

seems to have changed. Is this the coming ofa new human power?

‘‘For this is the secret ofthe soul: when the hero hath abandoned

it, then only approacheth it in dreams—the super-hero.’’37

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H UMANISM AFTER THE D EATH OF M AN

Michel Foucault’s final works on the history of sexuality bring to life once again that same revolutionary impulse that animated Renaissance humanism. The ethical care of the self reemerges as a constituent power of self-creation. How is it possible that the author who worked so hard to convince us of the death of Man, the thinker who carried the banner of antihumanism throughout his career, would in the end champion these central tenets of the humanist tradition? We do not mean to suggest that Foucault contradicts himself or that he reversed his earlier position; he was always so insistent about the continuity of his discourse. Rather, Foucault asks in his final work a paradoxical and urgent question: What is humanism after the death of Man? Or rather, what is an antihumanist (or posthuman) humanism?

This question, however, is only a seeming paradox that derives at

least in part from a terminological confusion between two distinct notions of humanism. The antihumanism that was such an important project for

Foucault and Althusser in the 1960s can be linked effectively to a battle that Spinoza fought three hundred years earlier. Spinoza denounced any

understanding of humanity as an imperium in imperio. In other words, he refused to accord any laws to human nature that were different from the laws of nature as a whole. Donna Haraway carries on Spinoza’s project

in our day as she insists on breaking down the barriers we pose among the human, the animal, and the machine. If we are to conceive Man as separate from nature, then Man does not exist. This recognition is precisely the death of Man.

This antihumanism, however, need not conflict with the revolutionary

spirit of Renaissance humanism we outlined earlier from Cusano to Marsilius. In fact, this antihumanism follows directly on Renaissance humanism’s secularizing project, or more precisely, its discovery of the plane of immanence.

Both projects are founded on an attack on transcendence. There is a strict continuity between the religious thought that accords a power above nature to God and the modern ‘‘secular’’ thought that accords that same power

above nature to Man. The transcendence of God is simply transferred to

Man. Like God before it, this Man that stands separate from and above

nature has no place in a philosophy of immanence. Like God, too, this

transcendent figure of Man leads quickly to the imposition of social hierarchy and domination. Antihumanism, then, conceived as a refusal of any transcen-92

P A S S A G E S O F S O V E R E I G N T Y

dence, should in no way be confused with a negation of the vis viva, the creative life force that animates the revolutionary stream of the modern tradition. On the contrary, the refusal of transcendence is the condition of possibility of thinking this immanent power, an anarchic basis of philosophy:

‘‘Ni Dieu, ni maıˆtre, ni l’homme.’’

The humanism of Foucault’s final works, then, should not be seen

as contradictory to or even as a departure from the death of Man he proclaimed twenty years earlier. Once we recognize our posthuman bodies and minds, once we see ourselves for the simians and cyborgs we are, we then need to explore the vis viva, the creative powers that animate us as they do all of nature and actualize our potentialities. This is humanism after the death of Man: what Foucault calls ‘‘le travail de soi sur soi,’’ the continuous constituent project to create and re-create ourselves and our world.

2.2

S O V E R E I G N T Y O F T H E

N A T I O N - S T A T E

Foreigners, please don’t leave us alone with the French!

Paris graffito, 1995

We thought we were dying for the fatherland. We realized quickly

it was for the bank vaults.

Anatole France

As European modernity progressively took shape, ma-

chines ofpower were constructed to respond to its crisis, searching

continually for a surplus that would resolve or at least contain the

crisis. In the previous section we traced the path ofone response

to the crisis that led to the development ofthe modern sovereign

state. The second approach centers on the concept ofnation, a

development that presupposes the first path and builds on it to

construct a more perfect mechanism to reestablish order and

command.

Birth of theNation

The concept ofnation in Europe developed on the terrain ofthe

patrimonial and absolutist state. The patrimonial state was defined

as the property ofthe monarch. In a variety ofanalogous forms in

different countries throughout Europe, the patrimonial and absolut-

ist state was the political form required to rule feudal social relations

and relations ofproduction.1 Feudal property had to be delegated

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and its usage assigned according to the degrees ofthe social division

ofpower, in the same way that levels ofadministration would have

to be delegated in subsequent centuries. Feudal property was part

ofthe body ofthe monarch, just as, ifwe shift our view toward

the metaphysical domain, the sovereign monarchic body was part

ofthe body ofGod.2

In the sixteenth century, in the midst ofthe Reformation and

that violent battle among the forces of modernity, the patrimonial

monarchy was still presented as the guarantee ofpeace and social

life. It was still granted control over social development in such a

way that it could absorb that process within its machine ofdomina-

tion. ‘‘Cujus regio, ejus religio’’—or really, religion had to be

subordinated to the territorial control ofthe sovereign. There was

nothing diplomatic about this adage; on the contrary, it confided

entirely to the power ofthe patrimonial sovereign the management

ofthe passage to the new order. Even religion was the sovereign’s

property. In the seventeenth century, the absolutist reaction to

the revolutionary forces of modernity celebrated the patrimonial

monarchic state and wielded it as a weapon for its own purposes.

At that point, however, the celebration ofthe patrimonial state

could not but be paradoxical and ambiguous, since the feudal bases

ofits power were withering away. The processes ofthe primitive

accumulation ofcapital imposed new conditions on all the structures

ofpower.3 Until the era ofthe three great bourgeois revolutions

(the English, the American, and the French), there was no political

alternative that could successfully oppose this model. The absolutist

and patrimonial model survived in this period only with the support

ofa specific compromise ofpolitical forces, and its substance was

eroding from the inside owing primarily to the emergence of new

productive forces. The model did survive nonetheless, and, much

more important, it was transformed through the development of

some fundamental characteristics that would be bequeathed to suc-

cessive centuries.

The transformation of the absolutist and patrimonial model

consisted in a gradual process that replaced the theological founda-

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tion ofterritorial patrimony with a new foundation that was equally

transcendent.4 The spiritual identity ofthe nation rather than the

divine body ofthe king now posed the territory and population as

an ideal abstraction. Or rather, the physical territory and population

were conceived as the extension ofthe transcendent essence ofthe

nation. The modern concept of nation thus inherited the patrimonial body of the monarchic state and reinvented it in a new form. This new totality ofpower was structured in part by new capitalist productive processes on the one hand and old networks ofabsolutist administration

on the other. This uneasy structural relationship was stabilized by

the national identity: a cultural, integrating identity, founded on a

biological continuity ofblood relations, a spatial continuity ofterri-

tory, and linguistic commonality.

It is obvious that, although this process preserved the material-

ity ofthe relationship to the sovereign, many elements changed.

Most important, as the patrimonial horizon was transformed into

the national horizon, the feudal order of the subject (subjectus)

yielded to the disciplinary order ofthe citizen (cives). The shift of the population from subjects to citizens was an index of the shift

from a passive to an active role. The nation is always presented as

an active force, as a generative form of social and political relations.

As Benedict Anderson and others point out, the nation is often

experienced as (or at least functions as if it were) a collective imagin-

ing, an active creation ofthe community ofcitizens.5 At this point

we can see both the proximity and the specific difference between

the concepts ofpatrimonial state and national state. The latter

faithfully reproduces the former’s totalizing identity of both the

territory and the population, but the nation and the national state

propose new means ofovercoming the precariousness ofmodern

sovereignty. These concepts reify sovereignty in the most rigid

way; they make the relation ofsovereignty into a thing (often by naturalizing it) and thus weed out every residue ofsocial antagonism.

The nation is a kind ofideological shortcut that attempts to free

the concepts ofsovereignty and modernity from the antagonism and

crisis that define them. National sovereignty suspends the conflictual

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origins ofmodernity (when they are not definitively destroyed),

and it closes the alternative paths within modernity that had refused

to concede their powers to state authority.6

The transf

ormation ofthe concept ofmodern sovereignty

into that ofnational sovereignty also required certain new material

conditions. Most important, it required that a new equilibrium be

established between the processes ofcapitalist accumulation and

the structures ofpower. The political victory ofthe bourgeoisie,

as the English and French revolutions show well, corresponded to

the perfecting of the concept of modern sovereignty through that

ofnational sovereignty. Behind the ideal dimension ofthe concept

ofnation there were the class figures that already dominated the

processes ofaccumulation. ‘‘Nation’’ was thus at once both the

hypostasis ofthe Rousseauian ‘‘general will’’ and what manufactur-

ing ideology conceived as the ‘‘community ofneeds’’ (that is, the

capitalist regulation ofthe market) that in the long era ofprimitive

accumulation in Europe was more or less liberal and always bour-

geois.

When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the concept

of nation was taken up in very different ideological contexts and led

popular mobilizations in regions and countries within and outside

Europe that had experienced neither the liberal revolution nor the

same level ofprimitive accumulation, it still always was presented

as a concept ofcapitalist modernization, which claimed to bring

together the interclass demands for political unity and the needs of

economic development. In other words, the nation was posed as

the one and only active vehicle that could deliver modernity and

development. Rosa Luxemburg argued vehemently (and futilely)

against nationalism in the debates internal to the Third International

in the years before the First World War. Luxemburg opposed a

policy of ‘‘national self-determination’’ for Poland as an element of

the revolutionary platform, but her indictment of nationalism was

much more general.7 Her critique ofthe nation was not merely a

critique ofmodernization as such, although she was no doubt keenly

aware ofthe ambiguities involved in capitalist development; and

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she was not primarily concerned with the divisions that nationalisms

would inevitably create within the European working class, al-

though her own nomadic passage through central and eastern Eu-

rope certainly made her extremely sensitive to this. Luxemburg’s

most powerful argument, rather, was that nation means dictatorship

and is thus profoundly incompatible with any attempt at democratic

organization. Luxemburg recognized that national sovereignty and

national mythologies effectively usurp the terrain of democratic

organization by renewing the powers ofterritorial sovereignty and

modernizing its project through the mobilization ofan active com-

munity.

The process ofconstructing the nation, which renewed the

concept ofsovereignty and gave it a new definition, quickly became

in each and every historical context an ideological nightmare. The

crisis ofmodernity, which is the contradictory co-presence ofthe

multitude and a power that wants to reduce it to the rule ofone—

that is, the co-presence ofa new productive set offree subjectivities

and a disciplinary power that wants to exploit it—is not finally

pacified or resolved by the concept ofnation, any more than it was

by the concept ofsovereignty or state. The nation can only mask

the crisis ideologically, displace it, and defer its power.

TheNation and theCrisis of Modernity

Jean Bodin’s work lies at the head ofthe road in European thought

that leads to the concept ofnational sovereignty. His masterwork,

Les six livres de la Re´publique, which first appeared in 1576, right in the middle ofthe Renaissance crisis, addressed the current civil and

religious wars in France and Europe as its fundamental problem.

Bodin confronted political crises, conflicts, and war, but these ele-

ments ofrupture did not lead him to pose any idyllic alternative,

not even in simply theoretical or utopian terms. This is why Bodin’s

work was not only a seminal contribution to the modern definition

of sovereignty but also an effective anticipation of the subsequent

development ofsovereignty in national terms. By adopting a realistic

standpoint, he managed to anticipate modernity’s own critique

ofsovereignty.

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Sovereignty, Bodin claimed, cannot be produced by the unity

ofthe Prince and the multitude, the public and the private, nor

can its problem be resolved so long as one holds to either a contractu-

alist or a natural right framework. Really, the origin of political

power and the definition ofsovereignty consist in the victory of

one side over the other, a victory that makes the one sovereign

and the other subject. Force and violence create the sovereign. The

physical determinations ofpower impose the plenitudo potestatis (the fullness ofpower). This is the plenitude and the unity ofpower,

since ‘‘the union of[the republic’s] members depends on unity

under a single ruler, on whom the effectiveness of all the rest

depends. A sovereign prince is therefore indispensable, for it is his

power which informs all the members of the republic.’’8

After discarding the framework of natural right and the tran-

scendental perspectives that it always in some way invokes, Bodin

presents us with a figure ofthe sovereign, or rather the state,

that realistically and thus historically constructs its own origin and

structure. The modern state arose from within this transformation,

and only there could it continue to develop. This is the theoretical

hinge on which the theory ofmodern sovereignty is linked to

and perfects the experience of territorial sovereignty. By taking up

Roman law and drawing on its capacities to articulate the sources

ofright and order the forms ofproperty, Bodin’s doctrine became

a theory ofa united political body articulated as administration that

appeared to surmount the difficulties of the crisis of modernity.

The displacement ofthe center oftheoretical consideration from

the question oflegitimacy to that ofthe life ofthe state and its

sovereignty as a united body constituted an important advance.

When Bodin spoke of‘‘the political right ofsovereignty,’’ he al-

ready anticipated the national (and corporeal) overdetermination

ofsovereignty, and he thus opened an original and direct path that

would stretch forward across the subsequent centuries.9

After Bodin, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there

developed in Europe simultaneously two schools ofthought that

also accorded the theme of sovereignty a central role and effectively

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anticipated the concept ofnational sovereignty: the natural right

tradition and the realist (or historicist) tradition ofstate theory.10

Both schools mediated the transcendental conception ofsovereignty

with a realistic methodology that grasped the terms ofthe material

conflict; both brought together the construction ofthe sovereign

state with the constitution ofthe sociopolitical community that

later would be called nation. As in Bodin, both ofthese schools

continually confronted the crisis of the theoretical conception of

sovereignty, which was itselfcontinually reopened by the antagonis-

tic powers ofmodernity and the juridical and administrative con-

struction ofthe figure ofthe state.

In the natural right school, from Grotius to Althusius and from

Thomasius to Puffendorf, the transcendental figures of sovereignty

were brought down to earth and grounded in the reality ofthe

institutional and administrative processes. Sovereignty was distrib-

uted by setting in motion a system ofmultiple contracts designed

to intervene on every node ofthe administrative structure ofpower.

This process was not oriented toward the apex ofthe state and the

mere title ofsovereignty; rather, the problem oflegitimation began

to be addressed in terms ofan administrative machine that functioned through the articulations ofthe exercise ofpower. The circle of

sovereignty and obedience closed in on itself, duplicating itself,

multiplying, and extending across social reality. Sovereignty came

to be studied less from the perspective of the antagonists involved

in the crisis ofmodernity and more as an administrative process

that articulates these antagonisms and aims toward a unity in the

dialectic ofpower, abstacting and reifying it through the historical

dynamics. An important segment ofthe natural right school thus

developed the idea ofdistributing and articulating the transcendent

sovereignty through the real forms of administration.11

The synthesis that was implicit in the natural right school,

however, became explicit in the context ofhistoricism. Certainly,

it would be incorrect to attribute to the historicism ofthe Enlighten-

ment the thesis that was really only developed later by the reactionary

schools in the period after the French Revolution—the thesis, that

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is, that unites the theory ofsovereignty with the theory ofthe

nation and grounds both ofthem in a common historical humus.

And yet there are already in this early period the seeds ofthat later

development. Whereas an important segment ofthe natural right

school developed the idea ofarticulating transcendent sovereignty

through the real forms of administration, the historicist thinkers of

the Enlightenment attempted to conceive the subjectivity of the historical process and thereby find an effective ground for the title and exercise ofsovereignty.12 In the work ofGiambattista Vico, for

example, that terrific meteor that shot across the age ofEnlighten-

ment, the determinations ofthe juridical conception ofsovereignty

were all grounded in the power ofhistorical development. The

transcendent figures ofsovereignty were translated into indexes of

a providential process, which was at once both human and divine.

This construction ofsovereignty (or really reification ofsovereignty)

in history was very powerful. On this historical terrain, which forces

every ideological construct to confront reality, the genetic crisis of

modernity was never closed—and there was no need for it to close,

because the crisis itselfproduced new figures that incessantly spurred

on historical and political development, all still under the rule of

the transcendent sovereign. What an ingenious inversion ofthe

problematic! And yet, at the same time, what a complete mystifica-

tion ofsovereignty! The elements ofthe crisis, a continuous and

unresolved crisis, were now considered active elements ofprogress.

In effect, we can already recognize in Vico the embryo of Hegel’s

apologia of ‘‘effectiveness,’’ making the present world arrangement

the telos ofhistory.13

What remained hints and suggestions in Vico, however,

emerged as an open and radical declaration in the late German

Enlightenment. In the Hannover school first, and then in the work

ofJ. G. Herder, the modern theory ofsovereignty was directed

exclusively toward the analysis ofwhat was conceived as a social

and cultural continuity: the real historical continuity ofthe territory,

the population, and the nation. Vico’s argument that ideal history

is located in the history ofall nations became more radical in Herder

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so that every human perfection is, in a certain respect, national.14

Identity is thus conceived not as the resolution ofsocial and historical

differences but as the product of a primordial unity. The nation is

a complete figure ofsovereignty prior to historical development; or better, there is no historical development that is not already prefigured in the origin. In other words, the nation sustains the concept

ofsovereignty by claiming to precede it.15 It is the material engine

that courses throughout history, the ‘‘genius’’ that works history.

The nation becomes finally the condition ofpossibility ofall human

action and social life itself.

TheNation’s People

Between the end ofthe eighteenth and the beginning ofthe nine-

teenth centuries, the concept ofnational sovereignty finally emerged

in European thought in its completed form. At the base of this

definitive figure ofthe concept were a trauma, the French Revolu-

tion, and the resolution ofthat trauma, the reactionary appropriation

and celebration ofthe concept ofnation. The fundamental elements

ofthis swift reconfiguration ofthe concept ofnation that made it

a real political weapon can be seen in summary form in the work

ofEmmanuel-Joseph Sieyès. In his wonderful and libelous tract

What Is the Third Estate? he linked the concept ofnation to that

ofthe Third Estate, that is, the bourgeoisie. Sieyès tried to lead the

concept ofsovereignty back to its humanist origins and rediscover

its revolutionary possibilities. More important for our purposes,

Sieyès’s intense engagement with revolutionary activity allowed

him to interpret the concept ofnation as a constructive political concept, a constitutional mechanism. It gradually becomes clear, however,

particularly in Sieyès’s later work, the work ofhis followers, and

above all that ofhis detractors, that although the nation was formed

through politics, it was ultimately a spiritual construction, and the concept ofnation was thus stripped away f

rom the revolution,

consigned to all the Thermidors. The nation became explicitly the

concept that summarized the bourgeois hegemonic solution to the

problem ofsovereignty.16

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At those points when the concept ofnation has been presented

as popular and revolutionary, as indeed it was during the French

Revolution, one might assume that the nation has broken away

from the modern concept ofsovereignty and its apparatus ofsubju-

gation and domination, and is dedicated instead to a democratic

notion ofcommunity. The link between the concept ofnation and

the concept ofpeople was indeed a powerful innovation, and it

did constitute the center ofthe Jacobin sensibility as well as that

ofother revolutionary groups. What appears as revolutionary and

liberatory in this notion ofnational, popular sovereignty, however,

is really nothing more than another turn ofthe screw, a further

extension ofthe subjugation and domination that the modern con-

cept ofsovereignty has carried with it from the beginning. The

precarious power ofsovereignty as a solution to the crisis ofmoder-

nity was first referred for support to the nation, and then when the

nation too was revealed as a precarious solution, it was further

referred to the people. In other words, just as the concept of nation

completes the notion ofsovereignty by claiming to precede it, so

too the concept ofthe people completes that ofnation through

another feigned logical regression. Each logical step back functions

to solidify the power of sovereignty by mystifying its basis, that is,

by resting on the naturalness ofthe concept. The identity ofthe

nation and even more so the identity ofthe people must appear

natural and originary.

We, by contrast, must de-naturalize these concepts and ask

what is a nation and how is it made, but also, what is a people and

how is it made? Although ‘‘the people’’ is posed as the originary

basis ofthe nation, the modern conception of the people is in fact a product of the nation-state, and survives only within its specific ideological context. Many contemporary analyses ofnations and nationalism

from a wide variety of perspectives go wrong precisely because

they rely unquestioningly on the naturalness ofthe concept and

identity ofthe people. We should note that the concept ofthe

people is very different from that of the multitude.17 Already in the

seventeenth century, Hobbes was very mindful of this difference

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and its importance for the construction of sovereign order: ‘‘It is a

great hindrance to civil government, especially monarchical, that

men distinguish not enough between a people and a multitude.

The people is somewhat that is one, having one will, and to whom

one action may be attributed; none ofthese can be properly said

ofthe multitude. The people rules in all governments. For even

in monarchies the people commands; for the people wills by the

will ofone man . . . (however it seem a paradox) the king is the

people.’’18 The multitude is a multiplicity, a plane ofsingularities,

an open set ofrelations, which is not homogeneous or identical

with itselfand bears an indistinct, inclusive relation to those outside

ofit. The people, in contrast, tends toward identity and homogene-

ity internally while posing its difference from and excluding what

remains outside ofit. Whereas the multitude is an inconclusive

constituent relation, the people is a constituted synthesis that is

prepared for sovereignty. The people provides a single will and

action that is independent ofand often in conflict with the various

wills and actions ofthe multitude. Every nation must make the

multitude into a people.

Two fundamental kinds of operations contribute to the con-

struction ofthe modern concept ofthe people in relation to that

ofthe nation in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The more important ofthese are the mechanisms ofcolonial racism

that construct the identity ofEuropean peoples in a dialectical play

ofoppositions with their native Others. The concepts ofnation,

people, and race are never very far apart.19 The construction ofan

absolute racial difference is the essential ground for the conception

ofa homogeneous national identity. Numerous excellent studies

are appearing today, when the pressures ofimmigration and multi-

culturalism are creating conflicts in Europe, to demonstrate that,

despite the persistent nostalgia ofsome, European societies and

peoples were never really pure and uniform.20 The identity ofthe

people was constructed on an imaginary plane that hid and/or

eliminated differences, and this corresponded on the practical plane

to racial subordination and social purification.

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The second fundamental operation in the construction of the

people, which is facilitated by the first, is the eclipse of internal

differences through the representation ofthe whole population by a hegemonic group, race, or class. The representative group is the

active agent that stands behind the effectiveness of the concept of

nation. In the course ofthe French Revolution itself

, between

Thermidor and the Napoleonic period, the concept ofnation re-

vealed its fundamental content and served as an antidote to the

concept and forces of revolution. Even in Sieyès’s early work we

can see clearly how the nation serves to placate the crisis and how

sovereignty will be reappropriated through the representation of

the bourgeoisie. Sieyès claims that a nation can have only one general interest: it would be impossible to establish order ifthe nation were

to admit several different interests. Social order necessarily supposes

the unity ofends and the concert ofmeans.21 The concept ofnation

in these early years ofthe French Revolution was the first hypothesis

ofthe construction ofpopular hegemony and the first conscious

manifesto ofa social class, but it was also the final declaration ofa

fully accomplished secular transformation, a coronation, a final seal.

Never was the concept ofnation so reactionary as when it presented

itselfas revolutionary.22 Paradoxically, this cannot but be a com-

pleted revolution, an end ofhistory. The passage from revolutionary

activity to the spiritual construction ofthe nation and the people

is inevitable and implicit in the concepts themselves.23

National sovereignty and popular sovereignty were thus prod-

ucts ofa spiritual construction, that is, a construction ofidentity.

When Edmund Burke opposed Sieyès, his position was much less

profoundly different than the torrid polemical climate of the age

would lead us to believe. Even for Burke, in fact, national sover-

eignty is the product ofa spiritual construction ofidentity. This

fact can be recognized even more clearly in the work of those who

carried the standard ofthe counterrevolutionary project on the

European continent. The continental conceptions ofthis spiritual

construction revived both the historical and the voluntarist traditions

ofthe nation and added to the conception ofhistorical development

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a transcendental synthesis in national sovereignty. This synthesis is

always already accomplished in the identity ofthe nation and the

people. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, for example, claims in more or less

mythological terms that the fatherland and the people are representa-

tives and gauges ofearthly eternity; they are what here on earth

can be immortal.24 The Romantic counterrevolution was in fact

more realistic than the Enlightenment revolution. It framed and

fixed what was already accomplished, celebrating it in the eternal

light ofhegemony. The Third Estate is power; the nation is its

totalizing representation; the people is its solid and natural founda-

tion; and national sovereignty is the apex ofhistory. Every historical

alternative to bourgeois hegemony had thus been definitively sur-

passed through the bourgeoisie’s own revolutionary history.25

This bourgeois formulation ofthe concept ofnational sover-

eignty surpassed by far all the previous formulations of modern

sovereignty. It consolidated a particular and hegemonic image of

modern sovereignty, the image ofthe victory ofthe bourgeoisie,

which it then both historicized and universalized. National particu-

larity is a potent universality. All the threads ofa long development

were woven together here. In the identity, that is, the spiritual

essence, ofthe people and the nation, there is a territory embedded

with cultural meanings, a shared history, and a linguistic community;

but moreover there is the consolidation ofa class victory, a stable

market, the potential for economic expansion, and new spaces to

invest and civilize. In short, the construction ofnational identity

guarantees a continually reinforced legitimation, and the right and

power ofa sacrosanct and irrepressible unity. This is a decisive shift

in the concept ofsovereignty. Married to the concepts ofnation

and people, the modern concept ofsovereignty shifts its epicenter

from the mediation of conflicts and crisis to the unitary experience

ofa nation-subject and its imagined community.

Subaltern Nationalism

We have been focusing our attention up to this point on the

development ofthe concept ofnation in Europe while Europe was

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in the process ofachieving world dominance. Outside ofEurope,

however, the concept of nation has often functioned very differ-

ently. In some respects, in fact, one might even say that the function

ofthe concept ofnation is inverted when deployed among subordi-

nated rather than dominant groups. Stated most boldly, it appears

that whereas the concept of nation promotes stasis and restoration in the hands of the dominant, it is a weapon for change and revolution in the

hands of the subordinated.

The progressive nature ofsubaltern nationalism is defined by

two primary functions, each of which is highly ambiguous. Most

important, the nation appears as progressive insofar as it serves as

a line ofdefense against the domination ofmore powerful nations

and external economic, political, and ideological forces. The right

to self-determination of subaltern nations is really a right to secession

from the control of dominant powers.26 Anticolonial struggles thus

used the concept ofnation as a weapon to defeat and expel the

occupying enemy, and anti-imperialist policies similarly erected

national walls to obstruct the overpowering forces of foreign capital.

The concept ofnation also served as an ideological weapon to ward

off the dominant discourse that figured the dominated population

and culture as inferior; the claim to nationhood affirmed the dignity

ofthe people and legitimated the demand for independence and

equality. In each ofthese cases, the nation is progressive strictly as a fortified line of defense against more powerful external forces. As much as those walls appear progressive in their protective function against

external domination, however, they can easily play an inverse role

with respect to the interior they protect. The flip side ofthe structure

that resists foreign powers is itself a dominating power that exerts an

equal and opposite internal oppression, repressing internal difference

and opposition in the name ofnational identity, unity, and security.

Protection and oppression can be hard to tell apart. This strategy

of‘‘national protection’’ is a double-edged sword that at times

appears necessary despite its destructiveness.

The nation appears progressive in the second place insofar as

it poses the commonality ofa potential community. Part ofthe

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‘‘modernizing’’ effects of the nation in subordinated countries has

been the unification ofdiverse populations, breaking down reli-

gious, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic barriers. The unification of

countries such as Indonesia, China, and Brazil, for example, is

an ongoing process that involves overcoming innumerable such

barriers—and in many cases this national unification was prepared

by the European colonial power. In cases ofdiasporic populations,

too, the nation seems at times to be the only concept available

under which to imagine the community ofthe subaltern group—as,

for example, the Aztlań is imagined as the geographical homeland

of‘‘la Raza,’’ the spiritual Latino nation in North America. It

may be true, as Benedict Anderson says, that a nation should be

understood as an imagined community—but here we should recog-

nize that the claim is inverted so that the nation becomes the only way to imagine community! Every imagination ofa community becomes

overcoded as a nation, and hence our conception ofcommunity

is severely impoverished. Just as in the context ofthe dominant

countries, here too the multiplicity and singularity ofthe multitude

are negated in the straitjacket ofthe identity and homogeneity of

the people. Once again, the unifying power of the subaltern nation

is a double-edged sword, at once progressive and reactionary.

Both ofthese simultaneously progressive and regressive aspects

ofsubaltern nationalism are present in all their ambiguity in the

tradition ofblack nationalism in the United States. Although de-

prived as it is ofany territorial definition (and thus undoubtedly

different from the majority of other subaltern nationalisms), it too

presents the two fundamental progressive functions—sometimes

by striving to pose itselfin an analogous position to the proper,

territorially defined nations. In the early 1960s, for example, after

the enormous impetus created by the Bandung Conference and the

emerging African and Latin American national liberation struggles,

Malcolm X attempted to redirect the focus ofdemands ofAfrican

American struggles from ‘‘civil rights’’ to ‘‘human rights’’ and thus

rhetorically shift the forum of appeal from the U.S. Congress to the

U.N. General Assembly.27 Malcolm X, like many African American

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leaders at least since Marcus Garvey, clearly recognized the powerful

position ofspeaking as a nation and a people. The concept of

nation here configures a defensive position of separation from the hegemonic ‘‘external’’ power and at the same time represents the

autonomous power ofthe unified community, the power ofthe people.

More important than any such theoretical and rhetorical prop-

ositions, however, are the actual practices ofblack nationalism, that

is, the wide variety ofactivities and phenomena that are conceived

by the actors themselves as expressions ofblack nationalism: from

community drill teams and parades to meal programs, separate

schools, and projects ofcommunity economic development and

self-sufficiency. As Wahneema Lubiano puts it, ‘‘Black nationalism

is significant for the ubiquity of its presence in black American

lives.’’28 In all these various activities and realms oflife, black nation-

alism names precisely the circuits ofself-valorization that constitute

the community and allow for its relative self-determination and

self-constitution. Despite the range of disparate phenomena called

black nationalism, then, we can still recognize in them the two

fundamental progressive functions of subaltern nationalism: the de-

fense and the unification of the community. Black nationalism can

name any expression ofthe separation and autonomous power of

the African American people.

In the case ofblack nationalism too, however, the progressive

elements are accompanied inevitably by their reactionary shadows.

The repressive forces of nation and people feed off the self-valoriza-

tion ofthe community and destroy its multiplicity. When black

nationalism poses the uniformity and homogeneity of the African

American people as its basis (eclipsing class differences, for example)

or when it designates one segment ofthe community (such as

African American men) as de facto representatives of the whole, the

profound ambiguity of subaltern nationalism’s progressive functions

emerges as clearly as ever.29 Precisely the structures that play a

defensive role with respect to the outside—in the interest of further-

ing the power, autonomy, and unity ofthe community—are the

same that play an oppressive role internally, negating the multiplicity

ofthe community itself.

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We should emphasize, however, that these ambiguous progres-

sive functions ofthe concept ofnation exist primarily when nation

is not effectively linked to sovereignty, that is, when the imagined

nation does not (yet) exist, when the nation remains merely a

dream. As soon as the nation begins to form as a sovereign state,

its progressive functions all but vanish. Jean Genet was enchanted

by the revolutionary desire ofthe Black Panthers and the Palestin-

ians, but he recognized that becoming a sovereign nation would

be the end oftheir revolutionary qualities. ‘‘The day when the

Palestinians are institutionalized,’’ he said, ‘ I will no longer be at

their side. The day the Palestinians become a nation like the other

nations, I will no longer be there.’’30 With national ‘‘liberation’’ and

the construction ofthe nation-state, all ofthe oppressive functions

of modern sovereignty inevitably blossom in full force.

Totalitarianism of theNation-State

When the nation-state does function as an institution of sovereignty,

does it finally manage to resolve the crisis ofmodernity? Does the

concept ofthe people and its biopolitical displacement ofsover-

eignty succeed in shifting the terms and the terrain of the synthesis

between constituent power and constituted power, and between

the dynamic ofproductive forces and relations ofproduction, in

such a way as to carry us beyond the crisis? A vast panorama of

authors, poets, and politicians (often emerging from progressive,

socialist, and anti-imperialist movements) have certainly thought

so. The conversion ofthe nineteenth-century Jacobin Left into a

national Left, the more and more intense adoption of national

programs in the Second and Third Internationals, and the nationalist

forms of liberation struggles in the colonial and postcolonial world

all the way up to today’s resistance ofnations to the processes of

globalization and the catastrophes they provoke: all this seems to

support the view that the nation-state does afford a new dynamic

beyond the historical and conceptual disaster ofthe modern sover-

eign state.31

We have a different perspective on the function of the nation,

however, and in our view the crisis ofmodernity remains resolutely

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open under the rule ofthe nation and its people. When we take

up again our genealogy ofthe concept ofsovereignty in nineteenth-

and twentieth-century Europe, it is clear that the state-form of

modernity first fell into the nation-state-form, then the nation-

state-form descended into a whole series of barbarisms. When class

struggle reopened the mystified synthesis ofmodernity in the early

decades ofthe twentieth century and demonstrated again the power-

ful antithesis between the state and the multitude and between

productive forces and relations of production, that antithesis led

directly to European civil war—a civil war that was nonetheless

cloaked in the guise ofconflicts among sovereign nation-states.32

In the Second World War, Nazi Germany, along with the various

European fascisms, stood opposed to socialist Russia. Nations were

presented as mystifications of, or stand-ins for, the class subjects in

conflict. IfNazi Germany is the ideal type ofthe transformation

ofmodern sovereignty into national sovereignty and ofits articula-

tion in capitalist form, then Stalinist Russia is the ideal type of the

transformation of popular interest and the cruel logics that follow

from it into a project of national modernization, mobilizing for

its own purposes the productive forces that yearn for liberation

from capitalism.

Here we could analyze the national socialist apotheosis ofthe

modern concept ofsovereignty and its transformation into national

sovereignty: nothing could more clearly demonstrate the coherence

ofthis passage than the transfer ofpower from the Prussian monarchy

to Hitler’s regime, under the good auspices ofthe German bourgeoi-

sie. This passage, however, is well known, as are the explosive

violence ofthis transfer ofpower, the exemplary obedience ofthe

German people, their military and civil valor in the service ofthe

nation, and the secondary consequences that we can call, in a

kind ofintellectual shorthand, Auschwitz (as symbol ofthe Jewish

holocaust) and Buchenwald (as symbol ofthe extermination of

communists, homosexuals, Gypsies, and others). Let us leave this

story to other scholars and to the disgrace ofhistory.

We are more interested here with the other side ofthe national

question in Europe during this era. In other words, what really

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happened when nationalism went hand in hand with socialism in

Europe? In order to respond to this question, we have to revisit a

few central moments in the history of European socialism. In partic-

ular, we must remember that not long after its inception, between

the middle and end ofthe nineteenth century, the socialist Interna-

tional had to come to terms with strong nationalist movements,

and through this confrontation the original internationalist passion

ofthe workers’ movement quickly evaporated. The policies of

the strongest European workers’ movements, in Germany, Austria,

France, and above all England, immediately raised the banner of

national interest. Social-democratic reformism was entirely invested

in this compromise conceived in the name ofthe nation—a com-

promise between class interests, that is, between the proletariat and

certain strata ofthe bourgeois hegemonic structure in each country.

Let’s not even talk about the ignoble history ofbetrayal in which

segments ofthe European workers’ movement supported the impe-

rialist enterprises ofthe European nation-states, nor the unpardon-

able folly that brought together the various European reformisms

in consenting to the masses’ being led to slaughter in the First

World War.

Social-democratic reformism did have an adequate theory for

these positions. Several Austrian social-democratic professors in-

vented it, contemporaries ofMusil’s Count Leinsdorf. In the idyllic

atmosphere ofalpine Kakania, in the gentle intellectual climate of

that ‘‘return to Kant,’’ those professors, such as Otto Bauer, insisted

on the necessity ofconsidering nationality a fundamental element of

modernization.33 In fact, they believed that from the confrontation

between nationality (defined as a community ofcharacter) and

capitalist development (understood as society) there would emerge

a dialectic that in its unfolding would eventually favor the proletariat

and its progressive hegemony in society. This program ignored the

fact that the concept of nation-state is not divisible but rather

organic, not transcendental but transcendent, and even in its tran-

scendence it is constructed to oppose every tendency on the part

ofthe proletariat to reappropriate social spaces and social wealth.

What, then, could modernization mean ifit is fundamentally tied

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to the reform of the capitalist system and inimical to any opening

ofthe revolutionary process? These authors celebrated the nation

without wanting to pay the price ofthis celebration. Or better,

they celebrated it while mystifying the destructive power of the

concept ofnation. Given this perspective, support for the imperialist

projects and the interimperialist war were really logical and inevita-

ble positions for social-democratic reformism.

Bolshevism, too, entered the terrain ofnationalist mythology,

particularly through Stalin’s celebrated prerevolutionary pamphlet

on Marxism and the national question.34 According to Stalin, nations

are immediately revolutionary, and revolution means moderniza-

tion: nationalism is an ineluctable stage in development. Through

Stalin’s translation, however, as nationalism becomes socialist, so-

cialism becomes Russian, and Ivan the Terrible is laid to rest in

the tomb beside Lenin. The Communist International is transformed

into an assembly ofthe ‘‘fifth column’’ ofRussian national interests.

The notion ofcommunist revolution—the deterritorializing specter

that had haunted Europe and the world, and that from the Paris

Commune to 1917 in Saint Petersburg and to Mao’s Long March

had managed to bring together deserters, internationalist partisans,

striking workers, and cosmopolitan intellectuals—was finally made

into a reterritorializing regime ofnational sovereignty. It is a tragic

irony that nationalist socialism in Europe came to resemble national

socialism. This is not because ‘‘the two extremes meet,’’ as some

liberals would like to think, but because the abstract machine of

national sovereignty is at the heart ofboth.

When, in the midst ofthe cold war, the concept oftotalitarian-

ism was introduced into political science, it only touched on extrin-

sic elements ofthe question. In its most coherent form the concept

oftotalitarianism was used to denounce the destruction ofthe

democratic public sphere, the continuation ofJacobinist ideologies,

the extreme forms ofracist nationalism, and the negation ofmarket

forces. The concept of totalitarianism, however, ought to delve

much more deeply into the real phenomena and at the same time

give a better explanation ofthem. In fact, totalitarianism consists

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not simply in totalizing the effects of social life and subordinating

them to a global disciplinary norm, but also in the negation ofsocial

life itself, the erosion of its foundation, and the theoretical and

practical stripping away ofthe very possibility ofthe existence of

the multitude. What is totalitarian is the organic foundation and

the unified source ofsociety and the state. The community is not

a dynamic collective creation but a primordial founding myth. An

originary notion ofthe people poses an identity that homogenizes

and purifies the image ofthe population while blocking the con-

structive interactions of differences within the multitude.

Sieyès saw the embryo oftotalitarianism already in eighteenth-

century conceptions ofnational and popular sovereignty, concep-

tions that effectively preserved the absolute power of monarchy

and transferred it to national sovereignty. He glimpsed the future

ofwhat might be called totalitarian democracy.35 In the debate over

the Constitution ofYear III ofthe French Revolution, Sieyès

denounced the ‘‘bad plans for a re-total [ re´-total] instead ofa republic [ re´-publique], which would be fatal for freedom and ruinous for both the public realm and the private.’’36 The concept ofnation

and the practices ofnationalism are from the beginning set down

on the road not to the republic but to the ‘‘re-total,’’ the total thing,

that is, the totalitarian overcoding ofsocial life.

2.3

T H E D I A L E C T I C S O F

C O L O N I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

To Toussaint l’Ouverture

Toussaint, the most unhappy man ofmen!

Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough

Within thy hearing, or thy head be now

Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;—

O miserable Chieftain! where and when

Wilt thou find patience! Yet die not; do thou

Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:

Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,

Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind

Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;

There’s not a breathing ofthe common wind

That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;

Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

William Wordsworth

We now need to take a step back and examine the

genealogy ofthe concept ofsovereignty from the perspective of

colonialism. The crisis ofmodernity has from the beginning had an

intimate relation to racial subordination and colonization. Whereas

within its domain the nation-state and its attendant ideological

structures work tirelessly to create and reproduce the purity ofthe

people, on the outside the nation-state is a machine that produces

Others, creates racial difference, and raises boundaries that delimit

and support the modern subject ofsovereignty. These boundaries

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and barriers, however, are not impermeable but rather serve to

regulate two-way flows between Europe and its outside. The Orien-

tal, the African, the Amerindian are all necessary components for the

negative foundation of European identity and modern sovereignty as

such. The dark Other ofEuropean Enlightenment stands as its

very foundation just as the productive relationship with the ‘‘dark

continents’’ serves as the economic foundation of the European

nation-states.1 The racial conflict intrinsic to European modernity

is another symptom ofthe permanent crisis that defines modern

sovereignty. The colony stands in dialectical opposition to European

modernity, as its necessary double and irrepressible antagonist. Colo-

nial sovereignty is another insufficient attempt to resolve the crisis

ofmodernity.

Humankind Is Oneand Many

The age ofEuropean discovery and the progressively intense com-

munication among the spaces and peoples ofthe earth that followed

have always carried with them a real utopian element. But so much

blood has been spilled, so many lives and cultures destroyed, that

it seems much more urgent to denounce the barbarity and horror

ofwestern European (and then also U.S., Soviet, and Japanese)

expansion and control over the globe. We think it important,

however, not to forget the utopian tendencies that have always

accompanied the progression toward globalization, even ifthese

tendencies have continually been defeated by the powers of modern

sovereignty. The love of differences and the belief in the universal

freedom and equality of humanity proper to the revolutionary

thought ofRenaissance humanism reappear here on a global scale.

This utopian element ofglobalization is what prevents us from

simply falling back into particularism and isolationism in reaction

to the totalizing forces of imperialism and racist domination, pushing

us instead to forge a project of counterglobalization, counter-

Empire. This utopian moment, however, has never been unambigu-

ous. It is a tendency that constantly conflicts with sovereign order

and domination. We see three exemplary expressions ofthis utopi-

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anism, in all its ambiguity, in the thought ofBartolome´ de Las

Casas, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and Karl Marx.

In the first half-century after the European landing in the

Americas at Hispaniola, Bartolome´ de Las Casas witnessed with

horror the barbarity ofthe conquistadores and colonists and their

enslavement and genocide ofthe Amerindians. The majority ofthe

Spanish military, administrators, and colonists, hungry for gold and

power, saw the occupants ofthis new world as irrevocably Other,

less than human, or at least naturally subordinate to Europeans—and

Las Casas recounts for us how the newly arrived Europeans treated

them worse than their animals. In this context it is a wonder that

Las Casas, who was part ofthe Spanish mission, could separate

himselfenough from the common stream ofopinion to insist on

the humanity ofthe Amerindians and contest the brutality ofthe

Spanish rulers. His protest arises from one simple principle: human-

kind is one and equal.

One should recognize at the same time, however, that a mis-

sionary vocation is intrinsically linked to the humanitarian project

ofthe good bishop ofChiapas. In fact, Las Casas can think equality

only in terms ofsameness. The Amerindians are equal to Europeans

in nature only insofar as they are potentially European, or really

potentially Christian: ‘‘The nature ofmen is the same and all are

called by Christ in the same way.’’2 Las Casas cannot see beyond

the Eurocentric view ofthe Americas, in which the highest generos-

ity and charity would be bringing the Amerindians under the control

and tutelage ofthe true religion and its culture. The natives are

undeveloped potential Europeans. In this sense Las Casas belongs

to a discourse that extends well into the twentieth century on the

perfectibility of savages. For the Amerindians, just as for the Jews

of sixteenth-century Spain, the path to freedom from persecution

must pass first through Christian conversion. Las Casas is really not

so far from the Inquisition. He recognizes that humankind is one,

but cannot see that it is also simultaneously many.

More than two centuries after Las Casas, in the late eighteenth

century, when Europe’s domination over the Americas had changed

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form from conquest, massacre, and pillage to the more stable colonial

structure oflarge-scale slave production and trade exclusives, a

black slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture led the first successful

independence struggle against modern slavery in the French colony

ofSaint Domingue (now Haiti). Toussaint L’Ouverture breathed

in the rhetoric ofthe French Revolution emanating from Paris in

its pure form. If the French revolutionaries opposing the ancien

re´gime proclaimed the universal human right to ‘‘liberte´, egalite´,

et fraternite´,’’ Toussaint assumed that the blacks, mulattoes, and

whites ofthe colony were also included under the broad umbrella

ofthe rights ofcitizens. He took the victory over the feudal aristoc-

racy and the exaltation ofuniversal values in Europe to imply also

the victory over the ‘‘race aristocracy’’ and the abolition ofslavery.

All will now be free citizens, equal brothers in the new French

republic. The letters ofToussaint to French military and govern-

mental leaders pursue the rhetoric ofthe revolution faultlessly to

its logical conclusion and thereby reveal its hypocrisy. Perhaps na-

ively or perhaps as a conscious political tactic, Toussaint demon-

strates how the leaders ofthe revolution betray the principles they

claim to hold most dear. In a report to the Directoire on 14 Brumaire

an VI (November 5, 1797), Toussaint warned the French leaders

that any return to slavery, any compromise ofprinciples, would

be impossible. A declaration offreedom is irreversible: ‘‘Do you

think that men who have enjoyed the blessing ofliberty will calmly

see it snatched away? . . . But no, the same hand that has bro-

ken our chains will not enslave us anew. France will not revoke

her principles, she will not withdraw from us the greatest of her

benefits.’’3

The proclamations ofuniversal rights launched so confidently

in Paris come back from Saint Domingue only to strike horror in

the hearts ofthe French. In the voyage across the Atlantic, the

universality ofthe ideals became more real and were put into

practice. As AimeĆeśaire puts it, Toussaint L’Ouverture pushed

the project forward across the terrain ‘‘that separates the only thought from concrete reality; right from its actualization; reason from its

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proper truth.’’4 Toussaint takes the Declaration ofthe Rights of

Man to the letter and insists on its full translation into practice. The

revolution under Toussaint does not seek liberation from European

domination only to return to a lost African world or reestablish in

isolation traditional forms of rule; Toussaint looks forward to the

forms of liberty and equality newly made available in the increasingly

interconnected world.5

At times, however, Toussaint writes as ifthe very idea of

freedom had been created by the French, and as if he and his

insurgent companions were free only by the grace of Paris. This

may be merely a rhetorical strategy ofToussaint’s, an example of

his ironic obsequiousness toward the French rulers; but certainly

one should not think freedom to be a European idea. The slaves

ofSaint Domingue had revolted against their masters ever since

their capture and forced immigration from Africa. They were not

granted freedom but won it through bloody and tireless battle.

Neither the desire for freedom nor its conquest originated in France,

and the blacks ofSaint Domingue did not need the Parisians to

teach them to fight for it. What Toussaint does receive and make

good use ofis the specific rhetoric ofthe French revolutionaries

that gives legitimate form to his quest for liberation.

In the nineteenth century Karl Marx, like Las Casas and Tous-

saint L’Ouverture before him, recognized the utopian potential of

the ever-increasing processes ofglobal interaction and communica-

tion. Like Las Casas, Marx was horrified by the brutality ofEuropean

conquest and exploitation. Capitalism was born in Europe through

the blood and sweat ofconquered and colonized non-European

peoples: ‘‘The veiled slavery ofthe wage-labourers in Europe needed

the unqualified slavery ofthe New World as its pedestal.’’6 Like

Toussaint L’Ouverture, Marx recognized human freedom as a uni-

versal project to be realized through practice and from which no

population should be excluded.

This global utopian vein in Marx is nonetheless ambiguous,

perhaps even more so than in the other two cases, as we can see

clearly from the series of articles he wrote for the New York Daily

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Tribune in 1853 on British rule in India. Marx’s primary goal in

these articles was to explain the debate going on at the time in the

British Parliament over the status ofthe East India Company and

situate the debate in the history ofBritish colonial rule. Marx is of

course quick to note the brutality ofthe introduction ofBritish

‘‘civilization’’ into India and the havoc and suffering wrought by

the rapacious greed ofBritish capital and the British government.

He immediately warns, however, in terms that bring us right back

to the revolutionary face of the Renaissance, against simply reacting

to the barbarity ofthe British by supporting blindly the status quo

ofIndian society. The village system that Marx understood to

preexist the British colonial intrusion was nothing to be champi-

oned: ‘‘Sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness’’ the

destruction and suffering caused by the British, ‘‘we must not forget

that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may

appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism,

that they restrained the human mind, within the smallest possible

compass, making it the unresisting tool ofsuperstition, enslaving it

beneath the traditional rules depriving it ofall grandeur and historical

energies.’’7 Neither does the ruling structure ofIndian princes de-

serve support, even in reaction to the British: ‘‘It is not a strange

thing that the same men who denounce ‘the barbarous splendors

ofthe Crown and Aristocracy ofEngland’ are shedding tears at the

downfall of Indian Nabobs, Rujahs, and Jagidars, the great majority

ofwhom possess not even the prestige ofantiquity, being generally

usurpers ofvery recent date, set up by English intrigue.’’8

The colonial situation falls too easily into a choice between

two bad alternatives: either submission to British capital and British

rule or return to traditional Indian social structures and submission

to Indian princes; either foreign domination or local domination.

For Marx there must be another path that refuses both of these

alternatives, a path ofinsubordination and freedom. In this sense,

in creating the conditions ofpossibility for a new society, ‘‘whatever

may have been the crimes ofEngland, she was the unconscious

tool ofhistory in bringing about that revolution.’’9 Capital can, in

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certain circumstances, be a force of enlightenment. Like Toussaint,

then, Marx saw no use in overthrowing foreign domination simply

to restore some isolated and traditional form of oppression. The

alternative must look forward to a new form of freedom, connected

to the expansive networks ofglobal exchange.

The only ‘‘alternative’’ path Marx can imagine, however, is

that same path that European society has already traveled. Marx

has no conception of the difference of Indian society, the different

potentials it contains. He can thus see the Indian past only as vacant

and static: ‘‘Indian society has no history at all, at least no known

history. What we call its history is but the history ofthe successive

intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that

unresisting and unchanging society.’’10 The claim that Indian society

has no history means not that nothing has happened in India but

that the course ofevents has been determined exclusively by exter-

nal forces, while Indian society has remained passive, ‘‘unresisting

and unchanging.’’ Certainly Marx was limited by his scant knowl-

edge ofIndia’s present and past.11 His lack ofinformation, how-

ever, is not the point. The central issue is that Marx can con-

ceive ofhistory outside ofEurope only as moving strictly along

the path already traveled by Europe itself. ‘‘England has to fulfill a

double mission in India,’’ he wrote, ‘‘one destructive, the other

regenerating—the annihilation ofold Asiatic Society, and the laying

ofthe material foundations ofWestern society in Asia.’’12 India can

progress only by being transformed into a Western society. All the

world can move forward only by following the footsteps of Europe.

Marx’s Eurocentrism is in the end not so different from that of

Las Casas.

TheCrisis of Colonial Slavery

Although the utopian vein has continually surfaced in the historical

process ofthe interconnection and intercommunication ofthe world

in the modern period, it has nonetheless continually been suppressed

militarily and ideologically by the forces of European domination.

The primary result has been massacres on a scale never before

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imagined and the establishment ofracial, political, and economic

structures ofEuropean rule over the non-European world. The

rise ofEuropean supremacy was driven in large part by the develop-

ment and spread ofcapitalism, which fed Europe’s seemingly insatia-

ble thirst for wealth. The global expansion of capitalism, however,

was neither a uniform nor a univocal process. In various regions

and among different populations capitalism developed unevenly: it

lurched forward, hesitated, and retreated according to a variety of

diverse paths. One such circuitous path is traced by the history of

large-scale colonial slave production in the Americas between the

late seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, a history that is

not precapitalist but rather within the complex and contradictory

developments ofcapital.

Large-scale plantation production with slave labor was initiated

in the Caribbean in the mid-seventeenth century by English and

French planters who imported African slaves to fill the void left by

the native peoples killed by European weapons and disease. By the

end ofthe eighteenth century, the products ofslave labor in the

Americas constituted one third ofthe value ofEuropean com-

merce.13 European capitalism stood in a very ambiguous relation

to this slave production in the Americas. One might reason logically,

as many have, that since capitalism is based ideologically and materi-

ally on free labor, or really on the worker’s ownership of his or

her own labor power, capitalism must be antithetical to slave labor.

From this perspective, colonial slavery would be seen as a preexisting

form of production analogous to feudalism that capital succeeds

gradually in overcoming. The capitalist ideology offreedom would

in this case be an unalloyed force of enlightenment.

Capital’s relationship to colonial slavery, however, is in fact

much more intimate and complex. First ofall, even though capital-

ism’s ideology is indeed antithetical to slavery, in practice capital

nonetheless not only subsumed and reinforced existing slave produc-

tion systems throughout the world but also created new systems of

slavery on an unprecedented scale, particularly in the Americas.14

One might interpret capital’s creation ofslave systems as a kind of

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apprenticeship to capitalism, in which slavery would function as a

transitional stage between the natural (that is, self-sufficient and

isolated) economies that preexisted European intrusion and capital-

ism proper. Indeed, the scale and organization ofthe eighteenth-

century Caribbean plantations did foreshadow in certain respects

the nineteenth-century European industrial plant.15 The slave pro-

duction in the Americas and the African slave trade, however, were

not merely or even predominantly a transition to capitalism. They

were a relatively stable support, a pedestal ofsuperexploitation on

which European capitalism stood. There is no contradiction here:

slave labor in the colonies made capitalism in Europe possible, and

European capital had no interest in giving it up.

In the very same period when European powers constructed

the bases ofthe slave economy across the Atlantic, there was also

in Europe, principally in eastern but also in southern Europe, a

refeudalization of the agrarian economy and thus a very strong

tendency to block the mobility oflabor and freeze the conditions

ofthe labor market. Europe was thrown back into a second period

ofservitude. The point here is not simply to denounce the irrational-

ity ofthe bourgeoisie, but to understand how slavery and servitude

can be perfectly compatible with capitalist production, as mechanisms that limit the mobility ofthe labor f

orce and block its movements.

Slavery, servitude, and all the other guises ofthe coercive organiza-

tion oflabor—from coolieism in the Pacific and peonage in Latin

America to apartheid in South Africa—are all essential elements

internal to the processes ofcapitalist development. In this period

slavery and wage labor engaged each other as dance partners in the

coordinated steps ofcapitalist development.16

Certainly many noble and enlightened proponents ofaboli-

tionism in Europe and the Americas in the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries argued against slavery on moral grounds. The

abolitionist arguments had some real force, however, only when

they served the interests ofcapital, for example, when they served

to undercut the profits ofa competitor’s slave production. Even

then, however, their force was quite limited. In fact, neither moral

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arguments at home nor calculations ofprofitability abroad could

move European capital to dismantle the slave regimes. Only the

revolt and revolution ofslaves themselves could provide an adequate

lever. Just as capital moves forward to restructure production and

employ new technologies only as a response to the organized threat

ofworker antagonism, so too European capital would not relinquish

slave production until the organized slaves posed a threat to their

power and made that system ofproduction untenable. In other

words, slavery was not abandoned for economic reasons but rather

overthrown by political forces.17 Political unrest did ofcourse under-

cut the economic profitability ofthe system, but more important,

the slaves in revolt came to constitute a real counterpower. The

Haitian revolution was certainly the watershed in the modern history

ofslave revolt—and its specter circulated throughout the Americas

in the early nineteenth century just as the specter ofthe October

Revolution haunted European capitalism over a century later. One

should not forget, however, that revolt and antagonism were a

constant part ofslavery throughout the Americas, from New York

City to Bahia. The economy ofslavery, like the economy ofmoder-

nity itself, was an economy of crisis.

The claim that regimes ofslavery and servitude are internal

to capitalist production and development points toward the intimate

relationship between the laboring subjects’ desire to flee the relation-

ship ofcommand and capital’s attempts to block the population

within fixed territorial boundaries. Yann Moulier Boutang empha-

sizes the primacy ofthese lines offlight in the history ofcapitalist

development:

An anonymous, collective, continuous, and uncontainable

force of defection is what has driven the labor market toward

freedom. This same force is what has obliged liberalism to

produce the apology offree labor, the right to property, and

open borders. It has also forced the bourgeois economists

to establish models that immobilize labor, discipline it, and

disregard the elements ofuninterrupted flight. All ofthis has

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functioned to invent and reinvent a thousand forms of slavery.

This ineluctable aspect ofaccumulation precedes the question

ofthe proletarianization ofthe liberal era. It constructs the

bases ofthe modern state.18

The deterritorializing desire ofthe multitude is the motor that

drives the entire process ofcapitalist development, and capital must

constantly attempt to contain it.

TheProduction of Alterity

Colonialism and racial subordination function as a temporary solu-

tion to the crisis ofEuropean modernity, not only in economic and

political terms, but also in terms ofidentity and culture. Colonialism

constructs figures ofalterity and manages their flows in what unfolds

as a complex dialectical structure. The negative construction of

non-European others is finally what founds and sustains European

identity itself.

Colonial identity functions first of all through a Manichaean

logic ofexclusion. As Franz Fanon tells us, ‘‘The colonial world is

a world cut in two.’’19 The colonized are excluded from European

spaces not only in physical and territorial terms, and not only in

terms ofrights and privileges, but even in terms ofthought and

values. The colonized subject is constructed in the metropolitan

imaginary as other, and thus, as far as possible, the colonized is cast

outside the defining bases ofEuropean civilized values. (We can’t

reason with them; they can’t control themselves; they don’t respect

the value ofhuman life; they only understand violence.) Racial

difference is a sort of black hole that can swallow up all the capacities

for evil, barbarism, unrestrained sexuality, and so forth. The dark

colonized subject thus seems at first obscure and mysterious in its

otherness. This colonial construction ofidentities rests heavily on

the fixity ofthe boundary between metropole and colony. The

purity ofthe identities, in both biological and cultural senses, is of

utmost importance, and maintenance ofthe boundary is cause for

considerable anxiety. ‘‘All values, in fact,’’ Fanon points out, ‘‘are

irrevocably poisoned and diseased as soon as they are allowed in

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contact with the colonized race.’’20 The boundaries protecting this

pure European space are continually under siege. Colonial law

operates primarily around these boundaries, both in that it supports

their exclusionary function and in that it applies differently to the

subjects on the two sides ofthe divide. Apartheid is simply one

form, perhaps the emblematic form, of the compartmentalization

ofthe colonial world.

The barriers that divide the colonial world are not simply

erected on natural boundaries, even though there are almost always

physical markers that help naturalize the division. Alterity is not given but produced. This premise is the common point ofdeparture for a

wide range ofresearch that has emerged in recent decades, including

notably Edward’s Said’s seminal book: ‘ I have begun with the

assumption that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature . . . that

the Orient was created—or, as I call it, ‘Orientalized.’ ’ Orientalism

is not simply a scholarly project to gain more accurate knowledge

ofa real object, the Orient, but rather a discourse that creates its

own object in the unfolding of the discourse itself. The two primary

characteristics ofthis Orientalist project are its homogenization of

the Orient from Maghreb to India (Orientals everywhere are all

nearly the same) and its essentialization (the Orient and the Oriental

character are timeless and unchanging identities). The result, as Said

points out, is not the Orient as it is, an empirical object, but the

Orient as it has been Orientalized, an object ofEuropean discourse.21

The Orient, then, at least as we know it through Orientalism, is a

creation ofdiscourse, made in Europe and exported back to the

Orient. The representation is at once a form of creation and a form

ofexclusion.

Among the academic disciplines involved in this cultural pro-

duction ofalterity, anthropology was perhaps the most important

rubric under which the native other was imported to and exported

from Europe.22 From the real differences of non-European peoples,

nineteenth-century anthropologists constructed an other being of

a different nature; differential cultural and physical traits were con-

strued as the essence ofthe African, the Arab, the Aboriginal, and

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so forth. When colonial expansion was at its peak and European

powers were engaged in the scramble for Africa, anthropology and

the study ofnon-European peoples became not only a scholarly

endeavor but also a broad field for public instruction. The other

was imported to Europe—in natural history museums, public exhi-

bitions ofprimitive peoples, and so forth—and thus made increas-

ingly available for the popular imaginary. In both its scholarly and

its popular forms, nineteenth-century anthropology presented non-

European subjects and cultures as undeveloped versions ofEurope-

ans and their civilization: they were signs ofprimitiveness that

represented stages on the road to European civilization. The dia-

chronic stages ofhumanity’s evolution toward civilization were

thus conceived as present synchronically in the various primitive

peoples and cultures spread across the globe.23 The anthropological

presentation ofnon-European others within this evolutionary the-

ory ofcivilizations served to confirm and validate the eminent

position ofEuropeans and thereby legitimate the colonialist project

as a whole.

Important segments ofthe discipline ofhistory were also deeply

embedded in the scholarly and popular production ofalterity, and

thus also in the legitimation ofcolonial rule. For example, upon

arriving in India and finding no historiography they could use,

British administrators had to write their own ‘‘Indian history’’ to

sustain and further the interests of colonial rule. The British had

to historicize the Indian past in order to have access to it and put

it to work. This British creation ofan Indian history, however,

like the formation of the colonial state, could be achieved only by

imposing European colonial logics and models on Indian reality.24

India’s past was thus annexed so as to become merely a portion of

British history—or rather, British scholars and administrators created

an Indian history and exported it to India. This historiography

supported the Raj and in turn made the past inaccessible to Indians

as history. The reality ofIndia and Indians was thus supplanted

by a powerful representation that posed them as an other to Europe,

a primitive stage in the teleology ofcivilization.

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TheDialectic of Colonialism

In the logic ofcolonialist representations, the construction ofa

separate colonized other and the segregation ofidentity and alterity

turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely inti-

mate. The process consists, in fact, of two moments that are dialectic-

ally related. In the first moment difference has to be pushed to the

extreme. In the colonial imaginary the colonized is not simply an

other banished outside the realm ofcivilization; rather, it is grasped

or produced as Other, as the absolute negation, as the most distant

point on the horizon. Eighteenth-century colonial slaveholders, for

example, recognized the absoluteness of this difference clearly. ‘‘The

Negro is a being, whose nature and dispositions are not merely

different from those of the European, they are the reverse ofthem.

Kindness and compassion excite in his breast implacable and deadly

hatred; but stripes, and insults, and abuse, generate gratitude, af-

fection, and inviolable attachment!’’25 Thus the slaveholders’ men-

tality, according to an abolitionist pamphlet. The non-European

subject acts, speaks, and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the European.

Precisely because the difference of the Other is absolute, it

can be inverted in a second moment as the foundation of the

Self. In other words, the evil, barbarity, and licentiousness of the

colonized Other are what make possible the goodness, civility, and

propriety of the European Self. What first appears strange, foreign,

and distant thus turns out to be very close and intimate. Knowing,

seeing, and even touching the colonized is essential, even ifthis

knowledge and contact take place only on the plane ofrepresenta-

tion and relate little to the actual subjects in the colonies and the

metropole. The intimate struggle with the slave, feeling the sweat

on its skin, smelling its odor, defines the vitality ofthe master. This

intimacy, however, in no way blurs the division between the two

identities in struggle, but only makes more important that the

boundaries and the purity ofthe identities be policed. The identity

of the European Self is produced in this dialectical movement. Once the colonial subject is constructed as absolutely Other, it can in turn

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be subsumed (canceled and raised up) within a higher unity. The

absolute Other is reflected back into the most proper. Only through

opposition to the colonized does the metropolitan subject really

become itself. What first appeared as a simple logic of exclusion,

then, turns out to be a negative dialectic ofrecognition. The colo-

nizer does produce the colonized as negation, but, through a dialec-

tical twist, that negative colonized identity is negated in turn to

found the positive colonizer Self. Modern European thought and

the modern Selfare both necessarily bound to what Paul Gilroy

calls the ‘‘relationship ofracial terror and subordination.’’26 The

gilded monuments not only ofEuropean cities but also ofmodern

European thought itselfare f

ounded on the intimate dialectical

struggle with its Others.

We should be careful to note that the colonial world never

really conformed to the simple two-part division of this dialectical

structure. Any analysis ofeighteenth-century Haitian society before

the revolution, for example, cannot consider only whites and blacks

but must also take into account at least the position ofmulattoes,

who were at times united with whites on the basis oftheir property

and freedom, and at times united with blacks because of their

nonwhite skin. Even in simple racial terms this social reality demands

at least three axes ofanalysis—but that, too, fails to grasp the real

social divisions. One must also recognize the conflict among whites

of different classes and the interests of the black slaves as distinct

from those of the free blacks and maroons. In short, the real social

situation in the colonies never breaks down neatly into an absolute

binary between pure opposing forces. Reality always presents prolif-

erating multiplicities. Our argument here, however, is not that

reality presents this facile binary structure but that colonialism, as

an abstract machine that produces identities and alterities, imposes

binary divisions on the colonial world. Colonialism homogenizes

real social differences by creating one overriding opposition that

pushes differences to the absolute and then subsumes the opposition

under the identity ofEuropean civilization. Reality is not dialectical, colonialism is.

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The work ofnumerous authors, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and

Franz Fanon, who have recognized that colonial representations

and colonial sovereignty are dialectical in form has proven useful

in several respects. First ofall, the dialectical construction demon-

strates that there is nothing essential about the identities in struggle.

The White and the Black, the European and the Oriental, the

colonizer and the colonized are all representations that function

only in relation to each other and (despite appearances) have no

real necessary basis in nature, biology, or rationality. Colonialism

is an abstract machine that produces alterity and identity. And yet

in the colonial situation these differences and identities are made

to function as if they were absolute, essential, and natural. The first

result ofthe dialectical reading is thus the denaturalization ofracial

and cultural difference. This does not mean that once recognized

as artificial constructions, colonial identities evaporate into thin air;

they are real illusions and continue to function as if they were

essential. This recognition is not a politics in itself, but merely the

sign that an anticolonial politics is possible. In the second place, the

dialectical interpretation makes clear that colonialism and colonialist

representations are grounded in a violent struggle that must be

continually renewed. The European Selfneeds violence and needs

to confront its Other to feel and maintain its power, to remake

itselfcontinually. The generalized state ofwar that continuously

subtends colonial representations is not accidental or even un-

wanted—violence is the necessary foundation of colonialism itself.

Third, posing colonialism as a negative dialectic ofrecognition

makes clear the potential for subversion inherent in the situation.

For a thinker like Fanon, the reference to Hegel suggests that the

Master can only achieve a hollow form of recognition; it is the

Slave, through life-and-death struggle, who has the potential to

move forward toward full consciousness.27 The dialectic ought to

imply movement, but this dialectic ofEuropean sovereign identity

has fallen back into stasis. The failed dialectic suggests the possibility

ofa proper dialectic that through negativity will move history

forward.

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The Boomerang of Alterity

Many authors, particularly during the long season ofintense decolo-

nization struggles from the end of World War II through the 1960s,

argued that this positive dialectic ofcolonialism that founds and

stabilizes European sovereign identity should be challenged by a

properly negative and hence revolutionary dialectic. We cannot

defeat the colonialist production of alterity, these authors claimed,

simply by revealing the artificiality of the identities and differences

created—and thereby hoping to arrive directly at an affirmation of

the authentic universality ofhumanity. The only possible strategy

is one ofreversal or inversion ofthe colonialist logic itself. ‘‘The

unity which will come eventually, bringing all oppressed peoples

together in the same struggle,’’ Sartre proclaims, ‘‘must be preceded

in the colonies by what I shall call the moment ofseparation or

negativity: this antiracist racism is the only road that will lead to the

abolition of racial differences.’’28 Sartre imagines that this negative

dialectic will finally set history in motion.

The negative dialectic has most often been conceived in cul-

tural terms, for example, as the project of ne´gritude—the quest to

discover the black essence or unveil the black soul. According to

this logic, the response to colonialist representations has to involve

reciprocal and symmetrical representations. Even ifthe blackness

ofthe colonized is recognized as a production and a mystification

constructed in the colonial imaginary, it is not denied or dispelled

on account ofthat, but rather affirmed—as essence! According to

Sartre, the revolutionary poets ofne´gritude, such as AimeĆeśaire

and Leópold Senghor, adopt the negative pole that they have inher-

ited from the European dialectic and transform it into something

positive, intensifying it, claiming it as a moment of self-conscious-

ness. No longer a force of stabilization and equilibrium, the domesti-

cated Other has become savage, truly Other—that is, capable of

reciprocity and autonomous initiative. This, as Sartre announces so

beautifully and ominously, is ‘‘the moment of the boomerang.’’29

The negative moment is able to operate a reciprocal destruction of

the European Self—precisely because European society and its val-

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ues are founded on the domestication and negative subsumption

ofthe colonized. The moment ofnegativity is posed as the necessary

first step in a transition toward the ultimate goal ofa raceless society

that recognizes the equality, freedom, and common humanity of

all.30

Despite the coherent dialectical logic ofthis Sartrean cultural

politics, however, the strategy it proposes seems to us completely

illusory. The power ofthe dialectic, which in the hands ofcolonial

power mystified the reality ofthe colonial world, is adopted again

as part ofan anticolonial project as ifthe dialectic were itselfthe

real form ofthe movement ofhistory. Reality and history, however,

are not dialectical, and no idealist rhetorical gymnastics can make

them conform to the dialect.

The strategy ofnegativity, however, the moment ofthe boo-

merang, appears in an entirely different light when it is cast in a

nondialectical form and in political rather than cultural terms. Fanon,

for example, refuses the cultural politics of ne´gritude with its con-

sciousness ofblack identity and poses the revolutionary antithesis

instead in terms ofphysical violence. The original moment of

violence is that ofcolonialism: the domination and exploitation of

the colonized by the colonizer. The second moment, the response

ofthe colonized to this original violence, can take all sorts of

perverted forms in the colonial context. ‘‘The colonized man will

first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his

bones against his own people.’’31 The violence among the colonized

population, sometimes thought to be the residues ofancient tribal

or religious antagonisms, is really the pathological reflections ofthe

violence of colonialism that most often surfaces as superstitions,

myths, dances, and mental disorders. Fanon does not recommend

that the colonized should flee or avoid the violence. Colonialism

by its very operation perpetuates this violence, and ifit is not

addressed directly, it will continue to manifest itself in these destruc-

tive, pathological forms. The only path to health that Doctor Fanon

can recommend is a reciprocal counterviolence.32 Moreover, this

is the only path to liberation. The slave who never struggles for

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freedom, who is simply granted the permission of the master, will

forever remain a slave. This is precisely the ‘‘reciprocity’’ that Mal-

colm X proposed as a strategy to address the violence ofwhite

supremacy in the United States.33

For both Fanon and Malcolm X, however, this negative mo-

ment, this violent reciprocity, does not lead to any dialectical synthe-

sis; it is not the upbeat that will be resolved in a future harmony.

This open negativity is merely the healthy expression ofa real

antagonism, a direct relation offorce. Because it is not the means

to a final synthesis, this negativity is not a politics in itself; rather,

it merely poses a separation from colonialist domination and opens

the field for politics. The real political process of constitution will

have to take place on this open terrain offorces with a positive

logic, separate from the dialectics of colonial sovereignty.

ThePoisoned Gift of National Liberation

Subaltern nationalism has indeed, as we argued in the previous

section, served important progressive functions. The nation has

served among subordinated groups both as a defensive weapon

employed to protect the group against external domination and as

a sign ofthe unity, autonomy, and power ofthe community.34

During the period ofde-colonization and after, the nation appeared

as the necessary vehicle for political modernization and hence the

ineluctable path toward freedom and self-determination. The prom-

ise ofa global democracy among nations, including their formal

equality and sovereignty, was written into the original Charter of

the United Nations: ‘‘The Organization and its Members . . . shall

act in accordance with . . . the principle ofthe sovereign equality

ofall its members.’’35 National sovereignty means freedom from

foreign domination and the self-determination of peoples, and thus

signals the definitive defeat of colonialism.

The progressive functions of national sovereignty, however,

are always accompanied by powerful structures of internal domina-

tion. The perils ofnational liberation are even clearer when viewed

externally, in terms ofthe world economic system in which the

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‘‘liberated’’ nation finds itself. Indeed, the equation nationalism

equals political and economic modernization, which has been her-

alded by leaders ofnumerous anticolonial and anti-imperialist strug-

gles from Gandhi and Ho Chi Minh to Nelson Mandela, really

ends up being a perverse trick. This equation serves to mobilize

popular forces and galvanize a social movement, but where does

the movement lead and what interests does it serve? In most cases

it involves a delegated struggle, in which the modernization project also establishes in power the new ruling group that is charged with

carrying it out. The revolution is thus offered up, hands and feet

bound, to the new bourgeoisie. It is a February revolution, one

might say, that should be followed by an October. But the calendar

has gone crazy: October never comes, the revolutionaries get

bogged down in ‘‘realism,’’ and modernization ends up lost in

hierarchies ofthe world market. Is not the control exerted by the

world market, however, the opposite ofthe nationalist dream of

an autonomous, self-centered development? The nationalism of

anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles effectively functions in

reverse, and the liberated countries find themselves subordinated

in the international economic order.

The very concept ofa liberatory national sovereignty is ambig-

uous ifnot completely contradictory. While this nationalism seeks

to liberate the multitude from foreign domination, it erects domestic structures ofdomination that are equally severe. The position of

the newly sovereign nation-state cannot be understood when it is

viewed in terms ofthe rosy U.N. imaginary ofa harmonious concert

ofequal and autonomous national subjects. The postcolonial nation-

state functions as an essential and subordinated element in the global

organization ofthe capitalist market. As Partha Chatterjee argues,

national liberation and national sovereignty are not just powerless

against this global capitalist hierarchy but themselves contribute to

its organization and functioning:

Nowhere in the world has nationalism qua nationalism chal-

lenged the legitimacy ofthe marriage between Reason and

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capital. Nationalist thought . . . does not possess the ideologi-

cal means to make this challenge. The conflict between metro-

politain capital and the people-nation it resolves by absorbing

the political lif

e ofthe nation into the body ofthe state.

Conservatory ofthe passive revolution, the national state now

proceeds to find for ‘‘the nation’’ a place in the global order

ofcapital, while striving to keep the contradictions between

capital and the people in perpetual suspension. All politics is

now sought to be subsumed under the overwhelming require-

ments ofthe state-representing-the-nation.36

The entire logical chain ofrepresentation might be summarized

like this: the people representing the multitude, the nation repre-

senting the people, and the state representing the nation. Each

link is an attempt to hold in suspension the crisis ofmodernity.

Representation in each case means a further step of abstraction and

control. From India to Algeria and Cuba to Vietnam, the state is

the poisoned gift of national liberation.

The final link that explains the necessary subordination ofthe

postcolonial nation-state, however, is the global order ofcapital. The

global capitalist hierarchy that subordinates the formally sovereign

nation-states within its order is fundamentally different from the

colonialist and imperialist circuits ofinternational domination. The

end ofcolonialism is also the end ofthe modern world and modern

regimes ofrule. The end ofmodern colonialisms, ofcourse, has

not really opened an age ofunqualified freedom but rather yielded

to new forms of rule that operate on a global scale. Here we have

our first real glimpse ofthe passage to Empire.

C ONTAGION

When Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (Ceĺine) went to Africa, what he found

was disease. In the unforgettable African passage of Journey to the End ofthe Night, the narrator, through the deliriums of his own fever, saw

a population permeated through and through with disease: ‘‘The natives

in those parts suffered horribly from every communicable disease [toutes les maladies attrapables]. ’’1 Perhaps this is exactly what we should expect T H E D I A L E C T I C S O F C O L O N I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

135

from Doctor Destouches, given that he was sent to Africa by the League

of Nations to work as a hygienist, but of course Ceĺine was also working with a commonplace of colonial consciousness.

There are two sides to the connection between colonialism and disease.

First of all, simply the fact that the indigenous population is disease-ridden is itself a justification for the colonial project: ‘‘These niggers are sick! You’ll see! They’re completely corrupt [tout creveś et tout pourris]! . . .

They’re degenerates!’’ (p. 142). Disease is a sign of physical and moral corruption, a sign of a lack of civilization. Colonialism’s civilizing project, then, is justified by the hygiene it brings. On the other side of the coin, however, from the European perspective, the primary danger of colonialism is disease—or really contagion. In Africa, Louis-Ferdinand finds ‘‘every communicable disease.’’ Physical contamination, moral corruption, madness: the darkness of the colonial territories and populations is contagious, and Europeans are always at risk. (This is essentially the same truth that Kurtzrecognizes in Conrad’s Heart ofDarkness. ) Once there is established the differential between the pure, civilized European and the corrupt, barbarous Other, there is possible not only a civilizing process from disease to health, but also ineluctably the reverse process, from health to disease.

Contagion is the constant and present danger, the dark underside of the civilizing mission.

It is interesting in Ceĺine’s Journey that the disease of colonial territories is a sign not really of death, but of an overabundance of life. The narrator, Louis-Ferdinand, finds that not only the population but moreover the African terrain itself is ‘‘monstrous’’ (p. 140). The disease of the jungle is that life springs up everywhere, everything grows, without bounds. What a horror for a hygienist! The disease that the colony lets loose is the lack of boundaries on life, an unlimited contagion. If one looks back, Europe appears reassuringly sterile. (Remember in Heart ofDarkness the deathly pallor of Brussels that Marlow finds on his return from the Belgian Congo, but with respect to the monstrous, unbounded overabundance of life in the colony, the sterile environment of Europe seems comforting.) The standpoint of the hygienist may in fact be the privileged position for recognizing the anxieties of colonialist consciousness. The horror released by European conquest and colonialism is a horror of unlimited contact, flow, and ex-136

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change—or really the horror of contagion, miscegenation, and unbounded

life. Hygiene requires protective barriers. European colonialism was continually plagued by contradictions between virtuous exchange and the danger of contagion, and hence it was characterized by a complex play of flows and hygienic boundaries between metropole and colony and among colonial territories.

The contemporary processes of globalization have torn down many of

the boundaries of the colonial world. Along with the common celebrations of the unbounded flows in our new global village, one can still sense also an anxiety about increased contact and a certain nostalgia for colonialist hygiene. The dark side of the consciousness of globalization is the fear of contagion. If we break down global boundaries and open universal contact in our global village, how will we prevent the spread of disease and corruption?

This anxiety is most clearly revealed with respect to the AIDS pandemic.2

The lightning speed of the spread of AIDS in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia demonstrated the new dangers of global contagion. As AIDS has

been recognized first as a disease and then as a global pandemic, there have developed maps of its sources and spread that often focus on central Africa and Haiti, in terms reminiscent of the colonialist imaginary: unrestrained sexuality, moral corruption, and lack of hygiene. Indeed, the dominant

discourses of AIDS prevention have been all about hygiene: We must avoid contact and use protection. The medical and humanitarian workers have to throw up their hands in frustration working with these infected populations who have so little respect for hygiene! (Think of what Doctor Destouches would say!) International and supranational projects to stop the spread of AIDS have tried to establish protective boundaries at another level by

requiring HIV tests in order to cross national boundaries. The boundaries of nation-states, however, are increasingly permeable by all kinds of flows.

Nothing can bring back the hygienic shields of colonial boundaries. The age of globalization is the age of universal contagion.

2.4

S Y M P T O M S O F P A S S A G E

Here then is the man outside our people, outside our humanity.

He is continually starving, nothing belongs to him but the instant,

the prolonged instant oftorture . . . He always has only one thing:

his suffering, but there is nothing on the entire face of the earth

that could serve as a remedy for him, there is no ground on which

to plant his two feet, no support for his two hands to grasp, and

thus there is so much less for him than there is for the music-hall

trapeze artist who is at least hanging by a thread.

Franz Kafka

The end ofcolonialism and the declining powers ofthe

nation are indicative ofa general passage from the paradigm of

modern sovereignty toward the paradigm ofimperial sovereignty.

The various postmodernist and postcolonialist theories that have

emerged since the 1980s give us a first view ofthis passage, but

the perspective they offer proves to be quite limited. As the prefix

‘‘post-’’ should indicate, postmodernist and postcolonialist theorists

never tire of critiquing and seeking liberation from the past forms

ofrule and their legacies in the present. Postmodernists continually

return to the lingering influence ofthe Enlightenment as the source

ofdomination; postcolonialist theorists combat the remnants of

colonialist thinking.

We suspect that postmodernist and postcolonialist theories

may end up in a dead end because they fail to recognize adequately

the contemporary object ofcritique, that is, they mistake today’s

real enemy. What ifthe modern form ofpower these critics (and

we ourselves) have taken such pains to describe and contest no

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longer holds sway in our society? What ifthese theorists are so

intent on combating the remnants ofa past form ofdomination

that they fail to recognize the new form that is looming over them

in the present? What ifthe dominating powers that are the intended

object ofcritique have mutated in such a way as to depotentialize

any such postmodernist challenge? In short, what ifa new paradigm

ofpower, a postmodern sovereignty, has come to replace the mod-

ern paradigm and rule through differential hierarchies of the hybrid

and fragmentary subjectivities that these theorists celebrate? In this

case, modern forms of sovereignty would no longer be at issue,

and the postmodernist and postcolonialist strategies that appear to

be liberatory would not challenge but in fact coincide with and

even unwittingly reinforce the new strategies of rule!

When we begin to consider the ideologies ofcorporate capital

and the world market, it certainly appears that the postmodernist

and postcolonialist theorists who advocate a politics of difference,

fluidity, and hybridity in order to challenge the binaries and essen-

tialism ofmodern sovereignty have been outflanked by the strategies

ofpower. Power has evacuated the bastion they are attacking and

has circled around to their rear to join them in the assault in the

name of difference. These theorists thus find themselves pushing

against an open door. We do not mean to suggest that postmodernist

and/or postcolonialist theorists are somehow the lackeys ofglobal

capital and the world market. Anthony Appiah and ArifDirlik are

ungenerous when they cast these authors in the position of‘‘a

comprador intelligentsia’’ and ‘‘the intelligentsia ofglobal capital-

ism.’’1 There is no need to doubt the democratic, egalitarian, and

even at times anticapitalist desires that motivate large segments of

these fields ofwork, but it is important to investigate the utility of

these theories in the context ofthe new paradigm ofpower. This

new enemy not only is resistant to the old weapons but actually

thrives on them, and thus joins its would-be antagonists in applying

them to the fullest. Long live difference! Down with essentialist bi-

naries!

To a certain extent postmodernist and postcolonialist theories

are important effects that reflect or trace the expansion ofthe world S Y M P T O M S O F P A S S A G E

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market and the passage ofthe form ofsovereignty. These theories

point toward Empire, but in a vague and confused way, with no

awareness ofthe paradigmatic leap that this passage constitutes. We

have to delve deep into this passage, elaborate its terms, and make

clear the lineaments that constitute the new Empire. Recognizing

the value and limitations ofpostmodernist and postcolonialist theo-

ries is a first step in this project.

Politics of Difference

In order to appreciate fully the critical powers of postmodernist

discourses, one must first focus on the modern forms of sovereignty.

As we saw in the previous sections, the world ofmodern sovereignty

is a Manichaean world, divided by a series ofbinary oppositions

that define Selfand Other, white and black, inside and outside,

ruler and ruled. Postmodernist thought challenges precisely this

binary logic ofmodernity and in this respect provides important

resources for those who are struggling to challenge modern dis-

courses ofpatriarchy, colonialism, and racism. In the context of

postmodernist theories, the hybridity and ambivalences ofour cul-

tures and our senses ofbelonging seem to challenge the binary logic

ofSelfand Other that stands behind modern colonialist, sexist,

and racist constructions. Similarly, the postmodernist insistence on

difference and specificity defies the totalitarianism of universalizing

discourses and structures ofpower; the affirmation offragmented

social identities appears as a means ofcontesting the sovereignty of

both the modern subject and the modern nation-state, along with

all the hierarchies they imply. This postmodernist critical sensibility

is extremely important in this regard because it constitutes the

proposition (or the symptom) ofa break with respect to the entire

development ofmodern sovereignty.

It is difficult to generalize about the numerous discourses that

go under the banner ofpostmodernism, but most ofthem draw at

least indirectly on Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard’s critique ofmodernist

master narratives, Jean Baudrillard’s affirmations of cultural simula-

cra, or Jacques Derrida’s critique ofWestern metaphysics. In the

most basic and reductive formulation, postmodernist theories are

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defined by many oftheir proponents as sharing one single common

denominator, a generalized attack on the Enlightenment.2 From

this perspective the call to action is clear: Enlightenment is the

problem and postmodernism is the solution.

We should take care, however, to look more closely at what

exactly is intended by ‘‘Enlightenment’’ or ‘‘modernity’’ from this

postmodernist perspective.3 We argued earlier that modernity

should be understood not as uniform and homogeneous, but rather

as constituted by at least two distinct and conflicting traditions. The

first tradition is that initiated by the revolution ofRenaissance

humanism, from Duns Scotus to Spinoza, with the discovery of

the place ofimmanence and the celebration ofsingularity and

difference. The second tradition, the Thermidor of the Renaissance

revolution, seeks to control the utopian forces of the first through

the construction and mediation ofdualisms, and arrives finally at

the concept ofmodern sovereignty as a provisional solution. When

postmodernists propose their opposition to a modernity and an

Enlightenment that exalt the universality ofreason only to sustain

white male European supremacy, it should be clear that they are

really attacking the second tradition ofour schema (and unfortu-

nately ignoring or eclipsing the first). It would be more accurate,

in other words, to pose postmodernist theory as a challenge neither

to the Enlightenment nor to modernity in toto but specifically to

the tradition ofmodern sovereignty. More precisely still, these

various theoretical contestations are brought together most coher-

ently in a challenge to the dialectic as the central logic ofmodern

domination, exclusion, and command—for both its relegating the

multiplicity of difference to binary oppositions and its subsequent

subsumption of these differences in a unitary order. If modern

power itselfis dialectical, the logic goes, then the postmodernist

project must be nondialectical.

Once we recognize postmodernist discourses as an attack on

the dialectical form of modern sovereignty, then we can see more

clearly how they contest systems ofdomination such as racism

and sexism by deconstructing the boundaries that maintain the

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hierarchies between white and black, masculine and feminine, and

so forth. This is how postmodernists can conceive their theoretical

practice as heir to an entire spectrum ofmodern and contemporary

liberation struggles. The history ofchallenges to European political-

economic hegemony and its colonial rule, the successes ofnational

liberation movements, women’s movements, and antiracist strug-

gles, are all interpreted as the heritage ofpostmodernist politics

because they, too, aim at disrupting the order and the dualisms of

modern sovereignty. Ifthe modern is the field ofpower ofthe

white, the male, and the European, then in perfectly symmetrical

fashion the postmodern will be the field of liberation of the non-

white, the non-male, and the non-European. As bell hooks says,

in its best form radical postmodernist practice, a politics of difference,

incorporates the values and voices ofthe displaced, the marginalized,

the exploited, and the oppressed.4 The binaries and dualisms of

modern sovereignty are not disrupted only to establish new ones;

rather, the very power of binaries is dissolved as ‘‘we set differences

to play across boundaries.’’5

Postmodernist thinking has been received by a wide range of

scholars as a clarion call to a new paradigm ofacademic and intellec-

tual practice, and as a real opportunity to dislodge the dominant

paradigms ofscholarship in their own field.6 One ofthe most

important examples from our perspective is the postmodernist chal-

lenge in the field ofinternational relations.7 Here the ‘‘modernist’’

paradigm ofresearch is more or less identified with the methods

ofrealism and neorealism, and thus centered on the concept of

sovereignty, commonly understood as synonymous with the power

ofnation-states, the legitimate use ofstate violence, and territorial

integrity. From a postmodernist perspective, this ‘‘modernist’’ inter-

national relations, because ofits acceptance ofand focus on these

boundaries, tends to support the dominant power and the sover-

eignty ofnation-states. Authors in this field thus make a clear

connection between the critique ofthe binary dualisms ofthe

‘‘Enlightenment’’ developed in the context ofthe philosophical and

literary postmodernists and the challenge to the fixed boundaries

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ofmodern state sovereignty. Postmodernist international relations

theorists strive to challenge the sovereignty ofstates by deconstruct-

ing the boundaries ofthe ruling powers, highlighting irregular and

uncontrolled international movements and flows, and thus fractur-

ing stable unities and oppositions. ‘‘Discourse’’ and ‘‘interpretation’’

are presented as powerful weapons against the institutional rigidities

ofthe modernist perspectives. The resulting postmodernist analyses

point toward the possibility of a global politics of difference, a

politics ofdeterritorialized flows across a smooth world, free ofthe

rigid striation ofstate boundaries.

Although many ofthe various postmodernist theorists are lucid

in their refusal ofthe logics ofmodern sovereignty, they are in

general extremely confused about the nature of our potential libera-

tion from it—perhaps precisely because they cannot recognize

clearly the forms of power that have today come to supplant it.

When they present their theories as part ofa project ofpolitical

liberation, in other words, postmodernists are still waging battle

against the shadows ofold enemies: the Enlightenment, or really

modern forms of sovereignty and its binary reductions of difference

and multiplicity to a single alternative between Same and Other.

The affirmation of hybridities and the free play of differences across

boundaries, however, is liberatory only in a context where power

poses hierarchy exclusively though essential identities, binary divi-

sions, and stable oppositions. The structures and logics ofpower

in the contemporary world are entirely immune to the ‘‘liberatory’’

weapons of the postmodernist politics of difference. In fact, Empire

too is bent on doing away with those modern forms of sovereignty

and on setting differences to play across boundaries. Despite the

best intentions, then, the postmodernist politics of difference not

only is ineffective against but can even coincide with and support

the functions and practices of imperial rule. The danger is that

postmodernist theories focus their attention so resolutely on the

old forms of power they are running from, with their heads turned

backwards, that they tumble unwittingly into the welcoming arms

ofthe new power. From this perspective the celebratory affirmations

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143

ofpostmodernists can easily appear naive, when not purely mystifi-

catory.

What we find most important in the various postmodernist

currents ofthought is the historical phenomenon they represent:

they are the symptom ofa rupture in the tradition ofmodern

sovereignty. There is, ofcourse, a long tradition of‘‘anti-modern’’

thought that opposes modern sovereignty, including the great think-

ers ofthe Frankfurt School (along with the entire republican line

we have traced back to Renaissance humanism). What is new,

however, is that postmodernist theorists point to the end ofmodern sovereignty and demonstrate a new capacity to think outside the

framework of modern binaries and modern identities, a thought of

plurality and multiplicity. However confusedly or unconsciously,

they indicate the passage toward the constitution ofEmpire.

TheLiberation of Hybridities, or

Beyond Colonial Binaries

A certain stream ofpostcolonial studies also proposes a global politics

of difference and might be well situated in line with postmodernist

theory. Our analysis ofmodern sovereignty in the preceding sections

poses already a strong potential rationale for an accord between

postcolonialist and postmodernist theories. Insofar as modern sover-

eignty was identified with Europe’s tendency toward global domina-

tion, and more important, insofar as colonial administration and

imperialist practices were central components in the constitution

ofmodern sovereignty, postmodernist and postcolonialist theories

do indeed share a common enemy. Postmodernism appears in this

light to be fundamentally post-Eurocentric.

Postcolonial studies encompasses a wide and varied group of

discourses, but we want to focus here on the work of Homi Bhabha

because it presents the clearest and best-articulated example ofthe

continuity between postmodernist and postcolonialist discourses.

One ofthe primary and constant objects ofBhabha’s attack are

binary divisions. In fact, the entire postcolonial project as he presents it is defined by its refusal of the binary divisions on which the

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colonialist worldview is predicated. The world is not divided in

two and segmented in opposing camps (center versus periphery,

First versus Third World), but rather it is and has always been

defined by innumerable partial and mobile differences. Bhabha’s

refusal to see the world in terms of binary divisions leads him to

reject also theories oftotality and theories ofthe identity, homoge-

neity, and essentialism ofsocial subjects. These various refusals are

very closely linked. The binary conception ofthe world implies

the essentialism and homogeneity ofthe identities on its two halves,

and, through the relationship across that central boundary, implies

the subsumption ofall experience within a coherent social totality.

In short, the specter that haunts Bhabha’s analysis and that coherently

links together these various opponents is the Hegelian dialectic,

that is, the dialectic that subsumes within a coherent totality the

essential social identities that face each other in opposition. In this

sense one could say that postcolonial theory (or at least this version

ofit) is, along with postmodernist theories, defined above all by

its being nondialectical.

Bhabha’s critique ofthe dialectic—that is, his attack on binary

divisions, essential identities, and totalization—is both a sociological

claim about the real nature ofsocieties and a political project aimed

at social change. The former is in fact a condition of possibility of

the latter. Social identities and nations were never really coherent

imagined communities; the colonized’s mimicry ofthe colonizer’s

discourse rearticulates the whole notion ofidentity and alienates it

from essence; cultures are always already partial and hybrid forma-

tions. This social fact is the basis on which a subversive political

project can be conducted to destroy the binary structure ofpower

and identity. In summary form, then, Bhabha’s logic of liberation

runs like this: Power, or forces of social oppression, function by

imposing binary structures and totalizing logics on social subjectivi-

ties, repressing their difference. These oppressive structures, how-

ever, are never total, and differences are always in some way ex-

pressed (through mimicry, ambivalence, hybridization, fractured

identities, and so forth). The postcolonial political project, then, is

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145

to affirm the multiplicity of differences so as to subvert the power

ofthe ruling binary structures.

The utopia Bhabha points toward after the binary and totalizing

structures ofpower have been fractured and displaced is not an

isolated and fragmentary existence but a new form of community,

a community ofthe ‘‘unhomely,’’ a new internationalism, a gather-

ing of people in the diaspora. The affirmation of difference and

hybridity is itself, according to Bhabha, an affirmation of commu-

nity: ‘‘To live in the unhomely world, to find its ambivalences and

ambiguities enacted in the house offiction, or its sundering and

splitting performed in the work of art, is also to affirm a profound

desire for social solidarity.’’8 The seeds ofthe alternative community,

he believes, arise out ofclose attention to the locality ofculture,

its hybridity, and its resistance to the binary structuring ofsocial hier-

archies.

We should be careful to recognize the form of the dominating

power that serves as the enemy (and really the negative foundation)

in this postcolonialist framework. Power is assumed to operate

exclusively through a dialectical and binary structure. The only

form of domination Bhabha recognizes, in other words, is that of

modern sovereignty. This is why, for example, he can say ‘‘hierarchi-

cal or binary’’ as ifthe two terms were interchangeable: from his

perspective hierarchy as such is necessarily grounded in binary divi-

sions, so that the mere fact of hybridity has the power to destroy

hierarchy tout court. Hybridity itself is a realized politics of difference, setting differences to play across boundaries. This is where the

postcolonial and the postmodern most powerfully meet: in the

united attack on the dialectics ofmodern sovereignty and the propo-

sition ofliberation as a politics ofdifference.

Like the postmodernist theorists, postcolonial theorists such

as Bhabha interest us primarily insofar as they are symptoms of the

epochal shift we are undergoing, that is, the passage to Empire.

Perhaps the discourses themselves are possible only when the re-

gimes ofmodern sovereignty are already on the wane. Like post-

modernists too, however, postcolonialist theorists in general give

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a very confused view of this passage because they remain fixated

on attacking an old form ofpower and propose a strategy oflib-

eration that could be effective only on that old terrain. The post-

colonialist perspective remains primarily concerned with colonial

sovereignty. As Gyan Prakash says, ‘‘The postcolonial exists as an

aftermath, as an after—after being worked over by colonialism.’’9

This may make postcolonialist theory a very productive tool for

rereading history, but it is entirely insufficient for theorizing con-

temporary global power. Edward Said, certainly one ofthe most

brilliant to go under the label ofpostcolonial theory, manages to

condemn the current global power structures only to the extent

that they perpetuate cultural and ideological remnants ofEuropean

colonialist rule.10 He charges that ‘‘the tactics ofthe great empires

[that is, the European imperialisms], which were dismantled after

the first world war, are being replicated by the U.S.’’11 What is

missing here is a recognition ofthe novelty ofthe structures and

logics ofpower that order the contemporary world. Empire is not

a weak echo of modern imperialisms but a fundamentally new form

ofrule.

Fundamentalism and/or Postmodernism

Another symptom ofthe historical passage already in process in

the final decades ofthe twentieth century is the rise ofso-called

fundamentalisms. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the great

ideologues ofgeopolitics and the theoreticians ofthe end ofhistory

have consistently posed fundamentalisms as the primary danger

facing global order and stability. Fundamentalism, however, is a

poor and confused category that groups together widely disparate

phenomena. In general, one might say that fundamentalisms, diverse

though they may be, are linked by their being understood both

from within and outside as anti-modernist movements, resurgences

ofprimordial identities and values; they are conceived as a kind of

historical backflow, a de-modernization. It is more accurate and

more useful, however, to understand the various fundamentalism

not as the re-creation ofa premodern world, but rather as a powerful

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147

refusal of the contemporary historical passage in course. In this

sense, then, like postmodernist and postcolonialist theories, funda-

mentalisms too are a symptom ofthe passage to Empire.

Often today in the media the term ‘ fundamentalism’’ reduces

the variety of social formations that go by that name and refers

exclusively to Islamic fundamentalism, the complexity of which is

in turn reduced to a violent and intolerant religious fanaticism that

is above all ‘‘anti-Western.’’ Islamic fundamentalism itself, of course,

takes various forms and has a long history extending throughout

the modern era. Islamic revivalism and reformism were strong at

different times in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the

current forms of Islamic radicalism bear distinct similarities to those

previous movements. Islamic fundamentalisms are most coherently

united, however, in their being resolutely opposed to modernity and

modernization. Insofar as political and cultural modernization has been a process ofsecularization, Islamic fundamentalisms oppose it

by posing sacred texts at the center ofpolitical constitutions and

religious leaders, both priests and jurists, in positions ofpolitical

power. In terms, too, ofgender roles, family structures, and cultural

forms, an unchanging, traditional religious norm is commonly

meant to stand against the progressively changing secular forms of

modernity. Counter to modernism’s dynamic and secular society,

fundamentalism seems to pose a static and religious one. In this

light, then, as an anti-modernism, Islamic fundamentalisms seem

to be engaged in an effort to reverse the process of social moderniza-

tion, separate from the global flows of modernity, and re-create a

premodern world. The Iranian revolution of1979, for example,

would from this perspective be seen as an anti-revolution, resurrect-

ing an ancient order.

Christian fundamentalisms in the United States also present

themselves as movements against social modernization, re-creating

what is imagined to be a past social formation based on sacred texts.

These movements should certainly be situated in line with the long

U.S. tradition ofprojects to create in America a new Jerusalem, a

Christian community separate from both the corruption of Europe

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and the savagery ofthe ‘‘uncivilized’’ world.12 The most prominent

social agenda ofthe current Christian fundamentalist groups is cen-

tered on the (re)creation ofthe stable and hierarchical nuclear family,

which is imagined to have existed in a previous era, and thus

they are driven specifically in their crusades against abortion and

homosexuality. Christian fundamentalisms in the United States have

also continuously been oriented (in different times and different

regions more or less overtly) toward a project ofwhite supremacy

and racial purity. The new Jerusalem has almost always been imag-

ined as a white and patriarchal Jerusalem.

These common characterizations offundamentalisms as a re-

turn to a premodern or traditional world and its social values,

however, obscure more than they illuminate. In fact, fundamentalist

visions ofa return to the past are generally based on historical

illusions. The purity and wholesomeness ofthe stable, nuclear het-

erosexual family heralded by Christian fundamentalists, for example,

never existed in the United States. The ‘‘traditional family’’ that

serves as their ideological foundation is merely a pastiche of values

and practices that derives more from television programs than from

any real historical experiences within the institution ofthe family.13

It is a fictional image projected on the past, like Main Street U.S.A.

at Disneyland, constructed retrospectively through the lens ofcon-

temporary anxieties and fears. The ‘‘return to the traditional family’’

ofthe Christian fundamentalists is not backward-looking at all, but

rather a new invention that is part ofa political project against the

contemporary social order.

Similarly, the current forms of Islamic fundamentalism should

not be understood as a return to past social forms and values, not

even from the perspective of the practitioners. According to Fazlur

Rahman: ‘‘Actually it is even something ofa misnomer to call

such phenomena in Islam ‘fundamentalist’ except insofar as they

emphasize the basis ofIslam as being the two original sources: the

Qur’an and the Sunna ofthe Prophet Muhammed. Otherwise

they emphasize ijtihad, original thought.’’14 Contemporary Islamic

radicalisms are indeed primarily based on ‘‘original thought’’ and

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149

the invention oforiginal values and practices, which perhaps echo

those ofother periods ofrevivalism or fundamentalism but are really

directed in reaction to the present social order. In both cases, then,

the fundamentalist ‘‘return to tradition’’ is really a new invention.15

The anti-modern thrust that defines fundamentalisms might

be better understood, then, not as a pre modern but as a post modern project. The postmodernity offundamentalism has to be recognized

primarily in its refusal ofmodernity as a weapon ofEuro-American

hegemony—and in this regard Islamic fundamentalism is indeed

the paradigmatic case. In the context ofIslamic traditions, funda-

mentalism is postmodern insofar as it rejects the tradition of Islamic

modernism for which modernity was always overcoded as assimila-

tion or submission to Euro-American hegemony. ‘‘Ifmodern meant

the pursuit ofWestern education, technology and industrialization

in the first flush ofthe post-colonial period,’’ Akbar Ahmed writes,

‘‘postmodern would mean a reversion to traditional Muslim values

and a rejection ofmodernism.’’16 Considered simply in cultural

terms, Islamic fundamentalism is a paradoxical kind of postmodernist

theory—postmodern only because it chronologically follows and

opposes Islamic modernism. It is more properly postmodernist,

however, when considered in geopolitical terms. Rahman writes:

‘‘The current postmodernist fundamentalism, in an important way,

is novel because its basic eĺan is anti-Western . . . Hence its con-

demnation ofclassical modernism as a purely Westernizing force.’’17

Certainly, powerful segments of Islam have been in some sense

‘‘anti-Western’’ since the religion’s inception. What is novel in the

contemporary resurgence of fundamentalism is really the refusal of

the powers that are emerging in the new imperial order. From this

perspective, then, insofar as the Iranian revolution was a powerful

rejection ofthe world market, we might think ofit as the first

postmodernist revolution.

This marriage between postmodernism and fundamentalism

is certainly an odd coupling considering that postmodernist and

fundamentalist discourses stand in most respects in polar opposition:

hybridity versus purity, difference versus identity, mobility versus

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stasis. It seems to us that postmodernists and the current wave of

fundamentalists have arisen not only at the same time but also in

response to the same situation, only at opposite poles ofthe global

hierarchy, according to a striking geographical distribution. Simpli-

fying a great deal, one could argue that postmodernist discourses

appeal primarily to the winners in the processes ofglobalization

and fundamentalist discourses to the losers. In other words, the

current global tendencies toward increased mobility, indeterminacy,

and hybridity are experienced by some as a kind ofliberation but

by others as an exacerbation of their suffering. Certainly, bands

of popular support for fundamentalist projects—from the Front

National in France and Christian fundamentalism in the United

States to the Islamic Brothers—have spread most widely among

those who have been further subordinated and excluded by the

recent transformations of the global economy and who are most

threatened by the increased mobility ofcapital. The losers in the

processes ofglobalization might indeed be the ones who give us

the strongest indication ofthe transformation in progress.

TheIdeology of theWorld Market

Many ofthe concepts dear to postmodernists and postcolonialists

find a perfect correspondence in the current ideology of corporate

capital and the world market. The ideology ofthe world market

has always been the anti-foundational and anti-essentialist discourse

par excellence. Circulation, mobility, diversity, and mixture are its

very conditions of possibility. Trade brings differences together and

the more the merrier! Differences (of commodities, populations,

cultures, and so forth) seem to multiply infinitely in the world

market, which attacks nothing more violently than fixed boundaries:

it overwhelms any binary division with its infinite multiplicities.

As the world market today is realized ever more completely,

it tends to deconstruct the boundaries ofthe nation-state. In a

previous period, nation-states were the primary actors in the modern

imperialist organization ofglobal production and exchange, but to

the world market they appear increasingly as mere obstacles. Robert

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151

Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor, is in an excellent position

to recognize and celebrate the overcoming ofnational boundaries

in the world market. He contends that ‘‘as almost every factor of

production—money, technology, factories, and equipment—

moves effortlessly across borders, the very idea of a [national] econ-

omy is becoming meaningless.’’ In the future ‘‘there will be no

national products or technologies, no national corporations, no national industries. There will no longer be national economies, as

least as we have come to understand that concept.’’18 With the

decline ofnational boundaries, the world market is liberated from

the kind ofbinary divisions that nation-states had imposed, and in

this new free space a myriad of differences appears. These differences

ofcourse do not play freely across a smooth global space, but rather

are regimented in global networks ofpower consisting ofhighly

differentiated and mobile structures. Arjun Appadurai captures the

new quality ofthese structures with the analogy oflandscapes, or

better, seascapes: in the contemporary world he sees finanscapes,

technoscapes, ethnoscapes, and so forth.19 The suffix ‘‘-scape’’ allows

us on the one hand to point to the fluidity and irregularity ofthese

various fields and on the other to indicate formal commonalities

among such diverse domains as finance, culture, commodities, and

demography. The world market establishes a real politics ofdif-

ference.

The various -scapes ofthe world market provide capital with

potentials on a scale previously unimaginable. It should be no sur-

prise, then, that postmodernist thinking and its central concepts

have flourished in the various fields ofpractice and theory proper

to capital, such as marketing, management organization, and the

organization ofproduction. Postmodernism is indeed the logic by

which global capital operates. Marketing has perhaps the clearest

relation to postmodernist theories, and one could even say that the

capitalist marketing strategies have long been postmodernist, avant

la lettre. On the one hand, marketing practices and consumer con-

sumption are prime terrain for developing postmodernist thinking:

certain postmodernist theorists, for example, see perpetual shopping

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and the consumption ofcommodities and commodified images as

the paradigmatic and defining activities ofpostmodern experience,

our collective journeys through hyperreality.20 On the other hand,

postmodernist thinking—with its emphasis on concepts such as

difference and multiplicity, its celebration of fetishism and simulacra,

its continual fascination with the new and with fashion—is an

excellent description ofthe ideal capitalist schemes ofcommodity

consumption and thus provides an opportunity to perfect marketing

strategies. As a marketing theorist says, there are clear ‘‘parallels

between contemporary market practices and the precepts ofpost-

modernism.’’21

Marketing itself is a practice based on differences, and the

more differences that are given, the more marketing strategies can

develop. Ever more hybrid and differentiated populations present

a proliferating number of ‘‘target markets’’ that can each be addressed

by specific marketing strategies—one for gay Latino males between

the ages ofeighteen and twenty-two, another for Chinese-American

teenage girls, and so forth. Postmodern marketing recognizes the

difference of each commodity and each segment of the population,

fashioning its strategies accordingly.22 Every difference is an oppor-

tunity.

Postmodern marketing practices represent the consumption

cycle ofcontemporary capital, its external face, but we are even

more interested in the postmodernist tendencies within the cycle

ofcapitalist production. In the productive sphere, postmodernist

thinking has perhaps had the largest direct impact in the field of

management and organization theory. Authors in this field argue

that large and complex modern organizations, with their rigid

boundaries and homogeneous units, are not adequate for doing

business in the postmodern world. ‘‘The postmodern organization,’’

one theorist writes, ‘‘has certain distinctive features—notably, an

emphasis on small-to-moderate size and complexity and adoption

offlexible structures and modes ofinterinstitutional cooperation

to meet turbulent organizational and environmental conditions.’’23

Postmodern organizations are thus imagined either as located on

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153

the boundaries between different systems and cultures or as internally

hybrid. What is essential for postmodern management is that organi-

zations be mobile, flexible, and able to deal with difference. Here

postmodernist theories pave the way for the transformation of the

internal structures ofcapitalist organizations.

The ‘‘culture’’ within these organizations has also adopted

the precepts ofpostmodernist thinking. The great transnational

corporations that straddle national boundaries and link the global

system are themselves internally much more diverse and fluid cultur-

ally than the parochial modern corporations ofprevious years. The

contemporary gurus ofcorporate culture who are employed by

management as consultants and strategy planners preach the effi-

ciency and profitability ofdiversity and multiculturalism within

corporations.24 When one looks closely at U.S. corporate ideology

(and, to a lesser but still significant extent, at U.S. corporate practice), it is clear that corporations do not operate simply by excluding the

gendered and/or racialized Other. In fact, the old modernist forms

ofracist and sexist theory are the explicit enemies ofthis new

corporate culture. The corporations seek to include difference

within their realm and thus aim to maximize creativity, free play,

and diversity in the corporate workplace. People of all different

races, sexes, and sexual orientations should potentially be included

in the corporation; the daily routine ofthe workplace should be

rejuvenated with unexpected changes and an atmosphere offun.

Break down the old boundaries and let one hundred flowers

bloom!25 The task ofthe boss, subsequently, is to organize these

energies and differences in the interests of profit. This project is

aptly called ‘‘diversity management.’’ In this light, the corporations

appear not only ‘‘progressive’’ but also ‘‘postmodernist,’’ as leaders

in a very real politics of difference.

The production processes ofcapital have also taken forms that

echo postmodernist projects. We will have ample opportunity to

analyze (particularly in Section 3.4) how production has come to

be organized in flexible and hybrid networks. This is, in our view,

the most important respect in which the contemporary transforma-

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tions ofcapital and the world market constitute a real process of

postmodernization.

We certainly agree with those contemporary theorists, such

as David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, who see postmodernity as

a new phase ofcapitalist accumulation and commodification that

accompanies the contemporary realization ofthe world market.26

The global politics of difference established by the world market

is defined not by free play and equality, but by the imposition of

new hierarchies, or really by a constant process ofhierarchization.

Postmodernist and postcolonialist theories (and fundamentalisms in

a very different way) are really sentinels that signal this passage in

course, and in this regard are indispensable.

Truth Commissions

It is salutary to remind ourselves that postmodernist and postcolonial

discourses are effective only in very specific geographical locations

and among a certain class ofthe population. As a political discourse,

postmodernism has a certain currency in Europe, Japan, and Latin

America, but its primary site ofapplication is within an elite segment

ofthe U.S. intelligentsia. Similarly, the postcolonial theory that

shares certain postmodernist tendencies has been developed primar-

ily among a cosmopolitan set that moves among the metropolises

and major universities ofEurope and the United States. This speci-

ficity does not invalidate the theoretical perspectives, but it should

make us pause for a moment to reflect on their political implications

and practical effects. Numerous genuinely progressive and liberatory

discourses have emerged throughout history among elite groups,

and we have no intention here ofquestioning the vocation ofsuch

theorizing tout court. More important than the specificity ofthese theorists are the resonances their concepts stimulate in different

geographical and class locations.

Certainly from the standpoint of many around the world,

hybridity, mobility, and difference do not immediately appear as

liberatory in themselves. Huge populations see mobility as an aspect

of their suffering because they are displaced at an increasing speed in

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155

dire circumstances. For several decades, as part ofthe modernization

process there have been massive migrations from rural areas to

metropolitan centers within each country and across the globe. The

international flow oflabor has only increased in recent years, not

only from south to north, in the form of legal and illegal guest

workers or immigrants, but also from south to south, that is, the

temporary or semipermanent worker migrations among southern

regions, such as that ofSouth Asian workers in the Persian Gulf.

Even these massive worker migrations, however, are dwarfed in

terms of numbers and misery by those forced from their homes

and land by famine and war. Just a cursory glance around the world,

from Central America to Central Africa and from the Balkans to

Southeast Asia, will reveal the desperate plight ofthose on whom

such mobility has been imposed. For them, mobility across bound-

aries often amounts to forced migration in poverty and is hardly

liberatory. In fact, a stable and defined place in which to live, a

certain immobility, can on the contrary appear as the most ur-

gent need.

The postmodernist epistemological challenge to ‘‘the Enlight-

enment’’—its attack on master narratives and its critique oftruth—

also loses its liberatory aura when transposed outside the elite intel-

lectual strata ofEurope and North America. Consider, for example,

the mandate ofthe Truth Commission formed at the end ofthe

civil war in El Salvador, or the similar institutions that have been

established in the post-dictatorial and post-authoritarian regimes of

Latin America and South Africa. In the context of state terror and

mystification, clinging to the primacy ofthe concept oftruth can

be a powerful and necessary form of resistance. Establishing and

making public the truth ofthe recent past—attributing responsibility

to state officials for specific acts and in some cases exacting retribu-

tion—appears here as the ineluctable precondition for any demo-

cratic future. The master narratives of the Enlightenment do not

seem particularly repressive here, and the concept oftruth is not

fluid or unstable—on the contrary! The truth is that this general

ordered the torture and assassination ofthat union leader, and this

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colonel led the massacre ofthat village. Making public such truths

is an exemplary Enlightenment project ofmodernist politics, and

the critique ofit in these contexts could serve only to aid the

mystificatory and repressive powers ofthe regime under attack.

In our present imperial world, the liberatory potential ofthe

postmodernist and postcolonial discourses that we have described

only resonates with the situation ofan elite population that enjoys

certain rights, a certain level ofwealth, and a certain position in

the global hierarchy. One should not take this recognition, however,

as a complete refutation. It is not really a matter of either/or.

Difference, hybridity, and mobility are not liberatory in themselves,

but neither are truth, purity, and stasis. The real revolutionary

practice refers to the level of production. Truth will not make us free, but taking control ofthe production oftruth will. Mobility

and hybridity are not liberatory, but taking control ofthe production

ofmobility and stasis, purities and mixtures is. The real truth com-

missions ofEmpire will be constituent assemblies ofthe multitude,

social factories for the production of truth.

T HE P OOR

In each and every historical period a social subject that is ever-present and everywhere the same is identified, often negatively but nonetheless urgently, around a common living form. This form is not that of the powerful and

the rich: they are merely partial and localized figures, quantitate signatae.

The only non-localizable ‘‘common name’’ of pure difference in all eras is that of the poor. The poor is destitute, excluded, repressed, exploited—and yet living! It is the common denominator of life, the foundation of the multitude. It is strange, but also illuminating, that postmodernist authors seldom adopt this figure in their theorizing. It is strange because the poor is in a certain respect an eternal postmodern figure: the figure of a transversal, omnipresent, different, mobile subject; the testament to the irrepressible aleatory character of existence.

This common name, the poor, is also the foundation of every possibility of humanity. As Niccolò Machiavelli pointed out, in the ‘‘return to beginnings’’ that characterizes the revolutionary phase of the religions and ideolo-S Y M P T O M S O F P A S S A G E

157

gies of modernity, the poor is almost always seen to have a prophetic capacity: not only is the poor in the world, but the poor itself is the very possibility of the world. Only the poor lives radically the actual and present being, in destitution and suffering, and thus only the poor has the ability to renew being. The divinity of the multitude of the poor does not point to any

transcendence. On the contrary, here and only here in this world, in the existence of the poor, is the field of immanence presented, confirmed, consolidated, and opened. The poor is god on earth.

Today there is not even the illusion of a transcendent God. The poor

has dissolved that image and recuperated its power. Long ago modernity

was inaugurated with Rabelais’s laugh, with the realistic supremacy of the belly of the poor, with a poetics that expresses all that there is in destitute humanity ‘‘from the belt on down.’’ Later, through the processes of primitive accumulation, the proletariat emerged as a collective subject that could express itself in materiality and immanence, a multitude of poor that not only

prophesied but produced, and that thus opened possibilities that were not virtual but concrete. Finally today, in the biopolitical regimes of production and in the processes of postmodernization, the poor is a subjugated, exploited figure, but nonetheless a figure of production. This is where the novelty lies. Everywhere today, at the basis of the concept and the common name of the poor, there is a relationship of production. Why are the postmodernists unable to read this passage? They tell us that a regime of transversal linguistic relations of production has entered into the unified and abstract universe of value. But who is the subject that produces ‘‘transversally,’’ who gives a creative meaning to language—who if not the poor, who are subjugated

and desiring, impoverished and powerful, always more powerful? Here,

within this reign of global production, the poor is distinguished no longer only by its prophetic capacity but also by its indispensable presence in the production of a common wealth, always more exploited and always more

closely indexed to the wages of rule. The poor itself is power. There is World Poverty, but there is above all World Possibility, and only the poor is capable of this.

Vogelfrei, ‘‘bird free,’’ is the term Marx used to describe the proletariat, which at the beginning of modernity in the processes of primitive

accumulation was freed twice over: in the first place, it was freed from being 158

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the property of the master (that is, freed from servitude); and in the second place, it was ‘‘freed’’ from the means of production, separated from the soil, with nothing to sell but its own labor power. In this sense, the proletariat was forced to become the pure possibility of wealth. The dominant stream of the Marxist tradition, however, has always hated the poor, precisely for their being ‘‘free as birds,’’ for being immune to the discipline of the factory and the discipline necessary for the construction of socialism. Consider how, when in the early 1950s Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini set the

poor to fly away on broomsticks at the end of their beautiful film Miracle in Milan, they were so violently denounced for utopianism by the spokesmen of socialist realism.

The Vogelfrei is an angel or an intractable demon. And here, after so many attempts to transform the poor into proletarians and proletarians into a liberation army (the idea of army weighed heavily on that of liberation), once again in postmodernity emerges in the blinding light of clear day the multitude, the common name of the poor. It comes out fully in the open

because in postmodernity the subjugated has absorbed the exploited. In

other words, the poor, every poor person, the multitude of poor people, have eaten up and digested the multitude of proletarians. By that fact itself the poor have become productive. Even the prostituted body, the destitute person, the hunger of the multitude—all forms of the poor have become productive.

And the poor have therefore become ever more important: the life of the poor invests the planet and envelops it with its desire for creativity and freedom. The poor is the condition of every production.

The story goes that at the root of the postmodernist sensibility and

the construction of the concept of postmodernism are those French socialist philosophers who in their youth celebrated factory discipline and the shining horizons of real socialism, but who became repentant after the crisis of 1968

and gave up, proclaiming the futility of the pretense of communism to

reappropriate social wealth. Today these same philosophers cynically deconstruct, banalize, and laugh at every social struggle that contests the universal triumph of exchange value. The media and the culture of the media tell

us that those philosophers are the ones who recognized this new era of the world, but that is not true. The discovery of postmodernity consisted in the reproposition of the poor at the center of the political and productive terrain.

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What was really prophetic was the poor, bird-free laugh of Charlie Chaplin when, free from any utopian illusions and above all from any discipline of liberation, he interpreted the ‘‘modern times’’ of poverty, but at the same time linked the name of the poor to that of life, a liberated life and a liberated productivity.

2.5

N E T W O R K P O W E R :

U . S . S O V E R E I G N T Y

A N D T H E N E W E M P I R E

I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated

as ours for extensive empire and self government.

Thomas Jefferson

Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always

to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrange-

ment without loss ofessential form.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

In order to articulate the nature ofimperial sovereignty,

we must first take a step back in time and consider the political

forms that prepared its terrain and constitute its prehistory. The

American Revolution represents a moment ofgreat innovation

and rupture in the genealogy ofmodern sovereignty. The U.S.

constitutional project, emerging from the struggles for indepen-

dence and formed through a rich history of alternative possibilities,

bloomed like a rare flower in the tradition ofmodern sovereignty.

Tracing the original developments ofthe notion ofsovereignty in

the United States will allow us to recognize its significant differences

from the modern sovereignty we have described thus far and discern

the bases on which a new imperial sovereignty has been formed.

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The American Revolution and the

Model of Two Romes

The American Revolution and the ‘‘new political science’’ pro-

claimed by the authors ofthe Federalist broke from the tradition of modern sovereignty, ‘‘returning to origins’’ and at the same time

developing new languages and new social forms that mediate be-

tween the one and the multiple. Against the tired transcendentalism

ofmodern sovereignty, presented either in Hobbesian or in Rous-

seauian form, the American constituents thought that only the

republic can give order to democracy, or really that the order of

the multitude must be born not from a transfer of the title of power

and right, but from an arrangement internal to the multitude, from

a democratic interaction ofpowers linked together in networks.

The new sovereignty can arise, in other words, only from the

constitutional formation of limits and equilibria, checks and bal-

ances, which both constitutes a central power and maintains power

in the hands ofthe multitude. There is no longer any necessity or

any room here for the transcendence of power. ‘‘The science of

politics,’’ the authors ofthe Federalist write,

like most other sciences, has received great improvement. The

efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which

were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the

ancients. The regular distribution ofpower into distinct depart-

ments; the introduction oflegislative balances and checks; the

institution ofcourts composed ofjudges, holding their offices

during good behaviour; the representation ofthe people in

the legislature, by deputies oftheir own election; these are

either wholly new discoveries, or have made their principal

progress towards perfection in modern times. They are means,

and powerful means, by which the excellencies of republican

government may be retained, and its imperfections lessened

or avoided.1

What takes shape here is an extraordinarily secular and immanentist

idea, despite the profound religiousness that runs throughout the

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texts ofthe Founding Fathers. It is an idea that rediscovers the

revolutionary humanism ofthe Renaissance and perfects it as a

political and constitutional science. Power can be constituted by a

whole series ofpowers that regulate themselves and arrange them-

selves in networks. Sovereignty can be exercised within a vast

horizon ofactivities that subdivide it without negating its unity

and that subordinate it continually to the creative movement of

the multitude.

Contemporary historians, such as J. G. A. Pocock, who link

the development ofthe U.S. Constitution and its notion ofpolitical

sovereignty to the Machiavellian tradition, go a long way toward

understanding this deviation from the modern concept of sover-

eignty.2 They link the U.S. Constitution not to baroque and count-

erreformist Machiavellianism, which constructs an apologia of state

reason and all the injustices that derive from it, but to the tradition

ofrepublican Machiavellianism that, after having inspired the pro-

tagonists ofthe English Revolution, was reconstructed in the Atlan-

tic exodus among European democrats who were defeated but not

vanquished.3 This republican tradition does have a solid foundation

in Machiavelli’s own texts. First ofall, there is the Machiavellian

concept ofpower as a constituent power—that is, as a product ofan

internal and immanent social dynamic. For Machiavelli, power is

always republican; it is always the product ofthe life ofthe multitude

and constitutes its fabric of expression. The free city of Renaissance

humanism is the utopia that anchors this revolutionary principle.

The second Machiavellian principle at work here is that the social

base ofthis democratic sovereignty is always conflictual. Power is

organized through the emergence and the interplay ofcounterpow-

ers. The city is thus a constituent power that is formed through

plural social conflicts articulated in continuous constitutional pro-

cesses. This is how Machiavelli read the organization ofrepublican

ancient Rome, and this is how the Renaissance notion ofthe city

served as the foundation for a realist political theory and practice:

social conflict is the basis ofthe stability ofpower and the logic ofthe

city’s expansion. Machiavelli’s thought inaugurated a Copernican

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revolution that reconfigured politics as perpetual movement. These

are the primary teachings that the Atlantic doctrine ofdemocracy

derived from the republican Machiavelli.4

This republican Rome was not the only Rome that fascinated

Machiavelli and guided the Atlantic republicans. Their new ‘‘science

ofpolitics’’ was also inspired by imperial Rome, particularly as it

was presented in the writings ofPolybius. In the first place, Polybius’

model ofimperial Rome grounded more solidly the republican

process ofthe mediation ofsocial powers and brought it to a

conclusion in a synthesis ofdiverse forms ofgovernment. Polybius

conceived the perfect form of power as structured by a mixed

constitution that combines monarchic power, aristocratic power,

and democratic power.5 The new political scientists in the United

States organized these three powers as the three branches ofthe

republican constitution. Any disequilibrium among these powers,

and this is the second sign ofPolybius’ influence, is a symptom of

corruption. The Machiavellian Constitution ofthe United States

is a structure poised against corruption—the corruption ofboth

factions and individuals, of groups and the state. The Constitution

was designed to resist any cyclical decline into corruption by activat-

ing the entire multitude and organizing its constituent capacity

in networks oforganized counterpowers, in flows ofdiverse and

equalized functions, and in a process of dynamic and expansive

self-regulation.

These ancient models, however, go only so far in characterizing

the U.S. experience, because in many respects it was truly new and

original. In very different periods, Alexis de Tocqueville and Han-

nah Arendt both grasped the novelty ofthis new ideology and new

form ofpower. Tocqueville was the more cautious ofthe two.

Although he recognized the vitality ofthe new political world in

the United States and saw how the synthesis ofdiverse forms of

government had been forged into a regulated mass democracy, he

also claimed to have seen in America the democratic revolution

reach its natural limits. His judgment about whether American

democracy can avoid the old cycle ofcorruption was thus mixed

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when not outright pessimistic.6 Hannah Arendt, by contrast, unre-

servedly celebrated American democracy as the site ofthe invention

ofmodern politics itself. The central idea ofthe American Revolu-

tion, she claimed, is the establishment offreedom, or really the

foundation of a political body that guarantees the space where

freedom can operate.7 Arendt puts the accent on the establishment

ofthis democracy in society, that is, the fixity ofits foundation and

the stability ofits f

unctioning. The revolution succeeds in her

estimation to the extent that it puts an end to the dynamic of

constituent powers and establishes a stable constituted power.

Later we will critique this notion ofnetwork power contained

in the U.S. Constitution, but here we want simply to highlight its

originality. Against the modern European conceptions ofsover-

eignty, which consigned political power to a transcendent realm

and thus estranged and alienated the sources ofpower from society,

here the concept ofsovereignty refers to a power entirely within

society. Politics is not opposed to but integrates and completes so-

ciety.

Extensive Empire

Before moving on to analyze how in the course of U.S. history

this new principle ofsovereignty developed and was transformed,

let us concentrate our attention for a moment on the nature of

the concept itself. The first characteristic of the U.S. notion of

sovereignty is that it poses an idea ofthe immanence ofpower

in opposition to the transcendent character ofmodern European

sovereignty. This idea ofimmanence is based on an idea ofproduc-

tivity. Ifit were not, the principle would be impotent: in immanence

alone, nothing allows society to become political. The multitude

that constitutes society is productive. U.S. sovereignty does not

consist, then, in the regulation ofthe multitude but arises, rather,

as the result ofthe productive synergies ofthe multitude. The

humanist revolution ofthe Renaissance and the subsequent experi-

ences ofsectarian Protestantism all developed this idea ofproductiv-

ity. In line with the Protestant ethic, one might say that only the

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165

productive power ofthe multitude demonstrates the existence of

God and the presence ofdivinity on earth.8 Power is not something

that lords over us but something that we make. The American

Declaration ofIndependence celebrates this new idea ofpower

in the clearest terms. The emancipation ofhumanity from every

transcendent power is grounded on the multitude’s power to con-

struct its own political institutions and constitute society.

This principle ofconstituent production, however, yields to

or is explained by a procedure ofself-reflection in a kind ofdialectical

ballet. This is the second characteristic ofthe U.S. notion ofsover-

eignty. In the process ofthe constitution ofsovereignty on the

plane ofimmanence, there also arises an experience offinitude that

results from the conflictive and plural nature of the multitude itself.

The new principle ofsovereignty seems to produce its own internal

limit. To prevent these obstacles from disrupting order and com-

pletely emptying out the project, sovereign power must rely on

the exercise ofcontrol. In other words, after the first moment of

affirmation comes a dialectical negation of the constituent power

ofthe multitude that preserves the teleology ofthe project of

sovereignty. Are we thus faced with a point of crisis in the elabora-

tion ofthe new concept? Does transcendence, first refused in the

definition ofthe source ofpower, return through the back door

in the exercise ofpower, when the multitude is posed as finite and

thus demanding special instruments ofcorrection and control?

That outcome is a constant threat, but after having recognized

these internal limits, the new U.S. concept ofsovereignty opens

with extraordinary force toward the outside, almost as if it wanted

to banish the idea ofcontrol and the moment ofreflection from

its own Constitution. The third characteristic ofthis notion of

sovereignty is its tendency toward an open, expansive project oper-

ating on an unbounded terrain. Although the text ofthe U.S. Con-

stitution is extremely attentive to the self-reflective moment, the

life and exercise of the Constitution are instead, throughout their

jurisprudential and political history, decidedly open to expansive

movements, to the renewed declaration ofthe democratic founda-

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tion ofpower. The principle ofexpansion continually struggles

against the forces of limitation and control.9

It is striking how strongly this American experiment resembles

the ancient constitutional experience, and specifically the political

theory inspired by imperial Rome! In that tradition the conflict

between limit and expansion was always resolved in favor of expan-

sion. Machiavelli defined as expansive those republics whose demo-

cratic foundations led to both the continuous production of conflicts

and the appropriation ofnew territories. Polybius conceived expan-

siveness as the reward for the perfect synthesis of the three forms

ofgovernment, because the eminent form ofsuch a power encour-

ages the democratic pressure ofthe multitude to surpass every limit

and every control. Without expansion the republic constantly risks

being absorbed into the cycle ofcorruption.10

This democratic expansive tendency implicit in the notion of

network power must be distinguished from other, purely expansion-

ist and imperialist forms of expansion. The fundamental difference

is that the expansiveness ofthe immanent concept ofsovereignty

is inclusive, not exclusive. In other words, when it expands, this

new sovereignty does not annex or destroy the other powers it

faces but on the contrary opens itself to them, including them in

the network. What opens is the basis ofconsensus, and thus, through

the constitutive network ofpowers and counterpowers, the entire

sovereign body is continually reformed. Precisely because of this

expansive tendency, the new concept ofsovereignty is pro-

foundly reformist.11

We can now distinguish clearly the expansive tendency ofthe

democratic republic from the expansionism ofthe transcendent sovereigns—or from, because this is primarily what is at issue, the expan-

sionism ofmodern nation-states. The idea ofsovereignty as an

expansive power in networks is poised on the hinge that links the

principle ofa democratic republic to the idea ofEmpire. Empire

can only be conceived as a universal republic, a network ofpowers

and counterpowers structured in a boundless and inclusive architec-

ture. This imperial expansion has nothing to do with imperialism,

nor with those state organisms designed for conquest, pillage, geno-

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167

cide, colonization, and slavery. Against such imperialisms, Empire

extends and consolidates the model ofnetwork power. Certainly,

when we consider these imperial processes historically (and we will

soon focus on them in U.S. history), we see clearly that the expansive

moments ofEmpire have been bathed in tears and blood, but

this ignoble history does not negate the difference between the

two concepts.

Perhaps the fundamental characteristic of imperial sovereignty

is that its space is always open. As we saw in earlier sections, the modern sovereignty that developed in Europe from the sixteenth

century onward conceived space as bounded, and its boundaries

were always policed by the sovereign administration. Modern sover-

eignty resides precisely on the limit. In the imperial conception,

by contrast, power finds the logics ofits order always renewed and

always re-created in expansion. This definition ofimperial power

raises numerous paradoxes: the indifference of the subjects coupled

with the singularization ofproductive networks; the open and ex-

pansive space ofEmpire together with its continuous reterritorializa-

tions; and so forth. The idea of an Empire that is also a democratic

republic, however, is formed precisely by linking and combining the

extreme terms ofthese paradoxes. The tension ofthese conceptual

paradoxes will run throughout the articulation and establishment

ofimperial sovereignty in practice.

Finally, we should note that an idea ofpeace is at the basis of

the development and expansion ofEmpire. This is an immanent

idea ofpeace that is dramatically opposed to the transcendent idea

ofpeace, that is, the peace that only the transcendent sovereign

can impose on a society whose nature is defined by war. Here, on

the contrary, nature is peace. Virgil gives us perhaps the highest

expression ofthis Roman peace: ‘‘The final age that the oracle

foretold has arrived; / The great order of the centuries is born

again.’’12

Open Frontiers

The realization ofthe imperial notion ofsovereignty was a long

process that developed through the different phases of U.S. constitu-

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tional history. As a written document, ofcourse, the U.S. Constitu-

tion has remained more or less unchanged (except for a few ex-

tremely important amendments), but the Constitution should also

be understood as a material regime ofjuridical interpretation and

practice that is exercised not only by jurists and judges but also by

subjects throughout the society. This material, social constitution

has indeed changed radically since the founding of the republic.

U.S. constitutional history, in fact, should be divided into four

distinct phases or regimes.13 A first phase extends from the Declara-

tion ofIndependence to the Civil War and Reconstruction; a

second, extremely contradictory, phase corresponds to the Progres-

sive era, straddling the turn ofthe century, from the imperialist

doctrine ofTheodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson’s interna-

tional reformism; a third phase moves from the New Deal and the

Second World War through the height ofthe cold war; and finally,

a fourth phase is inaugurated with the social movements of the

1960s and continues through the dissolution ofthe Soviet Union and

its Eastern European bloc. Each ofthese phases ofU.S. constitutional

history marks a step toward the realization ofimperial sovereignty.

In the first phase ofthe Constitution, between the presidencies

of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, the open space of the

frontier became the conceptual terrain of republican democracy:

this opening afforded the Constitution its first strong definition.

The declarations off

reedom made sense in a space where the

constitution ofthe state was seen as an open process, a collective

self-making.14 Most important, this American terrain was free of

the forms of centralization and hierarchy typical of Europe. Tocque-

ville and Marx, from opposite perspectives, agree on this point:

American civil society does not develop within the heavy shackles

of feudal and aristocratic power but starts off from a separate and

very different foundation.15 An ancient dream seems newly possible.

An unbounded territory is open to the desire (cupiditas) ofhumanity, and this humanity can thus avoid the crisis ofthe relationship

between virtue (virtus) and fortune (fortuna) that had ambushed and derailed the humanist and democratic revolution in Europe. From

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the perspective ofthe new United States, the obstacles to human

development are posed by nature, not history—and nature does

not present insuperable antagonisms or fixed social relationships. It

is a terrain to transform and traverse.

Already in this first phase, then, a new principle ofsovereignty

is affirmed, different from the European one: liberty is made sover-

eign and sovereignty is defined as radically democratic within an

open and continuous process of expansion. The frontier is a frontier

ofliberty. How hollow the rhetoric ofthe Federalists would have

been and how inadequate their own ‘‘new political science’’ had

they not presupposed this vast and mobile threshold ofthe frontier!

The very idea ofscarcity that—like the idea ofwar—had been at

the center ofthe European concept ofmodern sovereignty is a

priori stripped away from the constitutive processes of the American

experience. Jefferson and Jackson both understood the materiality

ofthe frontier and recognized it as the basis that supported the

expansiveness ofdemocracy.16 Liberty and the frontier stand in a

relationship ofreciprocal implication: every difficulty, every limit

ofliberty is an obstacle to overcome, a threshold to pass through.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific extended a terrain ofwealth and

freedom, constantly open to new lines of flight. In this framework

there is at least a partial displacement or resolution ofthat ambiguous

dialectic we saw developing within the American Constitution

that subordinated the immanent principles ofthe Declaration of

Independence to a transcendent order ofconstitutional self

-

reflection. Across the great open spaces the constituent tendency

wins out over the constitutional decree, the tendency ofthe imma-

nence ofthe principle over regulative reflection, and the initiative

ofthe multitude over the centralization ofpower.

This utopia ofopen spaces that plays such an important role

in the first phase ofAmerican constitutional history, however, al-

ready hides ingenuously a brutal form of subordination. The North

American terrain can be imagined as empty only by willfully ignor-

ing the existence ofthe Native Americans—or really conceiving

them as a different order of human being, as subhuman, part of the

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natural environment. Just as the land must be cleared oftrees and

rocks in order to farm it, so too the terrain must be cleared of the

native inhabitants. Just as the frontier people must gird themselves

against the severe winters, so too they must arm themselves against

the indigenous populations. Native Americans were regarded as

merely a particularly thorny element ofnature, and a continuous

war was aimed at their expulsion and/or elimination. Here we are

faced with a contradiction that could not be absorbed within the

constitutional machine: the Native Americans could not be inte-

grated in the expansive movement ofthe frontier as part ofthe

constitutional tendency; rather, they had to be excluded from the

terrain to open its spaces and make expansion possible. Ifthey had

been recognized, there would have been no real frontier on the

continent and no open spaces to fill. They existed outside the

Constitution as its negative foundation: in other words, their exclu-

sion and elimination were essential conditions ofthe functioning

ofthe Constitution itself. This contradiction may not even properly

be conceived as a crisis since Native Americans are so dramatically

excluded from and external to the workings of the constitutional ma-

chine.

In this first phase that runs from the founding of the democratic

republic to the Civil War, the constitutional dynamic did go into

crisis as a result ofan internal contradiction. Whereas Native Ameri-

cans were cast outside the Constitution, African Americans were

from the beginning posed within it. The conception of frontier

and the idea and practice ofan open space ofdemocracy were in

fact woven together with an equally open and dynamic concept of

people, multitude, and gens. The republican people is a new people, a people in exodus populating the empty (or emptied) new territories.

From the beginning, American space was not only an extensive,

unbounded space but also an intensive space: a space ofcrossings,

a ‘‘melting pot’’ ofcontinuous hybridization. The first real crisis of

American liberty was determined on this internal, intensive space.

Black slavery, a practice inherited from the colonial powers, was

an insurmountable barrier to the formation of a free people. The

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171

great American anticolonial constitution had to integrate this paradigmatic colonial institution at its very heart. Native Americans could be excluded because the new republic did not depend on their

labor, but black labor was an essential support ofthe new United

States: African Americans had to be included in the Constitution

but could not be included equally. (Women, ofcourse, occupied

a very similar position.) The Southern constitutionalists had no

trouble demonstrating that the Constitution, in its dialectical, self-

reflective, and ‘ federalist’’ moment, permitted, and even demanded,

this perverse interpretation ofthe social division oflabor that ran

completely counter to the affirmation of equality expressed in the

Declaration ofIndependence.

The delicate nature ofthis contradiction is indicated by the

bizarre compromise in the drafting of the Constitution, arrived at

only through tortuous negotiation, whereby the slave population

does count in the determination ofthe number ofrepresentatives

for each state in the House of Representatives, but at a ratio whereby

one slave equals three-fifths of a free person. (Southern states fought

to make this ratio as high as possible to increase their congressional

power, and Northerners fought to lower it.) The constitutionalists

were forced in effect to quantify the constitutional value of different races. The framers thus declared that the number of representatives

‘‘shall be determined by adding to the whole Number off

ree

Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years,

and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.’’17

One for white and zero for Native Americans poses relatively little

problem, but three fifths is a very awkward number for a Constitu-

tion. African American slaves could be neither completely included

nor entirely excluded. Black slavery was paradoxically both an

exception to and a foundation of the Constitution.

This contradiction posed a crisis for the newly developed U.S.

notion ofsovereignty because it blocked the free circulation, mixing,

and equality that animate its foundation.18 Imperial sovereignty must

always overcome barriers and boundaries both within its domain

and at the frontiers. This continuous overcoming is what makes

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the imperial space open. The enormous internal barriers between

black and white, free and slave, blocked the imperial integration

machine and deflated the ideological pretense to open spaces.

Abraham Lincoln was certainly right when, conducting the

Civil War, he thought ofhimselfas refounding the nation. The

passage ofthe Fourteenth Amendment inaugurated more than a

century ofjuridical struggles over civil rights and African American

equality. Furthermore, the debate over slavery was inextricably tied

to the debates over the new territories. What was in play was a

redefinition ofthe space ofthe nation. At stake was the question

whether the free exodus of the multitude, unified in a plural com-

munity, could continue to develop, perfect itself, and realize a new

configuration ofpublic space. The new democracy had to destroy

the transcendental idea ofthe nation with all its racial divisions and

create its own people, defined not by old heritages but by a new

ethics ofthe construction and expansion ofthe community. The

new nation could not but be the product ofthe political and cultural

management ofhybrid identities.

TheClosureof Imperial Space

The great open American spaces eventually ran out. Even pushing

Native Americans farther and farther away, into smaller and smaller

confines, was not enough. In the nineteenth and twentieth centu-

ries, American liberty, its new model ofnetwork power, and its

alternative conception to modern sovereignty all ran up against the

recognition that open terrain was limited. The development ofthe

U.S. Constitution would be from this moment on constantly poised

on a contradictory border. Every time the expansiveness ofthe

constitutional project ran up against its limits, the republic was

tempted to engage in a European-style imperialism. There was

always, however, another option: to return to the project ofimperial

sovereignty and articulate it in a way consistent with the original

‘‘Roman’’ mission ofthe United States. This new drama ofthe

U.S. political project was played out in the Progressive era, from

the 1890s to the First World War.

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This was the same period in which class struggle rose to center

stage in the United States. Class struggle posed the problem of

scarcity, not in absolute terms, but in terms proper to the history

ofcapitalism: that is, as the inequity ofthe division ofthe goods

ofdevelopment along the lines ofthe social division oflabor.

Class division emerged as a limit that threatened to destabilize the

expansive equilibria ofthe constitution. At the same time, capital’s

great trusts began to organize new forms of financial power, delink-

ing wealth from productivity and money from the relations of

production. Whereas in Europe this was experienced as a relatively

continuous development—because finance capital was built on the

social position ofland rent and the aristocracy—in the United States

it was an explosive event. It jeopardized the very possibility ofa

constitution in network, because when a power becomes monopo-

listic, the network itselfis destroyed. Since the expansion ofspace

was no longer possible and thus could no longer be used as a strategy

to resolve conflicts, social conflict appeared directly as a violent and

irreconcilable event. The entrance on the scene ofthe great U.S.

workers’ movement confirmed the closure ofthe constitutional

space ofmediation and the impossibility ofthe spatial displacement

ofconflicts. The Haymarket Square riot and the Pullman strike

stated it loud and clear: there is no more open space, and thus

conflict will result in a direct clash, right here.19 In effect, when

power ran up against its spatial limits, it was constrained to fold

back on itself. This was the new context in which all actions had

to be played out.

The closure ofspace posed a serious challenge to the original

American constitutional spirit, and the path to address this challenge

was treacherous. Never was the drive stronger to transform the

United States into something like a European-style sovereignty.

Our concepts of‘‘reaction,’’ ‘‘active counterrevolution,’’ ‘‘preven-

tive police,’’ and ‘‘Pinkerton State’’ were all developed in the United

States in this period. U.S. class repression had no reason to be

jealous ofthe various kaisers and czars ofEurope. Today that fero-

cious period ofcapitalist and state repression still lives on, even if

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the names ofits primary perpetrators (such as Frick, Carnegie,

Mellon, and Morgan) now only serve to grace the mantels of

philanthropic foundations. How ferocious that repression was—and

the stronger it was, the stronger the resistance! This is what really

matters. If things had gone differently, if the resistance to repression

had not been so strong, this book on Empire, as a form of rule

different from imperialism, would have had no reason to be written.

The possible lines ofresponse to address the closure ofspace

on the North American continent were diverse, contradictory, and

conflicting. The two proposals that most strongly determined the

tendency ofthe subsequent development ofthe Constitution were

both elaborated within the framework of U.S. ‘‘progressivism’’ at

the beginning ofthe twentieth century. The first was put forward

by Theodore Roosevelt, the second by Woodrow Wilson; the

first exercised a completely traditional European-style imperialist

ideology, and the second adopted an internationalist ideology of

peace as an expansion ofthe constitutional conception ofnetwork

power. Both ofthese proposals were intended as responses to the

same problem: the crisis ofthe social relationship and consequently

the crisis of Jeffersonian space. For both, the second element of

importance was the corruption ofthe network power ofthe Consti-

tution through the formation of powerful trusts. Both of their

presidential administrations were marked by the passage ofimportant

progressivist antitrust legislation, from the regulation of the railroads

under Roosevelt to broad regulation ofbusiness and finance under

Wilson. Their common problem was understanding how class an-

tagonism, which by this time had all but destroyed the model of

network power, could be placated. They recognized that within

the bounds ofthe system itself—and this is the third point in

common—it was impossible. The open terrain had been used up,

and even ifit were not completely depleted, any room for movement

could not be managed in democratic terms.

Since an internal solution to the closing ofspace was impossi-

ble, the progressivism ofAmerican ideology had to be realized with

reference to the outside. The two responses both emphasized this

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move outward, but Wilson’s project was so much more utopian

that Roosevelt’s. For Roosevelt, the Spanish-American War and

the Rough Riders’ rally up San Juan Hill constituted the prototype

ofthe solution, and that image became even more central as he

underwent his populist conversion. Roosevelt’s solution to the

limits ofspace involved abandoning the original features ofthe

U.S. model and instead following goals and methods similar to

the populist colonial imperialism ofa Cecil Rhodes and the progres-

sive imperialism ofthe French Third Republic.20 This imperialist

path led to the colonialist experience ofthe United States in the

Philippines. ‘‘It is our duty toward the people living in barbarism,’’

Roosevelt proclaimed, ‘‘to see that they are freed from their chains.’’

Any concession to liberation struggles that allowed uncivilized pop-

ulations like the Filipinos to govern themselves would thus be

‘‘an international crime.’’21 Roosevelt, along with generations of

European ideologues before him, relied on the notion of ‘‘civiliza-

tion’’ as an adequate justification for imperialist conquest and domi-

nation.

Wilson’s solution to the crisis of space took an entirely different

path. His project ofthe international extension ofthe network

power ofthe Constitution was a concrete political utopia. Nowhere

was Wilson’s interpretation ofAmerican ideology derided more

strongly than it was in Europe in the period ofthe Treaty of

Versailles, but it was not very well appreciated in the United States,

either. It is true that the League ofNations, the crowning glory of

the Wilsonian project for European and world peace, never got

past the veto power ofCongress; but his concept ofworld order

based on the extension ofthe U.S. constitutional project, the idea

ofpeace as product ofa new world network ofpowers, was a

powerful and long-lasting proposal.22 This proposal corresponded

to the original logic ofthe U.S. Constitution and its idea ofexpansive

Empire. European modernists could not help mocking this proposal

ofa postmodern Empire: the chronicles are full ofthe ironies and

insults ofGeorges Clemenceau and Lloyd George, along with the

fascists, who all declared that the refusal of the Wilsonian project

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was a central element oftheir projects ofdictatorship and war. Yet

poor maligned Wilson appears today in a rather different light: a

utopian, yes, but lucid in his foresight of the horrible future that

awaited the Europe ofnations in the coming years; the inventor

ofa world government ofpeace, which was certainly unrealizable,

but the vision proved nonetheless an efficient promoter of the

passage to Empire. This is all true even ifWilson did not recognize

it. Here in fact we begin to touch concretely the difference between

imperialism and Empire, and we can see in those Wilsonian utopias

the intelligence and foresight of a great idiot.

American Imperialism

The third phase or regime ofthe U.S. Constitution might be seen

as taking effect fully with the passage of the New Deal legislation

such as the National Industrial Relations Act, but for our purposes

it is better to mark its inception earlier, even as early as the Bolshevik

Revolution of1917 and the period when its threat echoed across

the United States and throughout the world. In retrospect, in those

first decades after the October Revolution we can already recognize

the roots ofthe cold war—the bipolar division ofthe territories of

the globe and the frantic competition between the two systems.

The New Deal legislation itself, along with the construction of

comparable welfare systems in Western Europe, might be cast as a

response to the threat conjured up by the Soviet experience, that

is, to the increasing power ofworkers’ movements both at home

and abroad.23 The United States found itself increasingly driven by

the need to placate class antagonism, and thus anticommunism

became the overriding imperative. Cold war ideology gave rise to

the most exaggerated forms of Manichaean division, and as a result,

some ofthe central elements we have seen defining modern Euro-

pean sovereignty reappeared in the United States.

It became increasingly evident during this phase, and through-

out the course ofthe twentieth century, that the United States, far

from being that singular and democratic nation its founders imagined

it to be, an Empire ofLiberty, was the author ofdirect and brutal

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imperialist projects, both domestically and abroad. The figure of

the U.S. government as the world cop and mastermind ofthe

repression ofliberation struggles throughout the world was not

really born in the 1960s, nor even with the inception ofthe cold

war proper, but stretches back to the Soviet revolution, and maybe

even earlier. Perhaps what we have presented as exceptions to the

development ofimperial sovereignty should instead be linked to-

gether as a real tendency, an alternative within the history ofthe U.S.

Constitution. In other words, perhaps the root ofthese imperialist

practices should be traced back to the very origins ofthe country,

to black slavery and the genocidal wars against the Native Americans.

Earlier we considered black slavery as a constitutional problem

in the antebellum period, but racial subordination and the super-

exploitation ofblack labor continued well after the passage ofthe

Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The ideologi-

cal and physical barriers erected around African Americans have

always contradicted the imperial notion ofopen spaces and mixed

populations. In particular, the position ofblack labor in the United

States strongly paralleled the position ofcolonial labor in European

regimes in terms ofthe division oflabor, working conditions, and

wage structure. Indeed, the super-exploitation ofblack labor gives

us one example, an internal example, ofthe imperialist tendency

that has run throughout U.S. history.

A second example ofthis imperialist tendency, an external

example, can be seen in the history ofthe Monroe Doctrine and

the U.S. efforts to exert control over the Americas. The doctrine,

announced by President James Monroe in 1823, was presented first

and foremost as a defensive measure against European colonialism:

the free and independent American continents ‘‘are henceforth not

to be considered as subjects for future colonization by a European

power.’’24 The United States assumed the role ofprotector ofall

the nations ofthe Americans against European aggression, a role

that was eventually made explicit with the Theodore Roosevelt

corollary to the doctrine, claiming for the United States ‘‘an inter-

national police power.’’ One would be hard-pressed, however,

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to characterize the numerous U.S. military interventions in the

Americas simply in terms ofdefense against European aggression.25

Yanqui politics is a strong tradition ofimperialism dressed in anti-

imperialist clothing.

During the cold war this imperialist temptation—or really

the ambiguity between protector and dominator—became more

intense and more extensive. In other words, protecting countries

across the entire world from communism (or, more accurately,

Soviet imperialism) became indistinguishable from dominating and

exploiting them with imperialist techniques. The U.S. involvement

in Vietnam might well be considered the pinnacle ofthis tendency.

From one perspective, and certainly within the U.S. government’s

elaboration ofcold war ideology, the war in Vietnam fit into a global

political strategy to defend the ‘ free world’’ against communism, to

contain its advances. The war, however, could not but also be, in

practice, a continuation ofEuropean imperialism on the part ofthe

United States. By the 1960s, the European colonial powers were

losing crucial battles and their control was waning. Like aging

prizefighters they began to bow out ofthe ring, and the United

States stepped in as the new champion. The U.S. military never

doubted that it was strong enough to avoid the kind ofhumiliation

that the French suffered at Dien Bien Phu. The Americans acted

during their brieftenure in Vietnam with all the violence, brutality,

and barbarity befitting any European imperialist power. It seemed

that the United States would declare itselfthe rightful heir to the

declining European powers, donning their imperialist mantle and

outdoing them at their own imperialist practices.

The U.S. adventure in Vietnam, ofcourse, ended in defeat.

In an extraordinary feat of unparalleled strength and courage, the

Vietnamese combated two imperialist powers in succession and

emerged victorious—although the fruits of that victory have since

proven to be exceedingly bitter. From the perspective ofthe United

States, however, and in terms ofour briefconstitutional history, the

Vietnam War might be seen as the final moment ofthe imperialist

tendency and thus a point ofpassage to a new regime ofthe Con-

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179

stitution. The path ofEuropean-style imperialism had become once

and for all impassable, and henceforth the United States would have

to both turn back and leap forward to a properly imperial rule.

As a kind ofhistorical shorthand, we could locate the end ofthe

third and beginning ofthe fourth regime ofthe U.S. Constitution in

1968.26 The Tet offensive in January marked the irreversible military

defeat of the U.S. imperialist adventures. More important, however,

as is the case before each shift of constitutional regimes, the pressure

for a return to republican principles and the original constitutional

spirit was already prepared by the powerful internal social move-

ments. Just when the United States was most deeply embroiled in

an imperialist venture abroad, when it had strayed farthest from its

original constitutional project, that constituent spirit bloomed most

strongly at home—not only in the antiwar movements themselves,

but also in the civil rights and Black Power movements, the student

movements, and eventually the second-wave feminist movements.

The emergence ofthe various components ofthe New Left was

an enormous and powerful affirmation of the principle of constituent

power and the declaration ofthe reopening ofsocial spaces.

Beyond the Cold War

During the cold war, when the United States ambiguously adopted

the mantle ofimperialism, it subordinated the old imperialist powers

to its own regime. The cold war waged by the United States did

not defeat the socialist enemy, and perhaps that was never really

its primary goal. The Soviet Union collapsed under the burden of

its own internal contradictions. The cold war at the most produced

some ofthe conditions ofisolation that, reverberating within the

Soviet bloc itself, multiplied those explosive contradictions. The

most important effect of the cold war was to reorganize the lines

ofhegemony within the imperialist world, accelerating the decline

ofthe old powers and raising up the U.S. initiative ofthe constitu-

tion ofan imperial order. The United States would not have been

victorious at the end ofthe cold war had a new type ofhegemonic

initiative not already been prepared. This imperial project, a global

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project ofnetwork power, defines the fourth phase or regime of

U.S. constitutional history.

In the waning years and wake ofthe cold war, the responsibility

ofexercising an international police power ‘ fell’’ squarely on the

shoulders ofthe United States. The GulfWar was the first time

the United States could exercise this power in its full form. Really,

the war was an operation ofrepression ofvery little interest from

the point ofview ofthe objectives, the regional interests, and

the political ideologies involved. We have seen many such wars

conducted directly by the United States and its allies. Iraq was

accused ofhaving broken international law, and it thus had to be

judged and punished. The importance ofthe GulfWar derives

rather from the fact that it presented the United States as the only

power able to manage international justice, not as a function of its

own national motives but in the name of global right. Certainly, many powers have falsely claimed to act in the universal interest before,

but this new role of the United States is different. Perhaps it is most

accurate to say that this claim to universality may also be false, but

it is false in a new way. The U.S. world police acts not in imperialist

interest but in imperial interest. In this sense the GulfWar did

indeed, as George Bush claimed, announce the birth ofa new

world order.

Legitimation ofthe imperial order, however, cannot be based

on the mere effectiveness of legal sanction and the military might

to impose it. It must be developed through the production of

international juridical norms that raise up the power ofthe hege-

monic actor in a durable and legal way. Here the constitutional

process that had originated with Wilson finally reaches maturity

and emerges again. Between the First and Second World Wars,

between Wilson’s messianism and the international economic-

political initiatives ofthe New Deal (which we will return to in

Section 3.2), a series ofinternational organizations was built that

produced what in the traditional contractual terms ofinternational

right is called a surplus ofnormativity and efficacy. This surplus

was given an expansive and tendentially universal basis in the spirit

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181

ofthe San Francisco accords that founded the United Nations. The

unifying, internal process was hindered by the cold war, but not

completely blocked by it. Through the years ofthe cold war there

was both a multiplication ofinternational organisms capable of

producing right and a reduction ofthe resistances to their function-

ing. We emphasized in Section 1.1 how the proliferation of these

different international organisms and their consolidation in a set of

symbiotic relationships—as ifthe one asked the other for its own

legitimation—pushed beyond a conception ofinternational right

based in contract or negotiation, and alluded instead to a central

authority, a legitimate supranational motor ofjuridical action. The

objective process was thus given a subjective face. The great interna-

tional institutions, which had been born on the limited basis of

negotiations and pacts, led to a proliferation of organisms and actors

that began to act as ifthere were a central authority sanctioning right.

With the end ofthe cold war, the United States was called

to serve the role ofguaranteeing and adding juridical efficacy to

this complex process ofthe formation ofa new supranational right.

Just as in the first century ofthe Christian era the Roman senators

asked Augustus to assume imperial powers ofthe administration

for the public good, so too today the international organizations

(the United Nations, the international monetary organizations, and

even the humanitarian organizations) ask the United States to assume

the central role in a new world order. In all the regional conflicts

ofthe late twentieth century, from Haiti to the Persian Gulfand

Somalia to Bosnia, the United States is called to intervene mili-

tarily—and these calls are real and substantial, not merely publicity

stunts to quell U.S. public dissent. Even ifit were reluctant, the

U.S. military would have to answer the call in the name ofpeace

and order. This is perhaps one ofthe central characteristics of

Empire—that is, it resides in a world context that continually calls

it into existence. The United States is the peace police, but only

in the final instance, when the supranational organizations ofpeace

call for an organizational activity and an articulated complex of

juridical and organizational initiatives.

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There are many reasons for the United States’ privileged posi-

tion in the new global constitution ofimperial authority. It can

be explained in part by the continuity ofthe United States’ role

(particularly its military role) from the central figure in the struggle

against the USSR to the central figure in the newly unified world

order. From the perspective ofthe constitutional history we are

tracing here, however, we can see that the United States is privileged

in a more important way by the imperial tendency ofits own

Constitution. The U.S. Constitution, as Jefferson said, is the one

best calibrated for extensive Empire. We should emphasize once

again that this Constitution is imperial and not imperialist. It is

imperial because (in contrast to imperialism’s project always to

spread its power linearly in closed spaces and invade, destroy, and

subsume subject countries within its sovereignty) the U.S. constitu-

tional project is constructed on the model ofrearticulating an open

space and reinventing incessantly diverse and singular relations in

networks across an unbounded terrain.

The contemporary idea ofEmpire is born through the global

expansion ofthe internal U.S. constitutional project. It is in fact

through the extension of internal constitutional processes that we enter into a constituent process ofEmpire. International right always

had to be a negotiated, contractual process among external par-

ties—in the ancient world that Thucydides portrayed in the Melian

Dialogue, in the era ofstate reason, and in the modern relations

among nations. Today right involves instead an internal and consti-

tutive institutional process. The networks ofagreements and associa-

tions, the channels ofmediation and conflict resolution, and the

coordination ofthe various dynamics ofstates are all institutionalized

within Empire. We are experiencing a first phase ofthe transforma-

tion ofthe global frontier into an open space ofimperial sovereignty.

2.6

I M P E R I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

The new men ofEmpire are the ones who believe in fresh starts,

new chapters, new pages; I struggle on with the old story, hoping

that before it is finished it will reveal to me why it was that I

thought it worth the trouble.

J. M. Coetzee

There is a long tradition ofmodern critique dedicated

to denouncing the dualisms ofmodernity. The standpoint ofthat

critical tradition, however, is situated in the paradigmatic place of

modernity itself, both ‘‘inside’’ and ‘‘outside,’’ at the threshold or

the point ofcrisis. What has changed in the passage to the imperial

world, however, is that this border place no longer exists, and thus

the modern critical strategy tends no longer to be effective.

Consider, for example, the responses offered in the history of

modern European philosophy from Kant to Foucault to the question

‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’ Kant provides the classic modernist char-

acterization ofthe mandate ofthe Enlightenment: Sapere aude (dare

to know), emerge from the present state of ‘‘immaturity,’’ and

celebrate the public use ofreason at the center ofthe social realm.1

Foucault’s version, when we situate it historically, is not really all

that different. Foucault was dealing not with Fredrick II’s despotism,

which Kant wanted to guide toward more reasonable political posi-

tions, but rather with the political system ofthe French Fifth Repub-

lic, in which a large public sphere for political exchange was taken

for granted. His response nonetheless insists once again on the

necessity ofstraddling the border that links what traditionally would

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be considered the ‘‘inside’’ ofsubjectivity and the ‘‘outside’’ ofthe

public sphere—even though in Foucault’s terms the division is

inverted so as to divide the ‘‘inside’’ ofthe system from the ‘‘outside’’

ofsubjectivity.2 The rationality ofmodern critique, its center of

gravity, is posed on this border.

Foucault does add another line ofinquiry that seeks to go

beyond these boundaries and the modern conception ofthe public

sphere. ‘‘What is at stake . .

. is this: How can the growth of

capabilities [ capaciteś] be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?’’ And this new task requires a new method: ‘‘We

have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative.’’ Foucault’s

response, however, is quite traditional: ‘‘We have to be at the

frontiers.’’3 In the end, Foucault’s philosophical critique ofthe

Enlightenment returns to the same Enlightenment standpoint. In

this ebb and flow between inside and outside, the critique ofmoder-

nity does not finally go beyond its terms and limits, but rather

stands poised on its boundaries.

This same notion ofa border place that serves as the standpoint

for the critique ofthe system ofpower—a place that is both inside

and outside—also animates the critical tradition ofmodern political

theory. Modern republicanism has long been characterized by a

combination ofrealistic foundations and utopian initiatives. Repub-

lican projects are always solidly rooted within the dominant histori-

cal process, but they seek to transform the realm of politics that

thus creates an outside, a new space ofliberation. The three highest

examples ofthis critical tradition ofmodern political theory, in our

opinion, are Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Marx. Their thought is

always grounded within the real processes ofthe constitution of

modern sovereignty, attempting to make its contradictions explode

and open the space for an alternative society. The outside is con-

structed from within.

For Machiavelli, the constituent power that is to found a

democratic politics is born out ofthe rupture ofthe medieval order

and through the necessity ofregulating the chaotic transformations

ofmodernity. The new democratic principle is a utopian initiative

I M P E R I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

185

that responds directly to the real historical process and the demands

ofthe epochal crisis. In Spinoza, too, the critique ofmodern sover-

eignty emerges from within the historical process. Against the de-

ployments ofmonarchy and aristocracy, which can only remain

limited forms, Spinoza defines democracy as the absolute form of

government because in democracy all ofsociety, the entire multi-

tude, rules; in fact, democracy is the only form of government in

which the absolute can be realized. For Marx, finally, every libera-

tory initiative, from wage struggles to political revolutions, proposes

the independence ofuse value against the world ofexchange value,

against the modalities ofcapitalist development—but that indepen-

dence exists only within capitalist development itself. In all these

cases the critique ofmodernity is situated within the historical evolution ofthe forms ofpower, an inside that searches for an outside. Even in the most radical and extreme forms of the call for an outside,

the inside is still assumed as foundation—albeit sometimes a negative

foundation—of the project. In Machiavelli’s constituent formation

ofa new republic, Spinoza’s democratic liberation ofthe multitude,

and Marx’s revolutionary abolition ofthe state, the inside continues

to live in an ambiguous but no less determinate way in the outside

that is projected as utopia.

We do not want to suggest here that modern critiques of

modernity have never reached a real point ofrupture that allows

a shift of perspective, nor that our project cannot profit from these

modern critical foundations. Machiavellian freedom, Spinozist de-

sire, and Marxian living labor are all concepts that contain real

transformative power: the power to confront reality and go beyond

the given conditions ofexistence. The force ofthese critical con-

cepts, which extends well beyond their ambiguous relation to mod-

ern social structures, consists primarily in their being posed as onto-

logical demands.4 The power ofthe modern critique ofmodernity

resides precisely where the blackmail ofbourgeois realism is re-

fused—in other words, where utopian thought, going beyond the

pressures ofhomology that always limit it to what already exists,

is given a new constituent form.

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The limitations ofthese critiques become clear when we ques-

tion their power to transform not only the objective we are aiming

for, but also the standpoint ofcritique. One briefexample should

be sufficient to illustrate this difficulty. The fifth part of Spinoza’s

Ethics is perhaps the highest development ofthe modern critique

ofmodernity. Spinoza takes on the theoretical challenge to establish

full knowledge oftruth and discover the path ofthe liberation of

the body and the mind, positively, in the absolute. All other modern

metaphysical positions, particularly those transcendental positions

ofwhich Descartes and Hobbes are the first major representatives,

are inessential and mystificatory with respect to this project of

liberation. Spinoza’s primary objective is the ontological develop-

ment ofthe unity oftrue knowledge and the powerful body along

with the absolute construction ofsingular and collective immanence.

Never before had philosophical thought so radically undermined

the traditional dualisms ofEuropean metaphysics, and never before,

consequently, had it so powerfully challenged the political practices

oftranscendence and domination. Every ontology that does not

bear the stamp ofhuman creativity is cast aside. The desire (cupiditas) that rules the course ofthe existence and action ofnature and

humans is made love (amor)—which invests at once both the natural

and the divine. And yet, in this final part ofthe Ethics, this utopia has only an abstract and indefinite relation to reality. At times,

setting out from this high level of ontological development, Spino-

za’s thought does attempt to confront reality, but the ascetic proposal

halts, stumbles, and disappears in the mystical attempt to reconcile

the language ofreality and divinity. Finally, in Spinoza as in the

other great modern critics ofmodernity, the search for an outside

seems to run aground and propose merely phantasms ofmysticism,

negative intuitions ofthe absolute.

ThereIs No MoreOutside

The domains conceived as inside and outside and the relationship

between them are configured differently in a variety of modern

discourses.5 The spatial configuration ofinside and outside itself,

I M P E R I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

187

however, seems to us a general and foundational characteristic of

modern thought. In the passage from modern to postmodern and

from imperialism to Empire there is progressively less distinction

between inside and outside.

This transformation is particularly evident when viewed in

terms ofthe notion ofsovereignty. Modern sovereignty has gener-

ally been conceived in terms ofa (real or imagined) territory and

the relation ofthat territory to its outside. Early modern social

theorists, for example, from Hobbes to Rousseau, understood the

civil order as a limited and interior space that is opposed or contrasted

to the external order ofnature. The bounded space ofcivil order,

its place, is defined by its separation from the external spaces of

nature. In an analogous fashion, the theorists of modern psychology

understood drives, passions, instincts, and the unconscious meta-

phorically in spatial terms as an outside within the human mind, a

continuation ofnature deep within us. Here the sovereignty ofthe

Selfrests on a dialectical relation between the natural order ofdrives

and the civil order ofreason or consciousness. Finally, modern

anthropology’s various discourses on primitive societies function as

the outside that defines the bounds ofthe civil world. The process

ofmodernization, in all these varied contexts, is the internalization

ofthe outside, that is, the civilization ofnature.

In the imperial world, this dialectic ofsovereignty between

the civil order and the natural order has come to an end. This is

one precise sense in which the contemporary world is postmodern.

‘‘Postmodernism,’’ Fredric Jameson tells us, ‘‘is what you have when

the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.’’6

Certainly we continue to have forests and crickets and thunder-

storms in our world, and we continue to understand our psyches

as driven by natural instincts and passions; but we have no nature

in the sense that these forces and phenomena are no longer under-

stood as outside, that is, they are not seen as original and indepen-

dent ofthe artifice ofthe civil order. In a postmodern world all

phenomena and forces are artificial, or, as some might say, part of

history. The modern dialectic ofinside and outside has been re-

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placed by a play ofdegrees and intensities, ofhybridity and artific-

iality.

The outside has also declined in terms of a rather different

modern dialectic that defined the relation between public and pri-

vate in liberal political theory. The public spaces ofmodern society,

which constitute the place ofliberal politics, tend to disappear in the

postmodern world. According to the liberal tradition, the modern

individual, at home in its private spaces, regards the public as its

outside. The outside is the place proper to politics, where the action

ofthe individual is exposed in the presence ofothers and there

seeks recognition.7 In the process ofpostmodernization, however,

such public spaces are increasingly becoming privatized. The urban

landscape is shifting from the modern focus on the common square

and the public encounter to the closed spaces ofmalls, freeways,

and gated communities. The architecture and urban planning of

megalopolises such as Los Angeles and Sa˜o Paolo have tended to

limit public access and interaction in such a way as to avoid the

chance encounter ofdiverse populations, creating a series ofpro-

tected interior and isolated spaces.8 Alternatively, consider how the

banlieu ofParis has become a series ofamorphous and indefinite

spaces that promote isolation rather than any interaction or commu-

nication. Public space has been privatized to such an extent that it

no longer makes sense to understand social organization in terms

ofa dialectic between private and public spaces, between inside

and outside. The place ofmodern liberal politics has disappeared,

and thus from this perspective our postmodern and imperial society

is characterized by a deficit of the political. In effect, the place of

politics has been de-actualized.

In this regard, Guy Debord’s analysis ofthe society ofthe

spectacle, more than thirty years after its composition, seems ever

more apt and urgent.9 In imperial society the spectacle is a virtual

place, or more accurately, a non-place ofpolitics. The spectacle is at once unified and diffuse in such a way that it is impossible to

distinguish any inside from outside—the natural from the social,

the private from the public. The liberal notion of the public, the

I M P E R I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

189

place outside where we act in the presence ofothers, has been both

universalized (because we are always now under the gaze ofothers,

monitored by safety cameras) and sublimated or de-actualized in

the virtual spaces ofthe spectacle. The end ofthe outside is the

end ofliberal politics.

Finally, there is no longer an outside also in a military sense.

When Francis Fukuyama claims that the contemporary historical

passage is defined by the end ofhistory, he means that the era of

major conflicts has come to an end: sovereign power will no longer

confront its Other and no longer face its outside, but rather will

progressively expand its boundaries to envelop the entire globe as

its proper domain.10 The history ofimperialist, interimperialist, and

anti-imperialist wars is over. The end ofthat history has ushered

in the reign ofpeace. Or really, we have entered the era ofminor

and internal conflicts. Every imperial war is a civil war, a police

action—from Los Angeles and Granada to Mogadishu and Sarajevo.

In fact, the separation of tasks between the external and the internal

arms ofpower (between the army and the police, the CIA and the

FBI) is increasingly vague and indeterminate.

In our terms, the end ofhistory that Fukuyama refers to is

the end ofthe crisis at the center ofmodernity, the coherent and

defining conflict that was the foundation and raison d’eˆtre for

modern sovereignty. History has ended precisely and only to the

extent that it is conceived in Hegelian terms—as the movement

ofa dialectic ofcontradictions, a play ofabsolute negations and

subsumption. The binaries that defined modern conflict have be-

come blurred. The Other that might delimit a modern sovereign

Selfhas become fractured and indistinct, and there is no longer an

outside that can bound the place ofsovereignty. The outside is

what gave the crisis its coherence. Today it is increasingly difficult

for the ideologues of the United States to name a single, unified

enemy; rather, there seem to be minor and elusive enemies every-

where.11 The end ofthe crisis ofmodernity has given rise to a

proliferation of minor and indefinite crises, or, as we prefer, to an

omni-crisis.

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It is useful to remember here (and we will develop this point

further in Section 3.1) that the capitalist market is one machine

that has always run counter to any division between inside and

outside. It is thwarted by barriers and exclusions; it thrives instead

by including always more within its sphere. Profit can be generated

only through contact, engagement, interchange, and commerce.

The realization ofthe world market would constitute the point of

arrival ofthis tendency. In its ideal form there is no outside to the

world market: the entire globe is its domain.12 We might thus use

the form of the world market as a model for understanding imperial

sovereignty. Perhaps, just as Foucault recognized the panopticon

as the diagram ofmodern power, the world market might serve

adequately—even though it is not an architecture but really an

anti-architecture—as the diagram ofimperial power.13

The striated space ofmodernity constructed places that were

continually engaged in and founded on a dialectical play with their

outsides. The space ofimperial sovereignty, in contrast, is smooth.

It might appear to be free of the binary divisions or striation of

modern boundaries, but really it is crisscrossed by so many fault

lines that it only appears as a continuous, uniform space. In this

sense, the clearly defined crisis ofmodernity gives way to an omni-

crisis in the imperial world. In this smooth space ofEmpire, there

is no place ofpower—it is both everywhere and nowhere. Empire

is an ou-topia, or really a non-place.

Imperial Racism

The passage from modern sovereignty to imperial sovereignty shows

one of its faces in the shifting configurations of racism in our

societies. We should note first ofall that it has become increasingly

difficult to identify the general lines of racism. In fact, politicians,

the media, and even historians continually tell us that racism has

steadily receded in modern societies—from the end of slavery to de-

colonization struggles and civil rights movements. Certain specific

traditional practices ofracism have undoubtedly declined, and one

might be tempted to view the end ofthe apartheid laws in South

I M P E R I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

191

Africa as the symbolic close of an entire era of racial segregation.

From our perspective, however, it is clear that racism has not

receded but actually progressed in the contemporary world, both

in extent and in intensity. It appears to have declined only because

its form and strategies have changed. If we take Manichaean divisions

and rigid exclusionary practices (in South Africa, in the colonial city,

in the southeastern United States, or in Palestine) as the paradigm of

modern racisms, we must now ask what is the postmodern form of racism and what are its strategies in today’s imperial society.

Many analysts describe this passage as a shift in the dominant

theoretical form of racism, from a racist theory based on biology

to one based on culture. The dominant modern racist theory and

the concomitant practices ofsegregation are centered on essential

biological differences among races. Blood and genes stand behind

the differences in skin color as the real substance of racial difference.

Subordinated peoples are thus conceived (at least implicitly) as other

than human, as a different order of being. These modern racist

theories grounded in biology imply or tend toward an ontological

difference—a necessary, eternal, and immutable rift in the order of

being. In response to this theoretical position, then, modern anti-

racism positions itselfagainst the notion ofbiological essentialism,

and insists that differences among the races are constituted instead

by social and cultural forces. These modern anti-racist theorists

operate on the belief that social constructivism will free us from

the straitjacket ofbiological determinism: ifour dif

f

erences are

socially and culturally determined, then all humans are in principle

equal, ofone ontological order, one nature.

With the passage to Empire, however, biological differences

have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers as the key

representation ofracial hatred and fear. In this way imperial racist

theory attacks modern anti-racism from the rear, and actually co-

opts and enlists its arguments. Imperial racist theory agrees that races

do not constitute isolable biological units and that nature cannot

be divided into different human races. It also agrees that the behavior

ofindividuals and their abilities or aptitudes are not the result of

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their blood or their genes, but are due to their belonging to different

historically determined cultures.14 Differences are thus not fixed and

immutable but contingent effects of social history. Imperial racist

theory and modern anti-racist theory are really saying very much

the same thing, and it is difficult in this regard to tell them apart.

In fact, it is precisely because this relativist and culturalist argument

is assumed to be necessarily anti-racist that the dominant ideology

ofour entire society can appear to be against racism, and that

imperial racist theory can appear not to be racist at all.

We should look more closely, however, at how imperial racist

theory operates. E

´ tienne Balibar calls the new racism a differentialist

racism, a racism without race, or more precisely a racism that

does not rest on a biological concept ofrace. Although biology is

abandoned as the foundation and support, he says, culture is made

to fill the role that biology had played.15 We are accustomed to

thinking that nature and biology are fixed and immutable but that

culture is plastic and fluid: cultures can change historically and mix

to form infinite hybrids. From the perspective of imperial racist

theory, however, there are rigid limits to the flexibility and compati-

bility of cultures. Differences between cultures and traditions are,

in the final analysis, insurmountable. It is futile and even dangerous,

according to imperial theory, to allow cultures to mix or insist that

they do so: Serbs and Croats, Hutus and Tutsis, African Americans

and Korean Americans must be kept separate.

As a theory of social difference, the cultural position is no less

‘‘essentialist’’ than the biological one, or at least it establishes an

equally strong theoretical ground for social separation and segrega-

tion. Nonetheless, it is a pluralist theoretical position: all cultural

identities are equal in principle. This pluralism accepts all the differ-

ences ofwho we are so long as we agree to act on the basis of

these differences of identity, so long as we act our race. Racial

differences are thus contingent in principle, but quite necessary in

practice as markers ofsocial separation. The theoretical substitution

of culture for race or biology is thus transformed paradoxically into

a theory ofthe preservation ofrace.16 This shift in racist theory

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193

shows us how imperial theory can adopt what is traditionally thought

to be an anti-racist position and still maintain a strong principle of

social separation.

We should be careful to note at this point that imperial racist

theory in itselfis a theory ofsegregation, not a theory ofhierarchy.

Whereas modern racist theory poses a hierarchy among the races

as the fundamental condition that makes segregation necessary,

imperial theory has nothing to say about the superiority or inferiority

of different races or ethnic groups in principle. It regards that as

purely contingent, a practical matter. In other words, racial hierarchy

is viewed not as cause but as effect of social circumstances. For

example, African American students in a certain region register

consistently lower scores on aptitude tests than Asian American

students. Imperial theory understands this as attributable not to any

racial inferiority but rather to cultural differences: Asian American

culture places a higher importance on education, encourages stu-

dents to study in groups, and so forth. The hierarchy of the different

races is determined only a posteriori, as an effect of their cultures—

that is, on the basis oftheir performance. According to imperial

theory, then, racial supremacy and subordination are not a theoreti-

cal question, but arise through free competition, a kind of market

meritocracy ofculture.

Racist practice, ofcourse, does not necessarily correspond

to the self-understandings of racist theory, which is all we have

considered up to this point. It is clear from what we have seen,

however, that imperial racist practice has been deprived ofa central

support: it no longer has a theory ofracial superiority that was

seen as grounding the modern practices ofracial exclusion. Ac-

cording to Gilles Deleuze and Feĺix Guattari, though, ‘‘European

racism . . . has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation

ofsomeone as Other . . . Racism operates by the determination

ofdegrees ofdeviance in relation to the White-Man face, which

endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccen-

tric and backward waves . . . From the viewpoint ofracism, there

is no exterior, there are no people on the outside.’’17 Deleuze and

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Guattari challenge us to conceive racist practice not in terms of

binary divisions and exclusion but as a strategy of differential inclu-

sion. No identity is designated as Other, no one is excluded from

the domain, there is no outside. Just as imperial racist theory cannot

pose as a point of departure any essential differences among human

races, imperial racist practice cannot begin by an exclusion ofthe

racial Other. White supremacy functions rather through first engag-

ing alterity and then subordinating differences according to degrees

ofdeviance from whiteness. This has nothing to do with the hatred

and fear of the strange, unknown Other. It is a hatred born in

proximity and elaborated through the degrees of difference of the

neighbor.

This is not to say that our societies are devoid ofracial exclu-

sions; certainly they are crisscrossed with numerous lines ofracial

barriers, across each urban landscape and across the globe. The

point, rather, is that racial exclusion arises generally as a result of

differential inclusion. In other words, it would be a mistake today,

and perhaps it is also misleading when we consider the past, to pose

the apartheid or Jim Crow laws as the paradigm ofracial hierarchy.

Difference is not written in law, and the imposition of alterity

does not go to the extreme ofOtherness. Empire does not think

differences in absolute terms; it poses racial differences never as a

difference of nature but always as a difference of degree, never as

necessary but always as accidental. Subordination is enacted in re-

gimes ofeveryday practices that are more mobile and flexible but

that create racial hierarchies that are nonetheless stable and brutal.

The form and strategies of imperial racism help to highlight the

contrast between modern and imperial sovereignty more generally.

Colonial racism, the racism ofmodern sovereignty, first pushes

difference to the extreme and then recuperates the Other as negative

foundation of the Self (see Section 2.3). The modern construction

ofa people is intimately involved in this operation. A people is

defined not simply in terms ofa shared past and common desires

or potential, but primarily in dialectical relation to its Other, its

outside. A people (whether diasporic or not) is always defined in

I M P E R I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

195

terms ofa place (be it virtual or actual). Imperial order, in contrast, has nothing to do with this dialectic. Imperial racism, or differential

racism, integrates others with its order and then orchestrates those

differences in a system of control. Fixed and biological notions of

peoples thus tend to dissolve into a fluid and amorphous multitude,

which is ofcourse shot through with lines ofconflict and antago-

nism, but none that appear as fixed and eternal boundaries. The

surface of imperial society continuously shifts in such a way that it

destabilizes any notion ofplace. The central moment ofmodern

racism takes place on its boundary, in the global antithesis between

inside and outside. As Du Bois said nearly one hundred years ago,

the problem ofthe twentieth century is the problem ofthe color

line. Imperial racism, by contrast, looking forward perhaps to the

twenty-first century, rests on the play of differences and the manage-

ment ofmicro-conflictualities within its continually expanding

domain.

On the Generation and

Corruption of Subjectivity

The progressive lack ofdistinction between inside and outside has

important implications for the social production of subjectivity.

One ofthe central and most common theses ofthe institutional

analyses proposed by modern social theory is that subjectivity is

not pre-given and original but at least to some degree formed

in the field ofsocial forces. In this sense, modern social theory

progressively emptied out any notion ofa presocial subjectivity and

instead grounded the production ofsubjectivity in the functioning

of major social institutions, such as the prison, the family, the factory,

and the school.

Two aspects ofthis production process should be highlighted.

First, subjectivity is a constant social process ofgeneration. When

the boss hails you on the shop floor, or the high school principal

hails you in the school corridor, a subjectivity is formed. The

material practices set out for the subject in the context of the

institution (be they kneeling down to pray or changing hundreds

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ofdiapers) are the production processes ofsubjectivity. In a reflexive

way, then, through its own actions, the subject is acted on, gener-

ated. Second, the institutions provide above all a discrete place

(the home, the chapel, the classroom, the shop floor) where the

production ofsubjectivity is enacted. The various institutions of

modern society should be viewed as an archipelago offactories of

subjectivity. In the course ofa life, an individual passes linearly into

and out ofthese various institutions (from the school to the barracks

to the factory) and is formed by them. The relation between inside

and outside is fundamental. Each institution has its own rules and

logics ofsubjectivation: ‘‘School tells us, ‘You’re not at home any-

more’; the army tells us, ‘You’re not in school anymore.’ ’ 18 Never-

theless, within the walls ofeach institution the individual is at least

partially shielded from the forces of the other institutions; in the

convent one is normally safe from the apparatus of the family, at

home one is normally out ofreach offactory discipline. This clearly

delimited place ofthe institutions is reflected in the regular and fixed form ofthe subjectivities produced.

In the passage to imperial society, the first aspect ofthe modern

condition is certainly still the case, that is, subjectivities are still

produced in the social factory. In fact, the social institutions produce

subjectivity in an ever more intense way. We might say that post-

modernism is what you have when the modern theory ofsocial

constructivism is taken to its extreme and all subjectivity is recog-

nized as artificial. How is this possible, however, when today, as

nearly everyone says, the institutions in question are everywhere

in crisis and continually breaking down? This general crisis does not

necessarily mean that the institutions no longer produce subjectivity.

What has changed, rather, is the second condition: that is, the place

ofthe production ofsubjectivity is no longer defined in this same

way. The crisis means, in other words, that today the enclosures

that used to define the limited space ofthe institutions have broken

down so that the logic that once functioned primarily within the

institutional walls now spreads across the entire social terrain. Inside

and outside are becoming indistinguishable.

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197

This omni-crisis of the institutions looks very different in

different cases. For example, continually decreasing proportions of

the U.S. population are involved in the nuclear family, while steadily

increasing proportions are confined to prisons. Both institutions,

however, the nuclear family and the prison, are equally in crisis,

in the sense that the place of their effectivity is increasingly indeter-

minate. One should not think that the crisis ofthe nuclear family

has brought a decline in the forces of patriarchy. On the contrary,

discourses and practices of‘‘family values’’ seem to be everywhere

across the social field. The old feminist slogan ‘‘The personal is the

political’’ has been reversed in such a way that the boundaries

between public and private have fractured, unleashing circuits of

control throughout the ‘‘intimate public sphere.’’19 In a similar way

the crisis ofthe prison means that carceral logics and techniques have

increasingly spread to other domains ofsociety. The production of

subjectivity in imperial society tends not to be limited to any specific

places. One is always still in the family, always still in school, always

still in prison, and so forth. In the general breakdown, then, the

functioning of the institutions is both more intensive and more

extensive. The institutions work even though they are breaking

down—and perhaps they work all the better the more they break

down. The indefiniteness ofthe place ofthe production corresponds

to the indeterminacy ofthe form ofthe subjectivities produced. The imperial social institutions might be seen, then, in a fluid process

ofthe generation and corruption ofsubjectivity.

This passage is not isolated to the dominant countries and

regions, but tends to be generalized to different degrees across the

world. The apologia ofcolonial administration always celebrated

its establishment ofsocial and political institutions in the colonies,

institutions that would constitute the backbone ofa new civil soci-

ety. Whereas in the process ofmodernization the most powerful

countries export institutional forms to the subordinated ones, in

the present process ofpostmodernization, what is exported is the

general crisis of the institutions. The Empire’s institutional structure is like a software program that carries a virus along with it, so that it

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is continually modulating and corrupting the institutional forms

around it. The imperial society ofcontrol is tendentially everywhere

the order ofthe day.

TheTripleImperativeof Empire

The general apparatus ofimperial command actually consists of

three distinct moments: one inclusive, another differential, and a

third managerial. The first moment is the magnanimous, liberal

face of Empire. All are welcome within its boundaries, regardless

ofrace, creed, color, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth. In its

inclusionary moment Empire is blind to differences; it is absolutely

indifferent in its acceptance. It achieves universal inclusion by setting

aside differences that are inflexible or unmanageable and thus might

give rise to social conflict.20 Setting aside differences requires us to

regard differences as inessential or relative and imagine a situation

not in which they do not exist but rather in which we are ignorant

ofthem. A veil ofignorance prepares a universal acceptance. When

Empire is blind to these differences and when it forces its constituents

to set them aside, there can exist an overlapping consensus across

the entire imperial space. Setting aside differences means, in effect,

taking away the potential ofthe various constituent subjectivities.

The resulting public space ofpower neutrality makes possible the

establishment and legitimation ofa universal notion ofright that

f

orms the core ofthe Empire. The law ofinclusionary neutral

indifference is a universal foundation in the sense that it applies

equally to all subjects that exist and that could exist under imperial

rule. In this first moment, then, the Empire is a machine for universal

integration, an open mouth with infinite appetite, inviting all to

come peacefully within its domain. (Give me your poor, your

hungry, your downtrodden masses . .

.) The Empire does not

fortify its boundaries to push others away, but rather pulls them

within its pacific order, like a powerful vortex. With boundaries

and differences suppressed or set aside, the Empire is a kind of

smooth space across which subjectivities glide without substantial

resistance or conflict.

I M P E R I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

199

The second moment of imperial control, its differential mo-

ment, involves the affirmation of differences accepted within the

imperial realm. While from the juridical perspective differences

must be set aside, from the cultural perspective differences are

celebrated. Since these differences are considered now to be cultural

and contingent rather than biological and essential, they are thought

not to impinge on the central band ofcommonality or overlapping

consensus that characterizes the Empire’s inclusionary mechanism.

They are nonconflictual differences, the kind of differences we

might set aside when necessary. For example, since the end ofthe

cold war, ethnic identities have been actively (re)created in the

socialist and formerly socialist countries with the firm support of the

United States, the U.N., and other global bodies. Local languages,

traditional place-names, arts, handcrafts, and so forth are celebrated

as important components ofthe transition from socialism to capital-

ism.21 These differences are imagined to be ‘‘cultural’’ rather than

‘‘political,’’ under the assumption that they will not lead to uncon-

trollable conflicts but will function, rather, as a force of peaceful

regional identification. In a similar fashion, many official promotions

ofmulticulturalism in the United States involve the celebration of

traditional ethnic and cultural differences under the umbrella of

universal inclusion. In general, Empire does not create differences.

It takes what it is given and works with it.

The differential moment of imperial control must be followed

by the management and hierarchization of these differences in a

general economy ofcommand. Whereas colonial power sought to

fix pure, separate identities, Empire thrives on circuits ofmovement

and mixture. The colonial apparatus was a kind ofmold that forged

fixed, distinct castings, but the imperial society ofcontrol functions

through modulation, ‘‘like a self-deforming cast that changes contin-

ually, from one instant to the next, or like a sieve whose pattern

changes from one point to the next.’’22 The colonial poses a simple

equation with a unique solution; the imperial is faced by multiple

complex variables that change continuously and admit a variety of

always incomplete but nonetheless effective solutions.

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In a certain sense, then, the colonial might be considered more

ideological and the imperial more pragmatic. Consider as an example

ofimperial strategy the practice ofNew England f

actories and

Appalachian coal mines at the beginning ofthe twentieth century.

The factories and mines were dependent on the labor of recent

immigrants from various European countries, many of whom carried

with them traditions ofintense worker militancy. Bosses, however,

did not shy away from bringing together this potentially explosive

mixture of workers. They found, in fact, that carefully managed

proportions of workers from different national backgrounds in each

workshop and each mine proved to be a powerful formula of

command. The linguistic, cultural, and ethnic differences within

each work force were stabilizing because they could be used as a

weapon to combat worker organization. It was in the bosses’ interest

that the melting pot not dissolve identities and that each ethnic group

continue to live in a separate community maintaining its differences.

A very similar strategy can be seen in the more recent practices

oflabor management on a Central American banana plantation.23

Multiple ethnic divisions among the workers function as an element

ofcontrol in the labor process. The transnational corporation ad-

dresses with different methods and degrees of exploitation and

repression each ofthe ethnic groups ofworkers—variously ofEuro-

pean and African descent and from different Amerindian groups.

Antagonisms and divisions among the workers along the various

lines ofethnicity and identification prove to enhance profit and

facilitate control. Complete cultural assimilation (in contrast to ju-

ridical integration) is certainly not a priority ofimperial strategy.

The reemergence of ethnic and national differences at the end of

the twentieth century, not only in Europe but also in Africa, Asia,

and the Americas, has presented Empire with an even more complex

equation containing a myriad ofvariables that are in a constant state

offlux. That this equation does not have a unique solution is not

really a problem—on the contrary. Contingency, mobility, and

flexibility are Empire’s real power. The imperial ‘‘solution’’ will

not be to negate or attenuate these differences, but rather to affirm

them and arrange them in an effective apparatus of command.

I M P E R I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

201

‘‘Divide and conquer’’ is thus not really the correct formulation

ofimperial strategy. More often than not, the Empire does not

create division but rather recognizes existing or potential differences,

celebrates them, and manages them within a general economy of

command. The triple imperative ofthe Empire is incorporate,

differentiate, manage.

From Crisis to Corruption

At the beginning ofPart 2 we elaborated a notion ofmodern

sovereignty as crisis: a crisis defined in the continual conflict be-

tween, on the one hand, the plane ofimmanent forces ofthe desire

and cooperation ofthe multitude and, on the other hand, the

transcendent authority that seeks to contain these forces and impose

an order on them. We can now see that imperial sovereignty, in

contrast, is organized not around one central conflict but rather

through a flexible network ofmicroconflicts. The contradictions

ofimperial society are elusive, proliferating, and nonlocalizable: the

contradictions are everywhere. Rather than crisis, then, the concept

that defines imperial sovereignty might be omni-crisis, or, as we

prefer, corruption. It is a commonplace of the classical literature

on Empire, from Polybius to Montesquieu and Gibbon, that Empire

is from its inception decadent and corrupt.

This terminology might easily be misunderstood. It is impor-

tant to make clear that we in no way intend our definition of

imperial sovereignty as corruption to be a moral charge. In its

contemporary and modern usage, corruption has indeed become a

poor concept for our purposes. It now commonly refers only to

the perverted, that which strays from the moral, the good, the pure.

We intend the concept rather to refer to a more general process

ofdecomposition or mutation with none ofthe moral overtones,

drawing on an ancient usage that has been largely lost. Aristotle,

for example, understands corruption as a becoming of bodies that

is a process complementary to generation.24 We might think of

corruption, then, as de-generation—a reverse process ofgeneration

and composition, a moment ofmetamorphosis that potentially frees

spaces for change. We have to forget all the commonplace images

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that come to mind when we refer to imperial decadence, corruption,

and degeneration. Such moralism is completely misplaced here.

More important is a strict argument about form, in other words,

that Empire is characterized by a fluidity ofform—an ebb and flow

of formation and deformation, generation and degeneration.

To say that imperial sovereignty is defined by corruption

means, on the one hand, that Empire is impure or hybrid and, on

the other, that imperial rule functions by breaking down. (Here

the Latin etymology is precise: cum-rumpere, to break.) Imperial

society is always and everywhere breaking down, but this does not

mean that it is necessarily heading to ruin. Just as the crisis of

modernity in our characterization did not point to any imminent

or necessary collapse, so too the corruption ofEmpire does not

indicate any teleology or any end in sight. In other words, the crisis

ofmodern sovereignty was not temporary or exceptional (as one

would refer to the stock market crash of 1929 as a crisis), but rather

the norm ofmodernity. In a similar way, corruption is not an

aberration ofimperial sovereignty but its very essence and modus

operandi. The imperial economy, for example, functions precisely

through corruption, and it cannot function otherwise. There is

certainly a tradition that views corruption as the tragic flaw of

Empire, the accident without which Empire would have triumphed:

think of Shakespeare and Gibbon as two very different examples.

We see corruption, rather, not as accidental but as necessary. Or,

more accurately, Empire requires that all relations be accidental.

Imperial power is founded on the rupture of every determinate

ontological relationship. Corruption is simply the sign ofthe absence

ofany ontology. In the ontological vacuum, corruption becomes

necessary, objective. Imperial sovereignty thrives on the proliferat-

ing contradictions corruption gives rise to; it is stabilized by its

instabilities, by its impurities and admixture; it is calmed by the

panic and anxieties it continually engenders. Corruption names

the perpetual process ofalteration and metamorphosis, the anti-

foundational foundation, the deontological mode of being.

We have thus arrived at a series ofdistinctions that conceptually

mark the passage from modern to imperial sovereignty: from the

I M P E R I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

203

people to the multitude, from dialectical opposition to the manage-

ment ofhybridities, from the place ofmodern sovereignty to the

non-place ofEmpire, from crisis to corruption.

R EFUSAL

Bartleby would prefer not to. The mystery of Herman Melville’s classic

story is the absoluteness of the refusal. When his boss asks him to perform his duties, Bartleby calmly repeats over and over, ‘‘I would prefer not to.’’

Melville’s character fits in with a long tradition of the refusal of work. Any worker with any sense, of course, wants to refuse the authority of the boss, but Bartleby takes it to the extreme. He does not object to this or that task, nor does he offer any reason for his refusal—he just passively and absolutely declines. Bartleby’s behavior is indeed disarming, in part because he is so calm and serene, but moreover because his refusal is so indefinite that it becomes absolute. He simply prefers not to.

Given Melville’s great penchant for metaphysics, it is no wonder that

Bartleby solicits ontological interpretations.1 His refusal is so absolute that Bartleby appears completely blank, a man without qualities or, as Renaissance philosophers would say, homo tantum, mere man and nothing more.

Bartleby in his pure passivity and his refusal of any particulars presents us with a figure of generic being, being as such, being and nothing more. And in the course of the story he strips down so much—approximating ever

more closely naked humanity, naked life, naked being—that eventually

he withers away, evaporates in the bowels of the infamous Manhattan

prison, the Tombs.

Michael K, the central character in J. M. Coetzee’s wonderful novel

The Life and Times of Michael K, is also a figure of absolute refusal.

But whereas Bartleby is immobile, almost petrified in his pure passivity, K is always on his feet, always moving. Michael K is a gardener, a simple man, so simple that he appears to be not of this world. In a fictional country divided by civil war, he is continually stopped by the cages, barriers, and checkpoints erected by authority, but he manages quietly to refuse them, to keep moving. Michael K does not keep moving just for the sake of perpetual motion. The barriers do not just block motion, they seem to stop life, and thus he refuses them absolutely in order to keep life in motion. What he really wants is to grow pumpkins and tend to their wandering vines. K’s 204

P A S S A G E S O F S O V E R E I G N T Y

refusal of authority is as absolute as Bartleby’s, and that very absoluteness and simplicity situate him, too, on a level of ontological purity. K also approaches the level of naked universality: ‘‘a human soul above and beneath classification,’’2 being simply homo tantum.

These simple men and their absolute refusals cannot but appeal to

our hatred of authority. The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics. Long ago E

´ tienne de La Boe´tie preached just such a politics of refusal: ‘‘Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support

him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose

pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into

pieces.’’3 La Boe´tie recognized the political power of refusal, the power of subtracting ourselves from the relationship of domination, and through our exodus subverting the sovereign power that lords over us. Bartleby and

Michael K continue La Boe´tie’s politics of the refusal of voluntary servitude, carrying it to the absolute.

This refusal certainly is the beginning of a liberatory politics, but it is only a beginning. The refusal in itself is empty. Bartleby and Michael K may be beautiful souls, but their being in its absolute purity hangs on the edge of an abyss. Their lines of flight from authority are completely solitary, and they continuously tread on the verge of suicide. In political terms, too, refusal in itself (of work, authority, and voluntary servitude) leads only to a kind of social suicide. As Spinoza says, if we simply cut the tyrannical head off the social body, we will be left with the deformed corpse of society. What we need is to create a new social body, which is a project that goes well beyond refusal. Our lines of flight, our exodus must be constituent and create a real alternative. Beyond the simple refusal, or as part of that refusal, we need also to construct a new mode of life and above all a new community. This project leads not toward the naked life of homo tantum but toward homohomo, humanity squared, enriched by the collective intelligence and love of the community.

I N T E R M E Z Z O

C O U N T E R - E M P I R E

While this Heavenly City is on pilgrimage on earth, it calls out all

peoples and so collects a society ofaliens, speaking all languages.

Saint Augustine

We want to destroy all the ridiculous monuments ‘‘to those who

have died for the fatherland’’ that stare down at us in every village,

and in their place erect monuments to the deserters. The monu-

ments to the deserters will represent also those who died in the war

because every one ofthem died cursing the war and envying the

happiness ofthe deserter. Resistance is born ofdesertion.

Antifascist partisan, Venice, 1943

We have now arrived at a turning point in our argument.

The trajectory we have traced up until now—from our recognition

ofmodernity as crisis to our analyses ofthe first articulations ofa

new imperial form of sovereignty—has allowed us to understand

the transformations of the constitution of world order. But that

order would be merely a hollow husk ifwe were not to designate

also a new regime of production. Furthermore, we have not yet

been able to give any coherent indication ofwhat type ofpolitical

subjectivities might contest and overthrow the forces of Empire,

because those subjectivities will arrive only on the terrain ofpro-

duction. It is as ifat this point we can see only shadows ofthe

figures that will animate our future. Let us therefore descend

into the hidden abode ofproduction to see the figures at work

there.

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I N T E R M E Z Z O

Even when we manage to touch on the productive, ontological

dimension ofthe problematic and the resistances that arise there,

however, we will still not be in the position—not even at the

end ofthis book—to point to any already existing and concrete

elaboration of a political alternative to Empire. And no such effective

blueprint will ever arise from a theoretical articulation such as ours.

It will arise only in practice. At a certain point in his thinking Marx

needed the Paris Commune in order to make the leap and conceive

communism in concrete terms as an effective alternative to capitalist

society. Some such experiment or series ofexperiments advanced

through the genius ofcollective practice will certainly be necessary

today to take that next concrete step and create a new social body

beyond Empire.

OneBig Union!

Our study set out from the hypothesis that the power of Empire

and the mechanisms ofimperial sovereignty can be understood only

when confronted on the most general scale, in their globality. We

believe that toward the end ofchallenging and resisting Empire

and its world market, it is necessary to pose any alternative at an

equally global level. Any proposition ofa particular community in

isolation, defined in racial, religious, or regional terms, ‘‘delinked’’

from Empire, shielded from its powers by fixed boundaries, is

destined to end up as a kind ofghetto. Empire cannot be resisted

by a project aimed at a limited, local autonomy. We cannot move

back to any previous social form, nor move forward in isolation.

Rather, we must push through Empire to come out the other

side. Deleuze and Guattari argued that rather than resist capital’s

globalization, we have to accelerate the process. ‘‘But which,’’ they

ask, ‘‘is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from

the world market . . ? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction?

To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of

decoding and deterritorialization?’’1 Empire can be effectively con-

tested only on its own level ofgenerality and by pushing the

processes that it offers past their present limitations. We have to

C O U N T E R - E M P I R E

207

accept that challenge and learn to think globally and act globally.

Globalization must be met with a counter-globalization, Empire

with a counter-Empire.

In this regard we might take inspiration from Saint Augustine’s

vision ofa project to contest the decadent Roman Empire. No

limited community could succeed and provide an alternative to

imperial rule; only a universal, catholic community bringing to-

gether all populations and all languages in a common journey could

accomplish this. The divine city is a universal city ofaliens, coming

together, cooperating, communicating. Our pilgrimage on earth,

however, in contrast to Augustine’s, has no transcendent telos be-

yond; it is and remains absolutely immanent. Its continuous move-

ment, gathering aliens in community, making this world its home,

is both means and end, or rather a means without end.

From this perspective the Industrial Workers ofthe World

(IWW) is the great Augustinian project ofmodern times. In the

first decades ofthe twentieth century the Wobblies, as they were

called, organized powerful strikes and rebellions across the United

States, from Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Paterson, New Jersey,

to Everett, Washington.2 The perpetual movement ofthe Wobblies

was indeed an immanent pilgrimage, creating a new society in the

shell ofthe old, without establishing fixed and stable structures of

rule. (In fact, the primary criticism of the IWW from the official

Left was and continues to be that its strikes, though powerful and

often victorious, never left behind durable union structures.) The

Wobblies had extraordinary success among the vast and mobile

immigrant populations because they spoke all the languages ofthat

hybrid labor force. The two accepted stories of the derivation of

the name ‘‘Wobbly’’ illustrate these two central characteristics of

the movement, its organizational mobility and its ethnic-linguistic

hybridity: first, Wobbly is supposed to refer to the lack of a center,

the flexible and unpredictable pilgrimage ofIWW militancy; and

second, the name is said to derive from the mispronunciation of a

Chinese cook in Seattle, ‘ I Wobbly Wobbly.’’ The primary focus

ofthe IWW was the universality ofits project. Workers ofall

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languages and races across the world (although in fact they only

made it as far as Mexico) and workers of all trades should come

together in ‘‘One Big Union.’’

Taking our cue from the IWW, and clearly departing from

Augustine in this regard, we would cast our political vision in line

with the radical republican tradition ofmodern democracy. What

does it mean to be republican today? What sense can it have in the

postmodern era to take up that antagonistic position that constituted

a radically democratic alternative within modernity? Where is the

standpoint from which critique can be possible and effective? In

this passage from modernity to postmodernity, is there still a place

from which we can launch our critique and construct an alternative?

Or, ifwe are consigned to the non-place ofEmpire, can we construct

a powerful non-place and realize it concretely, as the terrain of a

postmodern republicanism?

TheNon-Placeof Exploitation

In order to address this problematic, allow us a briefdigression.

We mentioned earlier that Marx’s theoretical method, in line with

the tradition ofmodern critiques ofmodernity, is situated in the

dialectic between inside and outside. Proletarian struggles consti-

tute—in real, ontological terms—the motor ofcapitalist develop-

ment. They constrain capital to adopt ever higher levels oftechnol-

ogy and thus transform labor processes.3 The struggles force capital

continually to reform the relations of production and transform the

relations ofdomination. From manufacturing to large-scale industry,

from finance capital to transnational restructuring and the globaliza-

tion ofthe market, it is always the initiatives oforganized labor

power that determine the figure ofcapitalist development. Through

this history the place ofexploitation is a dialectically determined

site. Labor power is the most internal element, the very source of

capital. At the same time, however, labor power represents capital’s

outside, that is, the place where the proletariat recognizes its own

use value, its own autonomy, and where it grounds its hope for

liberation. The refusal of exploitation—or really resistance, sabo-

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tage, insubordination, rebellion, and revolution—constitutes the

motor force of the reality we live, and at the same time is its living

opposition. In Marx’s thought the relationship between the inside

and the outside ofcapitalist development is completely determined

in the dual standpoint ofthe proletariat, both inside and outside

capital. This spatial configuration has led to many political positions

founded on the dream of affirming the place of use value, pure and

separate from exchange value and capitalist relations.

In the contemporary world this spatial configuration has

changed. On the one hand, the relations ofcapitalist exploitation

are expanding everywhere, not limited to the factory but tending

to occupy the entire social terrain. On the other hand, social relations

completely invest the relations ofproduction, making impossible

any externality between social production and economic produc-

tion. The dialectic between productive forces and the system of

domination no longer has a determinate place. The very qualities of labor power (difference, measure, and determination) can no longer

be grasped, and similarly, exploitation can no longer be localized

and quantified. In effect, the object of exploitation and domination

tend not to be specific productive activities but the universal capacity

to produce, that is, abstract social activity and its comprehensive

power. This abstract labor is an activity without place, and yet it

is very powerful. It is the cooperating set of brains and hands, minds

and bodies; it is both the non-belonging and the creative social

diffusion of living labor; it is the desire and the striving of the

multitude ofmobile and flexible workers; and at the same time it

is intellectual energy and linguistic and communicative construction

ofthe multitude ofintellectual and affective laborers.4

The inside defined by use value and the outside ofexchange

value are nowhere to be found, and hence any politics of use

value, which was always based on an illusion ofseparability, is

now definitely inconceivable. That does not mean, however, that

production and exploitation have ceased. Neither have innovation

and development nor the continuous restructuring ofrelations of

power come to an end. On the contrary, today more than ever,

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as productive forces tend to be completely de-localized, completely

universal, they produce not only commodities but also rich and

powerful social relationships. These new productive forces have no

place, however, because they occupy all places, and they produce

and are exploited in this indefinite non-place. The universality of

human creativity, the synthesis offreedom, desire, and living labor,

is what takes place in the non-place ofthe postmodern relations

ofproduction. Empire is the non-place ofworld production where

labor is exploited. By contrast, and with no possible homology with

Empire, here we find again the revolutionary formalism of modern

republicanism. This is still a formalism because it is without place,

but it is a potent formalism now that it is recognized not as abstracted

from the individual and collective subjects but as the general power

that constitutes their bodies and minds. The non-place has a brain,

heart, torso, and limbs, globally.

Being-Against: Nomadism, Desertion, Exodus

This recognition takes us back to the initial question: What does

it mean to be republican today? We have already seen that the

modern critical response ofopening the dialectic between inside

and outside is no longer possible. An effective notion of postmodern

republicanism will have to be constructed au milieu, on the basis

ofthe lived experience ofthe global multitude. One element we

can put our finger on at the most basic and elemental level is the

will to be against. In general, the will to be against does not seem to require much explanation. Disobedience to authority is one of

the most natural and healthy acts. To us it seems completely obvious

that those who are exploited will resist and—given the necessary

conditions—rebel. Today, however, this may not be so obvious.

A long tradition ofpolitical scientists has said the problem is not

why people rebel but why they do not. Or rather, as Deleuze and

Guattari say, ‘‘the fundamental problem of political philosophy is

still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm

Reich rediscovered): ‘Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?’ ’ 5 The first question of

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political philosophy today is not ifor even why there will be

resistance and rebellion, but rather how to determine the enemy

against which to rebel. Indeed, often the inability to identify the

enemy is what leads the will to resistance around in such paradoxical

circles. The identification ofthe enemy, however, is no small task

given that exploitation tends no longer to have a specific place and

that we are immersed in a system ofpower so deep and complex

that we can no longer determine specific difference or measure.

We suffer exploitation, alienation, and command as enemies, but

we do not know where to locate the production ofoppression.

And yet we still resist and struggle.

One should not exaggerate these logical paradoxes. Even

though on the new terrain ofEmpire exploitation and domination

often cannot be defined in specific places, they nonetheless exist.

The globality ofthe command they impose represents the inverted

image—something like a photo negative—ofthe generality ofthe

multitude’s productive activities. And yet, this inverted relation

between imperial power and the power ofthe multitude does not

indicate any homology. In effect, imperial power can no longer

discipline the powers ofthe multitude; it can only impose control

over their general social and productive capacities. From the eco-

nomic point ofview, the wage regime is replaced, as a function of

regulation, by a flexible and global monetary system; normative

command is replaced by the procedures ofcontrol and the police;

and the exercise ofdomination is formed through communicative

networks. This is how exploitation and domination constitute a

general non-place on the imperial terrain. Although exploitation

and domination are still experienced concretely, on the flesh ofthe

multitude, they are nonetheless amorphous in such a way that it

seems there is no place left to hide. 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, every desire that is effective—perhaps

of democracy itself. The first anti-fascist partisans in Europe, armed

deserters confronting their traitorous governments, were aptly called

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‘‘against-men.’’6 Today the generalized being-against ofthe multi-

tude must recognize imperial sovereignty as the enemy and discover

the adequate means to subvert its power.

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 ofimperial control it may be desertion. Whereas being-against in modernity often meant a direct and/or dialectical opposi-

tion offorces, in postmodernity being-against might well be most

effective in an oblique or diagonal stance. Battles against the Empire

might be won through subtraction and defection. This desertion

does not have a place; it is the evacuation ofthe places ofpower.

Throughout the history ofmodernity, the mobility and migra-

tion ofthe labor force have disrupted the disciplinary conditions

to which workers are constrained. And power has wielded the most

extreme violence against this mobility. In this respect slavery can

be considered on a continuum with the various wage labor regimes

as the most extreme repressive apparatus to block the mobility

ofthe labor force. The history ofblack slavery in the Americas

demonstrates both the vital need to control the mobility oflabor

and the irrepressible desire to flee on the part ofthe slaves: from

the closed ships ofthe Middle Passage to the elaborate repressive

techniques employed against escaped slaves. Mobility and mass

worker nomadism always express a refusal and a search for liberation:

the resistance against the horrible conditions ofexploitation and

the search for freedom and new conditions of life. It would be

interesting, in fact, to write a general history of the modes of

production from the standpoint of the workers’ desire for mobility

(from the country to the city, from the city to the metropolis, from

one state to another, from one continent to another) rather than

running through that development simply from the standpoint of

capital’s regulation ofthe technological conditions oflabor. This

history would substantially reconfigure the Marxian conception of

the stages ofthe organization oflabor, which has served as the

theoretical framework for numerous authors up to Polanyi.7

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213

Today the mobility oflabor power and migratory movements

is extraordinarily diffuse and difficult to grasp. Even the most sig-

nificant population movements ofmodernity (including the black

and white Atlantic migrations) constitute lilliputian events with

respect to the enormous population transfers of our times. A specter

haunts the world and it is the specter ofmigration. All the powers

ofthe old world are allied in a merciless operation against it, but

the movement is irresistible. Along with the flight from the so-

called Third World there are flows of political refugees and transfers

ofintellectual labor power, in addition to the massive movements

ofthe agricultural, manufacturing, and service proletariat. The legal

and documented movements are dwarfed by clandestine migrations:

the borders ofnational sovereignty are sieves, and every attempt at

complete regulation runs up against violent pressure. Economists

attempt to explain this phenomenon by presenting their equations

and models, which even ifthey were complete would not explain

that irrepressible desire for free movement. In effect, what pushes

from behind is, negatively, desertion from the miserable cultural

and material conditions ofimperial reproduction; but positively,

what pulls forward is the wealth of desire and the accumulation of

expressive and productive capacities that the processes ofglobaliza-

tion have determined in the consciousness ofevery individual and

social group—and thus a certain hope. Desertion and exodus are

a powerful form of class struggle within and against imperial post-

modernity. This mobility, however, still constitutes a spontaneous

level ofstruggle, and, as we noted earlier, it most often leads today

to a new rootless condition ofpoverty and misery.

A new nomad horde, a new race ofbarbarians, will arise to

invade or evacuate Empire. Nietzsche was oddly prescient oftheir

destiny in the nineteenth century. ‘‘Problem: where are the barbarians

ofthe twentieth century? Obviously they will come into view and

consolidate themselves only after tremendous socialist crises.’’8 We

cannot say exactly what Nietzsche foresaw in his lucid delirium,

but indeed what recent event could be a stronger example ofthe

power ofdesertion and exodus, the power ofthe nomad horde,

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than the fall ofthe Berlin Wall and the collapse ofthe entire Soviet

bloc? In the desertion from ‘‘socialist discipline,’’ savage mobility

and mass migration contributed substantially to the collapse ofthe

system. In fact, the desertion of productive cadres disorganized and

struck at the heart ofthe disciplinary system ofthe bureaucratic

Soviet world. The mass exodus ofhighly trained workers from

Eastern Europe played a central role in provoking the collapse of

the Wall.9 Even though it refers to the particularities of the socialist

state system, this example demonstrates that the mobility ofthe labor

force can indeed express an open political conflict and contribute to

the destruction ofthe regime. What we need, however, is more.

We need a force capable of not only organizing the destructive

capacities ofthe multitude, but also constituting through the desires

ofthe multitude an alternative. The counter-Empire must also be

a new global vision, a new way ofliving in the world.

Numerous republican political projects in modernity assumed

mobility as a privileged terrain for struggle and organization: from

the so-called Socians ofthe Renaissance (Tuscan and Lombard

artisans and apostles of the Reform who, banished from their own

country, fomented sedition against the Catholic nations of Europe,

from Italy to Poland) up to the seventeenth-century sects that

organized trans-Atlantic voyages in response to the massacres in

Europe; and from the agitators of the IWW across the United States

in the 1910s up to the European autonomists in the 1970s. In these

modern examples, mobility became an active politics and established

a political position. This mobility ofthe labor force and this political

exodus have a thousand threads that are interwoven—old traditions

and new needs are mixed together, just as the republicanism of

modernity and modern class struggle were woven together. Post-

modern republicanism, ifit is to arise, must face a similar task.

New Barbarians

Those who are against, while escaping from the local and particular

constraints oftheir human condition, must also continually attempt

to construct a new body and a new life. This is a necessarily violent,

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215

barbaric passage, but as Walter Benjamin says, it is a positive barba-

rism: ‘‘Barbarisms? Precisely. We affirm this in order to introduce

a new, positive notion ofbarbarism. What does the poverty of

experience oblige the barbarian to do? To begin anew, to begin

from the new.’’ The new barbarian ‘‘sees nothing permanent. But

for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encoun-

ter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he

sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere

. . . Because he sees ways everywhere, he always positions himself

at crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring.

What exists he reduces to rubble, not for the sake of the rubble,

but for that of the way leading through it.’’10 The new barbarians

destroy with an affirmative violence and trace new paths of life

through their own material existence.

These barbaric deployments work on human relations in gen-

eral, but we can recognize them today first and foremost in corporeal

relations and configurations ofgender and sexuality.11 Conventional

norms ofcorporeal and sexual relations between and within genders

are increasingly open to challenge and transformation. Bodies them-

selves transform and mutate to create new posthuman bodies.12 The

first condition ofthis corporeal transformation is the recognition

that human nature is in no way separate from nature as a whole,

that there are no fixed and necessary boundaries between the human

and the animal, the human and the machine, the male and the

female, and so forth; it is the recognition that nature itself is an

artificial terrain open to ever new mutations, mixtures, and hybrid-

izations.13 Not only do we consciously subvert the traditional

boundaries, dressing in drag, for example, but we also move in a

creative, indeterminate zone au milieu, in between and without

regard for those boundaries. Today’s corporeal mutations constitute

an anthropological exodus and represent an extraordinarily important, but still quite ambiguous, element ofthe configuration ofrepublicanism ‘‘against’’ imperial civilization. The anthropological exodus

is important primarily because here is where the positive, construc-

tive face of the mutation begins to appear: an ontological mutation

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in action, the concrete invention ofa first new place in the non-place.

This creative evolution does not merely occupy any existing place,

but rather invents a new place; it is a desire that creates a new

body; a metamorphosis that breaks all the naturalistic homologies

ofmodernity.

This notion ofanthropological exodus is still very ambiguous,

however, because its methods, hybridization and mutation, are

themselves the very methods employed by imperial sovereignty. In

the dark world of cyberpunk fiction, for example, the freedom of

self-fashioning is often indistinguishable from the powers of an all-

encompassing control.14 We certainly do need to change our bodies

and ourselves, and in perhaps a much more radical way than the

cyberpunk authors imagine. In our contemporary world, the now

common aesthetic mutations ofthe body, such as piercings and

tattoos, punk fashion and its various imitations, are all initial indica-

tions ofthis corporeal transformation, but in the end they do not

hold a candle to the kind ofradical mutation needed here. The

will to be against really needs a body that is completely incapable

ofsubmitting to command. It needs a body that is incapable of

adapting to family life, to factory discipline, to the regulations of

a traditional sex life, and so forth. (If you find your body refusing

these ‘‘normal’’ modes of life, don’t despair—realize your gift!)15

In addition to being radically unprepared for normalization, how-

ever, the new body must also be able to create a new life. We must

go much further to define that new place of the non-place, well

beyond the simple experiences ofmixture and hybridization, and

the experiments that are conducted around them. We have to arrive

at constituting a coherent political artifice, an artificial becoming in the sense that the humanists spoke ofa homohomo produced by art and knowledge, and that Spinoza spoke ofa powerful body produced by

that highest consciousness that is infused with love. The infinite

paths ofthe barbarians must form a new mode oflife.

Such transformations will always remain weak and ambiguous,

however, so long as they are cast only in terms ofform and order.

Hybridity itselfis an empty gesture, and the mere refusal oforder

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217

simply leaves us on the edge ofnothingness—or worse, these ges-

tures risk reinforcing imperial power rather than challenging it. The

new politics is given real substance only when we shift our focus

from the question of form and order to the regimes and practices

ofproduction. On the terrain ofproduction we will be able to

recognize that this mobility and artificiality do not merely represent

the exceptional experiences ofsmall privileged groups but indicate,

rather, the common productive experience ofthe multitude. As

early as the nineteenth century, proletarians were recognized as the

nomads ofthe capitalist world.16 Even when their lives remain

fixed in one geographical location (as is most often the case), their

creativity and productivity define corporeal and ontological migra-

tions. The anthropological metamorphoses ofbodies are established

through the common experience oflabor and the new technologies

that have constitutive effects and ontological implications. Tools

have always functioned as human prostheses, integrated into our

bodies through our laboring practices as a kind ofanthropological

mutation both in individual terms and in terms ofcollective social

life. The contemporary form of exodus and the new barbarian life

demand that tools become poietic prostheses, liberating us from

the conditions ofmodern humanity. To go back to the Marxian

digression we made earlier, when the dialectic between inside and

outside comes to an end, and when the separate place ofuse value

disappears from the imperial terrain, the new forms of labor power

are charged with the task ofproducing anew the human (or really

the posthuman). This task will be accomplished primarily through

the new and increasingly immaterial forms of affective and intellec-

tual labor power, in the community that they constitute, in the

artificiality that they present as a project.

With this passage the deconstructive phase ofcritical thought,

which from Heidegger and Adorno to Derrida provided a powerful

instrument for the exit from modernity, has lost its effectiveness.17

It is now a closed parenthesis and leaves us faced with a new

task: constructing, in the non-place, a new place; constructing

ontologically new determinations ofthe human, ofliving—a pow-

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erful artificiality of being. Donna Haraway’s cyborg fable, which

resides at the ambiguous boundary between human, animal, and

machine, introduces us today, much more effectively than decon-

struction, to these new terrains ofpossibility—but we should re-

member that this is a fable and nothing more. The force that must

instead drive forward theoretical practice to actualize these terrains

ofpotential metamorphosis is still (and ever more intensely) the

common experience ofthe new productive practices and the con-

centration ofproductive labor on the plastic and fluid terrain of

the new communicative, biological, and mechanical technologies.

Being republican today, then, means first ofall struggling

within and constructing against Empire, on its hybrid, modulating

terrains. And here we should add, against all moralisms and all

positions ofresentment and nostalgia, that this new imperial terrain

provides greater possibilities for creation and liberation. The multi-

tude, in its will to be-against and its desire for liberation, must push

through Empire to come out the other side.

PART 3

P A S S A G E S O F P R O D U C T I O N

3.1

T H E L I M I T S O F I M P E R I A L I S M

The world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of it is

being divided up, conquered, and colonised. To think ofthese stars

that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can

never reach. I would annex the planets ifI could; I often think of

that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.

Cecil Rhodes

For a large portion ofthe twentieth century, the critique

ofimperialism has been among the most active and urgent arenas

ofMarxist theory.1 Many ofthese arguments are today certainly

outdated and the situation they refer to is utterly transformed. This

does not mean, however, that we have nothing to learn from them.

These critiques ofimperialism can help us understand the passage

from imperialism to Empire because in certain respects they antici-

pated that passage.

One ofthe central arguments ofthe tradition ofMarxist think-

ing on imperialism is that there is an intrinsic relation between

capitalism and expansion, and that capitalist expansion inevitably

takes the political form ofimperialism. Marx himselfwrote very

little about imperialism, but his analyses ofcapitalist expansion are

central to the entire tradition ofcritique. What Marx explained most

clearly is that capital constantly operates through a reconfiguration of

the boundaries ofthe inside and the outside. Indeed, capital does

not function within the confines of a fixed territory and population,

but always overflows its borders and internalizes new spaces: ‘‘The

tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept

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ofcapital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome.’’2

This restive character ofcapital constitutes an ever-present point of

crisis that pertains to the essence ofcapital itself: constant expansion is its always inadequate but nonetheless necessary attempt to quench

an insatiable thirst. We do not mean to suggest that this crisis and

these barriers will necessarily lead capital to collapse. On the con-

trary, as it is for modernity as a whole, crisis is for capital a normal

condition that indicates not its end but its tendency and mode of

operation. Capital’s construction ofimperialism and its move be-

yond it are both given in the complex play between limits and bar-

riers.

The Need for an Outside

Marx analyzes capital’s constant need for expansion first by focusing

on the process of realization and thus on the unequal quantitative relationship between the worker as producer and the worker as

consumer ofcommodities.3 The problem ofrealization is one of

the factors that drives capital beyond its boundaries and poses the

tendency toward the world market. In order to understand the

problem we have to start out from exploitation. ‘‘To begin with,’’

we read in the Grundrisse, ‘‘capital forces the workers beyond necessary labour to surplus labour. Only in this way does it realize

itself, and create surplus value’’ (p. 421). The wage of the worker

(corresponding to necessary labor) must be less than the total value

produced by the worker. This surplus value, however, must find

an adequate market in order to be realized. Since each worker must

produce more value than he or she consumes, the demand ofthe

worker as consumer can never be an adequate demand for the

surplus value. In a closed system, the capitalist production and

exchange process is thus defined by a series ofbarriers: ‘‘Capital,

then, posits necessary labour time as the barrier to the exchange

value ofliving labour capacity; surplus labour time as the barrier

to necessary labour time; and surplus value as the barrier to surplus

labour time’’ (p. 422). All these barriers flow from a single barrier

defined by the unequal relationship between the worker as producer

and the worker as consumer.

T H E L I M I T S O F I M P E R I A L I S M

223

Certainly, the capitalist class (along with the other classes that

share in its profits) will consume some ofthis excess value, but it

cannot consume all ofit, because ifit did there would be no surplus

value left to reinvest. Instead of consuming all the surplus value,

capitalists must practice abstinence, which is to say, they must

accumulate.4 Capital itselfdemands that capitalists renounce plea-

sures and abstain as much as possible from ‘‘wasting’’ the surplus

value on their own consumption.

This cultural explanation ofcapitalist morality and abstinence,

however, is just a symptom ofthe real economic barriers posed

within capitalist production. On the one hand, ifthere is to be profit,

then the workers must produce more value than they consume. On

the other hand, ifthere is to be accumulation, the capitalist class

and its dependents cannot consume all ofthat surplus value. Ifthe

working class together with the capitalist class and its dependents

cannot form an adequate market and buy all the commodities

produced, then even though exploitation has taken place and surplus

value has been extracted, that value cannot be realized.5

Marx points out further that this barrier is continually exacer-

bated as labor becomes ever more productive. With the increase

ofproductivity and the consequent rise in the composition ofcapital,

variable capital (that is, the wage paid the workers) constitutes an

increasingly small part ofthe total value ofthe commodities. This

means that the workers’ power ofconsumption is increasingly small

with respect to the commodities produced: ‘‘The more productivity

develops, the more it comes into conflict with the narrow basis on

which the relations ofconsumption rest.’’6 The realization ofcapital

is thus blocked by the problem ofthe ‘‘narrow basis’’ ofthe powers

ofconsumption. We should note that this barrier has nothing to

do with the absolute power ofproduction ofa population or its

absolute power ofconsumption (undoubtedly the proletariat could

and wants to consume more), but rather it refers to the relative

power of consumption ofa population within the capitalist relations ofproduction and reproduction.

In order to realize the surplus value generated in the production

process and avoid the devaluation resulting from overproduction,

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Marx argues that capital must expand its realm: ‘ A precondition

ofproduction based on capital is therefore the production ofa

constantly widening sphere ofcirculation, whether the sphere itself

is directly expanded or whether more points within it are created

as points ofproduction’’ (p. 407). Expanding the sphere ofcircula-

tion can be accomplished by intensifying existing markets within

the capitalist sphere through new needs and wants; but the quantity

ofthe wage available to workers for spending and the capitalists’ need

to accumulate pose a rigid barrier to this expansion. Alternatively,

additional consumers can be created by drafting new populations

into the capitalist relationship, but this cannot stabilize the basically

unequal relationship between supply and demand, between the

value created and the value that can be consumed by the population

ofproletarians and capitalists involved.7 On the contrary, new prole-

tarians will themselves always be an inadequate market for the value

ofwhat they produce, and thus they will always only reproduce

the problem on a larger scale.8 The only effective solution is for

capital to look outside itselfand discover noncapitalist markets in

which to exchange the commodities and realize their value. Expan-

sion ofthe sphere ofcirculation outside the capitalist realm displaces

the destabilizing inequality.

Rosa Luxemburg developed Marx’s analysis ofthe problem

ofrealization, but she changed the inflection ofthat analysis. Luxem-

burg casts the fact that ‘‘outside consumers qua other-than-capitalist

are really essential’’ (pp. 365–66) in order for capital to realize its

surplus value as an indication ofcapital’s dependence on its outside.

Capitalism is ‘‘the first mode ofeconomy which is unable to exist

by itself, which needs other economic systems as a medium and a

soil.’’9 Capital is an organism that cannot sustain itselfwithout

constantly looking beyond its boundaries, feeding off its external

environment. Its outside is essential.

Perhaps this need constantly to expand its sphere ofcontrol

is the sickness ofEuropean capital, but perhaps it is also the motor

that drove Europe to the position ofworld dominance in the

modern era. ‘‘Perhaps then the merit ofthe West, confined as it

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225

was on its narrow ‘Cape ofAsia,’ ’ Fernand Braudel supposes, ‘‘was

to have needed the world, to have needed to venture outside its

own front door.’’10 Capital from its inception tends toward being

a world power, or really the world power.

Internalizing the Outside

Capital expands not only to meet the needs ofrealization and find

new markets but also to satisfy the requirements of the subsequent

moment in the cycle ofaccumulation, that is, the process of capital-

ization. After surplus value has been realized in the form of money (through intensified markets in the capitalist domain and through

reliance on noncapitalist markets), that realized surplus value must

be reinvested in production, that is, turned back into capital. The

capitalization ofrealized surplus value requires that for the subse-

quent cycle ofproduction the capitalist will have to secure f

or

purchase additional supplies ofconstant capital (raw materials, ma-

chinery, and so forth) and additional variable capital (that is, labor

power)—and eventually in turn this will require an even greater

extension of the market for further realization.

The search for additional constant capital (in particular, more

and newer materials) drives capital toward a kind ofimperialism

characterized by pillage and theft. Capital, Rosa Luxemburg asserts,

‘‘ransacks the whole world, it procures its means ofproduction

from all corners ofthe earth, seizing them, ifnecessary by force,

from all levels of civilisation and from all forms of society . . . It

becomes necessary for capital progressively to dispose ever more

fully of the whole globe, to acquire an unlimited choice of means

ofproduction, with regard to both quality and quantity, so as to

find productive employment for the surplus value it has realised.’’11

In the acquisition ofadditional means ofproduction, capital does

relate to and rely on its noncapitalist environment, but it does not

internalize that environment—or rather, it does not necessarily

make that environment capitalist. The outside remains outside. For

example, gold and diamonds can be extracted from Peru and South

Africa or sugarcane from Jamaica and Java perfectly well while

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those societies and that production continue to function through

noncapitalist relations.

The acquisition ofadditional variable capital, the engagement

ofnew labor power and creation ofproletarians, by contrast, implies

a capitalist imperialism. Extending the working day ofexisting

workers in the capitalist domain can, ofcourse, create additional

labor power, but there is a limit to this increase. For the remainder

ofthis new labor power, capital must continually create and engage

new proletarians among noncapitalist groups and countries. The

progressive proletarianization ofthe noncapitalist environment is

the continual reopening ofthe processes ofprimitive accumula-

tion—and thus the capitalization ofthe noncapitalist environment

itself. Luxemburg sees this as the real historical novelty of capitalist

conquest: ‘‘All conquerors pursued the aim ofdominating and

exploiting the country, but none was interested in robbing the

people oftheir productive f

orces and in destroying their social

organisation.’’12 In the process ofcapitalization the outside is inter-

nalized.

Capital must therefore not only have open exchange with

noncapitalist societies or only appropriate their wealth; it must also

actually transform them into capitalist societies themselves. This is

what is central in RudolfHilferding’s definition ofthe export of

capital: ‘‘By ‘export ofcapital’ I mean the export ofvalue which

is intended to breed surplus value abroad.’’13 What is exported is a

relation, a social form that will breed or replicate itself. Like a

missionary or vampire, capital touches what is foreign and makes

it proper. ‘‘The bourgeoisie,’’ Marx and Engels write, ‘‘compels all

nations, on pain ofextinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of

production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation

into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word,

it creates the world after its own image.’’14 In economic terms, this

civilization and modernization mean capitalization, that is, incorpo-

ration within the expanding cycle ofcapitalist production and accu-

mulation. In this way the noncapitalist environment (territory, social

forms, cultures, productive processes, labor power, and so forth) is

subsumed formally under capital.

T H E L I M I T S O F I M P E R I A L I S M

227

We should note here that European capital does not really

remake noncapitalist territories ‘‘after its own image,’’ as if all were

becoming homogeneous. Indeed, when the Marxist critics ofimpe-

rialism have recognized the processes ofthe internalization ofcapi-

tal’s outside, they have generally underestimated the significance

of the uneven development and geographical difference implicit in

them.15 Each segment ofthe noncapitalist environment is trans-

formed differently, and all are integrated organically into the expanding body of capital. In other words, the different segments of the outside

are internalized not on a model of similitude but as different organs

that function together in one coherent body.

At this point we can recognize the fundamental contradiction

ofcapitalist expansion: capital’s reliance on its outside, on the non-

capitalist environment, which satisfies the need to realize surplus

value, conflicts with the internalization ofthe noncapitalist environ-

ment, which satisfies the need to capitalize that realized surplus

value. Historically these two processes have often taken place in

sequence. A territory and population are first made accessible as an

outside for exchange and realization, and then subsequently brought

into the realm ofcapitalist production proper. The important point,

however, is that once a segment ofthe environment has been

‘‘civilized,’’ once it has been organically incorporated into the newly

expanded boundaries ofthe domain ofcapitalist production, it can

no longer be the outside necessary to realize capital’s surplus value.

In this sense, capitalization poses a barrier to realization and vice

versa; or better, internalization contradicts the reliance on the out-

side. Capital’s thirst must be quenched with new blood, and it must

continually seek new frontiers.

It is logical to assume that there would come a time when

these two moments ofthe cycle ofaccumulation, realization and

capitalization, come into direct conflict and undermine each other.

In the nineteenth century, the field for capitalist expansion (in

material resources, labor power, and markets) seemed to stretch

indefinitely, both in Europe and elsewhere. In Marx’s time, capitalist

production accounted for very little of global production. Only a

few countries had substantial capitalist production (England, France,

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and Germany), and even these countries still had large segments of

noncapitalist production—peasant-based agriculture, artisanal pro-

duction, and so forth. Luxemburg argues, however, that since the

earth is finite, the logical conflict will eventually become a real

contradiction: ‘‘The more violently, ruthlessly and thoroughly im-

perialism brings about the decline ofnon-capitalist civilisations, the

more rapidly it cuts the ground from under the feet of capitalist

accumulation. Though imperialism is the historical method for

prolonging the career ofcapitalism, it is also the sure means of

bringing it to a swift conclusion.’’16 This contradictory tension is

present throughout the development ofcapital, but it is revealed

in full view only at the limit, at the point of crisis—when capital

is faced with the finitude of humanity and the earth. Here the great

imperialist Cecil Rhodes appears as the paradigmatic capitalist. The

spaces ofthe globe are closing up and capital’s imperialist expansion

is confronting its limits. Rhodes, ever the adventurer, gazes wistfully

and yearningly at the stars above, frustrated by the cruel temptation

of those new frontiers, so close and yet so far.

Even though their critiques ofimperialism and capitalist expan-

sion are often presented in strictly quantitative, economic terms,

the stakes for Marxist theorists are primarily political. This does not mean that the economic calculations (and the critiques ofthem)

should not be taken seriously; it means, rather, that the economic

relationships must be considered as they are really articulated in the

historical and social context, as part ofpolitical relations ofrule and

domination.17 The most important political stake for these authors

in the question ofeconomic expansion is to demonstrate the ineluc-

table relationship between capitalism and imperialism. Ifcapitalism

and imperialism are essentially related, the logic goes, then any

struggle against imperialism (and the wars, misery, impoverishment,

and enslavement that follow from it) must also be a direct struggle

against capitalism. Any political strategy aimed at reforming the

contemporary configuration ofcapitalism to make it nonimperialist

is vain and naive because the core ofcapitalist reproduction and

accumulation necessarily implies imperialist expansion. Capital can-

T H E L I M I T S O F I M P E R I A L I S M

229

not behave otherwise—this is its nature. The evils ofimperialism

cannot be confronted except by destroying capitalism itself.

Equalization and Subsumption

Lenin’s book on imperialism is cast primarily as a synthesis ofthe

analyses ofother authors to make them accessible to a wide public.18

Lenin’s text, however, also makes its own original contributions,

the most important ofwhich is to pose the critique ofimperialism

from the subjective standpoint and thus link it to the Marxist notion

ofthe revolutionary potential ofcrises. He gave us a toolbox, a set

ofmachines for the production ofanti-imperialist subjectivity.

Lenin often presents his arguments by way of polemic. His

analysis ofimperialism is articulated primarily by challenging the

theses ofRudolfHilferding and Karl Kautsky. In order to develop

his critiques, however, Lenin considered carefully, and at times

assumed as his own, the theoretical assumptions ofboth these au-

thors. Most important, Lenin adopted Hilferding’s fundamental

thesis that as capital expands through the imperialist construction

ofthe world market, there emerge ever greater obstacles to the

Ausgleichung (the equalization) ofrates ofprofit among various

branches and sectors ofproduction. Peaceful capitalist development,

however, depends on at least a tendency toward equalized economic

conditions: equal prices for equal commodities, equal profit for

equal capital, equal wages and equal exploitation for equal work,

and so forth. Hilferding recognized that imperialism—which struc-

tures the nations and territories ofcapitalist development in an ever

more rigid way and assigns authority to national monopolies—

impedes the formation ofan equalized rate ofprofit and thus under-

mines the possibility ofa successful capitalist mediation ofinterna-

tional development.19 In effect, the domination and division of the

world market by monopolies had made the process ofequalization

virtually impossible. Only ifthe national central banks were to

intervene, or better, ifa unified international bank were to inter-

vene, could this contradiction, which portends both trade wars and

fighting wars, be equalized and placated. In short, Lenin adopted

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Hilferding’s hypothesis that capital had entered a new phase of

international development defined by monopoly and that this led

to both an increase ofcontradictions and a crisis ofequalization.

He did not accept, however, that the utopia ofa unified international

bank could be taken seriously and that a still capitalist Aufhebung

(subsumption) ofthe crisis could ever come about.

Lenin regarded the position ofKautsky, who also took Hilferd-

ing’s work as his point ofdeparture, as even more utopian and

damaging. Kautsky proposed, in effect, that capitalism could achieve

a real political and economic unification ofthe world market. The

violent conflicts of imperialism could be followed by a new peaceful

phase ofcapitalism, an ‘‘ultra-imperialist’’ phase. The magnates of

capital could unite in a single world trust, substituting an internation-

ally united finance capital for the competition and struggle between

nationally based finance capitals. We can thus imagine a phase

in the future, he claimed, in which capital achieves a peaceful

subsumption and resolution in which not a unified bank but market

forces and monopolies more or less regulated by states could succeed

somehow in determining the global equalization ofthe rate of

profit.20 Lenin agreed with Kautsky’s basic thesis that there is a

trend in capitalist development toward the international cooperation

ofthe various national finance capitals and possibly toward the

construction ofa single world trust. What he objected to so strongly

was the fact that Kautsky used this vision of a peaceful future to

negate the dynamics ofthe present reality; Lenin thus denounced

his ‘‘profoundly reactionary desire to blunt the contradictions’’ of

the present situation.21 Rather than waiting for some peaceful ultra-

imperialism to arrive in the future, revolutionaries should act now on

the contradictions posed by capital’s present imperialist organization.

Thus, while generally adopting these authors’ analytical propo-

sitions, Lenin rejected their political positions. Although he funda-

mentally agreed with Hilferding’s analysis of the tendency toward

a world market dominated by monopolies, he denied that such a

system was already in effect in such a way that it could mediate

and equalize the rate ofprofit. He denied this not so much theoreti-

T H E L I M I T S O F I M P E R I A L I S M

231

cally as politically. Lenin maintained that capitalist development in

the monopoly phase would be plagued by a series ofcontradictions

and that communists had to act on them. It was the responsibility

ofthe workers’ movement to oppose every capitalist attempt at

organizing an effective equalization of imperialist rates of profit,

and it was the task ofthe revolutionary party to intervene in and

deepen the objective contradictions ofdevelopment. What had to

be avoided most was the realization ofthe tendency toward ‘‘ultra-

imperialism,’’ which would monstrously increase the power ofcapi-

tal and take away for a long period to come the possibility of

struggles on the most contradictory and thus weakest links in the

chain ofdomination. Lenin writes, either as hope or as prediction,

‘‘This development proceeds in such circumstances, at such a pace,

through such contradictions, conflicts and upheavals—not only

economic but political, national, etc.—that inevitably imperialism

will burst and capitalism will be transformed into its opposite long

before one world trust materialises, before the ‘ultra-imperialist,’

world-wide amalgamation ofnational finance capitals takes place.’’22

Lenin’s logical de´marche here between analytical propositions

and political positions was certainly tortuous. Nevertheless, his rea-

soning was very effective from the subjective point of view. As Ilya

Babel said, Lenin’s thought ran along ‘‘the mysterious curve ofthe

straight line’’ that carried the analysis ofthe reality ofthe working

class to the necessity ofits political organization. Lenin recognized

the untimely element ofthe definition ofimperialism and grasped

in the subjective practices ofthe working class not only the potential

obstacles to the linear solution ofthe crises ofcapitalist realization

(which Luxemburg emphasized too), but also the existing and con-

crete possibility that these practices—struggles, insurrections, and

revolutions—could destroy imperialism itself.23 In this sense Lenin

took the critique ofimperialism from theory to practice.

From Imperialism to Empire

One ofthe most remarkable aspects ofLenin’s analysis is his critique

ofimperialism as a political concept. Lenin brought together the

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problematic ofmodern sovereignty and that ofcapitalist develop-

ment under the lens ofone unified critique, and by weaving together

the different lines of critique, he was able to glimpse beyond moder-

nity. In other words, through his political re-elaboration ofthe

concept ofimperialism, Lenin, more than any other Marxist, was

able to anticipate the passage to a new phase ofcapital beyond

imperialism and identify the place (or really the non-place) of emerg-

ing imperial sovereignty.

When Lenin studied imperialism, he focused his attention not

only on the work ofthe various recent Marxist authors but also

further back to the work of John Hobson and his bourgeois populist

version ofthe critique ofimperialism.24 Lenin learned a great deal

from Hobson—which, incidentally, he could have learned equally

well from the German, French, or Italian populist theorists of impe-

rialism. In particular, he learned that the modern European nation-

states use imperialism to transfer outside their own borders the

political contradictions that arise within each single country. The

nation-state asks imperialism to resolve or really displace class strug-

gle and its destabilizing effects. Cecil Rhodes expressed the essence

ofthis function ofimperialism most clearly: ‘‘My cherished idea is

a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000

inhabitants ofthe United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we

colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus

population, to provide new markets for the goods produced by

them in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said,

is a bread and butter question. Ifyou want to avoid civil war, you

must become imperialists.’’25 Through imperialism, the modern

state exports class struggle and civil war in order to preserve order

and sovereignty at home.

Lenin saw imperialism as a structural stage in the evolution

ofthe modern state. He imagined a necessary and linear historical

progression from the first forms of the modern European state to

the nation-state and then to the imperialist state. At each stage in

this development the state had to invent new means ofconstructing

popular consensus, and thus the imperialist state had to find a way

T H E L I M I T S O F I M P E R I A L I S M

233

to incorporate the multitude and its spontaneous forms of class

struggle within its ideological state structures; it had to transform

the multitude into a people. This analysis is the initial political

articulation ofthe concept ofhegemony that would later become

central to Gramsci’s thought.26 Lenin thus interpreted imperialist

populism as simply another variant ofthe proposition ofsovereignty

as a solution for the crisis of modernity.

On the basis ofthis interpretation ofimperialism as a hege-

monic element ofsovereignty, Lenin could account for the structur-

ing effects and totalitarian consequences of imperialist politics. He

understood with great clarity the centripetal dynamic ofimperialism

that progressively undermined the distinction between the ‘‘inside’’

and the ‘‘outside’’ ofcapitalist development. The standpoint of

Luxemburg’s critique ofimperialism was rooted in the ‘‘outside,’’

that is, in the resistances that could reorganize the noncapitalist use

values ofthe multitude in both the dominant and the subordinate

countries. From Lenin’s perspective, however, that standpoint and

that strategy are not tenable. The structural transformations imposed

by imperialist politics tend to eliminate any possibility ofbeing

outside, in either the dominant or the subordinate countries. The

standpoint ofcritique had to be located not outside but within

the crisis ofmodern sovereignty. Lenin believed that with World

War I, in which the imperialist stage ofmodern sovereignty had

led directly to mortal conflict among nation-states, the point of

crisis had arrived.

Lenin recognized finally that, although imperialism and the

monopoly phase were indeed expressions ofthe global expansion

ofcapital, the imperialist practices and the colonial administrations

through which they were often pursued had come to be obstacles

to the further development of capital. He emphasized the fact,

noted by many critics ofimperialism, that competition, essential

for the functioning and expansion of capital, declines necessarily in

the imperialist phase in proportion to the growth ofmonopolies.

Imperialism, with its trade exclusives and protective tariffs, its na-

tional and colonial territories, is continually posing and reinforcing

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P A S S A G E S O F P R O D U C T I O N

fixed boundaries, blocking or channeling economic, social, and

cultural flows. As we saw earlier in cultural terms (in Section 2.3),

and as Luxemburg argues in economic terms, imperialism rests

heavily on these fixed boundaries and the distinction between inside

and outside. Imperialism actually creates a straitjacket for capital—

or, more precisely, at a certain point the boundaries created by

imperialist practices obstruct capitalist development and the full

realization ofits world market. Capital must eventually overcome

imperialism and destroy the barriers between inside and outside.

It would be an exaggeration to say that, on the basis ofthese

intuitions, Lenin’s analysis ofimperialism and its crisis leads directly

to the theory ofEmpire. It is true, nonetheless, that his revolutionary

standpoint revealed the fundamental node of capitalist develop-

ment—or better, the Gordian knot that had to be undone. Even

though Lenin’s practical and political proposal for world revolution

was defeated (and soon we will focus on the reasons for this defeat),

something like the transformation he foresaw was nonetheless neces-

sary. Lenin’s analysis ofthe crisis ofimperialism had the same power

and necessity as had Machiavelli’s analysis ofthe crisis ofthe medieval

order: the reaction had to be revolutionary. This is the alternative

implicit in Lenin’s work: either world communist revolution or Empire,

and there is a profound analogy between these two choices.

TheMissing Volumes of Capital

In order to understand the passage from imperialism to Empire, in

addition to looking at the development ofcapital itself, we must

also understand the genealogy from the perspective of class struggle.

This point ofview is in fact probably more central to the real

historical movements. Theories ofthe passages to and beyond impe-

rialism that privilege the pure critique ofthe dynamics ofcapital

risk undervaluing the power ofthe real efficient motor that drives

capitalist development from its deepest core: the movements and

struggles ofthe proletariat. This motor can be very dif

ficult to

recognize, often because it is masked by the ideology of the state

and the dominant classes, but even when it appears only faintly or

T H E L I M I T S O F I M P E R I A L I S M

235

sporadically, it is nonetheless effective. History has a logic only when

subjectivity rules it, only when (as Nietzsche says) the emergence of

subjectivity reconfigures efficient causes and final causes in the

development ofhistory. The power ofthe proletariat consists pre-

cisely in this.

We thus arrive at the delicate passage through which the

subjectivity ofclass struggle transforms imperialism into Empire. In

this third part ofour book we will trace the genealogy ofthe

economic order ofEmpire so as to reveal the global nature of

proletarian class struggle and its ability to anticipate and prefigure

the developments ofcapital toward the realization ofthe world

market. We still need to identify, however, a theoretical schema

that can sustain us in this inquiry. The old analyses ofimperialism

will not be sufficient here because in the end they stop at the

threshold ofthe analysis ofsubjectivity and concentrate rather on the

contradictions ofcapital’s own development. We need to identify a

theoretical schema that puts the subjectivity ofthe social movements

ofthe proletariat at center stage in the processes ofglobalization

and the constitution ofglobal order.

There is a paradox in Marx’s thought that may be particularly

illuminating for resolving the problems we are facing here. In his

outlines for the drafting of Capital, Marx planned three volumes

that were never written: one on the wage, a second on the state,

and a third on the world market.27 One could say that the content

ofthe volume on the wage, insofar as it was really to be a volume

on wage earners, was in part contained in Marx’s political and

historical writings, such as The Eighteenth Brumaire, The Class Strug-

gles in France, and the writings on the Paris Commune.28 The situation ofthe volumes on the state and the world market, however,

is completely different. Marx’s various notes on these questions are

scattered and entirely insufficient; not even outlines of these volumes

exist. The comments Marx did make about the concept ofthe state

are directed less toward a general theoretical discussion than toward

specific analyses ofnational politics: on English parliamentarianism,

on French Bonapartism, on Russian autocracy, and so forth. The

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P A S S A G E S O F P R O D U C T I O N

national limits ofthese situations are what made a general theory

impossible. The constitutional characteristics ofeach nation-state

were, in Marx’s view, conditioned by the difference in the rates

of profit in the different national economies along with the differ-

ences in the regimes ofexploitation—in short, by particular state

overdeterminations ofthe processes ofvalorization in the different

national sites ofdevelopment. The nation-state was a singular organiza-

tion of the limit. In these conditions a general theory ofthe state could not but be aleatory and conceived only in the most abstract

terms. Marx’s difficulties in writing the volumes of Capital on the state and the world market were thus fundamentally linked: the

volume on the state could not be written until the world market

had been realized.

Marx’s thinking, however, was oriented toward a moment

when capitalist valorization and the political processes ofcommand

would converge and overlap on the world level. The nation-state

played only an ephemeral role in his work. Processes ofcapitalist

development determine valorization and exploitation as functions

ofa global system ofproduction, and every obstacle that appears

on that terrain tends to be surpassed in the long run. ‘‘The tendency

to create the world market,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is directly given in the

concept ofcapital itself

. Every limit appears as a barrier to be

overcome.’’29 A Marxian theory ofthe state can be written only

when all such fixed barriers are overcome and when the state and

capital effectively coincide. In other words, the decline of nation-

states is in a profound sense the full realization of the relationship

between the state and capital. ‘‘Capitalism only triumphs,’’ as Fer-

nand Braudel says, ‘‘when it becomes identified with the state, when

it is the state.’’30 Today it is perhaps finally possible (ifone still feels the need) to draft Marx’s two missing volumes; or rather, following

the spirit ofhis method and gathering together Marx’s insights

about the state and the world market, one could attempt to write

a revolutionary critique ofEmpire.

The analyses ofthe state and the world market also become

possible in Empire for another reason, because at this point in

T H E L I M I T S O F I M P E R I A L I S M

237

development class struggle acts without limit on the organization of power. Having achieved the global level, capitalist development is

faced directly with the multitude, without mediation. Hence the

dialectic, or really the science ofthe limit and its organization,

evaporates. Class struggle, pushing the nation-state toward its aboli-

tion and thus going beyond the barriers posed by it, proposes the

constitution ofEmpire as the site ofanalysis and conflict. Without

that barrier, then, the situation ofstruggle is completely open.

Capital and labor are opposed in a directly antagonistic form. This is

the fundamental condition of every political theory of communism.

C YCLES

From imperialism to Empire and from the nation-state to the political

regulation of the global market: what we are witnessing, considered from the point of view of historical materialism, is a qualitative passage in modern history. When we are incapable of expressing adequately the enormous

importance of this passage, we sometimes quite poorly define what is happening as the entry into postmodernity. We recognize the poverty of this

description, but we sometimes prefer it to others because at least postmodernity indicates the epochal shift in contemporary history.1 Other authors, however, seem to undervalue the difference of our situation and lead the analysis back to the categories of a cyclical understanding of historical evolution. What we are living today, in their view, would merely be another phase in the regularly repeating cycles of the forms of economic development or forms of government.

We are familiar with numerous theories of historical cycles, from those concerning the forms of government that we inherited from Greco-Roman

antiquity to those of the cyclical development and decline of civilization in twentieth-century authors such as Oswald Spengler and JoseÓrtega y

Gasset. There are, of course, enormous differences between Plato’s cyclical evaluation of the forms of government and Polybius’ apologia for the Roman Empire, or between Spengler’s Nazi ideology and the strong historicism of Fernand Braudel. We find this entire mode of reasoning completely inadequate, however, because every theory of cycles seems to laugh at the fact that history is a product of human action by imposing an objective law that 238

P A S S A G E S O F P R O D U C T I O N

rules over the intentions and resistances, the defeats and the victories, the joys and the suffering of humans. Or worse, it makes human actions dance to the rhythm of the cyclical structures.

Giovanni Arrighi adopted the methodology of long cycles to write

a rich and fascinating analysis of ‘‘the long twentieth century.’’2 The book is focused primarily on understanding how the crisis of United States hegemony and accumulation in the 1970s (indicated, for example, by

the decoupling of the dollar from the gold standard in 1971 and by the

defeat of the U.S. military in Vietnam) is a fundamental turning point in the history of world capitalism. In order to approach the contemporary

passage, however, Arrighi believes that we need to step back and situate this crisis in the long history of cycles of capitalist accumulation. Following the methodology of Fernand Braudel, Arrighi constructs an enormous historical and analytical apparatus of four great systemic cycles of capitalist accumulation, four ‘‘long centuries,’’ that situate the United States in line after the Genoese, the Dutch, and the British.

This historical perspective leads Arrighi to demonstrate how everything returns, or specifically how capitalism always returns. The crisis of the 1970s, then, is really nothing new. What is happening to the capitalist system led by the United States today happened to the British one hundred years ago, to the Dutch before them, and earlier to the Genoese. The crisis indicated a passage, which is the turning point in every systemic cycle of accumulation, from a first phase of material expansion (investment in production) to a second phase of financial expansion (including speculation). This passage toward financial expansion, which Arrighi claims has characterized the U.S. economy since the early 1980s, always has an autumnal character; it signals the end of a cycle. It indicates specifically the end of U.S. hegemony over the world capitalist system, because the end of each long cycle always indicates a geographical shift of the epicenter of systemic processes of capital accumulation. ‘‘Shifts of this kind,’’ he writes, ‘‘have occurred in all the crises and financial expansions that have marked the transition from one systemic cycle of accumulation to another.’’3 Arrighi claims that the United States has passed the torch to Japan to lead the next long cycle of capitalist accumulation.

We are not interested in discussing whether or not Arrighi is right to

advance this hypothesis about the decline of the United States and the rise T H E L I M I T S O F I M P E R I A L I S M

239

of Japan. What concerns us more is that in the context of Arrighi’s cyclical argument it is impossible to recognize a rupture of the system, a paradigm shift, an event. Instead, everything must always return, and the history of capitalism thus becomes the eternal return of the same. In the end, such a cyclical analysis masks the motor of the process of crisis and restructuring.

Even though Arrighi himself has done extensive research on working-class conditions and movements throughout the world, in the context of this book, and under the weight of its historical apparatus, it seems that the crisis of the 1970s was simply part of the objective and inevitable cycles of capitalist accumulation, rather than the result of proletarian and anticapitalist attack both in the dominant and in the subordinated countries. The accumulation of these struggles was the motor of the crisis, and they determined the terms and nature of capitalist restructuring. More important than any historical debate about the crisis of the 1970s, however, are the possibilities of rupture today. We have to recognize where in the transnational networks of production, the circuits of the world market, and the global structures of capitalist rule there is the potential for rupture and the motor for a future that is not simply doomed to repeat the past cycles of capitalism.

3.2

D I S C I P L I N A R Y G O V E R N A B I L I T Y

It seems politically impossible for a capitalist democracy to organize

expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiment

which would prove my case—except in war conditions.

John Maynard Keynes, July 29, 1940

The old imperialism—exploitation for foreign profit—has no place

in our plans.

President Harry S. Truman, January 20, 1949

The first major wave ofMarxist theoretical analyses of

imperialism was clustered around the period ofWorld War I. This

period too was the beginning ofsome profound changes in the

world capitalist system. Coming out ofthe Soviet Revolution of

1917 and the first great interimperialist war, capitalist development,

it was clear, could not proceed as before. There was, as we said, a

clear choice: either world communist revolution or the transforma-

tion ofcapitalist imperialism toward Empire. Capital had to respond

to this challenge, but conditions throughout the world were not

very favorable. In the 1920s the disorder of capitalist development

in the imperialist countries had reached its peak. The growth and

concentration ofindustrial production, which the war had pushed

to an extreme, continued at a rapid pace in the dominant capitalist

countries, and the spread ofTaylorism allowed for increasingly high

levels ofproductivity. This rational organization oflabor, however,

did not lead to the rational organization ofmarkets, but instead only

increased their anarchy. Wage regimes in the dominant countries

became ever stronger and more rigid along the Fordist model. The

D I S C I P L I N A R Y G O V E R N A B I L I T Y

241

fixed regimes ofhigh wages functioned in part as a response to the

threat conjured up by the October Revolution, an inoculation

against the spread ofthe communist disease. Meanwhile, colonial

expansion continued unabated as the spoils ofthe German, Austrian,

and Turkish territories were divided among the victors under the

dirty sheets ofthe League ofNations.

This set off

actors underlay the great economic crisis of

1929—a crisis ofboth capitalist overinvestment and proletarian

underconsumption in the dominant capitalist countries.1 When Wall

Street’s ‘‘Black Friday’’ officially declared the crisis open, the rulers

had to face the general problems of the capitalist system and search

for a solution, if one was still possible. What they should have done

at Versailles during the peace negotiations—deal with the causes of the interimperialist war rather than simply punish the losers2—now

had to be done within each individual country. Capitalism had to be

transformed radically. The governments of the primary imperialist

countries, however, were not able to accomplish this. In Great

Britain and France, reform never really took place, and the few

attempts got bogged down in the face of the conservative reaction.

In Italy and Germany, the project to restructure capitalist relations

eventually evolved into Nazism and fascism.3 In Japan, too, capitalist

growth took the form of militarism and imperialism.4 Only in the

United States was capitalist reform put into effect and proposed as

a democratic New Deal. The New Deal constituted a real departure

from the previous forms of the bourgeois regulation of economic

development. For our analysis, the importance ofthe New Deal

should be gauged not only in terms ofits capacity to restructure

the relations ofproduction and power within a single dominant

capitalist country but also, above all, in terms of its effects throughout

the world—effects that were not direct or straightforward but none-

theless profound. With the New Deal the real process of surpassing

imperialism began to take root.

A New Deal for the World

In the United States, the New Deal was supported by a strong

political subjectivity among both popular forces and the elite. The

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continuity ofthe liberal and populist faces ofAmerican progressivism

from the beginning of the century converged in Franklin Delano

Roosevelt’s action program. One could rightly say that FDR re-

solved the contradictions ofAmerican progressivism by forging a

synthesis ofthe American imperialist vocation and reformist capital-

ism, represented by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.5

This subjectivity was the driving force that transformed U.S. capital-

ism and renewed U.S. society in the process. The state was cele-

brated not only as mediator ofconflicts but also as motor ofsocial

movement. The transformations of the state’s juridical structure set

in motion procedural mechanisms that could allow for the strong

participation and expression ofa broad plurality ofsocial forces.

The state took the central role in economic regulation, too, as

Keynesianism was applied to labor and monetary policies. U.S.

capitalism was spurred forward by these reforms, and it developed

in a regime ofhigh wages, high consumption, and also high conflic-

tuality. Out ofthis development came the trinity that would consti-

tute the modern welfare state: a synthesis of Taylorism in the organi-

zation oflabor, Fordism in the wage regime, and Keynesianism in

the macroeconomic regulation ofsociety.6 It was not a welfare state

that was the product ofeconomic and social policies that mixed

public assistance and imperialist incentives, as had been the case in

Europe, but rather one that invested social relations in their entirety,

imposing a regime ofdiscipline accompanied by greater participation

in the processes ofaccumulation. It was a capitalism that wanted

to be transparent, regulated by a state that exercised liberal planning.

We should make clear that our apologia ofRoosevelt’s welfare

state is somewhat exaggerated here in order to demonstrate our

central thesis: that the New Deal model (responding to the crisis

common to all the dominant capitalist states after the First World

War) was the first instance ofa strong subjectivity that tended in

the direction ofEmpire. The New Deal produced the highest

form of disciplinary government. When we speak ofdisciplinary

government, we are not referring simply to the juridical and political

forms that organize it. We are referring primarily to the fact that

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243

in a disciplinary society, the entire society, with all its productive

and reproductive articulations, is subsumed under the command of

capital and the state, and that the society tends, gradually but with

unstoppable continuity, to be ruled solely by criteria ofcapitalist

production. A disciplinary society is thus a factory-society. 7 Disciplinarity is at once a form of production and a form of government such

that disciplinary production and disciplinary society tend to coincide

completely. In this new factory-society, productive subjectivities

are forged as one-dimensional functions of economic development.

The figures, structures, and hierarchies ofthe division ofsocial labor

become ever more widespread and minutely defined as civil society

is increasingly absorbed into the state: the new rules ofsubordination

and the disciplinary capitalist regimes are extended across the entire

social terrain.8 It is precisely when the disciplinary regime is pushed

to its highest level and most complete application that it is revealed

as the extreme limit ofa social arrangement, a society in the process

ofbeing overcome. This is certainly due in large part to the motor

behind the process, the subjective dynamics ofresistance and revolt,

which we will return to in the next section.

The New Deal model, then, was first ofall a development

proper to U.S. politics, a response to the domestic economic crisis,

but it also became a flag that the U.S. Army raised throughout the

course ofthe Second World War. Several explanations were given

for why the United States entered the war. Roosevelt always claimed

to have been dragged in unwillingly by the dynamics ofinternational

politics. Keynes and the economists thought instead that the needs

ofthe New Deal—confronted as it was in 1937 by a new type of

crisis, challenged by the political pressure ofworkers’ demands—had

obliged the U.S. government to choose the path ofwar. Facing an

international struggle for the new repartition of the world market,

the United States could not avoid the war, in particular because

with the New Deal, the U.S. economy had entered into another

expansive phase. In either case, the U.S. entry into World War II

tied the New Deal indissolubly to the crisis ofEuropean imperialisms

and projected the New Deal on the scene ofworld government as

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an alternative, successor model. From that point on, the effects of

the New Deal reforms would be felt over the entire global terrain.

In the aftermath of the war, many viewed the New Deal

model as the only path to global recovery (under the pacific powers

ofU.S. hegemony). As one U.S. commentator wrote, ‘‘Only a

New Deal for the world, more far reaching and consistent than

our faltering New Deal, can prevent the coming of World War

III.’’9 The economic reconstruction projects launched after the

Second World War did in fact impose on all the dominant capitalist

countries, both the victorious Allies and the defeated powers, adhe-

sion to the expansive model ofdisciplinary society according to the

model constructed by the New Deal. The previous European and

Japanese forms of state-based public assistance and the development

ofthe corporativist state (in both its liberal and national-socialist

forms) were thus substantially transformed. The ‘‘social state’’ was

born, or really the global disciplinary state, which took into account

more widely and deeply the life cycles of populations, ordering

their production and reproduction within a scheme ofcollective

bargaining fixed by a stable monetary regime. With the extension

ofU.S. hegemony, the dollar became king. The initiative ofthe

dollar (through the Marshall Plan in Europe and the economic

reconstruction in Japan) was the ineluctable path to postwar recon-

struction; the establishment ofthe dollar’s hegemony (through the

Bretton Woods accords) was tied to the stability ofall the standards

ofvalue; and U.S. military power determined the ultimate exercise

ofsovereignty with respect to each ofthe dominant and subordinate

capitalist countries. All the way up to the 1960s this model was

expanded and perfected. It was the Golden Age of the New Deal

reform of capitalism on the world stage.10

Decolonization, Decentering, and Discipline

As a result ofthe project ofeconomic and social reform under

U.S. hegemony, the imperialist politics ofthe dominant capitalist

countries was transformed in the postwar period. The new global

scene was defined and organized primarily around three mechanisms

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245

or apparatuses: (1) the process ofdecolonization that gradually re-

composed the world market along hierarchical lines branching out

from the United States; (2) the gradual decentralization of produc-

tion; and (3) the construction ofa framework ofinternational rela-

tions that spread across the globe the disciplinary productive regime

and disciplinary society in its successive evolutions. Each ofthese

aspects constitutes a step in the evolution from imperialism to-

ward Empire.

Decolonization, the first mechanism, was certainly a bitter and

ferocious process. We have already dealt with it briefly in Section

2.3, and we have seen its convulsive movements from the point

ofview ofthe colonized in struggle. Here we must historicize the

process from the standpoint of the dominant powers. The colonial

territories ofdefeated Germany, Italy, and Japan, ofcourse, were

completely dissolved or absorbed by the other powers. By this time,

however, the colonial projects ofthe victors, too (Britain, France,

Belgium, and Holland), had come to a standstill.11 In addition to

facing growing liberation movements in the colonies, they also

found themselves stymied by the bipolar divide between the United

States and the Soviet Union. The decolonization movements too

were seized immediately in the jaws ofthis cold war vise, and the

movements that had been focused on their independence were

forced to negotiate between the two camps.12 What Truman said

in 1947 during the Greek crisis remained true for the decolonizing

and postcolonial forces throughout the cold war: ‘‘At the present

moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between

alternative ways oflife.’’13

The linear trajectory ofdecolonization was thus interrupted

by the necessity ofselecting a global adversary and lining up behind

one ofthe two models ofinternational order. The United States,

which was by and large favorable to decolonization, was forced by

the necessities ofthe cold war and the defeat ofthe old imperialisms

to assume the primary role as international guardian ofcapitalism

and hence ambiguous heir ofthe old colonizers. From both the

side ofthe anticolonial subjects and the side ofthe United States,

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decolonization was thus distorted and diverted. The United States

inherited a global order, but one whose forms of rule conflicted

with its own constitutional project, its imperial form of sovereignty.

The Vietnam War was the final episode ofthe United States’

ambiguous inheritance ofthe old imperialist mantle, and it ran the

risk ofblocking any possible opening ofan imperial ‘‘new frontier’’

(see Section 2.5). This phase was the final obstacle to the maturation

ofthe new imperial design, which would eventually be built on

the ashes ofthe old imperialisms. Little by little, after the Vietnam

War the new world market was organized: a world market that

destroyed the fixed boundaries and hierarchical procedures ofEuro-

pean imperialisms. In other words, the completion ofthe decoloni-

zation process signaled the point ofarrival ofa new world hierarchi-

zation ofthe relations ofdomination—and the keys were firmly

in the hands ofthe United States. The bitter and ferocious history

ofthe first period ofdecolonization opened onto a second phase

in which the army ofcommand wielded its power less through

military hardware and more through the dollar. This was an enor-

mous step forward toward the construction of Empire.

The second mechanism is defined by a process ofdecentering

the sites and flows ofproduction.14 Here, as in decolonization, two

phases divide the postwar period. A first, neocolonial phase involved

the continuity ofthe old hierarchical imperialist procedures and

the maintenance ifnot deepening ofthe mechanisms ofunequal

exchange between subordinated regions and dominant nation-states.

This first period, however, was a brieftransitional phase, and, in

effect, in the arc of twenty years the scene changed radically. By

the end ofthe 1970s, or really by the end ofthe Vietnam War,

transnational corporations began to establish their activities firmly

across the globe, in every corner ofthe planet. The transnationals

became the fundamental motor of the economic and political trans-

formation of postcolonial countries and subordinated regions. In

the first place, they served to transfer the technology that was

essential for constructing the new productive axis of the subordinate

countries; second, they mobilized the labor force and local produc-

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247

tive capacities in these countries; and finally, the transnationals

collected the flows ofwealth that began to circulate on an enlarged

base across the globe. These multiple flows began to converge

essentially toward the United States, which guaranteed and coordi-

nated, when it did not directly command, the movement and

operation ofthe transnationals. This was a decisive constituent phase

ofEmpire. Through the activities ofthe transnational corporations,

the mediation and equalization ofthe rates ofprofit were unhinged

from the power of the dominant nation-states. Furthermore, the

constitution ofcapitalist interests tied to the new postcolonial

nation-states, far from opposing the intervention of transnationals,

developed on the terrain ofthe transnationals themselves and tended

to be formed under their control. Through the decentering of

productive flows, new regional economies and a new global division

oflabor began to be determined.15 There was no global order yet,

but an order was being formed.

Along with the decolonization process and the decentering

offlows, a third mechanism involved the spread ofdisciplinary

forms of production and government across the world. This process

was highly ambiguous. In the postcolonial countries, discipline

required first ofall transforming the massive popular mobilization

for liberation into a mobilization for production. Peasants through-

out the world were uprooted from their fields and villages and

thrown into the burning forge of world production.16 The ideologi-

cal model that was projected from the dominant countries (particu-

larly from the United States) consisted of Fordist wage regimes,

Taylorist methods ofthe organization oflabor, and a welfare state

that would be modernizing, paternalistic, and protective. From the

standpoint ofcapital, the dream ofthis model was that eventually

every worker in the world, sufficiently disciplined, would be inter-

changeable in the global productive process—a global factory-

society and a global Fordism. The high wages ofa Fordist regime

and the accompanying state assistance were posed as the workers’

rewards for accepting disciplinarity, for entering the global factory.

We should be careful to point out, however, that these specific

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relations ofproduction, which were developed in the dominant

countries, were never realized in the same forms in the subordinated

regions ofthe global economy. The regime ofhigh wages that

characterizes Fordism and the broad social assistance that character-

izes the welfare state were realized only in fragmentary forms and

for limited populations in the subordinated capitalist countries. All

this, however, did not really have to be realized; its promise served

rather as the ideological carrot to ensure sufficient consensus for

the modernizing project. The real substance of the effort, the real

take-off toward modernity, which was in fact achieved, was the

spread ofthe disciplinary regime throughout the social spheres of

production and reproduction.

The leaders ofthe socialist states agreed in substance on this

disciplinary project. Lenin’s renowned enthusiasm for Taylorism

was later outdone by Mao’s modernization projects.17 The official

socialist recipe for decolonization also followed the essential logic

dictated by the capitalist transnationals and the international agen-

cies: each postcolonial government had to create a labor force

adequate to the disciplinary regime. Numerous socialist economists

(especially those who were in the position to plan the economies

ofcountries recently liberated from colonialism) claimed that indus-

trialization was the ineluctable path to development18 and enumer-

ated the benefits ofthe extension of‘‘peripheral Fordist’’ econo-

mies.19 The benefits were really an illusion, and the illusion did not

last long, but that could not significantly alter the course ofthese

postcolonial countries along the path ofmodernization and discipli-

narization. This seemed to be the only path open to them.20 Disci-

plinarity was everywhere the rule.

These three mechanisms—decolonization, decentering of

production, and disciplinarity—characterize the imperial power of

the New Deal, and demonstrate how far it moved beyond the old

practices ofimperialism. Certainly the original formulators ofthe

New Deal policies in the United States in the 1930s never imagined

such a wide application oftheir ideas, but already in the 1940s, in

the midst ofwar, world leaders began to recognize its role and

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249

power in the establishment ofglobal economic and political order.

By the time ofHarry Truman’s inauguration, he understood that

finally the old European-style imperialism could have no part in

their plans. No, the new era had something new in store.

Into and Out of Modernity

The cold war was the dominant figure on the global scene during

the period ofdecolonization and decentralization, but from today’s

vantage point we have the impression that its role was really second-

ary. Although the specular oppositions ofthe cold war strangled

both the U.S. imperial project and the Stalinist project ofsocialist

modernization, these were really minor elements ofthe entire pro-

cess. The truly important element, whose significance goes well

beyond the history ofthe cold war, was the gigantic postcolonial

transformation ofthe Third World under the guise ofmodernization

and development. In the final analysis, that project was relatively

independent ofthe dynamics and constraints ofthe cold war, and

one could almost claim, post factum, that in the Third World the

competition between the two world power blocs merely accelerated

the processes ofliberation.

It is certainly true that the Third World elites who led the

anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles during this period were

ideologically tied to one or the other side ofthe cold war divide,

and in both cases they defined the mass project ofliberation in

terms ofmodernization and development. For us, however, poised

as we are at the far border of modernity, it is not difficult to

recognize the tragic lack ofperspective involved in the translation

ofliberation into modernization. The myth ofmodernity—and

thus ofsovereignty, the nation, the disciplinary model, and so

forth—was virtually the exclusive ideology of the elites, but this is

not the most important factor here.

The revolutionary processes ofliberation determined by the

multitude actually pushed beyond the ideology ofmodernization,

and in the process revealed an enormous new production ofsubjec-

tivity. This subjectivity could not be contained in the bipolar U.S.-

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USSR relationship, nor in the two competing regimes, which both

merely reproduced modernity’s modalities ofdomination. When

Nehru, Sukarno, and Chou En-lai came together at the Bandung

Conference in 1955 or when the nonalignment movement first

formed in the 1960s, what was expressed was not so much the

enormity oftheir nations’ misery nor the hope ofrepeating the

glories ofmodernity but rather the enormous potential for liberation

that the subaltern populations themselves produced.21 This non-

aligned perspective gave a first glimpse ofa new and generalized

desire.

The question what to do after liberation so as not to fall under

the domination ofone camp or the other remained unanswered.

What were clear and full of potential, by contrast, were the subjectiv-

ities that pushed beyond modernity. The utopian image ofthe

Soviet and Chinese revolutions as alternatives for development

vanished when those revolutions could no longer go forward, or

rather when they failed to find a way to go beyond modernity.

The U.S. model ofdevelopment appeared equally closed, since

throughout the postwar period the United States presented itself

more as the police force of the old imperialisms than the agent of

a new hope. The struggle ofsubaltern populations for their liberation

remained an explosive and uncontainable mixture. By the end of

the 1960s the liberation struggles, whose influence had come to be

felt in every interstice of world space, assumed a force, a mobility,

and a plasticity ofform that drove the project ofcapitalist moderniza-

tion (in both its liberal and its socialist guises) out into an open sea,

where it lost its bearings. Behind the fac¸ade ofthe bipolar U.S.-

Soviet divide they could discern a single disciplinary model, and

against this model the enormous movements struggled, in forms

that were more or less ambiguous, more or less mystified, but

nonetheless real. This enormous new subjectivity alluded to and

made necessary a paradigm shift.

The inadequacy ofthe theory and practice ofmodern sover-

eignty became evident at this point. By the 1960s and 1970s, even

though the model ofdisciplinary modernization had been imposed

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251

across the world, even though the welfarist policies set in motion by

the dominant countries had become unstoppable and were naively

championed by leaders in the subordinated countries, and even

in this new world ofcommunicative media and networks, the

mechanisms ofmodern sovereignty were no longer sufficient to

rule the new subjectivities. We should point out here that as the

paradigm of modern sovereignty lost its effectiveness, so too the

classical theories ofimperialism and anti-imperialism lost whatever

explanatory powers they had. In general, when these theories con-

ceived the surpassing ofimperialism, they saw it as a process that

would be in perfect continuity with the paradigm of modernization

and modern sovereignty. What happened, however, was exactly

the opposite. Massified subjectivities, populations, oppressed classes,

in the very moment when they entered the processes ofmoderniza-

tion, began to transform them and go beyond them. The struggles

for liberation, in the very moment when they were situated and

subordinated in the world market, recognized insufficient and tragic

keystone ofmodern sovereignty. Exploitation and domination

could no longer be imposed in their modern forms. As these enor-

mous new subjective forces emerged from colonization and reached

modernity, they recognized that the primary task is not getting into

but getting out of modernity.

Toward a New Global Paradigm

A paradigm shift in the world economic and political order was

taking place. One important element ofthis passage was the fact

that the world market as a structure ofhierarchy and command

became more important and decisive in all the zones and regions

in which the old imperialisms had previously operated. The world

market began to appear as the centerpiece ofan apparatus that could

regulate global networks ofcirculation. This unification was still

posed only at a formal level. The processes that arose on the conflic-

tual terrain ofliberation struggles and expanding capitalist circulation

were not necessarily or immediately compatible with the new struc-

tures ofthe world market. Integration proceeded unevenly and at

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different speeds. In different regions and often within the same

region, diverse forms of labor and production coexisted, as did also

different regimes of social reproduction. What might have seemed

like a coherent central axis ofthe restructuring ofglobal production

was shattered into a thousand particular fragments and the unifying

process was experienced everywhere singularly. Far from being

unidimensional, the process ofrestructuring and unifying command

over production was actually an explosion of innumerable different

productive systems. The processes ofthe unification ofthe world

market operated paradoxically through diversity and diversification,

but its tendency was nonetheless real.

Several important effects follow from the tendency toward

the unification ofthe world market. On the one hand, the wide

spread ofthe disciplinary model ofthe organization oflabor and

society outward from the dominant regions produced in the rest

of the world a strange effect of proximity, simultaneously pulling

it closer and isolating it away in a ghetto. That is, liberation struggles

found themselves ‘‘victorious’’ but nonetheless consigned to the

ghetto ofthe world market—a vast ghetto with indeterminate

borders, a shantytown, a favela. On the other hand, huge populations

underwent what might be called wage emancipation as a result of

these processes. Wage emancipation meant the entrance ofgreat

masses ofworkers into the disciplinary regime ofmodern capitalist

production, whether it be in the factory, the fields, or some other

site ofsocial production, and hence these populations were liberated

from the semi-servitude that imperialism had perpetuated. Entry

into the wage system can be bloody (and it has been); it can repro-

duce systems offerocious repression (and it has done so); but even

in the shacks ofthe new shantytowns and favelas, the wage relation

does determine the constitution ofnew needs, desires, and demands.

For example, the peasants who become wage workers and who are

subjected to the discipline ofthe new organization oflabor in many

cases suffer worse living conditions, and one cannot say that they

are more free than the traditional territorialized laborer, but they

do become infused with a new desire for liberation. When the new

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253

disciplinary regime constructs the tendency toward a global market

oflabor power, it constructs also the possibility ofits antithesis. It

constructs the desire to escape the disciplinary regime and tenden-

tially an undisciplined multitude ofworkers who want to be free.

The increasing mobility oflarge portions ofthe global proletar-

iat is another important consequence ofthe tendential unification

ofthe world market. In contrast to the old imperialist regimes

in which the currents oflabor mobility were primarily regulated

vertically between colony and metropole, the world market opens

up wider horizontal paths. The constitution ofa global market

organized along a disciplinary model is traversed by tensions that

open mobility in every direction; it is a transversal mobility that is

rhizomatic rather than arborescent. Our interest here is not only

in giving a phenomenological description ofthe existing situation,

but also in recognizing the possibilities inherent in that situation.

The new transversal mobility ofdisciplined labor power is significant

because it indicates a real and powerful search for freedom and the

formation of new, nomadic desires that cannot be contained and

controlled within the disciplinary regime.22 It is true that many

workers across the world are subject to forced migrations in dire

circumstances that are hardly liberatory in themselves. It is true,

too, that this mobility rarely increases the cost oflabor power; in

fact, it most often decreases it, increasing instead the competition

among workers. The mobility does carry for capital a high price,

however, which is the increased desire for liberation.

Some significant macroeconomic effects follow from the new

mobility introduced by capital’s global disciplinary paradigm. The

mobility ofpopulations makes it increasingly difficult to manage

national markets (particularly national labor markets) individually.

The adequate domain for the application of capitalist command

is no longer delimited by national borders or by the traditional

international boundaries. Workers who flee the Third World to

go to the First for work or wealth contribute to undermining the

boundaries between the two worlds. The Third World does not

really disappear in the process ofunification ofthe world market

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but enters into the First, establishes itselfat the heart as ghetto,

shantytown, favela, always again produced and reproduced. In turn,

the First World is transferred to the Third in the form of stock

exchanges and banks, transnational corporations and icy skyscrapers

ofmoney and command. Economic geography and political geogra-

phy both are destabilized in such a way that the boundaries among

the various zones are themselves fluid and mobile. As a result, the

entire world market tends to be the only coherent domain for the

effective application of capitalist management and command.

At this point the capitalist regimes have to undergo a process

ofreform and restructuring in order to ensure their capacity to

organize the world market. This tendency emerges clearly only in

the 1980s (and is established definitively after the collapse of the

Soviet model ofmodernization), but already at the moment ofits

first appearance its principal features are clearly defined. It has to

be a new mechanism ofthe general control ofthe global process

and thus a mechanism that can coordinate politically the new dy-

namics ofthe global domain ofcapital and the subjective dimensions

ofthe actors; it has to be able to articulate the imperial dimension

ofcommand and the transversal mobility ofthe subjects. We will

see in the next section how this process was realized historically,

and thus we will begin to address directly the processes ofthe

constitution ofa global apparatus ofgovernment.

Real Subsumption and the World Market

Before we move on, the expository development of our study

demands that we look more closely at the relationship between

this tendency toward the realization ofthe world market and the

paradigm ofdisciplinary production and government. How does

the spread ofdisciplinary regimes throughout the world represent

a fundamental genealogical moment of Empire? We can give one

explanation why this is the case by linking Marx’s description of

the phases ofthe capitalist subsumption ofsociety together with

his analyses ofthe tendency toward the world market. The two

movements actually coincide at a certain point, or really the capitalist

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255

subsumption ofsociety tends to be completed in the construction

ofthe world market.

Earlier we saw that the practices ofimperialism involve capital’s

internalization ofits outside and are thus processes ofthe formal

subsumption oflabor under capital. Marx uses the term ‘ f

ormal

subsumption’’ to name processes whereby capital incorporates under

its own relations ofproduction laboring practices that originated

outside its domain.23 The processes offormal subsumption are thus

intrinsically related to the extension ofthe domain ofcapitalist

production and capitalist markets. At a certain point, as capitalist

expansion reaches its limit, the processes offormal subsumption

can no longer play the central role. The processes ofthe real subsump-

tion oflabor under capital do not rely on the outside and do not

involve the same processes ofexpansion. Through the real subsump-

tion, the integration oflabor into capital becomes more intensive

than extensive and society is ever more completely fashioned by

capital. There are certainly processes ofreal subsumption without

a world market, but there cannot be a fully realized world market

without the processes ofreal subsumption. In other words, the

realization ofthe world market and the general equalization or at

least management ofrates ofprofit on a world scale cannot be the

result simply offinancial or monetary factors but must come about

through a transformation of social and productive relations. Disci-

pline is the central mechanism ofthis transformation. When a new

social reality is formed, integrating both the development of capital

and the proletarianization ofthe population into a single process, the

political form ofcommand must itselfbe modified and articulated in

a manner and on a scale adequate to this process, a global quasi-

state ofthe disciplinary regime.

Marx’s intuitions ofthe processes ofreal subsumption do not

furnish us with the key we need. The passage from the formal

subsumption to the real must be explained through the practices

ofactive subjective forces. In other words, disciplinarity pushed to

its extreme, imposed by the global Taylorization oflabor processes,

cannot actually determine the need for a new form of command

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except through the expression ofactive social subjectivities. The

globalization of markets, far from being simply the horrible fruit

ofcapitalist entrepreneurship, was actually the result ofthe desires

and demands ofTaylorist, Fordist, and disciplined labor power across

the world. In this sense, the processes ofthe formal subsumption

anticipated and carried through to maturity the real subsumption,

not because the latter was the product ofthe former (as Marx himself

seemed to believe), but because in the former were constructed

conditions ofliberation and struggle that only the latter could con-

trol. The movements ofdesiring subjectivities forced the develop-

ment to go forward—and proclaimed that there was no turning

back. In response to these movements in both the dominant and

the subordinated countries, a new form of control had to be posed

in order to establish command over what was no longer controllable

in disciplinary terms.

P RIMITIVE A CCUMULATIONS

Just when the proletariat seems to be disappearing from the world stage, the proletariat is becoming the universal figure of labor. This claim is not actually as paradoxical as it may seem. What has disappeared is the

hegemonic position of the industrial working class, which has not disappeared or even declined in numbers—it has merely lost its hegemonic position and shifted geographically. We understand the concept ‘‘proletariat,’’ however, to refer not just to the industrial working class but to all those who are subordinated to, exploited by, and produce under the rule of capital. From this perspective, then, as capital ever more globalizes its relations of production, all forms of labor tend to be proletarianized. In each society and across the entire world the proletariat is the ever more general figure of social labor.

Marx described the processes of proletarianization in terms of primitive accumulation, the prior or previous accumulation necessary before capitalist production and reproduction can begin to take place. What is necessary is not merely an accumulation of wealth or property, but a social accumulation, the creation of capitalists and proletarians. The essential historical process, then, involves first of all divorcing the producer from the means of production.

For Marx it was sufficient to describe the English example of this social D I S C I P L I N A R Y G O V E R N A B I L I T Y

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transformation, since England represented the ‘‘highest point’’ of capitalist development at the time. In England, Marx explains, proletarianization

was accomplished first by the enclosures of the common lands and the clearing of peasants from the estates, and then by the brutal punishment of vagabond-age and vagrancy. The English peasant was thus ‘‘freed’’ from all previous means of subsistence, herded toward the new manufacturing towns, and

made ready for the wage relation and the discipline of capitalist production.

The central motor for the creation of capitalists, by contrast, came from outside England, from commerce—or really from conquest, the slave trade, and the colonial system. ‘‘The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder,’’ Marx writes, ‘‘flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there.’’1 The enormous

influx of wealth overflowed the capacities of the old feudal relations of production. English capitalists sprang up to embody the new regime of

command that could exploit this new wealth.

It would be a mistake, however, to take the English experience of

becoming-proletarian and becoming-capitalist as representative of all the others. Over the last three hundred years, as capitalist relations of production and reproduction have spread across the world, although primitive accumulation has always involved separating the producer from the means of production and thereby creating classes of proletarians and capitalists, each process of social transformation has nonetheless been unique. In each case the social and productive relations that preexisted were different, the processes of the transition were different, and even the form of the resulting capitalist relations of production and especially those of reproduction were different in line with specific cultural and historical differences.

Despite these important differences, it is still useful to group the

modern processes of primitive accumulation under two general models that highlight the relationship between wealth and command, and between inside and outside. In all cases, the primitive accumulation of capital requires a new combination of wealth and command. What is distinctive about the

first model, which Marx described for England and which applies generally to Europe as a whole, is that the new wealth for the primitive accumulation of capital comes from the outside (from the colonial territories) and the command arises internally (through the evolution of English and European 258

P A S S A G E S O F P R O D U C T I O N

relations of production). According to the second model, which characterizes most of the modern processes of primitive accumulation outside Europe, the terms are reversed, such that the new wealth arises from within and command comes from the outside (usually European capital). This inversion of wealth/

command and inside/outside in the two models leads to a whole series of differences in the economic, political, and social formations of capital across the world. Many of these differences deriving from the two models were

described adequately by theorists of underdevelopment in terms of central and peripheral capitalist formations.2

As we pass from modernity to postmodernity, the processes of primitive

accumulation do indeed continue. Primitive accumulation is not a process that happens once and then is done with; rather, capitalist relations of production and social classes have to be reproduced continually. What has changed is the model or mode of primitive accumulation. First of all, the play between inside and outside that distinguishes the two modern models has progressively declined. More important, the nature of the labor and wealth accumulated is changing. In postmodernity the social wealth accumulated is increasingly immaterial; it involves social relations, communication systems, information, and affective networks. Correspondingly, social labor is increasingly more immaterial; it simultaneously produces and reproduces directly all aspects of social life. As the proletariat is becoming the universal figure of labor, the object of proletarian labor is becoming equally universal.

Social labor produces life itself.

We should emphasize the central role that informational accumulation

plays in the processes of postmodern primitive accumulation and the ever greater socialization of production. As the new informational economy

emerges, a certain accumulation of information is necessary before capitalist production can take place. Information carries through its networks both the wealth and the command of production, disrupting previous conceptions of inside and outside, but also reducing the temporal progression that had previously defined primitive accumulation. In other words, informational accumulation (like the primitive accumulation Marx analyzed) destroys or at least destructures the previously existing productive processes, but (differently than Marx’s primitive accumulation) it immediately integrates those productive processes in its own networks and generates across the different D I S C I P L I N A R Y G O V E R N A B I L I T Y

259

realms of production the highest levels of productivity. The temporal sequence of development is thus reduced to immediacy as the entire society tends to be integrated in some way into the networks of informational production.

Information networks tend toward something like a simultaneity ofsocial production. The revolution of informational accumulation therefore requires an enormous leap forward in the greater socialization of production. This increased socialization, along with the reduction of social space and temporality, is a process that no doubt benefits capital with increased productivity, but is one also that points beyond the era of capital toward a new social mode of production.

3.3

R E S I S T A N C E , C R I S I S , T R A N S F O R M A T I O N

The continuity ofstruggle is easy: the workers need only them-

selves and the boss in front of them. But the continuity of organiza-

tion is a rare and complex thing: as soon as it is institutionalized it

quickly becomes used by capitalism, or by the workers’ movement

in the service ofcapitalism.

Mario Tronti

The New Left sprang . . . from Elvis’s gyrating pelvis.

Jerry Rubin

Earlier we posed the Vietnam War as a deviation from

the U.S. constitutional project and its tendency toward Empire.

The war was also, however, an expression of the desire for freedom

ofthe Vietnamese, an expression ofpeasant and proletarian subjec-

tivity—a fundamental example of resistance against both the final

forms of imperialism and the international disciplinary regime. The

Vietnam War represents a real turning point in the history ofcon-

temporary capitalism insofar as the Vietnamese resistance is con-

ceived as the symbolic center ofa whole series ofstruggles around

the world that had up until that point remained separate and distant

from one another. The peasantry who were being subsumed under

multinational capital, the (post)colonial proletariat, the industrial

working class in the dominant capitalist countries, and the new

strata ofintellectual proletariat everywhere all tended toward a

common site ofexploitation in the factory-society ofthe globalized

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disciplinary regime. The various struggles converged against one

common enemy: the international disciplinary order. An objective unity was established, sometimes with the consciousness ofthose in struggle and sometimes without. The long cycle ofstruggles against the

disciplinary regimes had reached maturity and forced capital to

modify its own structures and undergo a paradigm shift.

Two, Three, Many Vietnams

In the late 1960s the international system ofcapitalist production

was in crisis.1 Capitalist crisis, as Marx tells us, is a situation that

requires capital to undergo a general devaluation and a profound

rearrangement ofthe relations ofproduction as a result ofthe

downward pressure that the proletariat puts on the rate ofprofit.

In other words, capitalist crisis is not simply a function of capital’s

own dynamics but is caused directly by proletarian conflict.2 This

Marxian notion ofcrisis helps bring to light the most important

features ofthe crisis ofthe late 1960s. The fall ofthe rate ofprofit

and the disruption ofrelations ofcommand in this period are best

understood when seen as a result ofthe confluence and accumulation ofproletarian and anticapitalist attacks against the international capitalist system.

In the dominant capitalist countries, this period witnessed a

worker attack ofthe highest intensity directed primarily against the

disciplinary regimes ofcapitalist labor. The attack was expressed,

first ofall, as a general refusal ofwork and specifically as a refusal

offactory work. It was aimed against productivity and against any

model ofdevelopment based on increasing the productivity of

factory labor. The refusal of the disciplinary regime and the affirma-

tion ofthe sphere ofnon-work became the defining features ofa

new set ofcollective practices and a new form oflife.3 Second, the

attack served to subvert the capitalist divisions ofthe labor market.

The three primary characteristics ofthe labor market—the separa-

tion ofsocial groups (by class strata, race, ethnicity, or sex), the

fluidity ofthe labor market (social mobility, tertiarization, new

relations between directly and indirectly productive labor, and so

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forth), and the hierarchies ofthe market ofabstract labor—were

all threatened by the rising rigidity and commonality ofworker

demands. The increasing socialization ofcapital led also toward the

social unification ofthe proletariat. This increasingly unified voice

posed the general demand for a guaranteed social wage and a very

high level ofwelfare.4 Third, and finally, the worker attack was

waged directly against capitalist command. The refusal of work and

the social unification ofthe proletariat came together in a frontal

attack against the coercive organization ofsocial labor and the

disciplinary structures ofcommand. This worker attack was com-

pletely political—even when many mass practices, particularly of

youth, seemed decidedly apolitical—insofar as it exposed and struck

the political nerve centers ofthe economic organization ofcapital.

The peasant and proletarian struggles in the subordinate coun-

tries also imposed reform on local and international political regimes.

Decades ofrevolutionary struggle—from the Chinese Revolution

to Vietnam and from the Cuban Revolution to the numerous

liberation struggles throughout Latin America, Africa, and the Arab

world—had pushed forward a proletarian wage demand that various

socialist and/or nationalist reformist regimes had to satisfy and that

directly destabilized the international economic system. The ideol-

ogy ofmodernization, even when it did not bring ‘‘development,’’

created new desires that exceeded the established relations ofpro-

duction and reproduction. The sudden increase in the costs ofraw

materials, energy, and certain agricultural commodities in the 1960s

and 1970s was a symptom ofthese new desires and the rising pressure

of the international proletariat on the wage. The effects of these

struggles not only were a quantitative matter but also determined

a qualitatively new element that profoundly marked the intensity

ofthe crisis. For more than one hundred years the practices of

imperialism had worked to subsume all forms of production

throughout the world under the command ofcapital, and that

tendency was only intensified in this period oftransition. The

tendency created necessarily a potential or virtual unity ofthe

international proletariat. This virtual unity was never fully actualized R E S I S T A N C E , C R I S I S , T R A N S F O R M A T I O N

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as a global political unity, but it nonetheless had substantial effects.

In other words, the few instances of the actual and conscious interna-

tional organization oflabor are not what seem most important here,

but rather the objective coincidence ofstruggles that overlap precisely because, despite their radical diversity, they were all directed against

the international disciplinary regime ofcapital. The growing coinci-

dence determined what we call an accumulation ofstruggles.

This accumulation ofstruggles undermined the capitalist strat-

egy that had long relied on the hierarchies ofthe international

divisions oflabor to block any global unity among workers. Already

in the nineteenth century, before European imperialism had fully

bloomed, Engels was bemoaning the fact that the English proletariat

was put in the position ofa ‘‘labor aristocracy’’ because its interests

lay with the project ofBritish imperialism rather than with the

ranks ofcolonial labor power. In the period ofthe decline of

imperialisms, strong international divisions oflabor certainly re-

mained, but the imperialist advantages ofany national working class

had begun to wither away. The common struggles ofthe proletariat

in the subordinate countries took away the possibility ofthe old

imperialist strategy of transferring the crisis from the metropolitan

terrain to its subordinate territories. It was no longer feasible to rely

on Cecil Rhodes’s old strategy ofplacating the domestic dangers

ofclass struggle in Europe by shifting the economic pressures to

the still peaceful order of the dominated imperialist terrain main-

tained with brutally effective techniques. The proletariat formed

on the imperialist terrain was now itselforganized, armed, and

dangerous. There was thus a tendency toward the unity ofthe

international or multinational proletariat in one common attack

against the capitalist disciplinary regime.5 The resistance and initia-

tive ofthe proletariat in the subordinate countries resonated as a

symbol and model both above and within the proletariat ofthe

dominant capitalist countries. By virtue ofthis convergence, the

worker struggles throughout the domain ofinternational capital

already decreed the end ofthe division between First and Third

Worlds and the potential political integration ofthe entire global

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proletariat. The convergence ofstruggles posed on an international

scale the problem oftransforming laboring cooperation into revolu-

tionary organization and actualizing the virtual political unity.

With this objective convergence and accumulation ofstrug-

gles, Third Worldist perspectives, which may earlier have had a

limited utility, were now completely useless. We understand Third

Worldism to be defined by the notion that the primary contradiction

and antagonism ofthe international capitalist system is between the

capital ofthe First World and the labor ofthe Third.6 The potential

for revolution thus resides squarely and exclusively in the Third

World. This view has been evoked implicitly and explicitly in a

variety ofdependency theories, theories ofunderdevelopment, and

world system perspectives.7 The limited merit ofthe Third Worldist

perspective was that it directly countered the ‘‘First Worldist’’ or

Eurocentric view that innovation and change have always origi-

nated, and can only originate, in Euro-America. Its specular opposi-

tion ofthis false claim, however, leads only to a position that is

equally false. We find this Third Worldist perspective inadequate

because it ignores the innovations and antagonisms oflabor in the

First and Second Worlds. Furthermore, and most important for our

argument here, the Third Worldist perspective is blind to the real

convergence ofstruggles across the world, in the dominant and

subordinate countries alike.

Capitalist Responseto theCrisis

As the global confluence ofstruggles undermined the capitalist and

imperialist capacities ofdiscipline, the economic order that had

dominated the globe for almost thirty years, the Golden Age of

U.S. hegemony and capitalist growth, began to unravel. The form

and substance ofthe capitalist management ofinternational develop-

ment for the postwar period were dictated at the conference at

Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944.8 The Bretton Woods

system was based on three fundamental elements. Its first characteris-

tic was the comprehensive economic hegemony ofthe United

States over all the nonsocialist countries. This hegemony was secured

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265

through the strategic choice ofa liberal development based on

relatively free trade and moreover by maintaining gold (of which

the United States possessed about one third ofthe world total) as

the guarantee ofthe power ofthe dollar. The dollar was ‘‘as good

as gold.’’ Second, the system demanded the agreement for monetary

stabilization between the United States and the other dominant

capitalist countries (first Europe then Japan) over the traditional

territories ofEuropean imperialisms, which had been dominated

previously by the British pound and the French franc. Reform in

the dominant capitalist countries could thus be financed by a surplus

ofexports to the United States and guaranteed by the monetary

system ofthe dollar. Finally, Bretton Woods dictated the establish-

ment ofa quasi-imperialist relationship ofthe United States over

all the subordinate nonsocialist countries. Economic development

within the United States and stabilization and reform in Europe

and Japan were all guaranteed by the United States insofar as it

accumulated imperialist superprofits through its relationship to the

subordinate countries.

The system ofU.S. monetary hegemony was a fundamentally

new arrangement because, whereas the control ofprevious interna-

tional monetary systems (notably the British) had been firmly in

the hands ofprivate bankers and financiers, Bretton Woods gave

control to a series ofgovernmental and regulatory organizations,

including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and

ultimately the U.S. Federal Reserve.9 Bretton Woods might thus

be understood as the monetary and financial face of the hegemony

ofthe New Deal model over the global capitalist economy.

The Keynesian and pseudo-imperialist mechanisms ofBretton

Woods eventually went into crisis when the continuity ofthe

workers’ struggles in the United States, Europe, and Japan raised

the costs ofstabilization and reformism, and when anti-imperialist

and anticapitalist struggles in subordinate countries began to under-

mine the extraction ofsuperprofits.10 When the imperialist motor

could no longer move forward and the workers’ struggles become

ever more demanding, the U.S. trade balance began to lean heavily

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in the direction ofEurope and Japan. A first phase ofcrisis—creeping

rather than rampant—extended from the early to the late 1960s.

Since the controls provided by Bretton Woods made the dollar

de facto inconvertible, the monetary mediation of international

production and trade developed through a phase characterized by

the relatively free circulation ofcapital, the construction ofa strong

Eurodollar market, and the fixing ofpolitical parity more or less

everywhere in the dominant countries.11 The explosion of1968 in

Europe, the United States, and Japan, coupled with the Vietnamese

military victory over the United States, however, completely dis-

solved this provisory stabilization. Stagflation gave way to rampant

inflation. The second phase ofthe crisis might be thought ofas

beginning on August 17, 1971, when President Nixon decoupled

the dollar from the gold standard, making the dollar inconvertible

de jure and adding a 10 percent surcharge to all imports from

Europe to the United States.12 The entire U.S. debt was effectively

pushed onto Europe. This operation was accomplished only by

virtue ofthe economic and political power ofthe United States,

which thus reminded the Europeans ofthe initial terms ofthe

agreement, ofits hegemony as the highest point ofexploitation

and capitalist command.

In the 1970s the crisis became official and structural. The

system ofpolitical and economic equilibria invented at Bretton

Woods had been completely thrown into disarray, and what re-

mained was only the brute fact of U.S. hegemony. The declining

effectiveness of the Bretton Woods mechanisms and the decomposi-

tion ofthe monetary system ofFordism in the dominant countries

made it clear that the reconstruction ofan international system of

capital would have to involve a comprehensive restructuring of

economic relations and a paradigm shift in the definition of world

command. Such a crisis, however, is not always an entirely negative

or unwelcome event from the perspective of capital. Marx claims

that capital does indeed have a fundamental interest in economic

crisis for its transformative power. With respect to the overall system,

individual capitalists are conservative. They are focused primarily

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on maximizing their individual profits in the short term even when

this leads down a ruinous path for collective capital in the long term.

Economic crisis can overcome these resistances, destroy unprofitable

sectors, restructure the organization ofproduction, and renew its

technologies. In other words, economic crisis can push forward a

transformation that reestablishes a high general rate of profit, thus

responding effectively on the very terrain defined by the worker

attack. Capital’s general devaluation and its efforts to destroy worker

organization serve to transform the substance of the crisis—the

disequilibria ofcirculation and overproduction—into a reorganized

apparatus ofcommand that rearticulates the relationship between

development and exploitation.

Given the intensity and coherence ofthe struggles ofthe 1960s

and 1970s, two paths were open to capital for accomplishing the

tasks ofplacating the struggles and restructuring command, and it

tried each ofthem in turn. The first path, which had only a limited

effectiveness, was the repressive option—a fundamentally conservative operation. Capital’s repressive strategy was aimed at completely

reversing the social process, separating and disaggregating the labor

market, and reestablishing control over the entire cycle ofproduc-

tion. Capital thus privileged the organizations that represented a

guaranteed wage for a limited portion of the work force, fixing that

segment ofthe population within their structures and reinforcing the

separation between those workers and more marginalized popula-

tions. The reconstruction ofa system ofhierarchical compartmental-

ization, both within each nation and internationally, was accom-

plished by controlling social mobility and fluidity. The repressive

use oftechnology, including the automation and computerization

of production, was a central weapon wielded in this effort. The

previous fundamental technological transformation in the history

ofcapitalist production (that is, the introduction ofthe assembly

line and the mass manufacturing regime) involved crucial modifica-

tions ofthe immediate productive processes (Taylorism) and an

enormous step forward in the regulation of the social cycle of

reproduction (Fordism). The technological transformations of the

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1970s, however, with their thrust toward automatic rationalization,

pushed these regimes to the extreme limit of their effectiveness, to

the breaking point. Taylorist and Fordist mechanisms could no

longer control the dynamic ofproductive and social forces.13 Re-

pression exercised through the old framework of control could

perhaps keep a lid on the destructive powers ofthe crisis and the

fury of the worker attack, but it was ultimately also a self-destructive

response that would suffocate capitalist production itself.

At the same time, then, a second path had to come into play,

one that would involve a technological transformation aimed no

longer only at repression but rather at changing the very composition

of the proletariat, and thus integrating, dominating, and profiting from its new practices and forms. In order to understand the emergence of

this second path ofcapitalist response to the crisis, however, the

path that constitutes a paradigm shift, we have to look beyond the

immediate logic ofcapitalist strategy and planning. The history of

capitalist forms is always necessarily a reactive history: left to its own devices capital would never abandon a regime ofprofit. In other

words, capitalism undergoes systemic transformation only when it

is forced to and when its current regime is no longer tenable. In

order to grasp the process from the perspective of its active element,

we need to adopt the standpoint ofthe other side—that is, the

standpoint ofthe proletariat along with that ofthe remaining non-

capitalist world that is progressively being drawn into capitalist

relations. The power ofthe proletariat imposes limits on capital

and not only determines the crisis but also dictates the terms and

nature ofthe transformation. The proletariat actually invents the social and productive forms that capital will be forced to adopt in the future.

We can get a first hint ofthis determinant role ofthe proletariat

by asking ourselves how throughout the crisis the United States

was able to maintain its hegemony. The answer lies in large part,

perhaps paradoxically, not in the genius ofU.S. politicians or capital-

ists, but in the power and creativity ofthe U.S. proletariat. Whereas

earlier, from another perspective, we posed the Vietnamese resis-

tance as the symbolic center ofthe struggles, now, in terms of

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269

the paradigm shift of international capitalist command, the U.S.

proletariat appears as the subjective figure that expressed most fully

the desires and needs ofinternational or multinational workers.14

Against the common wisdom that the U.S. proletariat is weak

because ofits low party and union representation with respect to

Europe and elsewhere, perhaps we should see it as strong for pre-

cisely those reasons. Working-class power resides not in the repre-

sentative institutions but in the antagonism and autonomy ofthe

workers themselves.15 This is what marked the real power ofthe

U.S. industrial working class. Moreover, the creativity and conflic-

tuality ofthe proletariat resided also, and perhaps more important, in

the laboring populations outside the factories. Even (and especially)

those who actively refused work posed serious threats and creative

alternatives.16 In order to understand the continuation ofU.S. he-

gemony, then, it is not sufficient to cite the relations of force that

U.S. capitalism wielded over the capitalists in other countries. U.S.

hegemony was actually sustained by the antagonistic power ofthe

U.S. proletariat.

The new hegemony that seemed to remain in the hands of

the United States was still limited at this point, closed within the

old mechanisms ofdisciplinary restructuring. A paradigm shift was

needed to design the restructuring process along the lines ofthe

political and technological shift. In other words, capital had to

confront and respond to the new production of subjectivity of the proletariat. This new production ofsubjectivity reached (beyond the strug-

gle over welfare, which we have already mentioned) what might

be called an ecological struggle, a struggle over the mode oflife, that

was eventually expressed in the developments ofimmaterial labor.

TheEcology of Capital

We are still not yet in a position to understand the nature ofthe

second path ofcapital’s response to the crisis, the paradigm shift

that will move it beyond the logics and practices ofdisciplinary

modernization. We need to step back once again and examine the

limitations imposed on capital by the international proletariat and

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the noncapitalist environment that both made the transformation

necessary and dictated its terms.

At the time ofthe First World War it seemed to many observ-

ers, and particularly to the Marxist theorists ofimperialism, that the

death knell had sounded and capital had reached the threshold of

a fatal disaster. Capitalism had pursued decades-long crusades of

expansion, used up significant portions ofthe globe for its accumula-

tion, and for the first time been forced to confront the limits of its

frontiers. As these limits approached, imperialist powers inevitably

found themselves in mortal conflict with one another. Capital de-

pended on its outside, as Rosa Luxemburg said, on its noncapitalist

environment, in order to realize and capitalize its surplus value and

thus continue its cycles ofaccumulation. In the early twentieth

century it appeared that the imperialist adventures ofcapitalist accu-

mulation would soon deplete the surrounding noncapitalist nature

and capital would starve to death. Everything outside the capitalist

relation—be it human, animal, vegetable, or mineral—was seen

from the perspective of capital and its expansion as nature.17 The

critique ofcapitalist imperialism thus expressed an ecological con-

sciousness—ecological precisely insofar as it recognized the real

limits ofnature and the catastrophic consequences ofits de-

struction.18

Well, as we write this book and the twentieth century draws

to a close, capitalism is miraculously healthy, its accumulation more

robust than ever. How can we reconcile this fact with the careful

analyses ofnumerous Marxist authors at the beginning ofthe century

who pointed to the imperialist conflicts as symptoms ofan impend-

ing ecological disaster running up against the limits ofnature? There

are three ways we might approach this mystery ofcapital’s continu-

ing health. First, some claim that capital is no longer imperialist,

that it has reformed, turned back the clock to its salad days of free

competition, and developed a conservationist, ecological relation-

ship with its noncapitalist environment. Even iftheorists from Marx

to Luxemburg had not demonstrated that such a process runs counter

to the essence ofcapitalist accumulation itself, merely a cursory

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271

glance at contemporary global political economy should persuade

anyone to dismiss this explanation out ofhand. It is quite clear that

capitalist expansion continued at an increasing pace in the latter

halfofthe twentieth century, opening new territories to the capitalist

market and subsuming noncapitalist productive processes under the

rule ofcapital.

A second hypothesis might be that the unforeseen persistence

ofcapitalism involves simply a continuation ofthe same processes

ofexpansion and accumulation that we analyzed earlier, only that

the complete depletion ofthe environment was not yet imminent,

and that the moment ofconfronting limits and ofecological disaster

is still to come. The global resources ofthe noncapitalist environ-

ment have indeed proved to be vast. Although the so-called Green

Revolution has subsumed within capitalism a large portion ofthe

world’s noncapitalist agriculture, and other modernization projects

have incorporated new territories and civilizations into the cycle

ofcapitalist accumulation, there still remain enormous (if, ofcourse,

limited) basins oflabor power and material resources to be subsumed

in capitalist production and potential sites for expanding markets.

For example, the collapse ofthe socialist regimes in the Soviet

Union and Eastern Europe, along with the opening ofthe Chinese

economy in the post-Mao era, has provided global capital access

to huge territories of noncapitalist environment—prefabricated for

capitalist subsumption by years ofsocialist modernization. Even in

regions already securely integrated into the world capitalist system,

there are still ample opportunities for expansion. In other words,

according to this second hypothesis, noncapitalist environments

continue to be subsumed formally under capital’s domain, and thus

accumulation can still function at least in part through this formal

subsumption: the prophets ofcapital’s imminent doom were not

wrong but merely spoke too early. The limitations ofthe noncapital-

ist environment, however, are real. Sooner or later the once abun-

dant resources ofnature will run out.

A third hypothesis, which may be seen as complementary to

the second, is that today capital continues to accumulate through

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subsumption in a cycle ofexpanded reproduction, but that increas-

ingly it subsumes not the noncapitalist environment but its own

capitalist terrain—that is, that the subsumption is no longer formal

but real. Capital no longer looks outside but rather inside its domain, and its expansion is thus intensive rather than extensive. This passage

centers on a qualitative leap in the technological organization of

capital. Previous stages ofthe industrial revolution introduced

machine-made consumer goods and then machine-made machines,

but now we find ourselves confronted with machine-made raw

materials and foodstuffs—in short, machine-made nature and

machine-made culture.19 We might say, then, following Fredric

Jameson, that postmodernization is the economic process that

emerges when mechanical and industrial technologies have ex-

panded to invest the entire world, when the modernization process

is complete, and when the formal subsumption of the noncapitalist

environment has reached its limit. Through the processes ofmodern

technological transformation, all of nature has become capital, or

at least has become subject to capital.20 Whereas modern accumula-

tion is based on the formal subsumption of the noncapitalist environ-

ment, postmodern accumulation relies on the real subsumption of

the capitalist terrain itself. This seems to be the real capitalist response to the threat of‘‘ecological disaster,’’ a response that looks to the

future.21 The completion ofthe industrialization ofsociety and

nature, however, the completion ofmodernization, poses only the

precondition for the passage to postmodernization and grasps the

transformation only in negative terms, as post-. In the next section we will confront directly the real processes of postmodernization,

or the informatization of production.

Assault on theDisciplinary Regime

To understand this passage more deeply, we have to touch somehow

on its determinant foundation, which resides in the subjective trans-

formations of labor power. In the period of crisis, throughout the

1960s and 1970s, the expansion ofwelfare and the universalization

ofdiscipline in both the dominant and the subordinate countries

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273

created a new margin of freedom for the laboring multitude. In

other words, workers made use ofthe disciplinary era, and above

all its moments ofdissent and its phases ofpolitical destabilization

(such as the period ofthe Vietnam crisis), in order to expand the

social powers oflabor, increase the value oflabor power, and

redesign the set ofneeds and desires to which the wage and welfare

had to respond. In Marx’s terminology, one would say that the

value ofnecessary labor had risen enormously—and ofcourse most

important from the perspective of capital, as necessary labor time

increases, surplus labor time (and hence profit) decreases corres-

pondingly. From the standpoint ofthe capitalist, the value ofneces-

sary labor appears as an objective economic quantity—the price of

labor power, like the price ofgrain, oil, and other commodities—

but really it is determined socially and is the index ofa whole series

ofsocial struggles. The definition ofthe set ofsocial needs, the

quality ofthe time ofnon-work, the organization offamily relation-

ships, the accepted expectations of life are all in play and effectively

represented by the costs ofreproducing the worker. The enormous

rise in the social wage (in terms ofboth working wages and welfare)

during the period ofcrisis in the 1960s and 1970s resulted directly

from the accumulation ofsocial struggles on the terrain ofreproduc-

tion, the terrain ofnon-work, the terrain oflife.

The social struggles not only raised the costs ofreproduction

and the social wage (hence decreasing the rate ofprofit), but also

and more important forced a change in the quality and nature of

labor itself. Particularly in the dominant capitalist countries, where

the margin of freedom afforded to and won by workers was greatest,

the refusal ofthe disciplinary regime ofthe social factory was accom-

panied by a reevaluation ofthe social value ofthe entire set of

productive activities. The disciplinary regime clearly no longer

succeeded in containing the needs and desires ofyoung people.

The prospect ofgetting a job that guarantees regular and stable

work for eight hours a day, fifty weeks a year, for an entire working

life, the prospect ofentering the normalized regime ofthe social

factory, which had been a dream for many of their parents, now

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appeared as a kind ofdeath. The mass refusal ofthe disciplinary

regime, which took a variety offorms, was not only a negative

expression but also a moment ofcreation, what Nietzsche calls a

transvaluation ofvalues.

The various forms of social contestation and experimentation

all centered on a refusal to value the kind offixed program ofmaterial

production typical ofthe disciplinary regime, its mass factories, and

its nuclear family structure.22 The movements valued instead a more

flexible dynamic ofcreativity and what might be considered more

immaterial forms of production. From the standpoint of the tradi-

tional ‘‘political’’ segments ofthe U.S. movements ofthe 1960s,

the various forms of cultural experimentation that blossomed with

a vengeance during that period all appeared as a kind ofdistraction

from the ‘‘real’’ political and economic struggles, but what they

failed to see was that the ‘‘merely cultural’’ experimentation had very profound political and economic effects.

‘‘Dropping out’’ was really a poor conception ofwhat was

going on in Haight-Ashbury and across the United States in the

1960s. The two essential operations were the refusal of the disciplin-

ary regime and the experimentation with new forms of productivity.

The refusal appeared in a wide variety of guises and proliferated

in thousands ofdaily practices. It was the college student who

experimented with LSD instead oflooking for a job; it was the

young woman who refused to get married and make a family; it

was the ‘‘shiftless’’ African-American worker who moved on ‘‘CP’’

(colored people’s) time, refusing work in every way possible.23 The

youth who refused the deadening repetition of the factory-society

invented new forms ofmobility and flexibility, new styles ofliving.

Student movements forced a high social value to be accorded to

knowledge and intellectual labor. Feminist movements that made

clear the political content of‘‘personal’’ relationships and refused

patriarchal discipline raised the social value ofwhat has traditionally

been considered women’s work, which involves a high content of

affective or caring labor and centers on services necessary for social

reproduction.24 The entire panoply ofmovements and the entire

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275

emerging counterculture highlighted the social value ofcooperation

and communication. This massive transvaluation ofthe values of

social production and production ofnew subjectivities opened the

way for a powerful transformation of labor power. In the next

section we will see in detail how the indexes ofthe value of

the movements—mobility, flexibility, knowledge, communication,

cooperation, the affective—would define the transformation of

capitalist production in the subsequent decades.

The various analyses of‘‘new social movements’’ have done

a great service in insisting on the political importance ofcultural

movements against narrowly economic perspectives that minimize

their significance.25 These analyses, however, are extremely limited

themselves because, just like the perspectives they oppose, they

perpetuate narrow understandings ofthe economic and the cultural.

Most important, they fail to recognize the profound economic power

of the cultural movements, or really the increasing indistinguishability ofeconomic and cultural phenomena. On the one hand, capitalist

relations were expanding to subsume all aspects ofsocial production

and reproduction, the entire realm oflife; and on the other hand,

cultural relations were redefining production processes and eco-

nomic structures ofvalue. A regime ofproduction, and above all

a regime ofthe production ofsubjectivity, was being destroyed and

another invented by the enormous accumulation ofstruggles.

These new circuits ofthe production ofsubjectivity, which

were centered on the dramatic modifications ofvalue and labor,

were realized within and against the final period ofthe disciplinary

organization ofsociety. The movements anticipated the capitalist

awareness of a need for a paradigm shift in production and dictated

its form and nature. If the Vietnam War had not taken place, if

there had not been worker and student revolts in the 1960s, ifthere

had not been 1968 and the second wave ofthe women’s movements,

ifthere had not been the whole series ofanti-imperialist struggles,

capital would have been content to maintain its own arrangement

ofpower, happy to have been saved the trouble ofshifting the

paradigm ofproduction! It would have been content for several

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good reasons: because the natural limits ofdevelopment served it

well; because it was threatened by the development ofimmaterial

labor; because it knew that the transversal mobility and hybridization

ofworld labor power opened the potential for new crises and class

conflicts on an order never before experienced. The restructuring

of production, from Fordism to post-Fordism, from modernization

to postmodernization, was anticipated by the rise ofa new subjectiv-

ity.26 The passage from the phase of perfecting the disciplinary

regime to the successive phase ofshifting the productive paradigm

was driven from below, by a proletariat whose composition had

already changed. Capital did not need to invent a new paradigm

(even ifit were capable ofdoing so) because the truly creative moment

had already taken place. Capital’s problem was rather to dominate a new composition that had already been produced autonomously

and defined within a new relationship to nature and labor, a relation-

ship ofautonomous production.

At this point the disciplinary system has become completely

obsolete and must be left behind. Capital must accomplish a negative

mirroring and an inversion ofthe new quality oflabor power; it

must adjust itselfso as to be able to command once again. We

suspect that for this reason the industrial and political forces that

have relied most heavily and with the most intelligence on the

extreme modernization ofthe disciplinary productive model (such

as the major elements ofJapanese and East Asian capital) are the

ones that will suffer most severely in this passage. The only configu-

rations ofcapital able to thrive in the new world will be those that

adapt to and govern the new immaterial, cooperative, communica-

tive, and affective composition of labor power.

The Death Throes of Soviet Discipline

Now that we have given a first approximation ofthe conditions

and forms of the new paradigm, we want to examine briefly one

gigantic subjective effect that the paradigm shift determined in the

course ofits movement: the collapse ofthe Soviet system. Our

thesis, which we share with many scholars ofthe Soviet world,27

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277

is that the system went into crisis and fell apart because of its

structural incapacity to go beyond the model ofdisciplinary govern-

ability, with respect to both its mode ofproduction, which was

Fordist and Taylorist, and its form of political command, which

was Keynesian-socialist and thus simply modernizing internally and

imperialist externally. This lack offlexibility in adapting its deploy-

ments ofcommand and its productive apparatus to the changes of

labor power exacerbated the difficulties of the transformation. The

heavy bureaucracy ofthe Soviet state, inherited from a long period

ofintense modernization, placed Soviet power in an impossible

position when it had to react to the new demands and desires

that the globally emerging subjectivities expressed, first within the

process ofmodernization and then at its outer limits.

The challenge ofpostmodernity was posed primarily not by

the enemy powers but by the new subjectivity oflabor power and

its new intellectual and communicative composition. The regime,

particularly in its illiberal aspects, was unable to respond adequately

to these subjective demands. The system could have continued,

and for a certain period did continue, to work on the basis of the

model ofdisciplinary modernization, but it could not combine

modernization with the new mobility and creativity oflabor power,

the fundamental conditions for breathing life into the new paradigm

and its complex mechanisms. In the context ofStar Wars, the

nuclear arms race, and space exploration, the Soviet Union may

still have been able to keep up with its adversaries from the techno-

logical and military point ofview, but the system could not manage

to sustain the competitive conflict on the subjective front. It could

not compete, in other words, precisely where the real power con-

flicts were being played out, and it could not face the challenges

ofthe comparative productivity ofeconomic systems, because ad-

vanced technologies ofcommunication and cybernetics are efficient

only when they are rooted in subjectivity, or better, when they

are animated by productive subjectivities. For the Soviet regime,

managing the power ofthe new subjectivities was a matter oflife

and death.

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According to our thesis, then, after the dramatic final years of

Stalin’s rule and Khrushchev’s abortive innovations, Brezhnev’s

regime imposed a freeze on a productive civil society that had

reached a high level ofmaturity and that, after the enormous mobili-

zations for war and productivity, was asking for social and political

recognition. In the capitalist world, the massive cold war propaganda

and the extraordinary ideological machine offalsification and misin-

formation prevented us from seeing the real developments in Soviet

society and the political dialectics that unfolded there. Cold war

ideology called that society totalitarian, but in fact it was a society

criss-crossed by extremely strong instances ofcreativity and freedom,

just as strong as the rhythms ofeconomic development and cultural

modernization. The Soviet Union was better understood not as a

totalitarian society but rather as a bureaucratic dictatorship.28 And

only ifwe leave these distorted definitions behind can we see how

political crisis was produced and reproduced in the Soviet Union,

to the point finally ofburying the regime.

Resistance to the bureaucratic dictatorship is what drove the

crisis. The Soviet proletariat’s refusal of work was in fact the very

same method ofstruggle that the proletariat in the capitalist countries

deployed, forcing their governments into a cycle of crisis, reform,

and restructuring. This is our point: despite the delays ofdevelop-

ment ofRussian capitalism, despite the massive losses in World

War II, despite the relative cultural isolation, the relative exclusion

from the world market, the cruel policies of imprisonment, starva-

tion, and murder ofthe population, despite all this, and despite

their enormous differences with the dominant capitalist countries,

the proletariat in Russia and the other countries ofthe Soviet bloc

managed by the 1960s and 1970s to pose the very same problems

as the proletariat in the capitalist countries.29 Even in Russia and

the other countries under Soviet control, the demand for higher

wages and greater freedom grew continuously along with the

rhythm ofmodernization. And just as in the capitalist countries,

there was defined a new figure oflabor power, which now expressed

enormous productive capacities on the basis ofa new development

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279

ofthe intellectual powers ofproduction. This new productive real-

ity, this living intellectual multitude, is what the Soviet leaders tried

to lock in the cages ofa disciplinary war economy (a war that was

continually conjured up rhetorically) and corral in the structures of

a socialist ideology oflabor and economic development, that is, a

socialist management ofcapital that no longer made any sense. The

Soviet bureaucracy was not able to construct the armory necessary

for the postmodern mobilization ofthe new labor power. It was

frightened by it, terrorized by the collapse of disciplinary regimes,

by the transformations of the Taylorized and Fordist subjects that

had previously animated production. This was the point where

the crisis became irreversible and, given the immobility ofthe

Brezhnevian hibernation, catastrophic.

What we find important was not so much the lack ofor the

offenses against the individual and formal freedoms of workers, but

rather the waste ofthe productive energy ofa multitude that had

exhausted the potential ofmodernity and now wanted to be liber-

ated from the socialist management of capitalist accumulation in

order to express a higher level ofproductivity. This repression and

this energy were the forces that, from opposite sides, made the

Soviet world collapse like a house ofcards. Glasnost and perestroika

certainly did represent a self-criticism of Soviet power and posed

the necessity ofa democratic passage as the condition for a renewed

productivity ofthe system, but they were employed too late and

too timidly to stop the crisis. The Soviet machine turned in on

itselfand ground to a halt, without the fuel that only new productive

subjectivities can produce. The sectors ofintellectual and immaterial

labor withdrew their consensus from the regime, and their exodus

condemned the system to death: death from the socialist victory of

modernization, death from the incapacity to use its effects and

surpluses, death from a definitive asphyxia that strangled the subjec-

tive conditions which demanded a passage to postmodernity.

3.4

P O S T M O D E R N I Z A T I O N , O R

T H E I N F O R M A T I Z A T I O N O F P R O D U C T I O N

Postmodernism is not something we can settle once and for all and

then use with a clear conscience. The concept, ifthere is one, has

to come at the end, and not at the beginning, ofour discussions

ofit.

Fredric Jameson

The good news from Washington is that every single person in

Congress supports the concept ofan information superhighway.

The bad news is that no one has any idea what that means.

Congressman Edward Markey

It has now become common to view the succession of

economic paradigms since the Middle Ages in three distinct mo-

ments, each defined by the dominant sector ofthe economy: a first

paradigm in which agriculture and the extraction ofraw materials

dominated the economy, a second in which industry and the manu-

facture of durable goods occupied the privileged position, and a third

and current paradigm in which providing services and manipulating

information are at the heart of economic production.1 The dominant

position has thus passed from primary to secondary to tertiary pro-

duction. Economic modernization involves the passage from the first paradigm to the second, from the dominance of agriculture to that

ofindustry. Modernization means industrialization. We might call

the passage from the second paradigm to the third, from the domina-

tion ofindustry to that ofservices and information, a process of

economic postmodernization, or better, informatization.

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281

The most obvious definition and index ofthe shifts among

these three paradigms appear first in quantitative terms, in reference

either to the percentage ofthe population engaged in each ofthese

productive domains or to the percentage ofthe total value produced

by the various sectors ofproduction. The changes in employment

statistics in the dominant capitalist countries during the past one

hundred years do indeed indicate dramatic shifts.2 This quantitative

view, however, can lead to serious misunderstandings ofthese eco-

nomic paradigms. Quantitative indicators cannot grasp either the

qualitative transformation in the progression from one paradigm to another or the hierarchy among the economic sectors in the context ofeach paradigm. In the process ofmodernization and the passage

toward the paradigm ofindustrial dominance, not only did agricul-

tural production decline quantitatively (both in percentage ofwork-

ers employed and in proportion ofthe total value produced), but

also, more important, agriculture itselfwas transf

ormed. When

agriculture came under the domination ofindustry, even when

agriculture was still predominant in quantitative terms, it became

subject to the social and financial pressures ofindustry, and moreover

agricultural production itselfwas industrialized. Agriculture, of

course, did not disappear; it remained an essential component of

modern industrial economies, but it was now a transformed, indus-

trialized agriculture.

The quantitative perspective also fails to recognize hierarchies

among national or regional economies in the global system, which

leads to all kinds ofhistorical misrecognitions, posing analogies

where none exist. From a quantitative perspective, for example,

one might assume a twentieth-century society with the majority

ofits labor force occupied in agriculture or mining and the majority

ofits value produced in these sectors (such as India or Nigeria) to

be in a position analogous to a society that existed sometime in the

past with the same percentage ofworkers or value produced in

those sectors (such as France or England). The historical illusion

casts the analogy in a dynamic sequence so that one economic

system occupies the same position or stage in a sequence ofdevelop-

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ment that another had held in a previous period, as ifall were

on the same track moving forward in line. From the qualitative

perspective, that is, in terms oftheir position in global power

relationships, however, the economies ofthese societies occupy

entirely incomparable positions. In the earlier case (France or En-

gland ofthe past), the agricultural production existed as the domi-

nant sector in its economic sphere, and in the later (twentieth-

century India or Nigeria), it is subordinated to industry in the world

system. The two economies are not on the same track but in

radically different and even divergent situations—of dominance and

subordination. In these different positions of hierarchy, a host of

economic factors is completely different—exchange relationships,

credit and debt relationships, and so forth.3 In order for the latter

economy to realize a position analogous to that ofthe former, it

would have to invert the power relationship and achieve a position

ofdominance in its contemporary economic sphere, as Europe did,

for example, in the medieval economy of the Mediterranean world.

Historical change, in other words, has to be recognized in terms

ofthe power relationships throughout the economic sphere.

Illusions of Development

The discourse ofeconomic development, which was imposed under

U.S. hegemony in coordination with the New Deal model in the

postwar period, uses such false historical analogies as the foundation

for economic policies. This discourse conceives the economic his-

tory ofall countries as following one single pattern ofdevelopment,

each at different times and according to different speeds. Countries

whose economic production is not presently at the level ofthe

dominant countries are thus seen as developing countries, with the

idea that ifthey continue on the path followed previously by the

dominant countries and repeat their economic policies and strate-

gies, they will eventually enjoy an analogous position or stage. The

developmental view fails to recognize, however, that the economies

ofthe so-called developed countries are defined not only by certain

quantitative factors or by their internal structures, but also and more

important by their dominant position in the global system.

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283

The critiques ofthe developmentalist view that were posed

by underdevelopment theories and dependency theories, which

were born primarily in the Latin American and African contexts

in the 1960s, were useful and important precisely because they

emphasized the fact that the evolution of a regional or national

economic system depends to a large extent on its place within the

hierarchy and power structures ofthe capitalist world-system.4 The

dominant regions will continue to develop and the subordinate will

continue to underdevelop as mutually supporting poles in the global

power structure. To say that the subordinate economies do not

develop does not mean that they do not change or grow; it means,

rather, that they remain subordinate in the global system and thus never achieve the promised form of a dominant, developed economy. In

some cases individual countries or regions may be able to change

their position in the hierarchy, but the point is that, regardless of

who fills which position, the hierarchy remains the determining

factor.5

The theorists ofunderdevelopment themselves, however, also

repeat a similar illusion ofeconomic development.6 Summarizing

in schematic terms, we could say that their logic begins with two

valid historical claims but then draws from them an erroneous

conclusion. First, they maintain that, through the imposition of

colonial regimes and/or other forms of imperialist domination,

the underdevelopment ofsubordinated economies was created and

sustained by their integration into the global network ofdominant

capitalist economies, their partial articulation, and thus their real

and continuing dependence on those dominant economies. Second,

they claim that the dominant economies themselves had originally

developed their fully articulated and independent structures in rela-

tive isolation, with only limited interaction with other economies

and global networks.7

From these two more or less acceptable historical claims, how-

ever, they then deduce an invalid conclusion: ifthe developed

economies achieved full articulation in relative isolation and the

underdeveloped economies became disarticulated and dependent

through their integration into global networks, then a project for

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the relative isolation ofthe underdeveloped economies will result

in their development and full articulation. In other words, as an

alternative to the ‘ false development’’ pandered by the economists of

the dominant capitalist countries, the theorists ofunderdevelopment

promoted ‘‘real development,’’ which involves delinking an econ-

omy from its dependent relationships and articulating in relative

isolation an autonomous economic structure. Since this is how the

dominant economies developed, it must be the true path to escape

the cycle ofunderdevelopment. This syllogism, however, asks us

to believe that the laws ofeconomic development will somehow

transcend the differences of historical change.

The alternative notion ofdevelopment is based paradoxically

on the same historical illusion central to the dominant ideology of

development it opposes. The tendential realization ofthe world

market should destroy any notion that today a country or region

could isolate or delink itselffrom the global networks ofpower in

order to re-create the conditions ofthe past and develop as the

dominant capitalist countries once did. Even the dominant countries

are now dependent on the global system; the interactions ofthe

world market have resulted in a generalized disarticulation ofall

economies. Increasingly, any attempt at isolation or separation will

mean only a more brutal kind ofdomination by the global system,

a reduction to powerlessness and poverty.

Informatization

The processes ofmodernization and industrialization transformed

and redefined all the elements ofthe social plane. When agriculture

was modernized as industry, the farm progressively became a factory,

with all ofthe factory’s discipline, technology, wage relations, and

so forth. Agriculture was modernized as industry. More generally,

society itselfslowly became industrialized even to the point of

transforming human relations and human nature. Society became

a factory. In the early twentieth century, Robert Musil reflected

beautifully on the transformation of humanity in the passage from

the pastoral agricultural world to the social factory: ‘‘There was a

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285

time when people grew naturally into the conditions they found

waiting for them and that was a very sound way of becoming

oneself. But nowadays, with all this shaking up of things, when

everything is becoming detached from the soil it grew in, even

where the production ofsoul is concerned one really ought, as it

were, to replace the traditional handicrafts by the sort of intelligence

that goes with the machine and the factory.’’8 The processes of

becoming human and the nature ofthe human itselfwere fundamen-

tally transformed in the passage defined by modernization.

In our times, however, modernization has come to an end. In

other words, industrial production is no longer expanding its domi-

nance over other economic forms and social phenomena. A symp-

tom of this shift is manifest in the quantitative changes in employ-

ment. Whereas the process ofmodernization was indicated by a

migration oflabor from agriculture and mining (the primary sector)

to industry (the secondary), the process ofpostmodernization or

informatization has been demonstrated through the migration from

industry to service jobs (the tertiary), a shift that has taken place in

the dominant capitalist countries, and particularly in the United

States, since the early 1970s. Services cover a wide range ofactivities

from health care, education, and finance to transportation, entertain-

ment, and advertising. The jobs for the most part are highly mobile

and involve flexible skills. More important, they are characterized

in general by the central role played by knowledge, information,

affect, and communication. In this sense many call the postindustrial

economy an informational economy.

The claim that modernization is over and that the global

economy is today undergoing a process ofpostmodernization to-

ward an informational economy does not mean that industrial pro-

duction will be done away with or even that it will cease to play

an important role, even in the most dominant regions ofthe globe.

Just as the processes ofindustrialization transformed agriculture and

made it more productive, so too the informational revolution will

transform industry by redefining and rejuvenating manufacturing

processes. The new managerial imperative operative here is, ‘‘Treat

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manufacturing as a service.’’9 In effect, as industries are transformed,

the division between manufacturing and services is becoming

blurred.10 Just as through the process ofmodernization all production

tended to become industrialized, so too through the process of

postmodernization all production tends toward the production of

services, toward becoming informationalized.

Not all countries, ofcourse, even among the dominant capital-

ist countries, have embarked on the project ofpostmodernization

along the same path. On the basis ofthe change ofemployment

statistics in the G-7 countries since 1970, Manuel Castells and Yuko

Aoyama have discerned two basic models or paths ofinformatiza-

tion.11 Both models involve the increase ofemployment in postin-

dustrial services, but they emphasize different kinds of services and

different relations between services and manufacturing. The first

path tends toward a service economy model and is led by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. This model involves a

rapid decline in industrial jobs and a corresponding rise in service-

sector jobs. In particular, the financial services that manage capital

come to dominate the other service sectors. In the second model,

the info-industrial model, typified by Japan and Germany, industrial employment declines more slowly than it does in the first model,

and, more important, the process ofinformatization is closely inte-

grated into and serves to reinforce the strength of existing industrial

production. Services related directly to industrial production thus

remain more important in this model relative to other services. The

two models represent two strategies to manage and gain an advantage

in the economic transition, but it should be clear that they both

move resolutely in the direction ofthe informatization ofthe econ-

omy and the heightened importance ofproductive flows and net-

works.

Although the subordinated countries and regions ofthe world

are not capable ofimplementing such strategies, the processes of

postmodernization nonetheless impose irreversible changes on

them. The fact that informatization and the shift toward services

have taken place thus far primarily in the dominant capitalist coun-

P O S T M O D E R N I Z A T I O N

287

tries and not elsewhere should not lead us back to an understanding

ofthe contemporary global economic situation in terms oflinear

stages ofdevelopment. It is true that as industrial production has

declined in the dominant countries, it has been effectively exported

to subordinated countries, from the United States and Japan, for

example, to Mexico and Malaysia. Such geographical shifts and

displacements might lead some to believe that there is a new global

organization ofeconomic stages whereby the dominant countries

are informational service economies, their first subordinates are

industrial economies, and those further subordinated are agricul-

tural. From the perspective ofstages ofdevelopment, for example,

one might think that through the contemporary export ofindustrial

production, an auto factory built by Ford in Brazil in the 1990s

might be comparable to a Ford factory in Detroit in the 1930s

because both instances ofproduction belong to the same indus-

trial stage.

When we look more closely, however, we can see that the

two factories are not comparable, and the differences are extremely

important. First of all, the two factories are radically different in

terms oftechnology and productive practices. When fixed capital

is exported, it is exported generally at its highest level ofproductiv-

ity. The Ford factory in 1990s Brazil, then, would not be built

with the technology ofthe Ford factory of1930s Detroit, but would

be based on the most advanced and most productive computer and

informational technologies available. The technological infrastruc-

ture ofthe factory itselfwould locate it squarely within the informa-

tional economy. Second, and perhaps more important, the two

factories stand in different relations of dominance with respect to

the global economy as a whole. The Detroit auto factory of the

1930s stood at the pinnacle ofthe global economy in the dominant

position and producing the highest value; the 1990s auto factory,

whether in Sa˜o Paulo, Kentucky, or Vladivostok, occupies a subor-

dinate position in the global economy—subordinated to the high-

value production ofservices. Today all economic activity tends to

come under the dominance ofthe informational economy and to

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be qualitatively transformed by it. The geographical differences in

the global economy are not signs ofthe co-presence ofdifferent

stages ofdevelopment but lines ofthe new global hierarchy ofpro-

duction.

It is becoming increasingly clear from the perspective of subor-

dinated regions that modernization is no longer the key to economic

advancement and competition. The most subordinated regions,

such as areas of sub-Saharan Africa, are effectively excluded from

capital flows and new technologies, and they thus find themselves

on the verge ofstarvation.12 Competition for the middle-level posi-

tions in the global hierarchy is conducted not through the industrial-

ization but through the informatization of production. Large coun-

tries with varied economies, such as India and Brazil, can support

simultaneously all levels ofproductive processes: information-based

production ofservices, modern industrial production ofgoods, and

traditional handicraft, agricultural, and mining production. There

does not need to be an orderly historical progression among these

forms, but rather they mix and coexist. All of the forms of production

exist within the networks ofthe world market and under the

domination ofthe informational production ofservices.

The transformations of the Italian economy since the 1950s

demonstrate clearly that relatively backward economies do not sim-

ply follow the same stages the dominant regions experience, but

evolve through alternative and mixed patterns. After World War

II, Italy was still a predominantly peasant-based society, but in the

1950s and 1960s it went through furious if incomplete moderniza-

tion and industrialization, a first economic miracle. Then, however,

in the 1970s and 1980s, when the processes ofindustrialization

were still not complete, the Italian economy embarked on another

transformation, a process of postmodernization, and achieved a

second economic miracle. These Italian miracles were not really

leaps forward that allowed it to catch up with the dominant econo-

mies; rather, they represented mixtures of different incomplete eco-

nomic forms. What is most significant here, and what might usefully

pose the Italian case as the general model for all other backward

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289

economies, is that the Italian economy did not complete one stage (industrialization) before moving on to another (informatization). According to two contemporary economists, the recent Italian transformation

reveals ‘‘an interesting transition from proto-industrialism to proto-

informationalism.’’13 Various regions will evolve to have peasant

elements mixed with partial industrialization and partial informatiza-

tion. The economic stages are thus all present at once, merged into

a hybrid, composite economy that varies not in kind but in degree

across the globe.

Just as modernization did in a previous era, postmodernization

or informatization today marks a new mode of becoming human.

Where the production ofsoul is concerned, as Musil would say,

one really ought to replace the traditional techniques ofindustrial

machines with the cybernetic intelligence ofinformation and com-

munication technologies. We must invent what Pierre Levy calls

an anthropology ofcyberspace.14 This shift of metaphors gives us

a first glimpse ofthe transformation, but we need to look more

closely to see clearly the changes in our notion ofthe human and

in humanity itselfthat emerge in the passage toward an informa-

tional economy.

TheSociology of Immaterial Labor

The passage toward an informational economy necessarily involves a

change in the quality and nature oflabor. This is the most immediate

sociological and anthropological implication ofthe passage ofeco-

nomic paradigms. Today information and communication have

come to play a foundational role in production processes.

A first aspect ofthis transformation is recognized by many in

terms ofthe change in factory labor—using the auto industry as a

central point of reference—from the Fordist model to the Toyotist

model.15 The primary structural change between these models in-

volves the system ofcommunication between the production and

the consumption ofcommodities, that is, the passage ofinformation

between the factory and the market. The Fordist model constructed

a relatively ‘‘mute’’ relationship between production and consump-

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tion. The mass production ofstandardized commodities in the

Fordist era could count on an adequate demand and thus had little

need to ‘‘listen’’ to the market. A feedback circuit from consumption

to production did allow changes in the market to spur changes in

productive engineering, but this communication circuit was re-

stricted (owing to the fixed and compartmentalized channels of

planning and design structures) and slow (owing to the rigidity of

the technologies and procedures ofmass production).

Toyotism is based on an inversion ofthe Fordist structure

ofcommunication between production and consumption. Ideally,

according to this model, production planning will communicate

with markets constantly and immediately. Factories will maintain

zero stock, and commodities will be produced just in time according

to the present demand ofthe existing markets. This model thus

involves not simply a more rapid feedback loop but an inversion of

the relationship because, at least in theory, the production decision

actually comes after and in reaction to the market decision. In

the most extreme cases the commodity is not produced until the

consumer has already chosen and purchased it. In general, however,

it would be more accurate to conceive the model as striving toward a

continual interactivity or rapid communication between production

and consumption. This industrial context provides a first sense in

which communication and information have come to play a newly

central role in production. One might say that instrumental action

and communicative action have become intimately interwoven in

the informationalized industrial process, but one should quickly add

that this is an impoverished notion ofcommunication as the mere

transmission ofmarket data.16

The service sectors ofthe economy present a richer model of

productive communication. Most services indeed are based on the

continual exchange ofinformation and knowledges. Since the pro-

duction ofservices results in no material and durable good, we

define the labor involved in this production as immaterial labor—that is, labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a

cultural product, knowledge, or communication.17 One face of

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291

immaterial labor can be recognized in analogy to the functioning

ofa computer. The increasingly extensive use ofcomputers has

tended progressively to redefine laboring practices and relations,

along with, indeed, all social practices and relations. Familiarity

and facility with computer technology is becoming an increasingly

general primary qualification for work in the dominant countries.

Even when direct contact with computers is not involved, the

manipulation ofsymbols and information along the model ofcom-

puter operation is extremely widespread. In an earlier era workers

learned how to act like machines both inside and outside the factory.

We even learned (with the help ofMuybridge’s photos, for example)

to recognize human activity in general as mechanical. Today we

increasingly think like computers, while communication technolo-

gies and their model ofinteraction are becoming more and more

central to laboring activities. One novel aspect ofthe computer is

that it can continually modify its own operation through its use.

Even the most rudimentary forms of artificial intelligence allow the

computer to expand and perfect its operation based on its interaction

with its user and its environment. The same kind ofcontinual

interactivity characterizes a wide range ofcontemporary productive

activities, whether computer hardware is directly involved or not.

The computer and communication revolution ofproduction has

transformed laboring practices in such a way that they all tend

toward the model ofinformation and communication technolo-

gies.18 Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis

integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to

redefine our bodies and minds themselves. The anthropology of

cyberspace is really a recognition ofthe new human condition.

Robert Reich calls the kind ofimmaterial labor involved in

computer and communication work ‘‘symbolic-analytical ser-

vices’’—tasks that involve ‘‘problem-solving, problem-identifying,

and strategic brokering activities.’’19 This type oflabor claims the

highest value, and thus Reich identifies it as the key to competition

in the new global economy. He recognizes, however, that the

growth ofthese knowledge-based jobs ofcreative symbolic manipu-

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lation implies a corresponding growth oflow-value and low-skill

jobs ofroutine symbol manipulation, such as data entry and word

processing. Here begins to emerge a fundamental division of labor

within the realm ofimmaterial production.

We should note that one consequence ofthe informatization

ofproduction and the emergence ofimmaterial labor has been a

real homogenization oflaboring processes. From Marx’s perspective

in the nineteenth century, the concrete practices ofvarious laboring

activities were radically heterogeneous: tailoring and weaving in-

volved incommensurable concrete actions. Only when abstracted

from their concrete practices could different laboring activities be

brought together and seen in a homogeneous way, no longer as

tailoring and weaving but as the expenditure ofhuman labor power

in general, as abstract labor. 20 With the computerization ofproduction today, however, the heterogeneity ofconcrete labor has tended to

be reduced, and the worker is increasingly further removed from

the object ofhis or her labor. The labor ofcomputerized tailoring

and the labor ofcomputerized weaving may involve exactly the

same concrete practices—that is, manipulation ofsymbols and infor-

mation. Tools, ofcourse, have always abstracted labor power from

the object oflabor to a certain degree. In previous periods, however,

the tools generally were related in a relatively inflexible way to

certain tasks or certain groups of tasks; different tools corresponded

to different activities—the tailor’s tools, the weaver’s tools, or later

a sewing machine and a power loom. The computer proposes itself,

in contrast, as the universal tool, or rather as the central tool, through

which all activities might pass. Through the computerization of

production, then, labor tends toward the position ofabstract labor.

The model ofthe computer, however, can account for only

one face of the communicational and immaterial labor involved in

the production ofservices. The other face ofimmaterial labor is

the affective labor ofhuman contact and interaction. Health services, for example, rely centrally on caring and affective labor, and the

entertainment industry is likewise focused on the creation and ma-

nipulation of affect. This labor is immaterial, even if it is corporeal

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293

and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible, a feeling

ofease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion. Categories

such as ‘‘in-person services’’ or services ofproximity are often used

to identify this kind of labor, but what is really essential to it are

the creation and manipulation of affect. Such affective production,

exchange, and communication are generally associated with human

contact, but that contact can be either actual or virtual, as it is in

the entertainment industry.

This second face of immaterial labor, its affective face, extends

well beyond the model ofintelligence and communication defined

by the computer. Affective labor is better understood by beginning

from what feminist analyses of ‘‘women’s work’’ have called ‘‘labor

in the bodily mode.’’21 Caring labor is certainly entirely immersed in

the corporeal, the somatic, but the affects it produces are nonetheless

immaterial. What affective labor produces are social networks, forms

ofcommunity, biopower. Here one might recognize once again

that the instrumental action ofeconomic production has been united

with the communicative action ofhuman relations; in this case,

however, communication has not been impoverished, but produc-

tion has been enriched to the level ofcomplexity ofhuman inter-

action.

In short, we can distinguish three types ofimmaterial labor

that drive the service sector at the top ofthe informational economy.

The first is involved in an industrial production that has been

informationalized and has incorporated communication technolo-

gies in a way that transforms the production process itself. Manufac-

turing is regarded as a service, and the material labor ofthe produc-

tion ofdurable goods mixes with and tends toward immaterial

labor. Second is the immaterial labor ofanalytical and symbolic

tasks, which itselfbreaks down into creative and intelligent manipu-

lation on the one hand and routine symbolic tasks on the other.

Finally, a third type ofimmaterial labor involves the production

and manipulation of affect and requires (virtual or actual) human

contact, labor in the bodily mode. These are the three types of

labor that drive the postmodernization ofthe global economy.

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We should point out before moving on that in each of these

forms of immaterial labor, cooperation is completely inherent in

the labor itself. Immaterial labor immediately involves social interac-

tion and cooperation. In other words, the cooperative aspect of

immaterial labor is not imposed or organized from the outside, as

it was in previous forms of labor, but rather, cooperation is completely immanent to the laboring activity itself. 22 This fact calls into question the old notion (common to classical and Marxian political economics) by which labor power is conceived as ‘‘variable capital,’’ that

is, a force that is activated and made coherent only by capital, because

the cooperative powers oflabor power (particularly immaterial labor

power) afford labor the possibility of valorizing itself. Brains and

bodies still need others to produce value, but the others they need

are not necessarily provided by capital and its capacities to orchestrate

production. Today productivity, wealth, and the creation ofsocial

surpluses take the form of cooperative interactivity through linguis-

tic, communicational, and affective networks. In the expression of

its own creative energies, immaterial labor thus seems to provide

the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism.

Network Production

The first geographical consequence ofthe passage from an industrial

to an informational economy is a dramatic decentralization of pro-

duction. The processes ofmodernization and the passage to the

industrial paradigm provoked the intense aggregation ofproductive

forces and mass migrations of labor power toward centers that

became factory cities, such as Manchester, Osaka, and Detroit. Ef-

ficiency ofmass industrial production depended on the concentra-

tion and proximity ofelements in order to create the factory site and

facilitate transportation and communication. The informatization of

industry and the rising dominance ofservice production, however,

have made such concentration ofproduction no longer necessary.

Size and efficiency are no longer linearly related; in fact, large scale

has in many cases become a hindrance. Advances in telecommunica-

tions and information technologies have made possible a deterritori-

alization of production that has effectively dispersed the mass facto-

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295

ries and evacuated the factory cities. Communication and control

can be exercised efficiently at a distance, and in some cases immate-

rial products can be transported across the world with minimal delay

and expense. Several different production facilities can be coordi-

nated in the simultaneous production ofa single commodity in such

a way that factories can be dispersed to various locations. In some

sectors even the factory site itself can be done away with as its workers

communicate exclusively through new information technologies.23

In the passage to the informational economy, the assembly

line has been replaced by the network as the organizational model

of production, transforming the forms of cooperation and commu-

nication within each productive site and among productive sites.

The mass industrial factory defined the circuits of laboring coopera-

tion primarily through the physical deployments ofworkers on the

shop floor. Individual workers communicated with their neighbor-

ing workers, and communication was generally limited to physical

proximity. Cooperation among productive sites also required physi-

cal proximity both to coordinate the productive cycles and to

minimize the transportation costs and time ofthe commodities

being produced. For example, the distance between the coal mine

and the steel mill, and the efficiency ofthe lines oftransportation

and communication between them, are significant factors in the

overall efficiency of steel production. Similarly, for automobile

production the efficiency of communication and transportation

among the series ofsubcontractors involved is crucial in the overall

efficiency of the system. The passage toward informational produc-

tion and the network structure oforganization, in contrast, make

productive cooperation and efficiency no longer dependent to such

a degree on proximity and centralization. Information technologies

tend to make distances less relevant. Workers involved in a single

process can effectively communicate and cooperate from remote

locations without consideration to proximity. In effect, the network

oflaboring cooperation requires no territorial or physical center.

The tendency toward the deterritorialization ofproduction is

even more pronounced in the processes ofimmaterial labor that

involve the manipulation ofknowledge and information. Laboring

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processes can be conducted in a form almost entirely compatible

with communication networks, for which location and distance

have very limited importance. Workers can even stay at home and

log on to the network. The labor ofinformational production (of

both services and durable goods) relies on what we can call abstract

cooperation. Such labor dedicates an ever more central role to communication ofknowledges and information among workers, but

those cooperating workers need not be present and can even be

relatively unknown to one another, or known only through the

productive information exchanged. The circuit of cooperation is

consolidated in the network and the commodity at an abstract level.

Production sites can thus be deterritorialized and tend toward a

virtual existence, as coordinates in the communication network.

As opposed to the old vertical industrial and corporate model,

production now tends to be organized in horizontal network enter-

prises.24

The information networks also release production from terri-

torial constraints insofar as they tend to put the producer in direct

contact with the consumer regardless ofthe distance between them.

Bill Gates, the co-founder of the Microsoft Corporation, takes this

tendency to an extreme when he predicts a future in which networks

will overcome entirely the barriers to circulation and allow an ideal,

‘ friction-free’’ capitalism to emerge: ‘‘The information highway

will extend the electronic marketplace and make it the ultimate

go-between, the universal middleman.’’25 IfGates’s vision were to

be realized, the networks would tend to reduce all distance and make

transactions immediate. Sites ofproduction and sites ofconsumption

would then be present to one another, regardless ofgeographical lo-

cation.

These tendencies toward the deterritorialization ofproduction

and the increased mobility ofcapital are not absolute, and there

are significant countervailing tendencies, but to the extent that they

do proceed, they place labor in a weakened bargaining position.

In the era ofthe Fordist organization ofindustrial mass production,

capital was bound to a specific territory and thus to dealing contrac-

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297

tually with a limited laboring population. The informatization of

production and the increasing importance ofimmaterial production

have tended to free capital from the constraints of territory and

bargaining. Capital can withdraw from negotiation with a given

local population by moving its site to another point in the global

network—or merely by using the potential to move as a weapon

in negotiations. Entire laboring populations, which had enjoyed a

certain stability and contractual power, have thus found themselves

in increasingly precarious employment situations. Once the bargain-

ing position oflabor has been weakened, network production can

accommodate various old forms of non-guaranteed labor, such as

freelance work, home work, part-time labor, and piecework.26

The decentralization and global dispersal ofproductive pro-

cesses and sites, which is characteristic ofthe postmodernization or

informatization of the economy, provokes a corresponding central-

ization ofthe control over production. The centrifugal movement

ofproduction is balanced by the centripetal trend ofcommand.

From the local perspective, the computer networks and communi-

cations technologies internal to production systems allow for more

extensive monitoring ofworkers from a central, remote location.

Control oflaboring activity can potentially be individualized and

continuous in the virtual panopticon ofnetwork production. The

centralization ofcontrol, however, is even more clear from a global

perspective. The geographical dispersal ofmanufacturing has created

a demand for increasingly centralized management and planning,

and also for a new centralization of specialized producer services,

especially financial services.27 Financial and trade-related services in

a few key cities (such as New York, London, and Tokyo) manage

and direct the global networks ofproduction. As a mass demographic

shift, then, the decline and evacuation of industrial cities has corres-

ponded to the rise ofglobal cities, or really cities ofcontrol.

Information Highways

The structure and management ofcommunication networks are

essential conditions for production in the informational economy.

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These global networks must be constructed and policed in such a

way as to guarantee order and profits. It should come as no surprise,

then, that the U.S. government poses the establishment and regula-

tion of a global information infrastructure as one of its highest

priorities, and that communications networks have become the most

active terrain of mergers and competition for the most powerful

transnational corporations.

An adviser to the Federal Communications Commission, Peter

Cowhey, provides an interesting analogy for the role these networks

play in the new paradigm ofproduction and power. The construc-

tion of the new information infrastructure, he says, provides the

conditions and terms ofglobal production and government just as

road construction did for the Roman Empire.28 The wide distribu-

tion ofRoman engineering and technology was indeed both the

most lasting gift to the imperial territories and the fundamental

condition for exercising control over them. Roman roads, however,

did not play a central role in the imperial production processes but

only facilitated the circulation of goods and technologies. Perhaps

a better analogy for the global information infrastructure might be

the construction ofrailways to further the interests ofnineteenth-

and twentieth-century imperialist economies. Railways in the dom-

inant countries consolidated their national industrial economies,

and the construction ofrailroads in colonized and economically

dominated regions opened those territories to penetration by capital-

ist enterprises, allowing for their incorporation into imperialist eco-

nomic systems. Like Roman roads, however, railways played only

an external role in imperialist and industrial production, extending

its lines ofcommunication and transportation to new raw materials,

markets, and labor power. The novelty of the new information infrastructure is the fact that it is embedded within and completely immanent to the new production processes. At the pinnacle ofcontemporary production, information and communication are the very commodities produced; the network itselfis the site ofboth production and circu-

lation.

In political terms, the global information infrastructure might

be characterized as the combination ofa democratic mechanism and

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299

an oligopolistic mechanism, which operate along different models of network systems. The democratic network is a completely horizontal and deterritorialized model. The Internet, which began as a

project ofDARPA (the U.S. Defense Department Advanced Re-

search Projects Agency), but has now expanded to points through-

out the world, is the prime example ofthis democratic network

structure. An indeterminate and potentially unlimited number of

interconnected nodes communicate with no central point ofcon-

trol; all nodes regardless ofterritorial location connect to all others

through a myriad ofpotential paths and relays. The Internet thus

resembles the structure oftelephone networks, and indeed it gener-

ally incorporates them as its own paths ofcommunication, just as

it relies on computer technology for its points of communication.

The development ofcellular telephony and portable computers,

unmooring in an even more radical way the communicating points

in the network, has intensified the process ofdeterritorialization.

The original design ofthe Internet was intended to withstand

military attack. Since it has no center and almost any portion can

operate as an autonomous whole, the network can continue to

function even when part of it has been destroyed. The same design

element that ensures survival, the decentralization, is also what

makes control ofthe network so difficult. Since no one point in

the network is necessary for communication among others, it is

difficult for it to regulate or prohibit their communication. This

democratic model is what Deleuze and Guattari call a rhizome, a

nonhierarchical and noncentered network structure.29

The oligopolistic network model is characterized by broadcast

systems. According to this model, for example in television or radio

systems, there is a unique and relatively fixed point ofemission,

but the points ofreception are potentially infinite and territorially

indefinite, although developments such as cable television networks

fix these paths to a certain extent. The broadcast network is defined

by its centralized production, mass distribution, and one-way com-

munication. The entire culture industry—from the distribution of

newspapers and books to films and video cassettes—has traditionally

operated along this model. A relatively small number ofcorporations

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(or in some regions a single entrepreneur, such as Rupert Murdoch,

Silvio Berlusconi, or Ted Turner) can effectively dominate all of

these networks. This oligopolistic model is not a rhizome but a

tree structure that subordinates all ofthe branches to the central root.

The networks of the new information infrastructure are a

hybrid ofthese two models. Just as in a previous era Lenin and other

critics ofimperialism recognized a consolidation ofinternational

corporations into quasi-monopolies (over railways, banking, elec-

tric power, and the like), today we are witnessing a competition

among transnational corporations to establish and consolidate quasi-

monopolies over the new information infrastructure. The various

telecommunication corporations, computer hardware and software

manufacturers, and information and entertainment corporations are

merging and expanding their operations, scrambling to partition

and control the new continents ofproductive networks. There will,

ofcourse, remain democratic portions or aspects ofthis consolidated

web that will resist control owing to the web’s interactive and

decentralized structure; but there is already under way a massive

centralization ofcontrol through the (de facto or de jure) unification

ofthe major elements ofthe information and communication power

structure: Hollywood, Microsoft, IBM, AT&T, and so forth. The

new communication technologies, which hold out the promise of

a new democracy and a new social equality, have in fact created

new lines ofinequality and exclusion, both within the dominant

countries and especially outside them.30

C OMMONS

There has been a continuous movement throughout the modern period to

privatize public property. In Europe the great common lands created with the break-up of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity were

eventually transferred to private hands in the course of capitalist primitive accumulation. Throughout the world what remains of the vast public spaces are now only the stuff of legends: Robin Hood’s forest, the Great Plains of the Amerindians, the steppes of the nomadic tribes, and so forth. During the consolidation of industrial society, the construction and destruction of P O S T M O D E R N I Z A T I O N

301

public spaces developed in an ever more powerful spiral. It is true that when it was dictated by the necessities of accumulation (in order to foster an acceleration or leap in development, to concentrate and mobilize the means of production, to make war, and so forth), public property was expanded by expropriating large sectors of civil society and transferring wealth and property to the collectivity. That public property, however, was soon reappropriated in private hands. In each process the communal possession, which is considered natural, is transformed at public expense into a second and third nature that functions finally for private profit. A second nature was created, for example, by damming the great rivers of western North America and irrigating the dry valleys, and then this new wealth was handed over to the magnates of agribusiness. Capitalism sets in motion a continuous cycle of private reappropriation of public goods: the expropriation of what is common.

The rise and fall of the welfare state in the twentieth century is one

more cycle in this spiral of public and private appropriations. The crisis of the welfare state has meant primarily that the structures of public assistance and distribution, which were constructed through public funds, are being privatized and expropriated for private gain. The current neoliberal trend toward the privatization of energy and communication services is another turn of the spiral. This consists in granting to private businesses the networks of energy and communication that were built through enormous expenditures of public monies. Market regimes and neoliberalism survive off these private appropriations of second, third, and nth nature. The commons, which once were considered the basis of the concept of the public, are expropriated for private use and no one can lift a finger. The public is thus dissolved, privatized, even as a concept. Or really, the immanent relation between the public and the common is replaced by the transcendent power

ofprivate property.

We do not intend here to weep over the destruction and expropriation

that capitalism continually operates across the world, even though resisting its force (and in particular resisting the expropriation of the welfare state) is certainly an eminently ethical and important task. We want to ask,

rather, what is the operative notion of the common today, in the midst of postmodernity, the information revolution, and the consequent transforma-302

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tions of the mode of production. It seems to us, in fact, that today we participate in a more radical and profound commonality than has ever been experienced in the history of capitalism. The fact is that we participate in a productive world made up of communication and social networks, interactive services, and common languages. Our economic and social reality is defined less by the material objects that are made and consumed than by co-produced services and relationships. Producing increasingly means constructing cooperation and communicative commonalities.

The concept of private property itself, understood as the exclusive right to use a good and dispose of all wealth that derives from the possession of it, becomes increasingly nonsensical in this new situation. There are ever fewer goods that can be possessed and used exclusively in this framework; it is the community that produces and that, while producing, is reproduced and redefined. The foundation of the classic modern conception of private property is thus to a certain extent dissolved in the postmodern mode

of production.

One should object, however, that this new social condition of production has not at all weakened the juridical and political regimes of private property.

The conceptual crisis of private property does not become a crisis in practice, and instead the regime of private expropriation has tended to be applied universally. This objection would be valid if not for the fact that, in the context of linguistic and cooperative production, labor and the common

property tend to overlap. Private property, despite its juridical powers, cannot help becoming an ever more abstract and transcendental concept and thus ever more detached from reality.

A new notion of ‘‘commons’’ will have to emerge on this terrain.

Deleuze and Guattari claim in What Is Philosophy? that in the contemporary era, and in the context of communicative and interactive production, the construction of concepts is not only an epistemological operation but equally an ontological project. Constructing concepts and what they call

‘‘common names’’ is really an activity that combines the intelligence and the action of the multitude, making them work together. Constructing

concepts means making exist in reality a project that is a community. There is no other way to construct concepts but to work in a common way. This commonality is, from the standpoint of the phenomenology of production, P O S T M O D E R N I Z A T I O N

303

from the standpoint of the epistemology of the concept, and from the standpoint of practice, a project in which the multitude is completely invested.

The commons is the incarnation, the production, and the liberation

ofthe multitude. Rousseau said that the first person who wanted a piece of nature as his or her own exclusive possession and transformed it into the transcendent form of private property was the one who invented evil. Good, on the contrary, is what is common.

3.5

M I X E D C O N S T I T U T I O N

One of the wonderful things about the information highway is that

virtual equity is far easier to achieve than real-world equity . . .

We are all created equal in the virtual world.

Bill Gates

The paradigm shift of production toward the network

model has fostered the growing power of transnational corporations

beyond and above the traditional boundaries ofnation-states. The

novelty ofthis relationship has to be recognized in terms ofthe

long-standing power struggle between capitalists and the state. The

history ofthis conflict is easily misunderstood. One should under-

stand that, most significantly, despite the constant antagonism be-

tween capitalists and the state, the relationship is really conflictive

only when capitalists are considered individually.

Marx and Engels characterize the state as the executive board

that manages the interests ofcapitalists; by this they mean that

although the action ofthe state will at times contradict the immediate

interests ofindividual capitalists, it will always be in the long-term

interest ofthe collective capitalist, that is, the collective subject of

social capital as a whole.1 Competition among capitalists, the reason-

ing goes, however free, does not guarantee the common good of

the collective capitalist, for their immediate egoistic drive for profit

is fundamentally myopic. The state is required for prudence to

mediate the interests ofindividual capitalists, raising them up in the

collective interest ofcapital. Capitalists will thus all combat the

powers ofthe state even while the state is acting in their own

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305

collective interests. This conflict is really a happy, virtuous dialectic

from the perspective of total social capital.

When Giants RuletheEarth

The dialectic between the state and capital has taken on different

configurations in the different phases of capitalist development. A

quick and rough periodization will help us pose at least the most

basic features of this dynamic. In the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries, as capitalism established itselffully in Europe, the state

managed the affairs of the total social capital but required relatively

unobtrusive powers ofintervention. This period has come to be

viewed in retrospect (with a certain measure ofdistortion) as the

golden age ofEuropean capitalism, characterized by f

ree trade

among relatively small capitalists. Outside the European nation-

state in this period, before the full deployment of powerful colonial

administrations, European capital operated with even fewer con-

straints. To a large extent the capitalist companies were sovereign

when operating in colonial or precolonial territories, establishing

their own monopoly offorce, their own police, their own courts.

The Dutch East India Company, for example, ruled the territories

it exploited in Java until the end ofthe eighteenth century with

its own structures ofsovereignty. Even af

ter the company was

dissolved in 1800, capital ruled relatively free of state mediation or

control.2 The situation was much the same for the capitalists operat-

ing in the British South Asian and African colonies. The sovereignty

ofthe East India Company lasted until the East India Act of1858

brought the company under the rule ofthe queen, and in southern

Africa the free reign of capitalist adventurers and entrepreneurs

lasted at least until the end ofthe century.3 This period was thus

characterized by relatively little need ofstate intervention at home

and abroad: within the European nation-states individual capitalists

were ruled (in their own collective interest) without great conflict,

and in the colonial territories they were effectively sovereign.

The relationship between state and capital changed gradually in

the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when crises increasingly

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threatened the development ofcapital. In Europe and the United

States, corporations, trusts, and cartels grew to establish quasi-

monopolies over specific industries and clusters ofindustries extend-

ing far across national boundaries. The monopoly phase posed a

direct threat to the health ofcapitalism because it eroded the compe-

tition among capitalists that is the lifeblood of the system.4 The

formation of monopolies and quasi-monopolies also undermined

the managerial capacities ofthe state, and thus the enormous corpo-

rations gained the power to impose their particular interests over

the interest ofthe collective capitalist. Consequently there erupted

a whole series ofstruggles in which the state sought to establish its

command over the corporations, passing antitrust laws, raising taxes

and tariffs, and extending state regulation over industries. In the

colonial territories, too, the uncontrolled activities ofthe sovereign

companies and the adventurer capitalists led increasingly toward

crisis. For example, the 1857 Indian rebellion against the powers

ofthe East India Company alerted the British government to the

disasters the colonial capitalists were capable ofifleft uncontrolled.

The India Act passed by the British Parliament the next year was

a direct response to the potential for crisis. The European powers

gradually established fully articulated and fully functioning adminis-

trations over the colonial territories, effectively recuperating colonial

economic and social activity securely under the jurisdiction ofthe

nation-states and thus guaranteeing the interests oftotal social capital

against crises. Internally and externally, the nation-states were forced

to intervene more strongly to protect the interests oftotal social

capital against individual capitalists.

Today a third phase ofthis relationship has fully matured, in

which large transnational corporations have effectively surpassed

the jurisdiction and authority ofnation-states. It would seem, then,

that this centuries-long dialectic has come to an end: the state has

been defeated and corporations now rule the earth! In recent years numerous studies have emerged on the Left that read this phenomenon

in apocalyptic terms as endangering humanity at the hands ofunre-

strained capitalist corporations and that yearn for the old protective

powers ofnation-states.5 Correspondingly, proponents ofcapital

M I X E D C O N S T I T U T I O N

307

celebrate a new era ofderegulation and free trade. Ifthis really

were the case, however, ifthe state really had ceased to manage

the affairs of collective capital and the virtuous dialectic of conflict

between state and capital were really over, then the capitalists ought

to be the ones most fearful of the future! Without the state, social

capital has no means to project and realize its collective interests.

The contemporary phase is in fact not adequately characterized

by the victory ofcapitalist corporations over the state. Although

transnational corporations and global networks ofproduction and

circulation have undermined the powers ofnation-states, state func-

tions and constitutional elements have effectively been displaced to

other levels and domains. We need to take a much more nuanced

look at how the relationship between state and capital has changed.

We need to recognize first ofall the crisis ofpolitical relations in

the national context. As the concept ofnational sovereignty is losing

its effectiveness, so too is the so-called autonomy of the political.6

Today a notion ofpolitics as an independent sphere ofthe determi-

nation ofconsensus and a sphere ofmediation among conflicting

social forces has very little room to exist. Consensus is determined

more significantly by economic factors, such as the equilibria of

the trade balances and speculation on the value ofcurrencies. Con-

trol over these movements is not in the hands ofthe political

forces that are traditionally conceived as holding sovereignty, and

consensus is determined not through the traditional political mecha-

nisms but by other means. Government and politics come to be

completely integrated into the system oftransnational command.

Controls are articulated through a series ofinternational bodies

and functions. This is equally true for the mechanisms of political

mediation, which really function through the categories of bureau-

cratic mediation and managerial sociology rather than through the

traditional political categories ofthe mediation ofconflicts and the

reconciliation ofclass conflict. Politics does not disappear; what

disappears is any notion ofthe autonomy ofthe political.

The decline ofany autonomous political sphere signals the

decline, too, ofany independent space where revolution could

emerge in the national political regime, or where social space could

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be transformed using the instruments of the state. The traditional

idea ofcounter-power and the idea ofresistance against modern

sovereignty in general thus becomes less and less possible. This

situation resembles in certain respects the one that Machiavelli faced

in a different era: the pathetic and disastrous defeat of ‘‘humanistic’’

revolution or resistance at the hands ofthe powers ofthe sovereign

principality, or really the early modern state. Machiavelli recognized

that the actions ofindividual heroes (in the style ofPlutarch’s heroes)

were no longer able even to touch the new sovereignty ofthe

principality. A new type ofresistance would have to be found that

would be adequate to the new dimensions ofsovereignty. Today,

too, we can see that the traditional forms of resistance, such as

the institutional workers’ organizations that developed through the

major part ofthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have begun

to lose their power. Once again a new type ofresistance has to

be invented.

Finally, the decline ofthe traditional spheres ofpolitics and

resistance is complemented by the transformation of the democratic

state such that its functions have been integrated into mechanisms

ofcommand on the global level ofthe transnational corporations.

The national democratic model ofstate-managed exploitation func-

tioned in the dominant capitalist countries so long as it was able

to regulate the growing conflictuality in a dynamic fashion—so

long, in other words, as it was able to keep alive the potential of

the development and the utopia ofstate planning, so long, above

all, as the class struggle in the individual countries determined a

sort ofdualism ofpower over which the unitary state structures

could situate themselves. To the extent that these conditions have

disappeared, in both real and ideological terms, the national demo-

cratic capitalist state has self-destructed. The unity of single govern-

ments has been disarticulated and invested in a series ofseparate

bodies (banks, international organisms ofplanning, and so forth, in

addition to the traditional separate bodies), which all increasingly

refer for legitimacy to the transnational level of power.

The recognition ofthe rise ofthe transnational corporations

above and beyond the constitutional command ofthe nation-states

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309

should not, however, lead us to think that constitutional mechanisms

and controls as such have declined, that transnational corporations,

relatively free of nation-states, tend to compete freely and manage

themselves. Instead, the constitutional functions have been displaced

to another level. Once we recognize the decline ofthe traditional

national constitutional system, we have to explore how power is

constitutionalized on a supranational level—in other words, how

the constitution ofEmpire begins to form.

ThePyramid of Global Constitution

At first glance and on a level ofpurely empirical observation, the

new world constitutional framework appears as a disorderly and

even chaotic set ofcontrols and representative organizations. These

global constitutional elements are distributed in a wide spectrum

ofbodies (in nation-states, in associations ofnation-states, and in

international organizations ofall kinds); they are divided by function

and content (such as political, monetary, health, and educational

organisms); and they are traversed by a variety ofproductive activi-

ties. Ifwe look closely, however, this disorderly set does nonetheless

contain some points ofreference. More than ordering elements,

these are rather matrixes that delimit relatively coherent horizons

in the disorder ofglobal juridical and political life. When we analyze

the configurations ofglobal power in its various bodies and organiza-

tions, we can recognize a pyramidal structure that is composed of

three progressively broader tiers, each ofwhich contains several

levels.

At the narrow pinnacle ofthe pyramid there is one superpower,

the United States, that holds hegemony over the global use of

force—a superpower that can act alone but prefers to act in collabo-

ration with others under the umbrella ofthe United Nations. This

singular status was posed definitively with the end ofthe cold war

and first confirmed in the GulfWar. On a second level, still within

this first tier, as the pyramid broadens slightly, a group ofnation-

states control the primary global monetary instruments and thus

have the ability to regulate international exchanges. These nation-

states are bound together in a series oforganisms—the G7, the

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Paris and London Clubs, Davos, and so forth. Finally, on a third

level ofthis first tier a heterogeneous set ofassociations (including

more or less the same powers that exercise hegemony on the military

and monetary levels) deploy cultural and biopolitical power on a

global level.

Below the first and highest tier ofunified global command

there is a second tier in which command is distributed broadly across

the world, emphasizing not so much unification as articulation.

This tier is structured primarily by the networks that transnational

capitalist corporations have extended throughout the world mar-

ket—networks ofcapital flows, technology flows, population flows,

and the like. These productive organizations that form and supply

the markets extend transversally under the umbrella and guarantee

ofthe central power that constitutes the first tier ofglobal power.

Ifwe were to take up the old Enlightenment notion ofthe construc-

tion of the senses by passing a rose in front of the face of the statue,

we could say that the transnational corporations bring the rigid

structure of the central power to life. In effect, through the global

distribution ofcapitals, technologies, goods, and populations, the

transnational corporations construct vast networks ofcommunica-

tion and provide the satisfaction of needs. The single and univocal

pinnacle ofworld command is thus articulated by the transnational

corporations and the organization ofmarkets. The world market

both homogenizes and differentiates territories, rewriting the geog-

raphy ofthe globe. Still on the second tier, on a level that is often

subordinated to the power ofthe transnational corporations, reside

the general set ofsovereign nation-states that now consist essentially

in local, territorialized organizations. The nation-states serve various

functions: political mediation with respect to the global hegemonic

powers, bargaining with respect to the transnational corporations,

and redistribution ofincome according to biopolitical needs within

their own limited territories. Nation-states are filters ofthe flow

ofglobal circulation and regulators ofthe articulation ofglobal

command; in other words, they capture and distribute the flows of

wealth to and from the global power, and they discipline their own

populations as much as this is still possible.

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311

The third and broadest tier ofthe pyramid, finally, consists of

groups that represent popular interests in the global power arrange-

ment. The multitude cannot be incorporated directly into the struc-

tures ofglobal power but must be filtered through mechanisms of

representation. Which groups and organizations fulfill the contesta-

tory and/or legitimating function of popular representation in the

global power structures? Who represents the People in the global

constitution? Or, more important, what forces and processes trans-

form the multitude into a People that can then be represented in

the global constitution? In many instances nation-states are cast in

this role, particularly the collective ofsubordinated or minor states.

Within the United Nations General Assembly, for example, collec-

tions ofsubordinate nation-states, the majority numerically but the

minority in terms ofpower, function as an at least symbolic con-

straint on and legitimation ofthe major powers. In this sense the

entire world is conceived as being represented on the floor ofthe

U.N. General Assembly and in other global forums. Here, since

the nation-states themselves are presented (both in the more or less

democratic countries and in the authoritarian regimes) as represent-

ing the will oftheir People, the representation ofnation-states on

a global scale can only lay claim to the popular will at two removes,

through two levels ofrepresentation: the nation-state representing

the People representing the multitude.

Nation-states, however, are certainly not the only organiza-

tions that construct and represent the People in the new global

arrangement. Also on this third tier ofthe pyramid, the global

People is represented more clearly and directly not by governmental

bodies but by a variety oforganizations that are at least relatively

independent ofnation-states and capital. These organizations are

often understood as functioning as the structures of a global civil

society, channeling the needs and desires ofthe multitude into

forms that can be represented within the functioning of the global

power structures. In this new global form we can still recognize

instances ofthe traditional components ofcivil society, such as the

media and religious institutions. The media have long positioned

themselves as the voice or even the conscience ofthe People in

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opposition to the power ofstates and the private interests ofcapital.

They are cast as a further check and balance on governmental

action, providing an objective and independent view ofall the

People want or need to know. It has long been clear, however,

that the media are in fact often not very independent from capital

on the one hand and states on the other.7 Religious organizations are

an even more long-standing sector ofnon-governmental institutions

that represent the People. The rise ofreligious fundamentalisms

(both Islamic and Christian) insofar as they represent the People

against the state should perhaps be understood as components of

this new global civil society—but when such religious organizations

stand against the state, they often tend to become the state them-

selves.

The newest and perhaps most important forces in the global

civil society go under the name ofnon-governmental organizations

(NGOs). The term NGO has not been given a very rigorous

definition, but we would define it as any organization that purports

to represent the People and operate in its interest, separate from

(and often against) the structures of the state. Many in fact regard

NGOs as synonymous with ‘‘people’s organizations’’ because the

People’s interest is defined in distinction from state interest.8 These

organizations operate at local, national, and supranational levels. The

term NGO thus groups together an enormous and heterogeneous set

oforganizations: in the early 1990s there were reported to be

more than eighteen thousand NGOs worldwide. Some ofthese

organizations fulfill something like the traditional syndicalist func-

tion oftrade unions (such as the Self-Employed Women’s Associa-

tion ofAhmedabad, India); others continue the missionary vocation

ofreligious sects (such as Catholic ReliefServices); and still others

seek to represent populations that are not represented by nation-

states (such as the World Council ofIndigenous Peoples). It would

be futile to try to characterize the functioning of this vast and

heterogeneous set oforganizations under one single definition.9

Some critics assert that NGOs, since they are outside and often

in conflict with state power, are compatible with and serve the

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313

neoliberal project ofglobal capital. While global capital attacks the

powers ofthe nation-state f

rom above, they argue, the NGOs

function as a ‘‘parallel strategy ‘from below’ ’ and present the ‘‘com-

munity face’’ of neoliberalism.10 It may indeed be true that the

activities ofmany NGOs serve to further the neoliberal project of

global capital, but we should be careful to point out that this cannot

adequately define the activities ofall NGOs categorically. The fact

ofbeing non-governmental or even opposed to the powers of

nation-states does not in itselfline these organizations up with the

interests ofcapital. There are many ways to be outside and opposed

to the state, ofwhich the neoliberal project is only one.

For our argument, and in the context ofEmpire, we are most

interested in a subset ofNGOs that strive to represent the least

among us, those who cannot represent themselves. These NGOs,

which are sometimes characterized broadly as humanitarian organi-

zations, are in fact the ones that have come to be among the most

powerful and prominent in the contemporary global order. Their

mandate is not really to further the particular interests of any limited

group but rather to represent directly global and universal human

interests. Human rights organizations (such as Amnesty International

and Americas Watch), peace groups (such as Witness ofPeace and

Shanti Sena), and the medical and famine relief agencies (such as

Oxfam and Me´decins sans frontières) all defend human life against

torture, starvation, massacre, imprisonment, and political assassina-

tion. Their political action rests on a universal moral call—what is

at stake is life itself. In this regard it is perhaps inaccurate to say

that these NGOs represent those who cannot represent themselves

(the warring populations, the starving masses, and so forth) or even

that they represent the global People in its entirety. They go further

than that. What they really represent is the vital force that underlies

the People, and thus they transform politics into a question of

generic life, life in all its generality. These NGOs extend far and

wide in the humus ofbiopower; they are the capillary ends ofthe

contemporary networks ofpower, or (to return to our general

metaphor) they are the broad base ofthe triangle ofglobal power.

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Here, at this broadest, most universal level, the activities ofthese

NGOs coincide with the workings ofEmpire ‘‘beyond politics,’’

on the terrain ofbiopower, meeting the needs oflife itself.

Polybius and Imperial Government

Ifwe take a step back from the level ofempirical description, we can

quickly recognize that the tripartite division offunctions and elements

that has emerged allows us to enter directly into the problematic of

Empire. In other words, the contemporary empirical situation resem-

bles the theoretical description ofimperial power as the supreme form

ofgovernment that Polybius constructed for Rome and the European

tradition handed down to us.11 For Polybius, the Roman Empire rep-

resented the pinnacle ofpolitical development because it brought

together the three ‘‘good’’ forms of power—monarchy, aristocracy,

and democracy, embodied in the persons ofthe Emperor, the Senate,

and the popular comitia. The Empire prevented these good forms from descending into the vicious cycle ofcorruption in which monarchy

becomes tyranny, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, and democracy be-

comes ochlocracy or anarchy.

According to Polybius’ analysis, monarchy anchors the unity

and continuity ofpower. It is the foundation and ultimate instance

ofimperial rule. Aristocracy defines justice, measure, and virtue,

and articulates their networks throughout the social sphere. It over-

sees the reproduction and circulation ofimperial rule. Finally, de-

mocracy organizes the multitude according to a representational

schema so that the People can be brought under the rule ofthe

regime and the regime can be constrained to satisfy the needs of

the People. Democracy guarantees discipline and redistribution.

The Empire we find ourselves faced with today is also—mutatis

mutandis—constituted by a functional equilibrium among these

three forms ofpower: the monarchic unity ofpower and its global

monopoly offorce; aristocratic articulations through transnational

corporations and nation-states; and democratic-representational co-

mitia, presented again in the form of nation-states along with the various kinds ofNGOs, media organizations, and other ‘‘popular’’

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315

organisms. One might say that the coming imperial constitution

brings together the three good traditional classifications ofgovern-

ment in a relationship that is formally compatible with Polybius’

model, even though certainly its contents are very different from

the social and political forces of the Roman Empire.

We can recognize the ways in which we are close to and

distant from the Polybian model of imperial power by situating

ourselves in the genealogy ofinterpretations ofPolybius in the

history ofEuropean political thought. The major line ofinterpreta-

tion comes down to us through Machiavelli and the Italian Renais-

sance; it animated the Machiavellian tradition in debates preceding

and following the English Revolution, and finally found its highest

application in the thought ofthe Founding Fathers and the drafting

ofthe U.S. Constitution.12 The key shift to come about in the

course ofthis interpretive tradition was the transformation ofPolyb-

ius’ classical tripartite model into a trifunctional model ofconstitutional construction. In a still medieval, proto-bourgeois society such as

Machiavelli’s Florence or even prerevolutionary England, the Po-

lybian synthesis was conceived as an edifice uniting three distinct

class bodies: to monarchy belonged the union and force, to aristoc-

racy the land and the army, and to the bourgeoisie the city and

money. Ifthe state were to function properly, every possible conflict

among these bodies had to be resolved in the interest ofthe totality.

In modern political science, however, from Montesquieu to the

Federalists, this synthesis was transformed into a model that regulated

not bodies but functions. 13 Social groups and classes were themselves considered embodying functions: the executive, the judiciary, and

the representative. These functions were abstracted from the collec-

tive social subjects or classes that enacted them and presented instead

as pure juridical elements. The three functions were then organized

in an equilibrium that was formally the same as the equilibrium

that had previously supported the interclass solution. It was an

equilibrium ofchecks and balances, ofweights and counterweights,

that continually managed to reproduce the unity ofthe state and

the coherence ofits parts.14

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It seems to us that in certain respects the original ancient

Polybian model ofthe constitution ofEmpire is closer to our reality

than the modern liberal tradition’s transformation of it. Today we

are once again in a genetic phase ofpower and its accumulation,

in which functions are seen primarily from the angle of the relations

and materiality of force rather than from the perspective of a possible

equilibrium and the formalization of the total definitive arrange-

ment. In this phase ofthe constitution ofEmpire, the demands

expressed by the modern development ofconstitutionalism (such

as the division ofpowers and the formal legality ofprocedures) are

not given the highest priority (see Section 1.1).

One could even argue that our experience ofthe constitution

(in formation) of Empire is really the development and coexistence

ofthe ‘‘bad’’ forms ofgovernment rather than the ‘‘good’’ forms,

as the tradition pretends. All the elements ofthe mixed constitution

appear at first sight in fact as through a distorting lens. Monarchy,

rather than grounding the legitimation and transcendent condition

ofthe unity ofpower, is presented as a global police force and thus

as a form of tyranny. The transnational aristocracy seems to prefer

financial speculation to entrepreneurial virtue and thus appears as

a parasitical oligarchy. Finally, the democratic forces that in this

framework ought to constitute the active and open element of the

imperial machine appear rather as corporative forces, as a set of

superstitions and fundamentalisms, betraying a spirit that is conserva-

tive when not downright reactionary.15 Both within the individual

states and on the international level, this limited sphere ofimperial

‘‘democracy’’ is configured as a People (an organized particularity that defends established privileges and properties) rather than as a

multitude (the universality offree and productive practices).

Hybrid Constitution

The Empire that is emerging today, however, is not really a throw-

back to the ancient Polybian model, even in its negative, ‘‘bad’’

form. The contemporary arrangement is better understood in post-

modern terms, that is, as an evolution beyond the modern, liberal

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317

model ofa mixed constitution. The framework ofjuridical formal-

ization, the constitutional mechanism ofguarantees, and the schema

ofequilibrium are all transformed along two primary axes in the

passage from the modern to the postmodern terrain.

The first axis oftransf

ormation involves the nature ofthe

mixture in the constitution—a passage from the ancient and modern

model ofa mixtum ofseparate bodies or functions to a process of

the hybridization ofgovernmental functions in the current situation.

The processes ofthe real subsumption, ofsubsuming labor under

capital and absorbing global society within Empire, force the figures

ofpower to destroy the spatial measure and distance that had defined

their relationships, merging the figures in hybrid forms. This muta-

tion of spatial relationships transforms the exercise of power itself.

First ofall, postmodern imperial monarchy involves rule over the

unity ofthe world market, and thus it is called on to guarantee the

circulation ofgoods, technologies, and labor power—to guarantee,

in effect, the collective dimension of the market. The processes of

the globalization ofmonarchic power, however, can make sense

only ifwe consider them in terms ofthe series ofhybridizations

that monarchy operates with the other forms of power. Imperial

monarchy is not located in a separate isolable place—and our post-

modern Empire has no Rome. The monarchic body is itselfmulti-

form and spatially diffuse. This process of hybridization is even

more clear with respect to the development ofthe aristocratic

function, and specifically the development and articulation of pro-

ductive networks and markets. In fact, aristocratic functions tend

to merge inextricably with monarchic functions. In the case of

postmodern aristocracy, the problem consists not only in creating

a vertical conduit between a center and a periphery for producing

and selling commodities, but also in continuously putting in relation

a wide horizon ofproducers and consumers within and among

markets. This omnilateral relationship between production and con-

sumption becomes all the more important when the production

ofcommodities tends to be defined predominantly by immaterial

services embedded in network structures. Here hybridization be-

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comes a central and conditioning element ofthe f

ormation of

circuits ofproduction and circulation.16 Finally, the democratic

functions of Empire are determined within these same monarchic

and aristocratic hybridizations, shifting their relations in certain

respects and introducing new relations offorce. On all three levels,

what was previously conceived as mixture, which was really the

organic interaction offunctions that remained separate and distinct,

now tends toward a hybridization ofthe functions themselves. We

might thus pose this first axis of transformation as a passage from

mixed constitution to hybrid constitution.

A second axis ofconstitutional transformation, which demon-

strates both a displacement ofconstitutional theory and a new quality

of the constitution itself, is revealed by the fact that in the present

phase, command must be exercised to an ever greater extent over

the temporal dimensions ofsociety and hence over the dimension

ofsubjectivity. We have to consider how the monarchic moment

functions both as a unified world government over the circulation

ofgoods and as a mechanism ofthe organization ofcollective social

labor that determines the conditions ofits reproduction.17 The

aristocratic moment must deploy its hierarchical command and its

ordering functions over the transnational articulation of production

and circulation, not only through traditional monetary instruments,

but also to an ever greater degree through the instruments and

dynamics ofthe cooperation ofsocial actors themselves. The pro-

cesses ofsocial cooperation have to be constitutionally formalized

as an aristocratic function. Finally, although both the monarchic

and the aristocratic functions allude to the subjective and productive

dimensions ofthe new hybrid constitution, the key to these transfor-

mations resides in the democratic moment, and the temporal dimen-

sion ofthe democratic moment has to refer ultimately to the multi-

tude. We should never forget, however, that we are dealing here

with the imperial overdetermination ofdemocracy, in which the

multitude is captured in flexible and modulating apparatuses of

control. This is precisely where the most important qualitative leap

must be recognized: from the disciplinary paradigm to the control

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319

paradigm ofgovernment.18 Rule is exercised directly over the move-

ments ofproductive and cooperating subjectivities; institutions are

formed and redefined continually according to the rhythm of these

movements; and the topography ofpower no longer has to do

primarily with spatial relations but is inscribed, rather, in the tempo-

ral displacements ofsubjectivities. Here we find once again the

non-place ofpower that our analysis ofsovereignty revealed earlier.

The non-place is the site where the hybrid control functions of

Empire are exercised.

In this imperial non-place, in the hybrid space that the constitu-

tional process constructs, we still find the continuous and irrepress-

ible presence ofsubjective movements. Our problematic remains

something like that ofthe mixed constitution, but now it is infused

with the full intensity of the displacements, modulations, and hy-

bridizations involved in the passage to postmodernity. Here the

movement from the social to the political and the juridical that

always defines constituent processes begins to take shape; here the

reciprocal relationships between social and political forces that de-

mand a formal recognition in the constitutional process begin to

emerge; and finally, here the various functions (monarchy, aristoc-

racy, and democracy) measure the force of the subjectivities that

constitute them and attempt to capture segments oftheir constit-

uent processes.

Struggleover theConstitution

Our ultimate objective in this analysis ofthe constitutional processes

and figures ofEmpire is to recognize the terrain on which contesta-

tion and alternatives might emerge. In Empire, as indeed was also

the case in modern and ancient regimes, the constitution itselfis a

site ofstruggle, but today the nature ofthat site and that struggle

is by no means clear. The general outlines oftoday’s imperial

constitution can be conceived in the form of a rhizomatic and

universal communication network in which relations are established

to and from all its points or nodes. Such a network seems paradoxi-

cally to be at once completely open and completely closed to

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struggle and intervention. On the one hand, the network formally

allows all possible subjects in the web ofrelations to be present

simultaneously, but on the other hand, the network itselfis a real

and proper non-place. The struggle over the constitution will have

to be played out on this ambiguous and shifting terrain.

There are three key variables that will define this struggle,

variables that act in the realm between the common and the singular,

between the axiomatic ofcommand and the self-identification of

the subject, and between the production ofsubjectivity by power

and the autonomous resistance ofthe subjects themselves. The

first variable involves the guarantee ofthe network and its general

control, in such a way that (positively) the network can always

function and (negatively) it cannot function against those in power.19

The second variable concerns those who distribute services in the

network and the pretense that these services are remunerated equita-

bly, so that the network can sustain and reproduce a capitalist

economic system and at the same time produce the social and

political segmentation that is proper to it.20 The third variable,

finally, is presented within the network itself. It deals with the

mechanisms by which differences among subjectivities are produced

and with the ways in which these differences are made to function

within the system.

According to these three variables, each subjectivity must be-

come a subject that is ruled in the general networks ofcontrol (in

the early modern sense ofthe one who is subject [ subdictus] to a

sovereign power), and at the same time each must also be an

independent agent ofproduction and consumption within net-

works. Is this double articulation really possible? Is it possible for

the system to sustain simultaneously political subjection and the

subjectivity ofthe producer/consumer? It does not really seem so.

In effect, the fundamental condition of the existence of the universal

network, which is the central hypothesis ofthis constitutional framework, is that it be hybrid, and that is, for our purposes, that the political subject be fleeting and passive, while the producing and

consuming agent is present and active. This means that, far from

M I X E D C O N S T I T U T I O N

321

being a simple repetition ofa traditional equilibrium, the formation

ofthe new mixed constitution leads to a fundamental disequilibrium

among the established actors and thus to a new social dynamic that

liberates the producing and consuming subject from (or at least

makes ambiguous its position within) the mechanisms ofpolitical

subjection. Here is where the primary site ofstruggle seems to

emerge, on the terrain ofthe production and regulation ofsubjec-

tivity.

Is this really the situation that will result from the capitalist

transformation ofthe mode ofproduction, the cultural develop-

ments ofpostmodernism, and the processes ofpolitical constitution

ofEmpire? We are certainly not yet in the position to come to

that conclusion. We can see, nonetheless, that in this new situation

the strategy ofequilibrated and regulated participation, which the

liberal and imperial mixed constitutions have always followed, is

confronted by new difficulties and by the strong expression of

autonomy by the individual and collective productive subjectivities

involved in the process. On the terrain ofthe production and

regulation ofsubjectivity, and in the disjunction between the politi-

cal subject and the economic subject, it seems that we can identify

a real field ofstruggle in which all the gambits ofthe constitution

and the equilibria among forces can be reopened—a true and proper

situation ofcrisis and maybe eventually ofrevolution.

Spectacleof theConstitution

The open field ofstruggle that seems to appear from this analysis,

however, quickly disappears when we consider the new mechanisms

by which these hybrid networks ofparticipation are manipulated

from above.21 In effect, the glue that holds together the diverse

functions and bodies of the hybrid constitution is what Guy Debord

called the spectacle, an integrated and diffuse apparatus of images

and ideas that produces and regulates public discourse and opinion.22

In the society ofthe spectacle, what was once imagined as the public

sphere, the open terrain ofpolitical exchange and participation,

completely evaporates. The spectacle destroys any collective form of

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sociality—individualizing social actors in their separate automobiles

and in front of separate video screens—and at the same time imposes

a new mass sociality, a new uniformity of action and thought.

On this spectacular terrain, traditional forms of struggle over the

constitution become inconceivable.

The common conception that the media (and television in

particular) have destroyed politics is false only to the extent that it

seems based on an idealized notion ofwhat democratic political

discourse, exchange, and participation consisted ofin the era prior

to this media age. The difference of the contemporary manipulation

of politics by the media is not really a difference of nature but a

difference of degree. In other words, there have certainly existed

previously numerous mechanisms for shaping public opinion and

public perception ofsociety, but contemporary media provide enor-

mously more powerful instruments for these tasks. As Debord says,

in the society ofthe spectacle only what appears exists, and the

major media have something approaching a monopoly over what

appears to the general population. This law ofthe spectacle clearly

reigns in the realm ofmedia-driven electoral politics, an art of

manipulation perhaps developed first in the United States but now

spread throughout the world. The discourse ofelectoral seasons

focuses almost exclusively on how candidates appear, on the timing

and circulation ofimages. The major media networks conduct a

sort ofsecond-order spectacle that reflects on (and undoubtedly

shapes in part) the spectacle mounted by the candidates and their

political parties. Even the old calls for a focus less on image and

more on issues and substance in political campaigns that we heard

not so long ago seem hopelessly naive today. Similarly, the notions

that politicians function as celebrities and that political campaigns

operate on the logic ofadvertising—hypotheses that seemed radical

and scandalous thirty years ago—are today taken for granted. Politi-

cal discourse is an articulated sales pitch, and political participation

is reduced to selecting among consumable images.

When we say that the spectacle involves the media manipulation

ofpublic opinion and political action, we do not mean to suggest

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323

that there is a little man behind the curtain, a great Wizard ofOz

who controls all that is seen, thought, and done. There is no single

locus ofcontrol that dictates the spectacle. The spectacle, however,

generally functions as if there were such a point ofcentral control. As Debord says, the spectacle is both diffuse and integrated. Conspiracy

theories ofgovernmental and extragovernmental plots ofglobal

control, which have certainly proliferated in recent decades, should

thus be recognized as both true and false. As Fredric Jameson

explains wonderfully in the context of contemporary film, conspir-

acy theories are a crude but effective mechanism for approximating

the functioning of the totality.23 The spectacle ofpolitics functions

as if the media, the military, the government, the transnational

corporations, the global financial institutions, and so forth were all

consciously and explicitly directed by a single power even though

in reality they are not.

The society ofthe spectacle rules by wielding an age-old

weapon. Hobbes recognized long ago that for effective domination

‘‘the Passion to be reckoned upon, is Fear.’’24 For Hobbes, fear is

what binds and ensures social order, and still today fear is the

primary mechanism ofcontrol that fills the society ofthe spectacle.25

Although the spectacle seems to function through desire and plea-

sure (desire for commodities and pleasure of consumption), it really

works through the communication offear—or rather, the spectacle

creates forms of desire and pleasure that are intimately wedded to

fear. In the vernacular of early modern European philosophy, the

communication offear was called superstition. And indeed the politics offear has always been spread through a kind ofsuperstition. What

has changed are the forms and mechanisms of the superstitions that

communicate fear.

The spectacle off

ear that holds together the postmodern,

hybrid constitution and the media manipulation ofthe public and

politics certainly takes the ground away from a struggle over the

imperial constitution. It seems as ifthere is no place left to stand,

no weight to any possible resistance, but only an implacable machine

ofpower. It is important to recognize the power ofthe spectacle

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and the impossibility oftraditional forms ofstruggle, but this is not

the end ofthe story. As the old sites and forms ofstruggle decline,

new and more powerful ones arise. The spectacle of imperial order

is not an ironclad world, but actually opens up the real possibility

ofits overturning and new potentials for revolution.

3.6

C A P I T A L I S T S O V E R E I G N T Y ,

O R A D M I N I S T E R I N G T H E G L O B A L

S O C I E T Y O F C O N T R O L

As long as society is founded on money we won’t have enough

ofit.

Leaflet, Paris strike, December 1995

This is the abolition ofthe capitalist mode ofproduction within the

capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-abolishing con-

tradiction, which presents itself prima facie as a mere point oftransition to a new form of production.

Karl Marx

Capital and sovereignty might well appear to be a contra-

dictory coupling. Modern sovereignty relies fundamentally on the

transcendence ofthe sovereign—be it the Prince, the state, the

nation, or even the People—over the social plane. Hobbes estab-

lished the spatial metaphor ofsovereignty for all modern political

thought in his unitary Leviathan that rises above and overarches

society and the multitude. The sovereign is the surplus ofpower

that serves to resolve or defer the crisis of modernity. Furthermore,

modern sovereignty operates, as we have seen in detail, through

the creation and maintenance offixed boundaries among territories,

populations, social functions, and so forth. Sovereignty is thus also

a surplus ofcode, an overcoding ofsocial flows and f

unctions.

In other words, sovereignty operates through the striation ofthe

social field.

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Capital, on the contrary, operates on the plane of immanence,

through relays and networks ofrelationships ofdomination, without

reliance on a transcendent center ofpower. It tends historically to

destroy traditional social boundaries, expanding across territories

and enveloping always new populations within its processes. Capital

functions, according to the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari,

through a generalized decoding offluxes, a massive deterritorializa-

tion, and then through conjunctions ofthese deterritorialized and

decoded fluxes.1 We can understand the functioning of capital as

deterritorializing and immanent in three primary aspects that Marx

himselfanalyzed. First, in the processes ofprimitive accumulation,

capital separates populations from specifically coded territories and

sets them in motion. It clears the Estates and creates a ‘‘free’’ proletar-

iat. Traditional cultures and social organizations are destroyed in

capital’s tireless march through the world to create the networks

and pathways ofa single cultural and economic system ofproduction

and circulation. Second, capital brings all forms of value together

on one common plane and links them all through money, their

general equivalent. Capital tends to reduce all previously established

forms ofstatus, title, and privilege to the level ofthe cash nexus,

that is, to quantitative and commensurable economic terms. Third,

the laws by which capital functions are not separate and fixed laws

that stand above and direct capital’s operations from on high, but

historically variable laws that are immanent to the very functioning

ofcapital: the laws ofthe rate ofprofit, the rate ofexploitation,

the realization ofsurplus value, and so forth.

Capital therefore demands not a transcendent power but a

mechanism ofcontrol that resides on the plane ofimmanence.

Through the social development ofcapital, the mechanisms of

modern sovereignty—the processes ofcoding, overcoding, and

recoding that imposed a transcendent order over a bounded and

segmented social terrain—are progressively replaced by an axiomatic:

that is, a set ofequations and relationships that determines and

combines variables and coefficients immediately and equally across

C A P I T A L I S T S O V E R E I G N T Y

327

various terrains without reference to prior and fixed definitions or

terms.2 The primary characteristic ofsuch an axiomatic is that

relations are prior to their terms. In other words, within an axiomatic

system, postulates ‘‘are not propositions that can be true or false,

since they contain relatively indeterminate variables. Only when we give these variables particular values, or in other words, when we

substitute constants for them, do the postulates become propositions,

true or false, according to the constants chosen.’’3 Capital operates

through just such an axiomatic ofpropositional f

unctions. The

general equivalence ofmoney brings all elements together in quanti-

fiable, commensurable relations, and then the immanent laws or

equations ofcapital determine their deployment and relation accord-

ing to the particular constants that are substituted for the variables

ofthe equations. Just as an axiomatic destabilizes any terms and

definitions prior to the relations oflogical deduction, so too capital

sweeps clear the fixed barriers ofprecapitalist society—and even

the boundaries ofthe nation-state tend to fade into the background

as capital realizes itselfin the world market. Capital tends toward

a smooth space defined by uncoded flows, flexibility, continual

modulation, and tendential equalization.4

The transcendence ofmodern sovereignty thus conflicts with

the immanence ofcapital. Historically, capital has relied on sover-

eignty and the support ofits structures ofright and force, but those

same structures continually contradict in principle and obstruct in

practice the operation ofcapital, finally obstructing its development.

The entire history ofmodernity that we have traced thus far might

be seen as the evolution ofthe attempts to negotiate and mediate

this contradiction. The historical process ofmediation has been not

an equal give and take, but rather a one-sided movement from

sovereignty’s transcendent position toward capital’s plane ofimma-

nence. Foucault traces this movement in his analysis ofthe passage

in European rule between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

from ‘‘sovereignty’’ (an absolute form of sovereignty centralized in

the will and person ofthe Prince) and ‘‘governmentality’’ (a form

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ofsovereignty expressed through a decentralized economy ofrule

and management ofgoods and populations).5 This passage between

forms of sovereignty coincides importantly with the early develop-

ment and expansion ofcapital. Each ofthe modern paradigms of

sovereignty indeed supports capital’s operation for a specific histori-

cal period, but at the same time they pose obstacles to capital’s

development that eventually have to be overcome. This evolving

relationship is perhaps the central problematic to be confronted by

any theory ofthe capitalist state.

Civil society served for one historical period as mediator be-

tween the immanent forces of capital and the transcendent power

ofmodern sovereignty. Hegel adopted the term ‘‘civil society’’ from

his reading ofBritish economists, and he understood it as a mediation

between the self-interested endeavors of a plurality of economic

individuals and the unified interest ofthe state. Civil society mediates

between the (immanent) Many and the (transcendent) One. The

institutions that constitute civil society functioned as passageways

that channel flows ofsocial and economic forces, raising them up

toward a coherent unity and, flowing back, like an irrigation net-

work, distribute the command ofthe unity throughout the imma-

nent social field. These non-state institutions, in other words, orga-

nized capitalist society under the order ofthe state and in turn

spread state rule throughout society. In the terms ofour conceptual

framework, we might say that civil society was the terrain of the

becoming-immanent ofmodern state sovereignty (down to capitalist

society) and at the same time inversely the becoming-transcendent

ofcapitalist society (up to the state).

In our times, however, civil society no longer serves as the

adequate point ofmediation between capital and sovereignty. The

structures and institutions that constitute it are today progressively

withering away. We have argued elsewhere that this withering can

be grasped clearly in terms ofthe decline ofthe dialectic between

the capitalist state and labor, that is, in the decline of the effectiveness and role oflabor unions, the decline ofcollective bargaining with

labor, and the decline ofthe representation oflabor in the constitu-

C A P I T A L I S T S O V E R E I G N T Y

329

tion.6 The withering ofcivil society might also be recognized as

concomitant with the passage from disciplinary society to the society

ofcontrol (see Section 2.6). Today the social institutions that consti-

tute disciplinary society (the school, the family, the hospital, the

factory), which are in large part the same as or closely related to

those understood as civil society, are everywhere in crisis. As the

walls ofthese institutions break down, the logics ofsubjectification

that previously operated within their limited spaces now spread

out, generalized across the social field. The breakdown ofthe institu-

tions, the withering ofcivil society, and the decline ofdisciplinary

society all involve a smoothing ofthe striation ofmodern social

space. Here arise the networks ofthe society ofcontrol.7

With respect to disciplinary society and civil society, the society

ofcontrol marks a step toward the plane ofimmanence. The disci-

plinary institutions, the boundaries of the effectivity of their logics,

and their striation ofsocial space all constitute instances ofverticality

or transcendence over the social plane. We should be careful, how-

ever, to locate where exactly this transcendence ofdisciplinary

society resides. Foucault was insistent on the fact, and this was the

brilliant core ofhis analysis, that the exercise ofdiscipline is abso-

lutely immanent to the subjectivities under its command. In other

words, discipline is not an external voice that dictates our practices

from on high, overarching us, as Hobbes would say, but rather

something like an inner compulsion indistinguishable from our

will, immanent to and inseparable from our subjectivity itself. The

institutions that are the condition ofpossibility and that define

spatially the zones of effectivity of the exercise of discipline, how-

ever, do maintain a certain separation from the social forces pro-

duced and organized. They are in effect an instance of sovereignty,

or rather a point ofmediation with sovereignty. The walls ofthe

prison both enable and limit the exercise ofcarceral logics. They

differentiate social space.

Foucault negotiates with enormous subtlety this distance be-

tween the transcendent walls ofthe institutions and the immanent

exercise ofdiscipline through his theories ofthe dispositif and the 330

P A S S A G E S O F P R O D U C T I O N

diagram, which articulate a series ofstages ofabstraction.8 In some-

what simplified terms, we can say that the dispositif (which is translated as either mechanism, apparatus, or deployment) is the general

strategy that stands behind the immanent and actual exercise of

discipline. Carceral logic, for example, is the unified dispositif that

oversees or subtends—and is thus abstracted and distinct from—the

multiplicity ofprison practices. At a second level ofabstraction, the

diagram enables the deployments ofthe disciplinary dispositif. For example, the carceral architecture ofthe panopticon, which makes

inmates constantly visible to a central point ofpower, is the diagram

or virtual design that is actualized in the various disciplinary dispos-

itifs. Finally, the institutions themselves instantiate the diagram in

particular and concrete social forms as well. The prison (its walls,

administrators, guards, laws, and so forth) does not rule its inmates

the way a sovereign commands its subjects. It creates a space in

which inmates, through the strategies ofcarceral dispositif

s and

through actual practices, discipline themselves. It would be more

precise to say, then, that the disciplinary institution is not itself

sovereign, but its abstraction from or transcendence above the social

field ofthe production ofsubjectivity constitutes the key element

in the exercise ofsovereignty in disciplinary society. Sovereignty

has become virtual (but it is for that no less real), and it is actualized

always and everywhere through the exercise ofdiscipline.

Today the collapse ofthe walls that delimited the institutions

and the smoothing ofsocial striation are symptoms ofthe flattening

ofthese vertical instances toward the horizontality ofthe circuits

ofcontrol. The passage to the society ofcontrol does not in any

way mean the end ofdiscipline. In fact, the immanent exercise of

discipline—that is, the self-disciplining of subjects, the incessant

whisperings ofdisciplinary logics within subjectivities them-

selves—is extended even more generally in the society ofcontrol.

What has changed is that, along with the collapse ofthe institutions,

the disciplinary dispositifs have become less limited and bounded

spatially in the social field. Carceral discipline, school discipline,

factory discipline, and so forth interweave in a hybrid production

C A P I T A L I S T S O V E R E I G N T Y

331

of subjectivity. In effect, in the passage to the society of control,

the elements oftranscendence ofdisciplinary society decline while

the immanent aspects are accentuated and generalized.

The immanent production ofsubjectivity in the society of

control corresponds to the axiomatic logic ofcapital, and their

resemblance indicates a new and more complete compatibility be-

tween sovereignty and capital. The production ofsubjectivity in

civil society and disciplinary society did in a certain period further

the rule and facilitate the expansion of capital. The modern social

institutions produced social identities that were much more mobile

and flexible than the previous subjective figures. The subjectivities

produced in the modern institutions were like the standardized

machine parts produced in the mass factory: the inmate, the mother,

the worker, the student, and so forth. Each part played a specific

role in the assembled machine, but it was standardized, produced

en masse, and thus replaceable with any part ofits type. At a certain

point, however, the fixity ofthese standardized parts, ofthe identities

produced by the institutions, came to pose an obstacle to the further

progression toward mobility and flexibility. The passage toward the

society ofcontrol involves a production ofsubjectivity that is not

fixed in identity but hybrid and modulating. As the walls that defined

and isolated the effects of the modern institutions progressively

break down, subjectivities tend to be produced simultaneously by

numerous institutions in different combinations and doses. Certainly

in disciplinary society each individual had many identities, but to

a certain extent the different identities were defined by different

places and different times of life: one was mother or father at home,

worker in the factory, student at school, inmate in prison, and

mental patient in the asylum. In the society ofcontrol, it is precisely

these places, these discrete sites ofapplicability, that tend to lose

their definition and delimitations. A hybrid subjectivity produced

in the society ofcontrol may not carry the identity ofa prison

inmate or a mental patient or a factory worker, but may still be

constituted simultaeously by all oftheir logics. It is factory worker

outside the factory, student outside school, inmate outside prison,

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insane outside the asylum—all at the same time. It belongs to no

identity and all ofthem—outside the institutions but even more

intensely ruled by their disciplinary logics.9 Just like imperial sover-

eignty, the subjectivities ofthe society ofcontrol have mixed consti-

tutions.

A Smooth World

In the passage ofsovereignty toward the plane ofimmanence, the

collapse ofboundaries has taken place both within each national

context and on a global scale. The withering ofcivil society and

the general crisis ofthe disciplinary institutions coincide with the

decline ofnation-states as boundaries that mark and organize the

divisions in global rule. The establishment ofa global society of

control that smooths over the striae ofnational boundaries goes

hand in hand with the realization ofthe world market and the real

subsumption ofglobal society under capital.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, imperialism

contributed to capital’s survival and expansion (see Section 3.1).

The partition ofthe world among the dominant nation-states, the

establishment ofcolonial administrations, the imposition oftrade

exclusives and tariffs, the creation of monopolies and cartels, differ-

entiated zones ofraw material extraction and industrial production,

and so forth all aided capital in its period of global expansion.

Imperialism was a system designed to serve the needs and further

the interests ofcapital in its phase ofglobal conquest. And yet, as

most ofthe (communist, socialist, and capitalist) critics ofimperialism have noted, imperialism also from its inception conflicted with

capital. It was a medicine that itselfthreatened the life ofthe patient.

Although imperialism provided avenues and mechanisms for capital

to pervade new territories and spread the capitalist mode ofproduc-

tion, it also created and reinforced rigid boundaries among the

various global spaces, strict notions of inside and outside that effec-

tively blocked the free flow of capital, labor, and goods—thus

necessarily precluding the full realization of the world market.

Imperialism is a machine ofglobal striation, channeling, cod-

ing, and territorializing the flows ofcapital, blocking certain flows

C A P I T A L I S T S O V E R E I G N T Y

333

and facilitating others. The world market, in contrast, requires a

smooth space ofuncoded and deterritorialized flows. This conflict

between the striation ofimperialism and the smooth space ofthe

capitalist world market gives us a new perspective that allows us

to reconsider Rosa Luxemburg’s prediction ofcapitalist collapse:

‘‘Though imperialism is the historical method for prolonging the

career ofcapitalism, it is also the sure means ofbringing it to a

swift conclusion.’’10 The international order and striated space of

imperialism did indeed serve to further capitalism, but it eventually

became a fetter to the deterritorializing flows and smooth space of

capitalist development, and ultimately it had to be cast aside. Rosa

Luxemburg was essentially right: imperialism would have been the death

of capital had it not been overcome. The full realization of the world market is necessarily the end ofimperialism.

The decline ofthe power ofnation-states and the dissolution

ofthe international order bring with them the definitive end of

the effectiveness of the term ‘‘Third World.’’ One could tell this story

as a very simple narrative. The term was coined as the complement to

the bipolar cold war division between the dominant capitalist nations

and the major socialist nations, such that the Third World was

conceived as what was outside this primary conflict, the free space

or frontier over which the first two worlds would compete. Since

the cold war is now over, the logic ofthis division is no longer

effective. This is true, but the neat closure of this simple narrative

fails to account for the real history of the term in its important uses

and effects.

Many argued, beginning at least as early as the 1970s, that the

Third World never really existed, in the sense that the conception

attempts to pose as a homogeneous unit an essentially diverse set

ofnations, failing to grasp and even negating the significant social,

economic, and cultural differences between Paraguay and Pakistan,

Morocco and Mozambique. Recognizing this real multiplicity,

however, should not blind us to the fact that, from the point of

view ofcapital in its march ofglobal conquest, such a unitary and

homogenizing conception did have a certain validity. For example,

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Rosa Luxemburg clearly takes the standpoint ofcapital when she

divides the world into the capitalist domain and the noncapitalist

environment. The various zones ofthat environment are undoubt-

edly radically different from one another, but from the standpoint

ofcapital it is all the outside: potential terrain for its expanded

accumulation and its future conquest. During the cold war, when

the regions of the Second World were effectively closed, Third

World meant to the dominant capitalist nations the remaining open

space, the terrain ofpossibility. The diverse cultural, social, and

economic forms could all potentially be subsumed formally under

the dynamic ofcapitalist production and the capitalist markets. From

the standpoint ofthis potential subsumption, despite the real

and substantial differences among nations, the Third World was

really one.

It is similarly logical when Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein,

and others differentiate within the capitalist domain among central,

peripheral, and semi-peripheral countries.11 Center, periphery, and

semi-periphery are distinguished by different social, political, and

bureaucratic forms, different productive processes, and different

forms of accumulation. (The more recent conceptual division be-

tween North and South is not significantly different in this regard.)

Like the First–Second–Third World conception, the division of

the capitalist sphere into center, periphery, and semi-periphery

homogenizes and eclipses real differences among nations and cul-

tures, but does so in the interest ofhighlighting a tendential unity

ofpolitical, social, and economic forms that emerge in the long

imperialist processes offormal subsumption. In other words, Third

World, South, and periphery all homogenize real differences to

highlight the unifying processes of capitalist development, but also

and more important, they name the potential unity of an international

opposition, the potential confluence of anticapitalist countries and forces.

The geographical divisions among nation-states or even be-

tween central and peripheral, northern and southern clusters of

nation-states are no longer sufficient to grasp the global divisions

and distribution ofproduction, accumulation, and social f

orms.

C A P I T A L I S T S O V E R E I G N T Y

335

Through the decentralization ofproduction and the consolidation

ofthe world market, the international divisions and flows oflabor

and capital have fractured and multiplied so that it is no longer

possible to demarcate large geographical zones as center and periph-

ery, North and South. In geographical regions such as the Southern

Cone ofLatin America or Southeast Asia, all levels ofproduction

can exist simultaneously and side by side, from the highest levels

oftechnology, productivity and accumulation to the lowest, with

a complex social mechanism maintaining their differentiation and

interaction. In the metropolises, too, labor spans the continuum

from the heights to the depths of capitalist production: the sweat-

shops ofNew York and Paris can rival those ofHong Kong and

Manila. Ifthe First World and the Third World, center and periph-

ery, North and South were ever really separated along national

lines, today they clearly infuse one another, distributing inequalities

and barriers along multiple and fractured lines. This is not to say

that the United States and Brazil, Britain and India are now identical

territories in terms ofcapitalist production and circulation, but rather

that between them are no differences of nature, only differences of

degree. The various nations and regions contain different propor-

tions ofwhat was thought ofas First World and Third, center and

periphery, North and South. The geography ofuneven develop-

ment and the lines ofdivision and hierarchy will no longer be

found along stable national or international boundaries, but in fluid

infra- and supranational borders.

Some may protest, with a certain justification, that the domi-

nant voices ofthe global order are proclaiming the nation-state

dead just when ‘‘the nation’’ has emerged as a revolutionary weapon

for the subordinated, for the wretched of the earth. After the victory

ofnational liberation struggles and after the emergence ofpotentially

destabilizing international alliances, which matured for decades after

the Bandung Conference, what better way to undermine the power

ofThird World nationalism and internationalism than to deprive

it ofits central and guiding support, the nation-state! In other words,

according to this view, which provides at least one plausible narrative

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for this complex history, the nation-state, which had been the

guarantor ofinternational order and the keystone to imperialist

conquest and sovereignty, became through the rise and organization

ofanti-imperialist f

orces the element that most endangered the

international order. Thus imperialism in retreat was forced to aban-

don and destroy the prize ofits own armory before the weapon

could be wielded against it.

We believe, however, that it is a grave mistake to harbor any

nostalgia for the powers of the nation-state or to resurrect any

politics that celebrates the nation. First of all, these efforts are in

vain because the decline ofthe nation-state is not simply the result

ofan ideological position that might be reversed by an act ofpolitical

will: it is a structural and irreversible process. The nation was not

only a cultural formulation, a feeling of belonging, and a shared

heritage, but also and perhaps primarily a juridico-economic struc-

ture. The declining effectiveness of this structure can be traced

clearly through the evolution ofa whole series ofglobal juridico-

economic bodies, such as GATT, the World Trade Organization,

the World Bank, and the IMF. The globalization ofproduction

and circulation, supported by this supranational juridical scaffolding,

supersedes the effectiveness of national juridical structures. Second,

and more important, even if the nation were still to be an effective

weapon, the nation carries with it a whole series ofrepressive

structures and ideologies (as we argued in Section 2.2), and any

strategy that relies on it should be rejected on that basis.

The New Segmentations

The general equalization or smoothing ofsocial space, however,

in both the withering ofcivil society and the decline ofnational

boundaries, does not indicate that social inequalities and segmenta-

tions have disappeared. On the contrary, they have in many respects

become more severe, but under a different form. It might be more

accurate to say that center and periphery, North and South no

longer define an international order but rather have moved closer

to one another. Empire is characterized by the close proximity of

C A P I T A L I S T S O V E R E I G N T Y

337

extremely unequal populations, which creates a situation ofperma-

nent social danger and requires the powerful apparatuses of the

society ofcontrol to ensure separation and guarantee the new man-

agement ofsocial space.

Trends in urban architecture in the world’s megalopolises

demonstrate one aspect ofthese new segmentations. Where the

extremes ofwealth and poverty have increased and the physical

distance between rich and poor has decreased in global cities such

as Los Angeles, Sa˜o Paulo, and Singapore, elaborate measures have

to be taken to maintain their separation. Los Angeles is perhaps

the leader in the trend toward what Mike Davis calls ‘ fortress

architecture,’’ in which not only private homes but also commercial

centers and government buildings create open and free environ-

ments internally by creating a closed and impenetrable exterior.12

This tendency in urban planning and architecture has established

in concrete, physical terms what we called earlier the end ofthe

outside, or rather the decline ofpublic space that had allowed for

open and unprogrammed social interaction.

Architectural analysis, however, can give only a first introduc-

tion to the problematic ofthe new separations and segmentations.

The new lines ofdivision are more clearly defined by the politics

oflabor. The computer and informational revolution that has made

it possible to link together different groups of labor power in real

time across the world has led to furious and unrestrained competition

among workers. Information technologies have been used to

weaken the structural resistances oflabor power, in terms ofboth the

rigidity of wage structures and cultural and geographical differences.

Capital has thus been able to impose both temporal flexibility and

spatial mobility. It should be clear that this process ofweakening

the resistances and rigidities oflabor power has become a completely

political process oriented toward a form of management that maxi-

mizes economic profit. This is where the theory ofimperial adminis-

trative action becomes central.

The imperial politics oflabor is designed primarily to lower

the price of labor. This is, in effect, something like a process of

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primitive accumulation, a process ofreproletarianization. The regu-

lation ofthe working day, which was the real keystone to socialist

politics throughout the past two centuries, has been completely

overturned. Working days are often twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours

long without weekends or vacations; there is work for men, women,

and children alike, and for the old and the handicapped. Empire

has work for everyone! The more unregulated the regime of exploi-

tation, the more work there is. This is the basis on which the new

segmentations ofwork are created. They are determined (in the

language of the economists) by the different levels of productivity,

but we could summarize the change simply by saying that there is

more work and lower wages. Like God’s broom sweeping across

society (this is how Hegel described the imposition ofbarbarian

law, principally at the hands ofAttila the Hun), the new norms of

productivity differentiate and segment the workers. There are still

places in the world where poverty allows for the reproduction of

labor power at a lower cost, and there are still places in the metropo-

lises where differences of consumption force a lower class to sell

itselffor less, or really to submit itselfto a more brutal regime of

capitalist exploitation.

Financial and monetary flows follow more or less the same

global patterns as the flexible organization oflabor power. On the

one hand, speculative and finance capital goes where the price of

labor power is lowest and where the administrative force to guaran-

tee exploitation is highest. On the other hand, the countries that

still maintain the rigidities oflabor and oppose its full flexibility

and mobility are punished, tormented, and finally destroyed by

global monetary mechanisms. The stock market drops when the

unemployment rate goes down, or really when the percentage of

workers who are not immediately flexible and mobile rises. The

same happens when the social policies in a country do not com-

pletely accommodate the imperial mandate offlexibility and mobil-

ity—or better, when some elements ofthe welfare state are pre-

served as a sign ofthe persistence ofthe nation-state. Monetary

policies enforce the segmentations dictated by labor policies.

C A P I T A L I S T S O V E R E I G N T Y

339

Fear ofviolence, poverty, and unemployment is in the end

the primary and immediate force that creates and maintains these

new segmentations. What stands behind the various politics ofthe

new segmentations is a politics ofcommunication. As we argued

earlier, the fundamental content of the information that the enor-

mous communication corporations present is fear. The constant

fear of poverty and anxiety over the future are the keys to creating

a struggle among the poor for work and maintaining conflict among

the imperial proletariat. Fear is the ultimate guarantee ofthe new

segmentations.

Imperial Administration

After we have seen how traditional social barriers are lowered in

the formation of Empire and how at the same time new segmenta-

tions are created, we must also investigate the administrative modal-

ities through which these various developments unfold. It is easy

to see that these processes are full of contradictions. When power

is made immanent and sovereignty transforms into governmentality,

the functions ofrule and regimes ofcontrol have to develop on a

continuum that flattens differences to a common plane. We have

seen, however, that differences are, on the contrary, accentuated

in this process, in such a way that imperial integration determines

new mechanisms ofthe separation and segmentation ofdifferent

strata ofthe population. The problem ofimperial administration is

thus to manage this process of integration and therefore to pacify,

mobilize, and control the separated and segmented social forces.

In these terms, however, the problem is still not clearly posed.

The segmentation ofthe multitude has in fact been the condition

of political administration throughout history. The difference today

lies in the fact that, whereas in modern regimes of national sover-

eignty, administration worked toward a linear integration ofconflicts and toward a coherent apparatus that could repress them, that is,

toward the rational normalization ofsocial life with respect to both

the administrative goal ofequilibrium and the development of

administrative reforms, in the imperial framework administration

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becomes fractal and aims to integrate conflicts not by imposing a

coherent social apparatus but by controlling differences. It is no

longer possible to understand imperial administration in the terms

ofa Hegelian definition ofadministration, which is grounded on

the mediations ofbourgeois society that constitute the spatial center

ofsocial life; but it is equally impossible to understand it according

to a Weberian definition, that is, a rational definition that is based

on continuous temporal mediation and an emerging principle ofle-

gitimacy.

A first principle that defines imperial administration is that in

it the management of political ends tends to be separate from the management of bureaucratic means. The new paradigm is thus not only different from but opposed to the old public administration model of the

modern state, which continually strove to coordinate its system of

bureaucratic means with its political ends. In the imperial regime,

bureaucracies (and administrative means in general) are considered

not according to the linear logics oftheir functionality to goals,

but according to differential and multiple instrumental logics. The

problem ofadministration is not a problem ofunity but one of

instrumental multifunctionality. Whereas for the legitimation and

administration ofthe modern state the universality and equality of

administrative actions were paramount, in the imperial regime what

is fundamental is the singularity and adequacy of the actions to

specific ends.

From this first principle, however, there arises what seems to

be a paradox. Precisely to the extent that administration is singular-

ized and no longer functions simply as the actor for centralized

political and deliberative organs, it becomes increasingly autono-

mous and engages more closely with various social groups: business

and labor groups, ethnic and religious groups, legal and criminal

groups, and so forth. Instead of contributing to social integration,

imperial administration acts rather as a disseminating and differentiating mechanism. This is the second principle ofimperial administration.

Administration will thus tend to present specific procedures that

allow the regime to engage directly with the various social singulari-

C A P I T A L I S T S O V E R E I G N T Y

341

ties, and the administration will be more effective the more direct

its contact with the different elements of social reality. Hence admin-

istrative action becomes increasingly autocentric and thus functional

only to the specific problems that it has to resolve. It becomes more

and more difficult to recognize a continuous line of administrative

action across the set ofrelays and networks ofthe imperial regime.

In short, the old administrative principle ofuniversality, treating

all equally, is replaced by the differentiation and singularization of

procedures, treating each differently.

Even though it is difficult now to trace a coherent and universal

line ofprocedure, such as the one that characterized modern sover-

eign systems, this does not mean that the imperial apparatus is

not unified. The autonomy and unity ofadministrative action is

constructed in other ways, by means neither ofthe normative

deduction ofcontinental European juridical systems nor ofthe

procedural formalism of Anglo-Saxon systems. Rather, it is created

by conforming to the structural logics that are active in the construc-

tion ofEmpire, such as the police and military logics (or really the

repression ofpotential subversive forces in the context ofimperial

peace), the economic logics (the imposition ofthe market, which

in turn is ruled by the monetary regime), and the ideological and

communicative logics. The only way that administrative action

gains its autonomy and legitimate authority in the imperial regime

is by following along the differentiating lines of these logics. This

authorization, however, is not direct. Administration is not strategi-

cally oriented toward the realization ofthe imperial logics. It submits

to them, insofar as they animate the great military, monetary, and

communicative means that authorize administration itself. Adminis-

trative action has become fundamentally non-strategic, and thus it is legitimated through heterogeneous and indirect means. This is the third principle ofadministrative action in the imperial regime.

Once we have recognized these three ‘‘negative’’ principles

ofimperial administrative action—its instrumental character, its

procedural autonomy, and its heterogeneity—we have to ask what

allows it to function without continually opening violent social

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antagonisms. What virtue affords this disarticulated system of con-

trol, inequality, and segmentation a sufficient measure of consent

and legitimation? This leads to the fourth principle, the ‘‘positive’’

characteristic ofimperial administration. The unifying matrix and

the most dominant value ofimperial administration lie in its local effectiveness.

To understand how this fourth principle can support the ad-

ministrative system as a whole, consider the kind ofadministrative

relationships that were formed between the feudal territorial organi-

zations and the monarchic power structures in Europe in the Middle

Ages, or between mafia organizations and state structures in the

modern period. In both cases the procedural autonomy, differential

application, and territorialized links to various segments ofthe popu-

lation, together with the specific and limited exercise oflegitimate

violence, were not generally in contradiction with the principle of

a coherent and unified ordering. These systems ofthe distribution

of administrative power were held together by the local effectiveness

ofa series ofspecific deployments ofmilitary, financial, and ideologi-

cal powers. In the European medieval system, the vassal was required

to contribute armed men and money when the monarch needed

them (whereas ideology and communication were controlled in

large part by the church). In the mafia system, the administrative

autonomy ofthe extended family and the deployment ofpolice-like

violence throughout the social territory guaranteed the adherence to

the primary principles ofthe capitalist system and supported the

ruling political class. As in these medieval and mafia examples, the

autonomy oflocalized administrative bodies does not contradict

imperial administration—on the contrary, it aids and expands its

global effectiveness.

Local autonomy is a fundamental condition, the sine qua non

ofthe development ofthe imperial regime. In fact, given the mobil-

ity ofpopulations in Empire, it would not be possible to claim a

principle oflegitimate administration ifits autonomy did not also

march a nomad path with the populations. It would likewise be

impossible to order the segments ofthe multitude through processes

C A P I T A L I S T S O V E R E I G N T Y

343

that force it to be more mobile and flexible in hybrid cultural forms

and in multicolored ghettos ifthis administration were not equally

flexible and capable ofspecific and continuous procedural revisions

and differentiations. Consent to the imperial regime is not something

that descends from the transcendentals of good administration,

which were defined in the modern rights states. Consent, rather,

is formed through the local effectiveness of the regime.

We have sketched here only the most general outlines of

imperial administration. A definition ofimperial administration that

focuses only on the autonomous local effectiveness of administrative

action cannot in itselfguarantee the system against eventual threats,

riots, subversions, and insurrections, or even against the normal

conflicts among local segments ofthe administration. This argu-

ment, however, does manage to transform the discussion into one

about the ‘‘royal prerogatives’’ ofimperial government—once we

have established the principle that the regulation ofconflict and

the recourse to the exercise oflegitimate violence must be resolved

in terms ofself-regulation (ofproduction, money, and communica-

tion) and by the internal police forces of Empire. This is where

the question ofadministration is transformed into a question of

command.

Imperial Command

Whereas modern regimes tended to bring administration increas-

ingly in line with command to the point ofmaking the two indistin-

guishable, imperial command remains separate from administration.

In both the modern and the imperial regimes, the internal contradic-

tions along with the risks and possible deviations ofa non-centralized

administration demand the guarantee ofa supreme command. The

early theorists ofthe juridical foundations ofthe modern state con-

ceive ofthis as an originary appeal to a supreme power, but the

theory of imperial command has no need for such fables about its

genealogy. It is not the appeals ofa multitude perpetually at war

that demand a pacifying supreme power (as in Hobbes), nor the

appeals ofa commercial class that demand the security ofcontracts

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(as in Locke and Hume). Imperial command is rather the result of

a social eruption that has overturned all the old relationships that

constituted sovereignty.

Imperial command is exercised no longer through the disci-

plinary modalities ofthe modern state but rather through the modal-

ities ofbiopolitical control. These modalities have as their basis and

their object a productive multitude that cannot be regimented

and normalized, but must nonetheless be governed, even in its

autonomy. The concept ofthe People no longer functions as the

organized subject ofthe system ofcommand, and consequently the

identity ofthe People is replaced by the mobility, flexibility, and

perpetual differentiation of the multitude. This shift demystifies and

destroys the circular modern idea ofthe legitimacy ofpower by

which power constructs from the multitude a single subject that

could then in turn legitimate that same power. That sophistic tautol-

ogy no longer works.

The multitude is governed with the instruments ofthe post-

modern capitalist system and within the social relations ofthe real

subsumption. The multitude can only be ruled along internal lines,

in production, in exchanges, in culture—in other words, in the

biopolitical context ofits existence. In its deterritorialized auton-

omy, however, this biopolitical existence ofthe multitude has the

potential to be transformed into an autonomous mass of intelligent

productivity, into an absolute democratic power, as Spinoza would

say. Ifthat were to happen, capitalist domination ofproduction,

exchange, and communication would be overthrown. Preventing

this is the first and primary task ofimperial government. We should

keep in mind, however, that the constitution ofEmpire depends for

its own existence on the forces that pose this threat, the autonomous

forces of productive cooperation. Their powers must be controlled

but not destroyed.

The guarantee that Empire offers to globalized capital does not

involve a micropolitical and/or microadministrative management of

populations. The apparatus ofcommand has no access to the local

spaces and the determinate temporal sequences oflife where the

C A P I T A L I S T S O V E R E I G N T Y

345

administration functions; it does not manage to put its hands on

the singularities and their activity. What imperial command seeks

substantially to invest and protect, and what it guarantees for capital-

ist development, are rather the general equilibria ofthe global

system.

Imperial control operates through three global and absolute

means: the bomb, money, and ether. The panoply ofthermonuclear

weapons, effectively gathered at the pinnacle of Empire, represents

the continuous possibility ofthe destruction oflife itself. This is an

operation ofabsolute violence, a new metaphysical horizon, which

completely changes the conception whereby the sovereign state

had a monopoly oflegitimate physical force. At one time, in moder-

nity, this monopoly was legitimated either as the expropriation of

weapons from the violent and anarchic mob, the disordered mass

ofindividuals who tend to slaughter one another, or as the instru-

ment ofdefense against the enemy, that is, against other peoples

organized in states. Both these means oflegitimation were oriented

finally toward the survival ofthe population. Today they are no

longer effective. The expropriation of the means of violence from

a supposedly self-destructive population tends to become merely

administrative and police operations aimed at maintaining the seg-

mentations ofproductive territories. The second justification be-

comes less effective too as nuclear war between state powers be-

comes increasingly unthinkable. The development ofnuclear

technologies and their imperial concentration have limited the sov-

ereignty ofmost ofthe countries ofthe world insofar as it has taken

away from them the power to make decisions over war and peace,

which is a primary element ofthe traditional definition ofsover-

eignty. Furthermore, the ultimate threat ofthe imperial bomb has

reduced every war to a limited conflict, a civil war, a dirty war,

and so forth. It has made every war the exclusive domain of adminis-

trative and police power. From no other standpoint is the passage

from modernity to postmodernity and from modern sovereignty

to Empire more evident than it is from the standpoint of the bomb.

Empire is defined here in the final instance as the ‘‘non-place’’ of

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life, or, in other words, as the absolute capacity for destruction.

Empire is the ultimate form of biopower insofar as it is the absolute

inversion ofthe power oflife.

Money is the second global means ofabsolute control. The

construction ofthe world market has consisted first ofall in the

monetary deconstruction ofnational markets, the dissolution of

national and/or regional regimes ofmonetary regulation, and the

subordination ofthose markets to the needs offinancial powers.

As national monetary structures tend to lose any characteristics of

sovereignty, we can see emerging through them the shadows ofa

new unilateral monetary reterritorialization that is concentrated at

the political and financial centers ofEmpire, the global cities. This

is not the construction ofa universal monetary regime on the basis

ofnew productive localities, new local circuits ofcirculation, and

thus new values; instead, it is a monetary construction based purely

on the political necessities ofEmpire. Money is the imperial arbiter,

but just as in the case ofthe imperial nuclear threat, this arbiter has

neither a determinate location nor a transcendent status. Just as the

nuclear threat authorizes the generalized power ofthe police, so

too the monetary arbiter is continually articulated in relation to the

productive functions, measures of value, and allocations of wealth

that constitute the world market. Monetary mechanisms are the

primary means to control the market.13

Ether is the third and final fundamental medium of imperial

control. The management ofcommunication, the structuring of

the education system, and the regulation ofculture appear today

more than ever as sovereign prerogatives. All ofthis, however,

dissolves in the ether. The contemporary systems ofcommunication

are not subordinated to sovereignty; on the contrary, sovereignty

seems to be subordinated to communication—or actually, sover-

eignty is articulated through communications systems. In the field

ofcommunication, the paradoxes that bring about the dissolution

ofterritorial and/or national sovereignty are more clear than ever.

The deterritorializing capacities ofcommunication are unique:

communication is not satisfied by limiting or weakening modern

C A P I T A L I S T S O V E R E I G N T Y

347

territorial sovereignty; rather it attacks the very possibility oflinking

an order to a space. It imposes a continuous and complete circulation

ofsigns. Deterritorialization is the primary force and circulation

the form through which social communication manifests itself. In

this way and in this ether, languages become functional to circulation

and dissolve every sovereign relationship. Education and culture

too cannot help submitting to the circulating society ofthe spectacle.

Here we reach an extreme limit ofthe process ofthe dissolution

ofthe relationship between order and space. At this point we cannot

conceive this relationship except in another space, an elsewhere that cannot in principle be contained in the articulation ofsovereign acts.

The space ofcommunication is completely deterritorialized.

It is absolutely other with respect to the residual spaces that we

have been analyzing in terms ofthe monopoly ofphysical force

and the definition ofmonetary measure. Here it is a question not

ofresidue but of metamorphosis: a metamorphosis ofall the elements

ofpolitical economy and state theory. Communication is the form

ofcapitalist production in which capital has succeeded in submitting

society entirely and globally to its regime, suppressing all alternative

paths. Ifever an alternative is to be proposed, it will have to arise

from within the society of the real subsumption and demonstrate

all the contradictions at the heart ofit.

These three means ofcontrol refer us again to the three tiers

ofthe imperial pyramid ofpower. The bomb is a monarchic power,

money aristocratic, and ether democratic. It might appear in each

ofthese cases as though the reins ofthese mechanisms were held

by the United States. It might appear as ifthe United States were

the new Rome, or a cluster ofnew Romes: Washington (the

bomb), New York (money), and Los Angeles (ether). Any such

territorial conception ofimperial space, however, is continually

destabilized by the fundamental flexibility, mobility, and deterritori-

alization at the core ofthe imperial apparatus. Perhaps the monopoly

offorce and the regulation ofmoney can be given partial territorial

determinations, but communication cannot. Communication has

become the central element that establishes the relations ofproduc-

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tion, guiding capitalist development and also transforming produc-

tive forces. This dynamic produces an extremely open situation:

here the centralized locus ofpower has to confront the power of

productive subjectivities, the power ofall those who contribute to

the interactive production ofcommunication. Here in this circulat-

ing domain ofimperial domination over the new forms ofproduc-

tion, communication is most widely disseminated in capillary forms.

B IG G OVERNMENT I S O VER!

‘‘Big government is over’’ is the battle cry of conservatives and neoliberals throughout Empire. The Republican Congress of the United States, led

by Newt Gingrich, fought to demystify the fetish of big government by

calling it ‘‘totalitarian’’ and ‘‘fascist’’ (in a session of Congress that wanted to be imperial but ended up being carnivalesque). It appeared as though we had returned to the times of the great diatribes of Henry Ford against Franklin D. Roosevelt! Or rather to the much less grand times of Margaret Thatcher’s first administration, when she frenetically, and with a sense of humor that only the British can muster, sought to sell off the public goods of the nation, from communications systems to the water supply, from the rail system and oil to the universities and hospitals. In the United States, however, the representatives of the most avid conservative wing finally went too far, and in the end everyone recognized it. The bottom line and brutal irony was that they sounded the attack on big government just when the

development of the postmodern informational revolution most needed big

government to support its efforts—for the construction of information highways, the control of the equilibria of the stock exchanges despite the wild fluctuations of speculation, the firm maintenance of monetary values, public investment in the military-industrial system to help transform the mode of production, the reform of the educational system to adapt to these new

productive networks, and so forth. Precisely at this time, after the Soviet Union had collapsed, the imperial tasks facing the U.S. government were most urgent and big government was most needed.

When the proponents of the globalization of capital cry out against

big government, they are being not only hypocritical but also ungrateful.

Where would capital be if it had not put its hands on big government and C A P I T A L I S T S O V E R E I G N T Y

349

made it work for centuries in its exclusive interest? And today where would imperial capital be if big government were not big enough to wield the power of life and death over the entire global multitude? Where would capital be without a big government capable of printing money to produce and reproduce a global order that guarantees capitalist power and wealth? Or without the communications networks that expropriate the cooperation of the productive multitude? Every morning when they wake up, capitalists and their representatives across the world, instead of reading the curses against big government in the Wall Street Journal, ought to get down on their knees and praise it!

Now that the most radical conservative opponents of big government

have collapsed under the weight of the paradox of their position, we want to pick up their banners where they left them in the mud. It is our turn now to cry ‘‘Big government is over!’’ Why should that slogan be the

exclusive property of the conservatives? Certainly, having been educated in class struggle, we know well that big government has also been an instrument for the redistribution of social wealth and that, under the pressure of working-class struggle, it has served in the fight for equality and democracy. Today, however, those times are over. In imperial postmodernity big government has become merely the despotic means of domination and the totalitarian production of subjectivity. Big government conducts the great orchestra of subjectivities reduced to commodities. And it is consequently the determination of the limits of desire: these are in fact the lines that, in the biopolitical Empire, establish the new division of labor across the global horizon, in the interest of reproducing the power to exploit and subjugate. We, on the contrary, struggle because desire has no limit and (since the desire to exist and the desire to produce are one and the same thing) because life can be continuously, freely, and equally enjoyed and reproduced.

Some might object that the productive biopolitical universe still requires some form of command over it, and that realistically we should aim not at destroying big government but at putting our hands on its controls. We

have to put an end to such illusions that have plagued the socialist and communist traditions for so long! On the contrary, from the standpoint of the multitude and its quest for autonomous self-government, we have to

put an end to the continuous repetition of the same that Marx lamented

150 years ago when he said that all revolutions have only perfected the 350

P A S S A G E S O F P R O D U C T I O N

state instead of destroying it. That repetition has only become clearer in our century, when the great compromise (in its liberal, socialist, and fascist forms) among big government, big business, and big labor has forced the state to produce horrible new fruits: concentration camps, gulags, ghettos, and the like.

You are just a bunch of anarchists, the new Plato on the block will

finally yell at us. That is not true. We would be anarchists if we were not to speak (as did Thrasymacus and Callicles, Plato’s immortal interlocutors) from the standpoint of a materiality constituted in the networks of productive cooperation, in other words, from the perspective of a humanity that is constructed productively, that is constituted through the ‘‘common name’’

of freedom. No, we are not anarchists but communists who have seen how

much repression and destruction of humanity have been wrought by liberal and socialist big governments. We have seen how all this is being re-created in imperial government, just when the circuits of productive cooperation have made labor power as a whole capable of constituting itself in government.

PART 4

T H E D E C L I N E A N D F A L L O F E M P I R E

4.1

V I R T U A L I T I E S

The people no longer exist, or not yet . . . the people are missing.

Gilles Deleuze

In the course ofour argument we have generally dealt

with Empire in terms ofa critique ofwhat is and what exists, and

thus in ontological terms. At times, however, in order to reinforce

the argumentation, we have addressed the problematic ofEmpire

with an ethico-political discourse, calculating the mechanics of

passions and interests—for example, when early in our argument

we judged Empire as less bad or better than the previous paradigm

ofpower from the standpoint ofthe multitude. English political

theory in the period from Hobbes to Hume presents perhaps the

paradigmatic example ofsuch an ethico-political discourse, which

began from a pessimistic description of presocial human nature and

attempted through reliance on a transcendental notion ofpower

to establish the legitimacy ofthe state. The (more or less liberal)

Leviathan is less bad with respect to the war ofall against all, better

because it establishes and preserves peace.1 This style ofpolitical

theorizing, however, is no longer very useful. It pretends that the

subject can be understood presocially and outside the community,

and then imposes a kind oftranscendental socialization on it. In

Empire, no subjectivity is outside, and all places have been subsumed

in a general ‘‘non-place.’’ The transcendental fiction ofpolitics can

no longer stand up and has no argumentative utility because we all

exist entirely within the realm ofthe social and the political. When

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we recognize this radical determination ofpostmodernity, political

philosophy forces us to enter the terrain of ontology.

OutsideMeasure(TheImmeasurable)

When we say that political theory must deal with ontology, we

mean first ofall that politics cannot be constructed from the outside.

Politics is given immediately; it is a field ofpure immanence. Empire

forms on this superficial horizon where our bodies and minds are

embedded. It is purely positive. There is no external logical machine

that constitutes it. The most natural thing in the world is that the

world appears to be politically united, that the market is global,

and that power is organized throughout this universality. Imperial

politics articulates being in its global extension—a great sea that

only the winds and current move. The neutralization ofthe tran-

scendental imagination is thus the first sense in which the political

in the imperial domain is ontological.2

The political must also be understood as ontological owing

to the fact that all the transcendental determinations of value and

measure that used to order the deployments ofpower (or really

determine its prices, subdivisions, and hierarchies) have lost their

coherence. From the sacred myths ofpower that historical anthro-

pologists such as RudolfOtto and Georges Dumezil employed to

the rules ofthe new political science that the authors of The Federalist described; from the Rights of Man to the norms of international

public law—all ofthis f

ades away with the passage to Empire.

Empire dictates its laws and maintains the peace according to a

model ofpostmodern right and postmodern law, through mobile,

fluid, and localized procedures.3 Empire constitutes the ontological

fabric in which all the relations of power are woven together—

political and economic relations as well as social and personal rela-

tions. Across this hybrid domain the biopolitical structure ofbeing

is where the internal structure ofimperial constitution is revealed,

because in the globality ofbiopower every fixed measure ofvalue

tends to be dissolved, and the imperial horizon ofpower is revealed

finally to be a horizon outside measure. Not only the political

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355

transcendental but also the transcendental as such has ceased to

determine measure.

The great Western metaphysical tradition has always abhorred

the immeasurable. From Aristotle’s theory ofvirtue as measure4 to

Hegel’s theory ofmeasure as the key to the passage from existence

to essence,5 the question ofmeasure has been strictly linked to that

oftranscendent order. Even Marx’s theory ofvalue pays its dues

to this metaphysical tradition: his theory ofvalue is really a theory

ofthe measure ofvalue.6 Only on the ontological horizon ofEmpire,

however, is the world finally outside measure, and here we can see

clearly the deep hatred that metaphysics has for the immeasurable.

It derives from the ideological necessity to given a transcendent

ontological foundation to order. Just as God is necessary for the

classical transcendence ofpower, so too measure is necessary for

the transcendent foundation ofthe values ofthe modern state. If

there is no measure, the metaphysicians say, there is no cosmos;

and ifthere is no cosmos, there is no state. In this framework one

cannot think the immeasurable, or rather, one must not think it.

Throughout modernity, the immeasurable was the object ofan

absolute ban, an epistemological prohibition. This metaphysical

illusion disappears today, however, because in the context ofbiopo-

litical ontology and its becomings, the transcendent is what is un-

thinkable. When political transcendence is still claimed today, it

descends immediately into tyranny and barbarism.

When we say immeasurable, we mean that the political devel-

opments ofimperial being are outside ofevery preconstituted mea-

sure. We mean that the relationships among the modes ofbeing

and the segments ofpower are always constructed anew and that

they vary infinitely. The indexes ofcommand (like those ofeco-

nomic value) are defined on the basis ofalways contingent and

purely conventional elements. Certainly there are apexes and sum-

mits ofimperial power which guarantee that contingency does not

become subversive, that it is not united with the storms that arise

on the seas ofbeing—apexes such as the monopoly ofnuclear arms,

the control ofmoney, and the colonization ofether. These royal

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deployments ofEmpire guarantee that the contingency becomes a

necessity and does not descend into disorder. These higher powers,

however, do not represent a figure oforder or a measure ofthe

cosmos; on the contrary, their effectiveness is based on destruction

(by the bomb), on judgment (by money), and on fear (by communi-

cation).

One might ask at this point whether this idea ofimmeasurabil-

ity does not imply the absolute negation ofthe concept ofjustice.

The history ofthe idea ofjustice has indeed generally referred to

some notion ofmeasure, be it a measure ofequality or a measure

ofproportionality. Furthermore, as Aristotle says, taking up a line

from Theognis, ‘‘in justice all virtue is summed up.’’7 Are we thus

simply making a nonsensical nihilist claim when we assert that in

the ontology ofEmpire value is outside measure? Are we claiming

that no value, no justice, and indeed no virtue can exist? No, in

contrast to those who have long claimed that value can be affirmed

only in the figure ofmeasure and order, we argue that value and

justice can live in and be nourished by an immeasurable world.

Here we can see once again the importance ofthe revolution of

Renaissance humanism. Ni Dieu, ni maıˆtre, ni l’homme—no transcen-

dent power or measure will determine the values ofour world.

Value will be determined only by humanity’s own continuous

innovation and creation.

Beyond Measure (The Virtual)

Even ifthe political has become a realm outside measure, value

nonetheless remains. Even ifin postmodern capitalism there is no

longer a fixed scale that measures value, value nonetheless is still

powerful and ubiquitous. This fact is demonstrated first of all by the

persistence ofexploitation, and second by the fact that productive

innovation and the creation ofwealth continue tirelessly—in fact,

they mobilize labor in every interstice ofthe world. In Empire,

the construction ofvalue takes place beyond measure. The contrast

between the immeasurable excesses ofimperial globalization and

the productive activity that is beyond measure must be read from

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357

the standpoint ofthe subjective activity that creates and re-creates

the world in its entirety.

What we need to highlight at this point, however, is something

more substantial than the simple claim that labor remains the central

constituent foundation of society as capital transforms to its post-

modern stage. Whereas ‘‘outside measure’’ refers to the impossibility

ofpower’s calculating and ordering production at a global level,

‘‘beyond measure’’ refers to the vitality of the productive context,

the expression oflabor as desire, and its capacities to constitute the

biopolitical fabric of Empire from below. Beyond measure refers

to the new place in the non-place, the place defined by the productive activity that is autonomous from any external regime of measure.

Beyond measure refers to a virtuality that invests the entire biopolitical fabric of imperial globalization.

By the virtual we understand the set ofpowers to act (being,

loving, transforming, creating) that reside in the multitude. We

have already seen how the multitude’s virtual set ofpowers is

constructed by struggles and consolidated in desire. Now we have

to investigate how the virtual can put pressure on the borders of

the possible, and thus touch on the real. The passage from the

virtual through the possible to the real is the fundamental act of

creation.8 Living labor is what constructs the passageway from the

virtual to the real; it is the vehicle ofpossibility. Labor that has

broken open the cages ofeconomic, social, and political discipline

and surpassed every regulative dimension ofmodern capitalism

along with its state-form now appears as general social activity.9

Labor is productive excess with respect to the existing order and

the rules ofits reproduction. This productive excess is at once the

result ofa collective force ofemancipation and the substance ofthe

new social virtuality oflabor’s productive and liberatory capacities.

In the passage to postmodernity, one ofthe primary conditions

oflabor is that it functions outside measure. The temporal regimen-

tation oflabor and all the other economic and/or political measures

that have been imposed on it are blown apart. Today labor is

immediately a social force animated by the powers of knowledge,

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affect, science, and language. Indeed, labor is the productive activity

ofa general intellect and a general body outside measure. Labor

appears simply as the power to act, which is at once singular and

universal: singular insofar as labor has become the exclusive domain

ofthe brain and body ofthe multitude; and universal insofar as the

desire that the multitude expresses in the movement from the virtual

to the possible is constantly constituted as a common thing. Only

when what is common is formed can production take place and

can general productivity rise. Anything that blocks this power to

act is merely an obstacle to overcome—an obstacle that is eventually

outflanked, weakened, and smashed by the critical powers oflabor

and the everyday passional wisdom of the affects. The power to

act is constituted by labor, intelligence, passion, and affect in one

common place.

This notion oflabor as the common power to act stands in a

contemporaneous, coextensive, and dynamic relationship to the

construction ofcommunity. This relationship is reciprocal such that

on the one hand the singular powers oflabor continuously create

new common constructions, and, on the other hand, what is com-

mon becomes singularized.10 We can thus define the virtual power

oflabor as a power ofself-valorization that exceeds itself, flows

over onto the other, and, through this investment, constitutes an

expansive commonality. The common actions oflabor, intelligence,

passion, and affect configure a constituent power.

The process we are describing is not merely formal; it is

material, and it is realized on the biopolitical terrain. The virtuality

ofaction and the transformation ofmaterial conditions, which at

times are appropriated by and enrich this power to act, are consti-

tuted in ontological mechanisms or apparatuses beyond measure.

This ontological apparatus beyond measure is an expansive power, a power offreedom, ontological construction, and omnilateral dissemination.

This last definition could be considered redundant. Ifthe

power to act constructs value from below, if it transforms value

according to the rhythm ofwhat is common, and ifit appropriates

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359

constitutively the material conditions ofits own realization, then

it is obvious that in it resides an expansive force beyond measure.

This definition is not redundant, however, but rather adds a new

dimension to the concept insofar as it demonstrates the positive

character ofthe non-place and the irrepressibility ofcommon action

beyond measure. This expansive definition plays an anti-dialectical

role, demonstrating the creativity ofwhat is beyond measure. With

reference to the history of philosophy, we could add, in order to

define the sense ofthis expansive power, that whereas the definitions

ofthe power to act in terms ofthe singular and the common are

Spinozist, this last definition is really a Nietzschean conception.

The omnilateral expansiveness ofthe power to act demonstrates

the ontological basis oftransvaluation, that is, its capacity not only

to destroy the values that descend from the transcendental realm

ofmeasure but also to create new values.11

The ontological terrain ofEmpire, completely plowed and

irrigated by a powerful, self-valorizing, and constituent labor, is

thus planted with a virtuality that seeks to be real. The keys of

possibility, or really ofthe modalities ofbeing that transform the

virtual into reality, reside in this realm beyond measure.

Parasite

One might object at this point that, despite the powers ofthe

multitude, this Empire still exists and commands. We ourselves

have amply described its functioning and highlighted its extreme

violence. With respect to the virtuality ofthe multitude, however,

imperial government appears as an empty shell or a parasite.12 Does

this mean that the investments ofpower that Empire continuously

makes in order to maintain imperial order and the powerlessness

of the multitude really are ineffective? If this were the case, then

the argumentation we have been developing up to this point about

the extrinsic character ofimperial government with respect to the

ontological developments ofthe multitude would be contradictory.

The gap between virtuality and possibility that we think can be

bridged from the standpoint of the action of the multitude is effec-

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tively held open by imperial domination. The two forces seem to

stand in contradiction.

We do not, however, think that this is really a contradiction.

Only in formal logic is contradiction static; contradiction is never

static, however, in material logic (that is, political, historical, and

ontological logic), which poses it on the terrain ofthe possible and

thus on the terrain ofpower. Indeed, the relationship that imperial

government imposes on the virtuality ofthe multitude is simply

a static relationship ofoppression. The investments ofimperial

government are essentially negative, deployed through procedures

intended to order coercively the actions and events that risk descend-

ing into disorder. In all cases the effectiveness of imperial govern-

ment is regulatory and not constituent, not even when its effects

are long-lasting. The redundancies ofimperial command configure

at most the chronicle that records political life, or really the most

feeble and repetitive image ofthe determinations ofbeing.

The royal prerogatives ofimperial government, its monopoly

over the bomb, money, and the communicative ether, are merely

destructive capacities and thus powers ofnegation. The action of

imperial government intervenes in the multitude’s project to suture

together virtuality and possibility only by disrupting it and slowing

it down. In this respect Empire does touch on the course ofhistorical

movement, but it cannot for that reason be defined as a positive

capacity—on the contrary, the legitimacy ofits command is only

increasingly undermined by these movements.

When the action of Empire is effective, this is due not to its

own force but to the fact that it is driven by the rebound from the

resistance ofthe multitude against imperial power. One might say

in this sense that resistance is actually prior to power.13 When

imperial government intervenes, it selects the liberatory impulses

ofthe multitude in order to destroy them, and in return it is driven

forward by resistance. The royal investments of Empire and all its

political initiatives are constructed according to the rhythm ofthe

acts ofresistance that constitute the being ofthe multitude. In

other words, the effectiveness of Empire’s regulatory and repressive

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procedures must finally be traced back to the virtual, constitutive

action ofthe multitude. Empire itselfis not a positive reality. In

the very moment it rises up, it falls. Each imperial action is a rebound

ofthe resistance ofthe multitude that poses a new obstacle for the

multitude to overcome.14

Imperial command produces nothing vital and nothing onto-

logical. From the ontological perspective, imperial command is

purely negative and passive. Certainly power is everywhere, but it

is everywhere because everywhere is in play the nexus between

virtuality and possibility, a nexus that is the sole province ofthe

multitude. Imperial power is the negative residue, the fallback of

the operation ofthe multitude; it is a parasite that draws its vitality

from the multitude’s capacity to create ever new sources of energy

and value. A parasite that saps the strength ofits host, however,

can endanger its own existence. The functioning of imperial power

is ineluctably linked to its decline.

Nomadism and Miscegenation

The ontological fabric of Empire is constructed by the activity

beyond measure ofthe multitude and its virtual powers. These

virtual, constituent powers conflict endlessly with the constituted

power ofEmpire. They are completely positive since their ‘‘being-

against’’ is a ‘‘being-for,’’ in other words, a resistance that becomes

love and community. We are situated precisely at that hinge of

infinite finitude that links together the virtual and the possible,

engaged in the passage from desire to a coming future.15

This ontological relation operates first ofall on space. The

virtuality ofworld space constitutes the first determination ofthe

movements ofthe multitude—a virtuality that must be made real.

Space that merely can be traversed must be transformed into a space

of life; circulation must become freedom. In other words, the

mobile multitude must achieve a global citizenship. The multitude’s

resistance to bondage—the struggle against the slavery ofbelonging

to a nation, an identity, and a people, and thus the desertion from

sovereignty and the limits it places on subjectivity—is entirely

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positive. Nomadism and miscegenation appear here as figures of

virtue, as the first ethical practices on the terrain ofEmpire. From

this perspective the objective space ofcapitalist globalization breaks

down. Only a space that is animated by subjective circulation and

only a space that is defined by the irrepressible movements (legal

or clandestine) ofindividuals and groups can be real. Today’s cele-

brations ofthe local can be regressive and even fascistic when they

oppose circulations and mixture, and thus reinforce the walls of

nation, ethnicity, race, people, and the like. The concept ofthe

local, however, need not be defined by isolation and purity. In

fact, if one breaks down the walls that surround the local (and

thereby separate the concept from race, religion, ethnicity, nation,

and people), one can link it directly to the universal. The concrete

universal is what allows the multitude to pass from place to place

and make its place its own. This is the common place ofnomadism

and miscegenation. Through circulation the common human spe-

cies is composed, a multicolored Orpheus ofinfinite power; through

circulation the human community is constituted. Outside every

Enlightenment cloud or Kantian reverie, the desire ofthe multitude

is not the cosmopolitical state but a common species.16 As in a

secular Pentecost, the bodies are mixed and the nomads speak a

common tongue.

In this context, ontology is not an abstract science. It involves

the conceptual recognition ofthe production and reproduction of

being and thus the recognition that political reality is constituted

by the movement ofdesire and the practical realization oflabor as

value. The spatial dimension ofontology today is demonstrated

through the multitude’s concrete processes ofthe globalization, or

really the making common, ofthe desire for human community.

One important example ofthe functioning ofthis spatial di-

mension is demonstrated by the processes that brought an end to

the Third World, along with all the glory and disgrace ofits past

struggles, the power ofdesires that ran throughout its processes of

liberation, and the poverty ofresults that crowned its success. The

real heroes ofthe liberation ofthe Third World today may really

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363

have been the emigrants and the flows ofpopulation that have

destroyed old and new boundaries. Indeed, the postcolonial hero

is the one who continually transgresses territorial and racial bound-

aries, who destroys particularisms and points toward a common

civilization. Imperial command, by contrast, isolates populations in

poverty and allows them to act only in the straitjackets ofsubordi-

nated postcolonial nations. The exodus from localism, the transgres-

sion ofcustoms and boundaries, and the desertion from sovereignty

were the operative forces in the liberation of the Third World.

Here more than ever we can recognize clearly the difference Marx

defined between emancipation and liberation. 17 Emancipation is the entry ofnew nations and peoples into the imperial society ofcontrol,

with its new hierarchies and segmentations; liberation, in contrast,

means the destruction ofboundaries and patterns offorced migra-

tion, the reappropriation ofspace, and the power ofthe multitude

to determine the global circulation and mixture ofindividuals and

populations. The Third World, which was constructed by the colo-

nialism and imperialism ofnation-states and trapped in the cold

war, is destroyed when the old rules ofthe political discipline of

the modern state (and its attendant mechanisms ofgeographical and

ethnic regulation ofpopulations) are smashed. It is destroyed when

throughout the ontological terrain ofglobalization the most

wretched ofthe earth becomes the most powerful being, because its

new nomad singularity is the most creative force and the omnilateral

movement ofits desire is itselfthe coming liberation.

The power to circulate is a primary determination ofthe

virtuality ofthe multitude, and circulating is the first ethical act of

a counterimperial ontology. This ontological aspect ofbiopolitical

circulation and mixture is highlighted even more when it is con-

trasted with other meanings attributed to postmodern circulation,

such as market exchanges or the velocity ofcommunication. Those

aspects ofspeed and circulation belong, rather, to the violence of

imperial command.18 Exchanges and communication dominated by

capital are integrated into its logic, and only a radical act ofresistance

can recapture the productive sense ofthe new mobility and hybridity

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ofsubjects and realize their liberation. This rupture, and only this

rupture, brings us to the ontological terrain ofthe multitude and

to the terrain on which circulation and hybridization are biopolitical.

Biopolitical circulation focuses on and celebrates the substantial

determinations ofthe activities ofproduction, self-valorization, and

freedom. Circulation is a global exodus, or really nomadism; and

it is a corporeal exodus, or really miscegenation.

General Intellect and Biopower

We insisted earlier on the importance and limitations ofMarx’s

notion of‘‘general intellect’’ (Section 1.2). At a certain point in

capitalist development, which Marx only glimpsed as the future,

the powers oflabor are infused by the powers ofscience, communi-

cation, and language. General intellect is a collective, social intelli-

gence created by accumulated knowledges, techniques, and know-

how. The value oflabor is thus realized by a new universal and

concrete labor force through the appropriation and free usage of

the new productive forces. What Marx saw as the future is our era.

This radical transformation of labor power and the incorporation

ofscience, communication, and language into productive f

orce

have redefined the entire phenomenology oflabor and the entire

world horizon ofproduction.

The danger ofthe discourse ofgeneral intellect is that it risks

remaining entirely on the plane ofthought, as ifthe new powers

oflabor were only intellectual and not also corporeal (Section 3.4).

As we saw earlier, new forces and new positions of affective labor

characterize labor power as much as intellectual labor does. Bio-

power names these productive capacities oflife that are equally

intellectual and corporeal. The powers ofproduction are in fact

today entirely biopolitical; in other words, they run throughout

and constitute directly not only production but also the entire realm

ofreproduction. Biopower becomes an agent ofproduction when

the entire context ofreproduction is subsumed under capitalist rule,

that is, when reproduction and the vital relationships that constitute

it themselves become directly productive. Biopower is another

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365

name for the real subsumption of society under capital, and both

are synonymous with the globalized productive order. Production

fills the surfaces of Empire; it is a machine that is full of life, an

intelligent life that by expressing itself in production and reproduc-

tion as well as in circulation (of labor, affects, and languages) stamps

society with a new collective meaning and recognizes virtue and

civilization in cooperation.

The powers of science, knowledge, affect, and communication

are the principal powers that constitute our anthropological virtual-

ity and are deployed on the surfaces of Empire. This deployment

extends across the general linguistic territories that characterize the

intersections between production and life. Labor becomes increas-

ingly immaterial and realizes its value through a singular and contin-

uous process ofinnovation in production; it is increasingly capable

ofconsuming or using the services ofsocial reproduction in an

ever more refined and interactive way. Intelligence and affect (or

really the brain coextensive with the body), just when they become

the primary productive powers, make production and life coincide

across the terrain on which they operate, because life is nothing

other than the production and reproduction ofthe set ofbodies

and brains.

The relationship between production and life has thus been

altered such that it is now completely inverted with respect to how

the discipline ofpolitical economy understands it. Life is no longer

produced in the cycles ofreproduction that are subordinated to the

working day; on the contrary, life is what infuses and dominates

all production. In fact, the value of labor and production is deter-

mined deep in the viscera oflife. Industry produces no surplus

except what is generated by social activity—and this is why, buried

in the great whale oflife, value is beyond measure. There would

be no surplus ifproduction were not animated throughout by social

intelligence, by the general intellect and at the same time by the

affective expressions that define social relations and rule over the

articulations ofsocial being. The excess ofvalue is determined

today in the affects, in the bodies crisscrossed by knowledge, in

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the intelligence ofthe mind, and in the sheer power to act. The

production ofcommodities tends to be accomplished entirely

through language, where by language we mean machines ofintelli-

gence that are continuously renovated by the affects and subjec-

tive passions.19

It should be clear at this point what constitutes social cooperation

here on the surfaces of imperial society: the synergies of life, or

really the productive manifestations of naked life. Giorgio Agamben has used the term ‘‘naked life’’ to refer to the negative limit of

humanity and to expose behind the political abysses that modern

totalitarianism has constructed the (more or less heroic) conditions

ofhuman passivity.20 We would say, on the contrary, that through

their monstrosities ofreducing human beings to a minimal naked

life, fascism and Nazism tried in vain to destroy the enormous

power that naked life could become and to expunge the form in

which the new powers ofproductive cooperation ofthe multitude

are accumulated. One might say in line with this idea that the

reactionary deliriums offascism and Nazism were unleashed when

capital discovered that social cooperation was no longer the result

ofthe investment ofcapital but rather an autonomous power, the

a priori ofevery act ofproduction. When human power appears

immediately as an autonomous cooperating collective force, capital-

ist prehistory comes to an end. In other words, capitalist prehistory

comes to an end when social and subjective cooperation is no

longer a product but a presupposition, when naked life is raised up

to the dignity ofproductive power, or really when it appears as

the wealth ofvirtuality.

The scientific, affective, and linguistic forces of the multitude

aggressively transform the conditions of social production. The field

on which productive forces are reappropriated by the multitude is a

field ofradical metamorphoses—the scene ofa demiurgic operation.

This consists above all in a complete revision ofthe production of

cooperative subjectivity; it consists in an act, that is, ofmerging

and hybridizing with the machines that the multitude has reappro-

priated and reinvented; it consists, therefore, in an exodus that is

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367

not only spatial but also mechanical in the sense that the subject

is transformed into (and finds the cooperation that constitutes it

multiplied in) the machine. This is a new form of exodus, an exodus

toward (or with) the machine—a machinic exodus.21 The history

ofthe modern worker and ofthe subject ofmodern sovereignty

already contains a long catalogue ofmachinic metamorphoses, but

the hybridization ofhumans and machines is no longer defined by

the linear path it followed throughout the modern period. We have

reached the moment when the relationship ofpower that had

dominated the hybridizations and machinic metamorphoses can

now be overturned. Marx recognized that the conflict between

workers and machines was a false conflict: ‘‘It took both time

and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish between

machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer

their attacks from the material instruments of production to the

form of society which utilizes these instruments.’’22 Now the new

virtualities, the naked life of the present, have the capacity to take

control ofthe processes ofmachinic metamorphosis. In Empire the

political struggle over the definition ofmachinic virtuality, or really

over the different alternatives of the passage between the virtual

and the real, is a central terrain ofstruggle. This new terrain of

production and life opens for labor a future of metamorphoses that

subjective cooperation can and must control ethically, politically,

and productively.

Res Gestae/Machinae

In recent years there has been much talk ofthe end ofhistory,

and there have also been made many justified objections to the

reactionary celebrations ofan end ofhistory that would see the

present state ofrule as eternal. It is certainly true, nonetheless, that

in modernity the power ofcapital and its institutions ofsovereignty

had a solid hold on history and exerted their rule over the historical

process. The virtual powers ofthe multitude in postmodernity signal

the end ofthat rule and those institutions. That history has ended.

Capitalist rule is revealed as a transitory period. And yet, ifthe

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transcendent teleology that capitalist modernity constructed is com-

ing to an end, how can the multitude define instead a materialist

telos?23

We will be able to respond to this question only after conduct-

ing a phenomenological and historical analysis ofthe relationship

between virtuality and possibility, that is, after responding to the

question if, how, and when the virtuality of the multitude passes

through possibility and becomes reality. The ontology ofthe possible

is in this sense the central terrain ofanalysis. This problematic has

been posed by authors from Lukaćs to Benjamin, from Adorno to

the later Wittgenstein, from Foucault to Deleuze, and indeed by

nearly all those who have recognized the twilight ofmodernity. In

all ofthese cases the question was posed against such tremendous

metaphysical obstacles! And we can now see how pallid their re-

sponses were with respect to the enormity ofthe question. What

is certain today is that the problematic does not risk repeating the

old models ofthe metaphysical tradition, even the most powerful

ones. In fact, every metaphysical tradition is now completely worn

out. Ifthere is to be a solution to the problem, it cannot help being

material and explosive. Whereas our attention was first drawn to

the intensity ofthe elements ofvirtuality that constituted the multi-

tude, now it must focus on the hypothesis that those virtualities

accumulate and reach a threshold ofrealization adequate to their

power. This is the sense in which we speak ofgeneral intellect and

its articulations in knowledge, affect, and cooperation; and similarly

the sense in which we speak ofthe various forms ofthe collective

exodus ofthose nomadic movements ofthe multitude that appro-

priate spaces and renew them.

Here we are dealing with two passages. The first consists in

the fact that virtuality totalizes the field of the res gestae. Virtuality steps forward and demonstrates that the capacity of the historia rerum

gestarum to dominate the active virtual singularities has definitively expired. This is the historia that comes to an end when the new

virtualities emerge as powerful and liberate themselves from a being

that is invested hegemonically by capital and its institutions. Today

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369

only the res gestae are charged with historical capacities, or rather, today there is no history, only historicity. The second passage consists in the fact that these singular virtualities as they gain their

autonomy also become self-valorizing. They express themselves as

machines ofinnovation. They not only refuse to be dominated by

the old systems ofvalue and exploitation, but actually create their

own irreducible possibilities as well. Here is where a materialist

telos is defined, founded on the action of singularities, a teleology

that is a resultant ofthe res gestae and a figure ofthe machinic logic ofthe multitude.

The res gestae, the singular virtualities that operate the connec-

tion between the possible and the real, are in the first passage outside

measure and in the second beyond measure. Singular virtualities,

which are the hinge between possible and real, play both these

cards: being outside measure as a destructive weapon (deconstructive

in theory and subversive in practice); and being beyond measure

as constituent power. The virtual and the possible are wedded as

irreducible innovation and as a revolutionary machine.

4.2

G E N E R A T I O N A N D C O R R U P T I O N

You can not spill a drop ofAmerican blood without spilling the

blood ofthe whole world . . . [O]ur blood is as the flood ofthe

Amazon, made up ofa thousand noble currents all pouring into

one. We are not a nation, so much as a world; for unless we may

claim all the world for our sire, like Melchisedec, we are with-

out mother or father . . . Our ancestry is lost in the universal

paternity . . . We are the heirs ofall time, and with all nations

we divide our inheritance.

Herman Melville

Fate has willed it that America is from now on to be at the center

ofWestern civilization rather than on the periphery.

Walter Lippmann

There is no escaping American business.

Louis-Ferdinand Ceĺine

The theory ofthe constitution ofEmpire is also a theory

ofits decline, as European theorists ofEmpire have recognized for

the last several thousand years. Already in Greco-Roman antiquity,

Thucydides, Tacitus, and Polybius all recounted the sequence of

rise and fall, as did later the Fathers of the Church and the theorists

ofearly Christianity. In none ofthese cases when speaking ofEmpire

was it simply a matter for them of repeating the classical theory of the

alternation between ‘‘positive’’ and ‘‘negative’’ forms of government,

because Empire by definition goes beyond this alternation. The

internal crisis ofthe concept ofEmpire, however, became com-

pletely clear only in the Enlightenment period and the period of

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371

the construction ofEuropean modernity, when authors such as

Montesquieu and Gibbon made the problem ofthe decadence of

the Roman Empire one ofthe central topoi ofthe analysis ofthe

political forms of the modern sovereign state.1

Riseand Fall (Machiavelli)

In classical antiquity the concept ofEmpire already presupposed

crisis. Empire was conceived in the framework of a naturalist theory

ofthe forms ofgovernment; and, even though it breaks the cyclical

alternation of good and bad forms, it is not exempt from the destiny

ofthe corruption ofthe city and civilization as a whole. History

is dominated by Thyche (Fortune or Destiny), which at times

inevitably ruins the perfection that Empire achieves. From Thucyd-

ides to Tacitus and from Athens to Rome, the necessary equilibrium

between the forms of common life and command was situated in

this linear destiny. Polybius’ analyses ofthe Roman Empire broke

with this conception ofthe cyclical character ofhistorical develop-

ment whereby the human construction ofthe political constantly

shifts from the good to the bad forms of the city and power:

from monarchy to tyranny, from aristocracy to oligarchy, and from

democracy to anarchy, and then eventually begins a new cycle.

Polybius claimed that the Roman Empire broke with this cycle by

creating a synthesis ofthe good forms ofpower (see Section 3.5).

Empire is thus understood not so much as rule over universal space

and time, but rather as a movement that gathers together the spaces

and the temporalities through the powers ofthe social forces that

seek to liberate themselves from the natural cyclical character of

the time ofhistory. Surpassing the line ofdestiny, however, is

aleatory. The synthesis ofthe good f

orms ofgovernment, the

government ofcivic virtue, can defy destiny but cannot replace

it. Crisis and decline are determinations that every day must be

overcome.

During the European Enlightenment, authors such as Montes-

quieu and Gibbon rejected the naturalist conception ofthis process.

The decline ofEmpire was explained in social scientific terms as a

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result ofthe impossibility ofmaking last the historical and social

constructions ofthe multitude and the virtue ofits heroes. The

corruption and decline ofEmpire were thus not a natural presuppo-

sition, determined by the cyclical destiny ofhistory, but rather a

product ofthe human impossibility (or at least the extreme difficulty)

ofgoverning an unlimited space and time. The limitlessness of

Empire undermined the capacity to make the good institutions

function and last. Nonetheless, Empire was an end toward which

the desire and the civic virtue ofthe multitude and its human

capacities to make history all tended. It was a precarious situation

that could not support unbounded space and time, but instead

ineluctably limited the universal aims ofgovernment to finite politi-

cal and social dimensions. The Enlightenment authors told us that

the government that approximates perfection will be constructed

with moderation across limited space and time. Between Empire

and the reality ofcommand, therefore, there was a contradiction

in principle that would inevitably spawn crises.

Machiavelli, looking back at the conception ofthe ancients

and anticipating that of the moderns, is really the one who offers

us the most adequate illustration ofthe paradox ofEmpire.2 He

clarified the problematic by separating it from both the naturalizing

terrain ofthe ancients and the sociological terrain ofthe moderns,

presenting it, rather, on the field ofimmanence and pure politics.

In Machiavelli, expansive government is pushed forward by the

dialectic ofthe social and political forces ofthe Republic. Only

where the social classes and their political expressions are posed in

an open and continuous play ofcounterpower are freedom and

expansion linked together, and hence only there does Empire be-

come possible. There is no concept ofEmpire, Machiavelli says,

that is not a decisively expansive concept offreedom. Precisely in

this dialectic offreedom, then, is where the elements ofcorruption

and destruction reside. When Machiavelli discusses the fall of the

Roman Empire, he focuses first and foremost on the crisis of civil

religion, or really on the decline ofthe social relation that had

unified the different ideological social forces and allowed them

to participate together in the open interaction ofcounterpowers.

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373

Christian religion is what destroyed the Roman Empire by destroy-

ing the civic passion that pagan society had sustained, the conflictual

but loyal participation ofthe citizens in the continuous perfecting

ofthe constitution and the process offreedom.

The ancient notion ofthe necessary and natural corruption

ofthe good forms ofgovernment is thus radically displaced because

they can be evaluated only in relation to the social and political

relationship that organized the constitution. The Enlightenment

and modern notion ofthe crisis ofunbounded and uncontrollable

space and time is similarly displaced because it too was led back to

the realm ofcivic power: on this and no other basis can space and

time be evaluated. The alternative is thus not between government

and corruption, or between Empire and decline, but between on

the one hand socially rooted and expansive government, that is,

‘‘civic’’ and ‘‘democratic’’ government, and on the other every

practice ofgovernment that grounds its own power on transcen-

dence and repression. We should be clear here that when we speak

ofthe ‘‘city’’ or ‘‘democracy’’ in quotation marks as the basis for

the expansive activity ofthe Republic, and as the only possibility

for a lasting Empire, we are introducing a concept of participation

that is linked to the vitality ofa population and to its capacity to

generate a dialectic ofcounterpowers—a concept, therefore, that

has little to do with the classical or the modern concept ofdemoc-

racy. Even the reigns ofGenghis Khan and Tamerlane were from

this perspective somewhat ‘‘democratic,’’ as were Caesar’s legions,

Napoleon’s armies, and the armies ofStalin and Eisenhower, since

each ofthem enabled the participation ofa population that supported

its expansive action. What is central in all ofthese cases, and in the

general concept ofEmpire, is that a terrain ofimmanence be af-

firmed. Immanence is defined as the absence ofevery external limit

from the trajectories ofthe action ofthe multitude, and immanence

is tied only, in its affirmations and destructions, to regimes of possi-

bility that constitute its formation and development.

Here we find ourselves back at the center ofthe paradox by

which every theory ofEmpire conceives the possibility ofits own

decline—but now we can begin to explain it. IfEmpire is always

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an absolute positivity, the realization ofa government ofthe multi-

tude, and an absolutely immanent apparatus, then it is exposed to

crisis precisely on the terrain ofthis definition, and not for any

other necessity or transcendence opposed to it. Crisis is the sign of

an alternative possibility on the plane ofimmanence—a crisis that

is not necessary but always possible. Machiavelli helps us understand

this immanent, constitutive, and ontological sense ofcrisis. Only

in the present situation, however, does this coexistence ofcrisis

and the field ofimmanence become completely clear. Since the

spatial and temporal dimensions ofpolitical action are no longer

the limits but the constructive mechanisms ofimperial government,

the coexistence ofthe positive and the negative on the terrain of

immanence is now configured as an open alternative. Today the

same movements and tendencies constitute both the rise and the

decline ofEmpire.

Finis Europae(Wittgenstein)

The coexistence ofthe imperial spirit with signs ofcrisis and

decline has appeared in many different guises in European dis-

course over the past two centuries, often as a reflection either

on the end ofEuropean hegemony or on the crisis ofdemocracy

and the triumph ofmass society. We have insisted at length

throughout this book that the modern governments ofEurope

developed not imperial but imperialist forms. The concept of Empire nonetheless survived in Europe, and its lack ofreality

was continually mourned. The European debates about Empire

and decline interest us for two primary reasons: first, because

the crisis ofthe ideal ofimperial Europe is at the center of

these debates, and second, because this crisis strikes precisely in

that secret place ofthe definition ofEmpire where the concept

ofdemocracy resides. Another element that we have to keep in

mind here is the standpoint from which the debates were

conducted: a standpoint that adopts the historical drama ofthe

decline ofEmpire in terms ofcollective lived experience. The

theme of the crisis of Europe was translated into a discourse on

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375

the decline ofEmpire and linked to the crisis ofdemocracy,

along with the forms of consciousness and resistance that this

crisis implies.

Alexis de Tocqueville was perhaps the first to present the

problem in these terms. His analysis ofmass democracy in the

United States, with its spirit ofinitiative and expansion, led him

to the bitter and prophetic recognition ofthe impossibility f

or

European eĺites to continue to maintain a position ofcommand

over world civilization.3 Hegel had already perceived something

very similar: ‘‘America is . . . the country ofthe future, and its

world-historical importance has yet to be revealed in the ages which

lie ahead . . . It is a land ofdesire for all those who are weary

ofthe historical arsenal ofold Europe.’’4 Tocqueville, however,

understood this passage in a much more profound way. The reason

for the crisis of European civilization and its imperial practices

consists in the fact that European virtue—or really its aristocratic

morality organized in the institutions ofmodern sovereignty—

cannot manage to keep pace with the vital powers ofmass de-

mocracy.

The death ofGod that many Europeans began to perceive

was really a sign ofthe expiration oftheir own planetary centrality,

which they could understand only in terms ofa modern mysticism.

From Nietzsche to Burkhardt, from Thomas Mann to Max Weber,

from Spengler to Heidegger and Ortega y Gasset, and numerous

other authors who straddled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

this intuition became a constant refrain that was sung with such

bitterness!5 The appearance ofthe masses on the social and political

scene, the exhaustion ofthe cultural and productive models of

modernity, the waning ofthe European imperialist projects, and

the conflicts among nations on questions ofscarcity, poverty, and

class struggle: all these emerged as irreversible signs ofdecline.

Nihilism dominated the era because the times were without hope.

Nietzsche gave the definitive diagnosis: ‘‘Europe is sick.’’6 The two

World Wars that would ravage its territories, the triumph offascism,

and now, after the collapse of Stalinism, the reappearance of the

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most terrible specters ofnationalism and intolerance all stand as

proofto confirm that these intuitions were in fact correct.

From our standpoint, however, the fact that against the old

powers ofEurope a new Empire has formed is only good news.

Who wants to see any more ofthat pallid and parasitic European

ruling class that led directly from the ancien re´gime to nationalism,

from populism to fascism, and now pushes for a generalized neolib-

eralism? Who wants to see more ofthose ideologies and those

bureaucratic apparatuses that have nourished and abetted the rotting

European eĺites? And who can still stand those systems oflabor

organization and those corporations that have stripped away every

vital spirit?

Our task here is not to lament the crisis ofEurope, but rather

to recognize in its analyses the elements that, while confirming its

tendency, still indicate possible resistances, the margins ofpositive

reaction, and the alternatives ofdestiny. These elements have often

appeared almost against the will ofthe theorists ofthe crisis oftheir

own times: it is a resistance that leaps to a future time—a real and

proper future past, a kind of future perfect tense. In this sense,

through the painful analyses ofits causes, the crisis ofEuropean

ideology can reveal the definition ofnew, open resources. This is

why it is important to follow the developments of the crisis of

Europe, because not only in authors such as Nietzsche and Weber

but also in the public opinion ofthe times, the denunciation of

the crisis revealed an extremely powerful positive side, which con-

tained the fundamental characteristics of the new world Empire we

are entering today. The agents ofthe crisis ofthe old imperial world

became foundations of the new. The undifferentiated mass that by

its simple presence was able to destroy the modern tradition and

its transcendent power appears now as a powerful productive force

and an uncontainable source ofvalorization. A new vitality, almost

like the barbaric forces that buried Rome, reanimates the field of

immanence that the death ofthe European God lef

t us as our

horizon. Every theory ofthe crisis ofEuropean Man and ofthe

decline ofthe idea ofEuropean Empire is in some way a symptom

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377

of the new vital force of the masses, or as we prefer, of the desire

ofthe multitude. Nietzsche declared this from the mountaintops:

‘ I have absorbed in myselfthe spirit ofEurope—now I want to

strike back!’’7 Going beyond modernity means going beyond the

barriers and transcendences ofEurocentrism and leads toward the

definitive adoption ofthe field ofimmanence as the exclusive terrain

ofthe theory and practice ofpolitics.

In the years after the explosion of the First World War, those

who had participated in the great massacre tried desperately to

understand and control the crisis. Consider the testimonies ofFranz

Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin. For both ofthem a kind of

secular eschatology was the mechanism by which the experience

ofthe crisis could be set free.8 After the historical experience of

war and misery, and also perhaps with an intuition ofthe holocaust

to come, they tried to discover a hope and a light ofredemption.

This attempt, however, did not succeed in escaping the powerful

undertow ofthe dialectic. Certainly the dialectic, that cursed dialec-

tic that had held together and anointed European values, had been

emptied out from within and was now defined in completely nega-

tive terms. The apocalyptic scene on which this mysticism searched

for liberation and redemption, however, was still too implicated in

the crisis. Benjamin recognized this bitterly: ‘‘The past carries with

it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There

is a secret agreement between past generations and the present. Our

coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded

us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power

to which the past has a claim.’’9

This theoretical experience arose precisely where the crisis of

modernity appeared with the most intensity. On this same terrain

other authors sought to break with the remnants ofthe dialectic

and its powers ofsubsumption. It seems to us, however, that even

the strongest thinkers ofthe day were not able to break with the

dialectic and the crisis. In Max Weber the crisis ofsovereignty and

legitimacy can be resolved only through recourse to the irrational

figures ofcharisma. In Carl Schmitt the horizon ofsovereign prac-

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tices can be cleared only by recourse to the ‘‘decision.’’ An irrational

dialectic, however, cannot resolve or even attenuate the crisis of

reality.10 And the powerful shadow of an aestheticized dialectic slips

even into Heidegger’s notion ofa pastoral function over a scattered

and fractured being.

For the real clarification ofthis scene, we are most indebted

to the series ofFrench philosophers who reread Nietzsche several

decades later, in the 1960s.11 Their rereading involved a reorienta-

tion ofthe standpoint ofthe critique, which came about when they

began to recognize the end ofthe functioning ofthe dialectic and

when this recognition was confirmed in the new practical, political

experiences that centered on the production ofsubjectivity. This

was a production ofsubjectivity as power, as the constitution ofan

autonomy that could not be reduced to any abstract or transcendent

synthesis.12 Not the dialectic but refusal, resistance, violence, and

the positive affirmation of being now marked the relationship be-

tween the location ofthe crisis in reality and the adequate response.

What in the midst ofthe crisis in the 1920s appeared as transcendence

against history, redemption against corruption, and messianism

against nihilism now was constructed as an ontologically definite

position outside and against, and thus beyond every possible resi-

due ofthe dialectic. This was a new materialism which negated

every transcendent element and constituted a radical reorientation

ofspirit.

In order to understand the profundity of this passage, one

would do well to focus on the awareness and anticipation of it in

the thought ofLudwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s early writings

gave a new life to the dominant themes of early twentieth-century

European thought: the condition ofdwelling in the desert ofsense

and searching for meaning, the coexistence of a mysticism of the

totality and the ontological tendency toward the production of

subjectivity. Contemporary history and its drama, which had been

stripped away from any dialectic, were then removed by Witt-

genstein from any contingency. History and experience became

the scene ofa materialist and tautological refoundation ofthe subject

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379

in a desperate attempt to find coherence in the crisis. In the midst

ofWorld War I Wittgenstein wrote: ‘‘How things stand, is God.

God is, how things stand. Only from the consciousness of the

uniqueness of my life arises religion—science—and art.’’ And further:

‘‘This consciousness is life itself. Can it be an ethics even if there

is no living being outside myself? Can there be any ethics if there

is no living being but myself? If ethics is supposed to be something

fundamental, there can. If I am right, then it is not sufficient for

the ethical judgment that a world be given. Then the world in

itselfis neither good nor evil . . . Good and evil only enter through

the subject. And the subject is not part ofthe world, but a boundary ofthe world.’’ Wittgenstein denounces the God ofwar and the

desert ofthings in which good and evil are now indistinguishable

by situating the world on the limit oftautological subjectivity:

‘‘Here one can see that solipsism coincides with pure realism, ifit

is strictly thought out.’’13 This limit, however, is creative. The

alternative is completely given when, and only when, subjectivity

is posed outside the world: ‘‘My propositions serve as elucidations

in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recog-

nizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to

climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder

after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and

then he will see the world aright.’’14 Wittgenstein recognizes the

end ofevery possible dialectic and any meaning that resides in the

logic ofthe world and not in its marginal, subjective surpassing.

The tragic trajectory ofthis philosophical experience allows

us to grasp those elements that made the perception ofthe crisis

ofmodernity and the decline ofthe idea ofEurope a (negative but

necessary) condition ofthe definition ofthe coming Empire. These

authors were voices crying out in the desert. Part ofthis generation

would be interned in extermination camps. Others would perpetu-

ate the crisis through an illusory faith in Soviet modernization.

Others still, a significant group ofthese authors, would flee to

America. They were indeed voices crying out in the desert, but

their rare and singular anticipations oflife in the desert give us the

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means to reflect on the possibilities ofthe multitude in the new

reality ofpostmodern Empire. Those authors were the first to define

the condition ofthe complete deterritorialization ofthe coming

Empire, and they were situated in it just as the multitudes are

situated in it today. The negativity, the refusal to participate, the

discovery ofan emptiness that invests everything: this means situat-

ing oneselfperemptorily in an imperial reality that is itselfdefined

by crisis. Empire is the desert and crisis is at this point indistinguish-

able from the tendency of history. Whereas in the ancient world

the imperial crisis was conceived as the product ofa natural cyclical

history, and whereas in the modern world crisis was defined by a

series ofaporias oftime and space, now figures ofcrisis and practices

ofEmpire have become indistinguishable. The twentieth-century

theorists ofcrisis teach us, however, that in this deterritorialized

and untimely space where the new Empire is constructed and in

this desert ofmeaning, the testimony ofthe crisis can pass toward

the realization ofa singular and collective subject, toward the powers

ofthe multitude. The multitude has internalized the lack ofplace

and fixed time; it is mobile and flexible, and it conceives the future

only as a totality ofpossibilities that branch out in every direction.

The coming imperial universe, blind to meaning, is filled by the

multifarious totality ofthe production ofsubjectivity. The decline

is no longer a future destiny but the present reality of Empire.

America, America

The flight ofEuropean intellectuals to the United States was an

attempt to rediscover a lost place. Was not American democracy

in fact founded on the democracy of exodus, on affirmative and

nondialectical values, and on pluralism and freedom? Did not these

values, along with the notion ofnew frontiers, perpetually re-create

the expansion ofits democratic basis, beyond every abstract obstacle

ofthe nation, ethnicity, and religion? This music was played at times

in a high form in the project of the ‘‘Pax Americana’’ proclaimed by

the liberal leadership, and at times in a low form, represented by

the American dream ofsocial mobility and equal opportunity for

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381

wealth and freedom for every honest person—in short, ‘‘the Ameri-

can way oflife.’’ The New Deal’s project to surmount the world

crisis of the 1930s, which was so different from and so much more

liberal than the European political and cultural projects to respond

to the crisis, supported this conception ofthe American ideal. When

Hannah Arendt claimed the American Revolution to be superior

to the French because the American was an unlimited search for

political freedom and the French a limited struggle over scarcity

and inequality, she not only celebrated an ideal offreedom that

Europeans no longer knew but also reterritorialized it in the United

States.15 In a certain sense, then, it seemed as ifthe continuity that

had existed between U.S. history and the history ofEurope was

broken and that the United States had embarked on a different

course, but really the United States represented for these Europeans

the resurrection ofan idea offreedom that Europe had lost.

From the standpoint ofa Europe in crisis, the United States,

Jefferson’s ‘‘Empire of liberty,’’ represented the renewal of the impe-

rial idea. The great nineteenth-century American writers had sung

the epic dimensions ofthe freedom ofthe new continent. In Whit-

man naturalism became affirmative and in Melville realism became

desiring. An American place was territorialized in the name ofa

constitution offreedom and at the same time continually deterritori-

alized through the opening off

rontiers and exodus. The great

American philosophers, from Emerson to Whitehead and Pierce,

opened up Hegelianism (or really the apologia ofimperialist Europe)

to the spiritual currents ofa process that was new and immense,

determinate and unlimited.16

The Europeans in crisis were enchanted by these siren songs

ofa new Empire. European Americanism and anti-Americanism

in the twentieth century are both manifestations of the difficult

relationship between Europeans in crisis and the U.S. imperial

project. The American utopia was received in many different ways,

but it functioned everywhere in twentieth-century Europe as a

central reference point. The continuous preoccupation was manifest

both in the spleen ofthe crisis and in the spirit ofthe avant-gardes,

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in other words, through the self-destruction of modernity and the

indeterminate but uncontainable will to innovation that drove the

last wave ofgreat European cultural movements, from expressionism

and futurism to cubism and abstractionism.

The military history ofthe double rescue ofEurope by the

U.S. armies in the two World Wars was paralleled by a rescue in

political and cultural terms. American hegemony over Europe,

which was founded on financial, economic, and military structures,

was made to seem natural through a series ofcultural and ideological

operations. Consider, for example, how in the years surrounding

the end ofWorld War II the locus ofartistic production and the

idea of modern art shifted from Paris to New York. Serge Guilbaut

recounts the fascinating story of how, when the Paris art scene had

been thrown into disarray by war and Nazi occupation, and in the

midst ofan ideological campaign to promote the leading role of

the United States in the postwar world, the abstract expressionism

ofNew York artists such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell

was established as the natural continuation and heir ofEuropean

and specifically Parisian modernism. New York stole the idea of

modern art:

American art was thus described as the logical culmination of

a long-standing and inexorable tendency toward abstraction.

Once American culture was raised to the status ofan interna-

tional model, the significance ofwhat was specifically Ameri-

can had to change: what had been characteristically American

now became representative of‘‘Western culture’’ as a whole.

In this way American art was transformed from regional to

international art and then to universal art . . . In this respect,

postwar American culture was placed on the same footing

as American economic and military strength: it was made

responsible for the survival of democratic liberties in the

‘ free’’ world.17

This passage in the history ofartistic production and, more impor-

tant, art criticism is simply one aspect ofthe multifaceted ideological

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383

operation that cast the U.S. global hegemony as the natural and

ineluctable consequence ofthe crisis ofEurope.

Paradoxically, even the ferocious European nationalisms,

which had led to such violent conflicts over the first halfofthe

century, were eventually displaced by a competition over who

could better express a strong Americanism. Lenin’s Soviet Union

in fact may have heard the siren song of Americanism most clearly.

The challenge was to replicate the results ofthe capitalism that had

achieved its pinnacle in the United States. The Soviets argued

against the means the United States employed and claimed instead

that socialism could attain the same results more efficiently through

hard labor and the sacrifice offreedom. This terrible ambiguity also

runs throughout Gramsci’s writings on Americanism and Fordism,

one of the fundamental texts for understanding the American prob-

lem from the European point of view.18 Gramsci saw the United

States, with its combination ofnew Taylorist forms ofthe organiza-

tion oflabor and its powerful capitalist will to dominate, as the

inevitable reference point for the future: it was the only path for

development. For Gramsci, it was then a matter ofunderstanding

whether that revolution would be active (like that ofSoviet Russia)

or passive (as in Fascist Italy). The consonance between American-

ism and state socialism should be obvious, with their parallel paths

ofdevelopment on the two sides ofthe Atlantic throughout the

cold war, which led finally to dangerous competitions over space

exploration and nuclear weapons. These parallel paths simply high-

light the fact that a certain Americanism had penetrated into the

heart ofeven its strongest adversary. The twentieth-century devel-

opments ofRussia were to a certain extent a microcosm for those

ofEurope.

The refusal of European consciousness to recognize its decline

often took the form of projecting its crisis onto the American utopia.

That projection continued for a long time, as long as lasted the

necessity and urgency to rediscover a site offreedom that could

continue the teleological vision ofwhich Hegelian historicism is

perhaps the highest expression. The paradoxes ofthis projection

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multiplied, to the point where European consciousness, faced with

its undeniable and irreversible decline, reacted by going to the other

extreme: the primary site ofcompetition, which had affirmed and

repeated the formal power of the U.S. utopia, now represented its

complete overturning. Solzhenitsyn’s Russia became the absolute

negative ofthe most caricatural and apologetic images ofthe U.S.

utopia in the guise ofArnold Toynbee. It should come as no surprise

that the ideologies ofthe end ofhistory, which are as evolutionary

as they are postmodern, should appear to complete this ideological

mess. The American Empire will bring an end to History.

We know, however, that this idea ofAmerican Empire as the

redemption ofutopia is completely illusory. First ofall, the coming

Empire is not American and the United States is not its center.

The fundamental principle of Empire as we have described it

throughout this book is that its power has no actual and localizable

terrain or center. Imperial power is distributed in networks, through

mobile and articulated mechanisms ofcontrol. This is not to say

that the U.S. government and the U.S. territory are no different

from any other: the United States certainly occupies a privileged

position in the global segmentations and hierarchies ofEmpire.

As the powers and boundaries ofnation-states decline, however,

differences between national territories become increasingly rela-

tive. They are now not differences of nature (as were, for example,

the differences between the territory of the metropole and that of

the colony) but differences of degree.

Furthermore, the United States cannot rectify or redeem the

crisis and decline ofEmpire. The United States is not the place

where the European or even the modern subject can flee to resolve

its uneasiness and unhappiness; there was no such place. The means

to get beyond the crisis is the ontological displacement ofthe subject.

The most important change therefore takes place inside humanity,

since with the end ofmodernity also ends the hope offinding

something that can identify the self outside the community, outside

cooperation, and outside the critical and contradictory relationships

that each person finds in a non-place, that is, in the world and the

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multitude. This is where the idea ofEmpire reappears, not as a

territory, not in the determinate dimensions ofits time and space,

and not from the standpoint of a people and its history, but rather

simply as the fabric of an ontological human dimension that tends

to become universal.

Crisis

Postmodernization and the passage to Empire involve a real conver-

gence ofthe realms that used to be designated as base and superstruc-

ture. Empire takes form when language and communication, or

really when immaterial labor and cooperation, become the domi-

nant productive force (see Section 3.4). The superstructure is put

to work, and the universe we live in is a universe ofproductive

linguistic networks. The lines ofproduction and those ofrepresenta-

tion cross and mix in the same linguistic and productive realm. In

this context the distinctions that define the central categories of

political economy tend to blur. Production becomes indistinguish-

able from reproduction; productive forces merge with relations of

production; constant capital tends to be constituted and represented

within variable capital, in the brains, bodies, and cooperation of

productive subjects. Social subjects are at the same time producers

and products ofthis unitary machine. In this new historical forma-

tion it is thus no longer possible to identify a sign, a subject, a

value, or a practice that is ‘‘outside.’’

The formation of this totality, however, does not eliminate

exploitation. It rather redefines it, primarily in relation to communi-

cation and cooperation. Exploitation is the expropriation ofcooper-

ation and the nullification ofthe meanings oflinguistic production.

Consequently, resistances to command continually emerge within

Empire. Antagonisms to exploitation are articulated across the global

networks ofproduction and determine crises on each and every

node. Crisis is coextensive with the postmodern totality ofcapitalist

production; it is proper to imperial control. In this respect, the

decline and fall of Empire is defined not as a diachronic movement

but as a synchronic reality. Crisis runs through every moment of

the development and recomposition ofthe totality.

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With the real subsumption ofsociety under capital, social

antagonisms can erupt as conflict in every moment and on every

term ofcommunicative production and exchange. Capital has be-

come a world. Use value and all the other references to values and

processes ofvalorization that were conceived to be outside the

capitalist mode ofproduction have progressively vanished. Subjec-

tivity is entirely immersed in exchange and language, but that does

not mean it is now pacific. Technological development based on

the generalization ofthe communicative relationships ofproduction

is a motor ofcrisis, and productive general intellect is a nest of

antagonisms. Crisis and decline refer not to something external to

Empire but to what is most internal. They pertain to the production

ofsubjectivity itself, and thus they are at once proper and contrary

to the processes ofthe reproduction ofEmpire. Crisis and decline

are not a hidden foundation nor an ominous future but a clear

and obvious actuality, an always expected event, a latency that is

always present.

It is midnight in a night ofspecters. Both the new reign of

Empire and the new immaterial and cooperative creativity ofthe

multitude move in shadows, and nothing manages to illuminate

our destiny ahead. Nonetheless, we have acquired a new point of

reference (and tomorrow perhaps a new consciousness), which

consists in the fact that Empire is defined by crisis, that its decline

has always already begun, and that consequently every line ofantago-

nism leads toward the event and singularity. What does it mean,

practically, that crisis is immanent to and indistinguishable from

Empire? Is it possible in this dark night to theorize positively and

define a practice ofthe event?

Generation

Two central impediments prevent us from responding to these

questions immediately. The first is presented by the overbearing

power ofbourgeois metaphysics and specifically the widely propa-

gated illusion that the capitalist market and the capitalist regime of

production are eternal and insuperable. The bizarre naturalness of

G E N E R A T I O N A N D C O R R U P T I O N

387

capitalism is a pure and simple mystification, and we have to disabuse

ourselves ofit right away. The second impediment is represented

by the numerous theoretical positions that see no alternative to the

present form of rule except a blind anarchic other and that thus

partake in a mysticism ofthe limit. From this ideological perspective,

the suffering of existence cannot manage to be articulated, become

conscious, and establish a standpoint ofrevolt. This theoretical

position leads merely to a cynical attitude and quietistic practices.

The illusion ofthe naturalness ofcapitalism and the radicality of

the limit actually stand in a relationship ofcomplementarity. Their

complicity is expressed in an exhausting powerlessness. The fact is

that neither ofthese positions, neither the apologetic one nor the

mystical one, manages to grasp the primary aspect ofbiopolitical

order: its productivity. They cannot interpret the virtual powers of

the multitude that tend constantly toward becoming possible and

real. In other words, they have lost track ofthe fundamental produc-

tivity ofbeing.

We can answer the question ofhow to get out ofthe crisis only

by lowering ourselves down into biopolitical virtuality, enriched by

the singular and creative processes ofthe production ofsubjectivity.

How are rupture and innovation possible, however, in the absolute

horizon in which we are immersed, in a world in which values

seem to have been negated in a vacuum ofmeaning and a lack of

any measure? Here we do not need to go back again to a description

ofdesire and its ontological excess, nor insist again on the dimension

ofthe ‘‘beyond.’’ It is sufficient to point to the generative determina-

tion of desire and thus its productivity. In effect, the complete

commingling ofthe political, the social, and the economic in the

constitution ofthe present reveals a biopolitical space that—much

better than Hannah Arendt’s nostalgic utopia ofpolitical space—

explains the ability ofdesire to confront the crisis.19 The entire

conceptual horizon is thus completely redefined. The biopolitical,

seen from the standpoint of desire, is nothing other than concrete

production, human collectivity in action. Desire appears here as

productive space, as the actuality ofhuman cooperation in the

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construction ofhistory. This production is purely and simply human

reproduction, the power ofgeneration. Desiring production is gen-

eration, or rather the excess oflabor and the accumulation ofa power

incorporated into the collective movement ofsingular essences, both

its cause and its completion.

When our analysis is firmly situated in the biopolitical world

where social, economic, and political production and reproduction

coincide, the ontological perspective and the anthropological per-

spective tend to overlap. Empire pretends to be the master ofthat

world because it can destroy it. What a horrible illusion! In reality

we are masters ofthe world because our desire and labor regenerate

it continuously. The biopolitical world is an inexhaustible weaving

together ofgenerative actions, ofwhich the collective (as meeting

point ofsingularities) is the motor. No metaphysics, except a deliri-

ous one, can pretend to define humanity as isolated and powerless.

No ontology, except a transcendent one, can relegate humanity to

individuality. No anthropology, except a pathological one, can

define humanity as a negative power. Generation, that first fact of

metaphysics, ontology, and anthropology, is a collective mechanism

or apparatus ofdesire. Biopolitical becoming celebrates this ‘‘first’’

dimension in absolute terms.

Political theory is forced by this new reality to redefine itself

radically. In biopolitical society, for example, fear cannot be em-

ployed, as Thomas Hobbes proposed, as the exclusive motor of

the contractual constitution ofpolitics, thus negating the love of

the multitude. Or rather, in biopolitical society the decision ofthe

sovereign can never negate the desire ofthe multitude. Ifthose

founding modern strategies of sovereignty were employed today

with the oppositions they determine, the world would come to a

halt because generation would no longer be possible. For generation

to take place, the political has to yield to love and desire, and that

is to the fundamental forces of biopolitical production. The political

is not what we are taught it is today by the cynical Machiavellianism

ofpoliticians; it is rather, as the democratic Machiavelli tells us, the

power ofgeneration, desire, and love. Political theory has to reorient

itselfalong these lines and assume the language ofgeneration.

G E N E R A T I O N A N D C O R R U P T I O N

389

Generation is the primum ofthe biopolitical world ofEmpire.

Biopower—a horizon ofthe hybridization ofthe natural and the

artificial, needs and machines, desire and the collective organization

ofthe economic and the social—must continually regenerate itself

in order to exist. Generation is there, before all else, as basis and

motor ofproduction and reproduction. The generative connection

gives meaning to communication, and any model of(everyday,

philosophical, or political) communication that does not respond

to this primacy is false. The social and political relationships of

Empire register this phase ofthe development ofproduction and

interpret the generative and productive biosphere. We have thus

reached a limit ofthe virtuality ofthe real subsumption ofproductive

society under capital—but precisely on this limit the possibility of

generation and the collective force of desire are revealed in all

their power.

Corruption

Opposed to generation stands corruption. Far from being the neces-

sary complement ofgeneration, as the various Platonic currents of

philosophy would like, corruption is merely its simple negation.20

Corruption breaks the chain ofdesire and interrupts its extension

across the biopolitical horizon ofproduction. It constructs black

holes and ontological vacuums in the life of the multitude that not

even the most perverse political science manages to camouflage.

Corruption, contrary to desire, is not an ontological motor but

simply the lack ofontological foundation ofthe biopolitical practices

ofbeing.

In Empire corruption is everywhere. It is the cornerstone and

keystone of domination. It resides in different forms in the supreme

government ofEmpire and its vassal administrations, the most re-

fined and the most rotten administrative police forces, the lobbies

ofthe ruling classes, the mafias ofrising social groups, the churches

and sects, the perpetrators and persecutors ofscandal, the great

financial conglomerates, and everyday economic transactions.

Through corruption, imperial power extends a smoke screen across

the world, and command over the multitude is exercised in this

putrid cloud, in the absence oflight and truth.

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It is no mystery how we recognize corruption and how we

identify the powerful emptiness of the mist of indifference that

imperial power extends across the world. In fact, the ability to

recognize corruption is, to use a phrase ofDescartes’s, ‘‘la faculteĺa mieux partageé du monde,’’ the most widely shared faculty in the world. Corruption is easily perceived because it appears immediately as a form of violence, as an insult. And indeed it is an insult:

corruption is in fact the sign ofthe impossibility oflinking power

to value, and its denunciation is thus a direct intuition ofthe lack

ofbeing. Corruption is what separates a body and a mind from

what they can do. Since knowledge and existence in the biopolitical

world always consist in a production ofvalue, this lack ofbeing

appears as a wound, a death wish ofthe socius, a stripping away

ofbeing from the world.

The forms in which corruption appears are so numerous that

trying to list them is like pouring the sea into a teacup. Let us try

nonetheless to give a few examples, even though they can in no way

serve to represent the whole. In the first place, there is corruption as

individual choice that is opposed to and violates the fundamental

community and solidarity defined by biopolitical production. This

small, everyday violence ofpower is a mafia-style corruption. In

the second place, there is corruption ofthe productive order, or

really exploitation. This includes the fact that the values that derive

from the collective cooperation of labor are expropriated, and what

was in the biopolitical ab origine public is privatized. Capitalism is completely implicated in this corruption ofprivatization. As Saint

Augustine says, the great reigns are only the enlarged projections

oflittle thieves. Augustine ofHippo, however, so realistic in this

pessimistic conception ofpower, would be struck dumb by today’s

little thieves ofmonetary and financial power. Really, when capital-

ism loses its relationship to value (both as the measure ofindividual

exploitation and as a norm ofcollective progress), it appears immedi-

ately as corruption. The increasingly abstract sequence ofits func-

tioning (from the accumulation of surplus value to monetary and

financial speculation) is shown to be a powerful march toward

G E N E R A T I O N A N D C O R R U P T I O N

391

generalized corruption. Ifcapitalism is by definition a system of

corruption, held together nonetheless as in Mandeville’s fable by

its cooperative cleverness and redeemed according to all its ideolo-

gies on right and left by its progressive function, then when measure

is dissolved and the progressive telos breaks down, nothing essential

remains ofcapitalism but corruption. In the third place, corruption

appears in the functioning of ideology, or rather in the perversion

ofthe senses oflinguistic communication. Here corruption touches

on the biopolitical realm, attacking its productive nodes and ob-

structing its generative processes. This attack is demonstrated, in

the fourth place, when in the practices of imperial government the

threat ofterror becomes a weapon to resolve limited or regional

conflicts and an apparatus for imperial development. Imperial com-

mand, in this case, is disguised and can alternately appear as cor-

ruption or destruction, almost as ifto reveal the prof

ound call

that the former makes for the latter and the latter for the former.

The two dance together over the abyss, over the imperial lack

ofbeing.

Such examples ofcorruption could be multiplied ad infinitum,

but at the base ofall these forms ofcorruption there is an operation

ofontological nullification that is defined and exercised as the

destruction ofthe singular essence ofthe multitude. The multitude

must be unified or segmented into different unities: this is how the

multitude has to be corrupted. This is why the ancient and modern

concepts ofcorruption cannot be translated directly into the post-

modern concept. Whereas in ancient and modern times corruption

was defined in relation to the schemas and/or relations ofvalue

and demonstrated as a falsification of them in such a way that it

could at times play a role in the change among the forms of govern-

ment and the restoration ofvalues, today, in contrast, corruption

cannot play a role in any transformation of the forms of government

because corruption itselfis the substance and totality ofEmpire.

Corruption is the pure exercise ofcommand, without any propor-

tionate or adequate reference to the world of life. It is command

directed toward the destruction ofthe singularity ofthe multitude

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through its coercive unification and/or cruel segmentation. This is

why Empire necessarily declines in the very moment ofits rise.

This negative figure ofcommand over productive biopower

is even more paradoxical when viewed from the perspective of

corporeality. Biopolitical generation directly transforms the bodies

ofthe multitude. These are, as we have seen, bodies enriched with

intellectual and cooperative power, and bodies that are already

hybrid. What generation offers us in postmodernity are thus bodies

‘‘beyond measure.’’ In this context corruption appears simply as

disease, frustration, and mutilation. This is how power has always

acted against enriched bodies. Corruption also appears as psychosis,

opiates, anguish, and boredom, but this too has always happened

throughout modernity and disciplinary societies. The specificity of

corruption today is instead the rupture ofthe community ofsingular

bodies and the impediment to its action—a rupture ofthe produc-

tive biopolitical community and an impediment to its life. Here

we are thus faced with a paradox. Empire recognizes and profits

from the fact that in cooperation bodies produce more and in

community bodies enjoy more, but it has to obstruct and control this

cooperative autonomy so as not to be destroyed by it. Corruption

operates to impede this going ‘‘beyond measure’’ ofthe bodies

through community, this singular universalization ofthe new power

ofbodies, which threaten the very existence ofEmpire. The paradox

is irresolvable: the more the world becomes rich, the more Empire,

which is based on this wealth, must negate the conditions ofthe

production ofwealth. Our task is to investigate how ultimately

corruption can be forced to cede its control to generation.

4.3

T H E M U L T I T U D E A G A I N S T E M P I R E

The great masses need a material religion of the senses [ eine sinnliche Religion]. Not only the great masses but also the philosopher needs it.

Monotheism ofreason and the heart, polytheism ofthe imagination

and art, this is what we need . . . [W]e must have a new mythol-

ogy, but this mythology must be at the service ofideas. It must be

a mythology of reason.

Das a¨lteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,

by Hegel, Ho¨lderlin, or Schelling

We do not lack communication, on the contrary we have too

much ofit. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.

Gilles Deleuze and Feĺix Guattari

Imperial power can no longer resolve the conflict of

social forces through mediatory schemata that displace the terms of

conflict. The social conflicts that constitute the political confront

one another directly, without mediations ofany sort. This is the

essential novelty ofthe imperial situation. Empire creates a greater

potential for revolution than did the modern regimes of power

because it presents us, alongside the machine ofcommand, with

an alternative: the set ofall the exploited and the subjugated, a

multitude that is directly opposed to Empire, with no mediation

between them. At this point, then, as Augustine says, our task is

to discuss, to the best ofour powers, ‘‘the rise, the development

and the destined ends ofthe two cities . . . which we find . . .

interwoven . . . and mingled with one another.’’1 Now that we

have dealt extensively with Empire, we should focus directly on

the multitude and its potential political power.

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TheTwo Cities

We need to investigate specifically how the multitude can become

a political subject in the context ofEmpire. We can certainly recognize the existence ofthe multitude from the standpoint ofthe constitution ofEmpire, but f

rom that perspective the multitude might

appear to be generated and sustained by imperial command. In the

new postmodern Empire there is no Emperor Caracalla who grants

citizenship to all his subjects and thereby forms the multitude as a

political subject. The formation ofthe multitude ofexploited and

subjugated producers can be read more clearly in the history of

twentieth-century revolutions. Between the communist revolutions

of1917 and 1949, the great anti-fascist struggles ofthe 1930s and

1940s, and the numerous liberation struggles ofthe 1960s up to

those of1989, the conditions ofthe citizenship ofthe multitude

were born, spread, and consolidated. Far from being defeated, the

revolutions ofthe twentieth century have each pushed forward and

transformed the terms ofclass conflict, posing the conditions ofa

new political subjectivity, an insurgent multitude against imperial

power. The rhythm that the revolutionary movements have estab-

lished is the beat ofa new aetas, a new maturity and metamorphosis ofthe times.

The constitution ofEmpire is not the cause but the conse-

quence ofthe rise ofthese new powers. It should be no surprise,

then, that Empire, despite its efforts, finds it impossible to construct

a system ofright adequate to the new reality ofthe globalization

ofsocial and economic relations. This impossibility (which served

as the point ofdeparture for our argument in Section 1.1) is not

due to the wide extension ofthe field ofregulation; nor is it simply

the result of the difficult passage from the old system of international

public law to the new imperial system. This impossibility is explained

instead by the revolutionary nature ofthe multitude, whose struggles

have produced Empire as an inversion ofits own image and who

now represents on this new scene an uncontainable force and an

excess ofvalue with respect to every form ofright and law.

To confirm this hypothesis, it is sufficient to look at the

contemporary development ofthe multitude and dwell on the

T H E M U L T I T U D E A G A I N S T E M P I R E

395

vitality ofits present expressions. When the multitude works, it

produces autonomously and reproduces the entire world oflife.

Producing and reproducing autonomously mean constructing a new

ontological reality. In effect, by working, the multitude produces

itselfas singularity. It is a singularity that establishes a new place in

the non-place ofEmpire, a singularity that is a reality produced by

cooperation, represented by the linguistic community, and devel-

oped by the movements ofhybridization. The multitude affirms

its singularity by inverting the ideological illusion that all humans

on the global surfaces of the world market are interchangeable.

Standing the ideology ofthe market on its f

eet, the multitude

promotes through its labor the biopolitical singularizations ofgroups

and sets ofhumanity, across each and every node ofglobal inter-

change.

Class struggles and revolutionary processes ofthe past under-

mined the political powers ofnations and peoples. The revolution-

ary preamble that has been written from the nineteenth to the

twentieth centuries has prepared the new subjective configuration

oflabor that comes to be realized today. Cooperation and communi-

cation throughout the spheres ofbiopolitical production define a

new productive singularity. The multitude is not formed simply

by throwing together and mixing nations and peoples indifferently;

it is the singular power ofa new city.

One might object at this point, with good reason, that all this

is still not enough to establish the multitude as a properly political

subject, nor even less as a subject with the potential to control

its own destiny. This objection, however, does not present an

insuperable obstacle, because the revolutionary past, and the con-

temporary cooperative productive capacities through which the

anthropological characteristics ofthe multitude are continually tran-

scribed and reformulated, cannot help revealing a telos, a material

affirmation of liberation. In the ancient world Plotinus faced some-

thing like this situation:

‘‘Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland’’: this is the soundest

counsel . . . The Fatherland to us is There whence we have

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come, and There is the Father. What then is our course, what

the manner of our flight? This is not a journey for the feet;

the feet bring us only from land to land; nor need you think

ofa coach or ship to carry you away; all this order ofthings

you must set aside and refuse to see: you must close the eyes

and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked

within you, a vision, the birth-right ofall, which few turn

to use.2

This is how ancient mysticism expressed the new telos. The multi-

tude today, however, resides on the imperial surfaces where there

is no God the Father and no transcendence. Instead there is our

immanent labor. The teleology ofthe multitude is theurgical; it

consists in the possibility ofdirecting technologies and production

toward its own joy and its own increase ofpower. The multitude

has no reason to look outside its own history and its own present

productive power for the means necessary to lead toward its consti-

tution as a political subject.

A material mythology ofreason thus begins to be formed, and

it is constructed in the languages, technologies, and all the means

that constitute the world oflife. It is a material religion ofthe senses

that separates the multitude from every residue of sovereign power

and from every ‘‘long arm’’ of Empire. The mythology of reason

is the symbolic and imaginative articulation that allows the ontology

ofthe multitude to express itselfas activity and consciousness. The

mythology oflanguages ofthe multitude interprets the telos ofan

earthly city, torn away by the power ofits own destiny from any

belonging or subjection to a city of God, which has lost all honor and legitimacy. To the metaphysical and transcendent mediations,

to the violence and corruption are thus opposed the absolute consti-

tution oflabor and cooperation, the earthly city ofthe multitude.

Endless Paths (The Right to

Global Citizenship)

The constitution ofthe multitude appears first as a spatial movement

that constitutes the multitude in limitless place. The mobility of

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397

commodities, and thus ofthat special commodity that is labor-

power, has been presented by capitalism ever since its birth as the

fundamental condition ofaccumulation. The kinds ofmovement

ofindividuals, groups, and populations that we find today in Empire,

however, cannot be completely subjugated to the laws ofcapitalist

accumulation—at every moment they overflow and shatter the

bounds ofmeasure. The movements ofthe multitude designate

new spaces, and its journeys establish new residences. Autonomous

movement is what defines the place proper to the multitude. In-

creasingly less will passports or legal documents be able to regulate

our movements across borders. A new geography is established by

the multitude as the productive flows ofbodies define new rivers

and ports. The cities ofthe earth will become at once great deposits

ofcooperating humanity and locomotives for circulation, temporary

residences and networks ofthe mass distribution ofliving humanity.

Through circulation the multitude reappropriates space and

constitutes itselfas an active subject. When we look closer at how

this constitutive process ofsubjectivity operates, we can see that

the new spaces are described by unusual topologies, by subterranean

and uncontainable rhizomes—by geographical mythologies that

mark the new paths ofdestiny. These movements often cost terrible

suffering, but there is also in them a desire of liberation that is not

satiated except by reappropriating new spaces, around which are

constructed new freedoms. Everywhere these movements arrive,

and all along their paths they determine new forms of life and

cooperation—everywhere they create that wealth that parasitic

postmodern capitalism would otherwise not know how to suck out

ofthe blood ofthe proletariat, because increasingly today production

takes place in movement and cooperation, in exodus and commu-

nity. Is it possible to imagine U.S. agriculture and service industries

without Mexican migrant labor, or Arab oil without Palestinians

and Pakistanis? Moreover, where would the great innovative sectors

of immaterial production, from design to fashion, and from electron-

ics to science in Europe, the United States, and Asia, be without

the ‘‘illegal labor’’ ofthe great masses, mobilized toward the radiant

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horizons ofcapitalist wealth and freedom? Mass migrations have

become necessary for production. Every path is forged, mapped,

and traveled. It seems that the more intensely each is traveled and

the more suffering is deposited there, the more each path becomes

productive. These paths are what brings the ‘‘earthly city’’ out of

the cloud and confusion that Empire casts over it. This is how the

multitude gains the power to affirm its autonomy, traveling and

expressing itselfthrough an apparatus ofwidespread, transversal

territorial reappropriation.

Recognizing the potential autonomy ofthe mobile multitude,

however, only points toward the real question. What we need to

grasp is how the multitude is organized and redefined as a positive,

political power. Up to this point we have been able to describe

the potential existence ofthis political power in merely f

ormal

terms. It would be a mistake to stop here, without going on to

investigate the mature forms of the consciousness and political orga-

nization ofthe multitude, without recognizing how much is already

powerful in these territorial movements of the labor power of

Empire. How can we recognize (and reveal) a constituent political

tendency within and beyond the spontaneity ofthe multitude’s

movements?

This question can be approached initially from the other side

by considering the policies ofEmpire that repress these movements.

Empire does not really know how to control these paths and can

only try to criminalize those who travel them, even when the

movements are required for capitalist production itself. The migra-

tion lines ofbiblical proportions that go f

rom South to North

America are obstinately called by the new drug czars ‘‘the cocaine

trail’’; or rather, the articulations of exodus from North Africa and

sub-Saharan Africa are treated by European leaders as ‘‘paths of

terrorism’’; or rather still, the populations forced to flee across the

Indian Ocean are reduced to slavery in ‘‘Arabia feĺix’’; and the list

goes on. And yet the flows ofpopulation continue. Empire must

restrict and isolate the spatial movements ofthe multitude to stop

them from gaining political legitimacy. It is extremely important

T H E M U L T I T U D E A G A I N S T E M P I R E

399

from this point of view that Empire use its powers to manage and

orchestrate the various forces of nationalism and fundamentalism

(see Sections 2.2 and 2.4). It is no less important, too, that Empire

deploy its military and police powers to bring the unruly and rebel-

lious to order.3 These imperial practices in themselves, however,

still do not touch on the political tension that runs throughout the

spontaneous movements ofthe multitude. All these repressive actions

remain essentially external to the multitude and its movements. Empire can only isolate, divide, and segregate. Imperial capital does indeed

attack the movements ofthe multitude with a tireless determination:

it patrols the seas and the borders; within each country it divides

and segregates; and in the world oflabor it reinforces the cleavages

and borderlines ofrace, gender, language, culture, and so forth. Even

then, however, it must be careful not to restrict the productivity of

the multitude too much because Empire too depends on this power.

The movements ofthe multitude have to be allowed to extend

always wider across the world scene, and the attempts at repressing

the multitude are really paradoxical, inverted manifestations of its

strength.

This leads us back to our fundamental questions: How can the

actions ofthe multitude become political? How can the multitude

organize and concentrate its energies against the repression and

incessant territorial segmentations ofEmpire? The only response

that we can give to these questions is that the action ofthe multitude

becomes political primarily when it begins to confront directly and

with an adequate consciousness the central repressive operations of

Empire. It is a matter ofrecognizing and engaging the imperial

initiatives and not allowing them continually to reestablish order;

it is a matter ofcrossing and breaking down the limits and segmenta-

tions that are imposed on the new collective labor power; it is a

matter ofgathering together these experiences ofresistance and

wielding them in concert against the nerve centers ofimperial

command.

This task for the multitude, however, although it is clear at a

conceptual level, remains rather abstract. What specific and concrete

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practices will animate this political project? We cannot say at this

point. What we can see nonetheless is a first element ofa political

program for the global multitude, a first political demand: global

citizenship. During the 1996 demonstrations for the sans papiers, the undocumented aliens residing in France, the banners demanded

‘‘Papiers pour tous!’’ Residency papers for everyone means in the

first place that all should have the full rights of citizenship in the

country where they live and work. This is not a utopian or unrealistic

political demand. The demand is simply that the juridical status

ofthe population be ref

ormed in step with the real economic

transf

ormations ofrecent years. Capital itselfhas demanded the

increased mobility oflabor power and continuous migrations across

national boundaries. Capitalist production in the more dominant

regions (in Europe, the United States, and Japan, but also in Singa-

pore, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere) is utterly dependent on the

influx ofworkers from the subordinate regions ofthe world. Hence

the political demand is that the existent fact of capitalist production

be recognized juridically and that all workers be given the full rights

of citizenship. In effect this political demand insists in postmodernity

on the fundamental modern constitutional principle that links right

and labor, and thus rewards with citizenship the worker who cre-

ates capital.

This demand can also be configured in a more general and

more radical way with respect to the postmodern conditions of

Empire. Ifin a first moment the multitude demands that each state

recognize juridically the migrations that are necessary to capital, in

a second moment it must demand control over the movements

themselves. The multitude must be able to decide if, when, and

where it moves. It must have the right also to stay still and enjoy

one place rather than being forced constantly to be on the move.

The general right to control its own movement is the multitude’s ultimate demand for global citizenship. This demand is radical insofar as it challenges the fundamental apparatus of imperial control over the

production and life of the multitude. Global citizenship is the multi-

tude’s power to reappropriate control over space and thus to design

the new cartography.

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Timeand Body (TheRight to a Social Wage)

Many elements arise on the endless paths ofthe mobile multitude

in addition to the spatial dimensions we have considered thus far.

In particular, the multitude takes hold oftime and constructs new

temporalities, which we can recognize by focusing on the transfor-

mations oflabor. Understanding this construction ofnew temporali-

ties will help us see how the multitude has the potential to make

its action coherent as a real political tendency.

The new temporalities ofbiopolitical production cannot be

understood in the frameworks of the traditional conceptions of

time. In the Physics, Aristotle defines time by the measure ofthe

movement between a before and an after. Aristotle’s definition

has the enormous merit ofseparating the definition oftime from

individual experience and spiritualism. Time is a collective experi-

ence that embodies and lives in the movements ofthe multitude.

Aristotle, however, proceeds to reduce this collective time deter-

mined by the experience ofthe multitude to a transcendent standard

ofmeasure. Throughout Western metaphysics, from Aristotle to

Kant and Heidegger, time has continuously been located in this

transcendent dwelling place. In modernity, reality was not conceiv-

able except as measure, and measure in turn was not conceivable

except as a (real or formal) a priori that corralled being within a

transcendent order. Only in postmodernity has there been a real

break with this tradition—a break not with the first element of

Aristotle’s definition oftime as a collective constitution but with

the second transcendent configuration. In postmodernity, instead,

time is no longer determined by any transcendent measure, any a

priori: time pertains directly to existence. Here is where the Aristote-

lian tradition of measure is broken. In fact, from our perspective

the transcendentalism oftemporality is destroyed most decisively

by the fact that it is now impossible to measure labor, either by

convention or by calculation. Time comes back entirely under

collective existence and thus resides within the cooperation of

the multitude.

Through the cooperation, the collective existence, and the

communicative networks that are formed and reformed within the

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multitude, time is reappropriated on the plane ofimmanence. It is

not given a priori, but rather bears the stamp ofcollective action.

The new phenomenology ofthe labor ofthe multitude reveals

labor as the fundamental creative activity that through cooperation

goes beyond any obstacle imposed on it and constantly re-creates

the world. The activity ofthe multitude constitutes time beyond

measure. Time might thus be defined as the immeasurability ofthe

movement between a before and an after, an immanent process

ofconstitution.4 The processes ofontological constitution unfold

through the collective movements ofcooperation, across the new

fabrics woven by the production ofsubjectivity. This site ofontolog-

ical constitution is where the new proletariat appears as a constit-

uent power.

This is a new proletariat and not a new industrial working class.

The distinction is fundamental. As we explained earlier, ‘‘proletariat’’

is the general concept that defines all those whose labor is exploited

by capital, the entire cooperating multitude (Section 1.3). The

industrial working class represented only a partial moment in the

history ofthe proletariat and its revolutions, in the period when

capital was able to reduce value to measure. In that period it seemed

as ifonly the labor ofwaged workers was productive, and therefore

all the other segments oflabor appeared as merely reproductive or

even unproductive. In the biopolitical context ofEmpire, however,

the production ofcapital converges ever more with the production

and reproduction of social life itself; it thus becomes ever more

difficult to maintain distinctions among productive, reproductive,

and unproductive labor. Labor—material or immaterial, intellectual

or corporeal—produces and reproduces social life, and in the process

is exploited by capital. This wide landscape ofbiopolitical produc-

tion allows us finally to recognize the full generality of the concept

ofproletariat. The progressive indistinction between production

and reproduction in the biopolitical context also highlights once

again the immeasurability oftime and value. As labor moves outside

the factory walls, it is increasingly difficult to maintain the fiction

ofany measure ofthe working day and thus separate the time of

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403

production from the time of reproduction, or work time from

leisure time. There are no time clocks to punch on the terrain of

biopolitical production; the proletariat produces in all its generality

everywhere all day long.

This generality ofbiopolitical production makes clear a second

programmatic political demand ofthe multitude: a social wage and

a guaranteed income for all. The social wage stands opposed first of all to the family wage, that fundamental weapon of the sexual

division oflabor by which the wage paid for the productive labor

ofthe male worker is conceived also to pay f

or the unwaged

reproductive labor ofthe worker’s wife and dependents at home.

The family wage keeps family control firmly in the hands of the

male wage earner and perpetuates a false conception of what labor

is productive and what is not. As the distinction between production

and reproductive labor fades, so too fades the legitimation of the

family wage. The social wage extends well beyond the family to

the entire multitude, even those who are unemployed, because the

entire multitude produces, and its production is necessary from the

standpoint oftotal social capital. In the passage to postmodernity

and biopolitical production, labor power has become increasingly

collective and social. It is not even possible to support the old slogan

‘‘equal pay for equal work’’ when labor cannot be individualized

and measured. The demand for a social wage extends to the entire

population the demand that all activity necessary for the production

ofcapital be recognized with an equal compensation such that a

social wage is really a guaranteed income. Once citizenship is ex-

tended to all, we could call this guaranteed income a citizenship

income, due each as a member ofsociety.

Telos (The Right to Reappropriation)

Since in the imperial realm ofbiopower production and life tend

to coincide, class struggle has the potential to erupt across all the

fields of life. The problem we have to confront now is how concrete

instances ofclass struggle can actually arise, and moreover how they

can form a coherent program of struggle, a constituent power

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adequate to the destruction ofthe enemy and the construction of

a new society. The question is really how the body ofthe multitude

can configure itselfas a telos.

The first aspect ofthe telos ofthe multitude has to do with

the senses oflanguage and communication. Ifcommunication has

increasingly become the fabric ofproduction, and iflinguistic coop-

eration has increasingly become the structure ofproductive corpore-

ality, then the control over linguistic sense and meaning and the

networks ofcommunication becomes an ever more central issue

for political struggle. Ju¨rgen Habermas seems to have understood

this fact, but he grants the liberated functions of language and

communication only to individual and isolated segments ofsociety.5

The passage to postmodernity and Empire prohibits any such com-

partmentalization ofthe life world and immediately presents com-

munication, production, and life as one complex whole, an open

site ofconflict. The theorists and practitioners ofscience have long

engaged these sites ofcontroversy, but today all oflabor power (be

it material or immaterial, intellectual or manual) is engaged in

struggles over the senses oflanguage and against capital’s coloniza-

tion ofcommunicative sociality. All the elements ofcorruption and

exploitation are imposed on us by the linguistic and communicative

regimes ofproduction: destroying them in words is as urgent as

doing so in deeds. This is not really a matter ofideology critique

ifby ideology we still understand a realm ofideas and language

that is superstructural, external to production. Or rather, in the

imperial regime ideology, critique becomes directly the critique of

both political economy and lived experience. How can sense and

meaning be oriented differently or organized in alternative, coherent

communicative apparatuses? How can we discover and direct the

performative lines of linguistic sets and communicative networks

that create the fabric of life and production? Knowledge has to

become linguistic action and philosophy has to become a real reappro-

priation of knowledge. 6 In other words, knowledge and communica-

tion have to constitute life through struggle. A first aspect of the

telos is posed when the apparatuses that link communication to

modes oflife are developed through the struggle ofthe multitude.

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405

To every language and communicative network corresponds

a system ofmachines, and the question ofmachines and their use

allows us to recognize a second aspect ofthe telos ofthe multitude,

which integrates the first and carries it further. We know well that

machines and technologies are not neutral and independent entities.

They are biopolitical tools deployed in specific regimes ofproduc-

tion, which facilitate certain practices and prohibit others. The

processes ofconstruction ofthe new proletariat that we have been

following go beyond a fundamental threshold here when the multi-

tude recognizes itselfas machinic, when it conceives ofthe possibil-

ity ofa new use ofmachines and technology in which the proletariat

is not subsumed as ‘‘variable capital,’’ as an internal part ofthe

production ofcapital, but is rather an autonomous agent ofproduc-

tion. In the passage from the struggle over the sense of language

to the construction ofa new system ofmachines, the telos gains a

greater consistency. This second aspect ofthe telos serves to make

what has been constructed in language become a lasting, corporeal

progression ofdesire in freedom. The hybridization ofhuman and

machine is no longer a process that takes place only on the margins

ofsociety; rather, it is a fundamental episode at the center ofthe

constitution ofthe multitude and its power.

Since great collective means must be mobilized for this muta-

tion, the telos must be configured as a collective telos. It has to

become real as a site ofencounter among subjects and a mechanism

ofthe constitution ofthe multitude.7 This is the third aspect ofthe

series ofpassages through which the material teleology ofthe new

proletariat is formed. Here consciousness and will, language and

machine are called on to sustain the collective making ofhistory.

The demonstration ofthis becoming cannot consist in anything

but the experience and experimentation ofthe multitude. Therefore

the power ofthe dialectic, which imagines the collective formed

through mediation rather than through constitution, has been de-

finitively dissolved. The making ofhistory is in this sense the con-

struction ofthe life ofthe multitude.

The fourth aspect deals with biopolitics. The subjectivity of

living labor reveals, simply and directly in the struggle over the

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senses oflanguage and technology, that when one speaks ofa

collective means ofthe constitution ofa new world, one is speaking

ofthe connection between the power oflife and its political organi-

zation. The political, the social, the economic, and the vital here

all dwell together. They are entirely interrelated and completely

interchangeable. The practices ofthe multitude invest this complex

and unitary horizon—a horizon that is at once ontological and

historical. Here is where the biopolitical fabric opens to the constitu-

tive, constituent power.

The fifth and final aspect thus deals directly with the constit-

uent power ofthe multitude—or really with the product ofthe

creative imagination ofthe multitude that configures its own consti-

tution. This constituent power makes possible the continuous open-

ing to a process ofradical and progressive transformation. It makes

conceivable equality and solidarity, those fragile demands that were

fundamental but remained abstract throughout the history of mod-

ern constitutions. It should come as no surprise that the postmodern

multitude takes away from the U.S. Constitution what allowed it

to become, above and against all other constitutions, an imperial

constitution: its notion of a boundless frontier of freedom and its

definition ofan open spatiality and temporality celebrated in a

constituent power. This new range ofpossibilities in no way guaran-

tees what is to come. And yet, despite such reservations, there is

something real that foreshadows a coming future: the telos that we

can feel pulsing, the multitude that we construct within desire.

Now we can formulate a third political demand of the multi-

tude: the right to reappropriation. The right to reappropriation is first ofall the right to the reappropriation ofthe means ofproduction.

Socialists and communists have long demanded that the proletariat

have free access to and control over the machines and materials

it uses to produce. In the context ofimmaterial and biopolitical

production, however, this traditional demand takes on a new guise.

The multitude not only uses machines to produce, but also becomes

increasingly machinic itself, as the means of production are increas-

ingly integrated into the minds and bodies ofthe multitude. In this

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407

context reappropriation means having free access to and control

over knowledge, information, communication, and affects—be-

cause these are some ofthe primary means ofbiopolitical produc-

tion. Just because these productive machines have been integrated

into the multitude does not mean that the multitude has control

over them. Rather, it makes more vicious and injurious their alien-

ation. The right to reappropriation is really the multitude’s right

to self-control and autonomous self-production.

Posse

The telos ofthe multitude must live and organize its political space

against Empire and yet within the ‘‘maturity ofthe times’’ and the

ontological conditions that Empire presents. We have seen how

the multitude moves on endless paths and takes corporeal form by

reappropriating time and hybridizing new machinic systems. We

have also seen how the power ofthe multitude materializes within

the vacuum that remains necessarily at the heart ofEmpire. Now

it is a matter ofposing within these dimensions the problem ofthe

becoming-subject ofthe multitude. In other words, the virtual

conditions must now become real in a concrete figure. Against the

divine city, the earthly city must demonstrate its power as an appara-

tus ofthe mythology ofreason that organizes the biopolitical reality

ofthe multitude.

The name that we want to use to refer to the multitude in

its political autonomy and its productive activity is the Latin term

posse—power as a verb, as activity. In Renaissance humanism the

triad esse–nosse–posse (being–knowing–having power) represented

the metaphysical heart ofthat constitutive philosophical paradigm

that was to go into crisis as modernity progressively took form.

Modern European philosophy, in its origins and in its creative

components that were not subjugated to transcendentalism, contin-

ually tended to pose posse at the center ofthe ontological dynamic:

posse is the machine that weaves together knowledge and being in

an expansive, constitutive process. When the Renaissance matured

and reached the point ofconflict with the forces ofcounterrevolu-

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tion, the humanistic posse became a force and symbol of resistance,

in Bacon’s notion of inventio or experimentation, Campanella’s

conception oflove, and Spinoza’s usage of potentia. Posse is what

a body and what a mind can do. Precisely because it continued to

live in resistance, the metaphysical term became a political term.

Posse refers to the power of the multitude and its telos, an embodied

power ofknowledge and being, always open to the possible.

Contemporary U.S. rap groups have rediscovered the term

‘‘posse’’ as a noun to mark the force that musically and literarily

defines the group, the singular difference of the postmodern multi-

tude. Of course, the proximate reference for the rappers is probably

the posse comitatus ofWild West lore, the rough group ofarmed

men who were constantly prepared to be authorized by the sheriff

to hunt down outlaws. This American fantasy of vigilantes and

outlaws, however, does not interest us very much. It is more interest-

ing to trace back a deeper, hidden etymology ofthe term. It seems

to us that perhaps a strange destiny has renewed the Renaissance

notion and has, with a grain ofmadness, made the term once again

deserving ofits high political tradition.

From this perspective we want to speak ofposse and not of

‘‘res-publica,’’ because the public and the activity ofsingularities

that compose it go beyond any object ( res) and are constitutionally incapable ofbeing corralled there. On the contrary, the singularities

are producers. Like the Renaissance ‘‘posse,’’ which was traversed

by knowledge and resided at the metaphysical root ofbeing, they

too will be at the origin ofthe new reality ofthe political that the

multitude is defining in the vacuum ofimperial ontology. Posse is

the standpoint that best allows us to grasp the multitude as singular

subjectivity: posse constitutes its mode ofproduction and its being.

As in all innovative processes, the mode ofproduction that

arises is posed against the conditions from which it has to be liber-

ated. The mode ofproduction ofthe multitude is posed against

exploitation in the name oflabor, against property in the name of

cooperation, and against corruption in the name offreedom. It

self-valorizes bodies in labor, reappropriates productive intelligence

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409

through cooperation, and transforms existence in freedom. The

history ofclass composition and the history oflabor militancy

demonstrate the matrix ofthese ever new and yet determinate

reconfigurations of self-valorization, cooperation, and political self-

organization as an effective social project.

The first phase ofproperly capitalist worker militancy, that is,

the phase ofindustrial production that preceded the full deployment

ofFordist and Taylorist regimes, was defined by the figure ofthe

professional worker, the highly skilled worker organized hierarchically in industrial production. This militancy involved primarily transforming the specific power of the valorization of the worker’s own

labor and productive cooperation into a weapon to be used in a

project of reappropriation, a project in which the singular figure of the worker’s own productive power would be exalted. A republic

ofworker councils was its slogan; a soviet ofproducers was its telos;

and autonomy in the articulation ofmodernization was its program.

The birth ofthe modern trade union and the construction ofthe

party as vanguard both date from this period of worker struggles

and effectively overdetermine it.

The second phase ofcapitalist worker militancy, which corres-

ponded to the deployment ofFordist and Taylorist regimes, was

defined by the figure ofthe mass worker. The militancy ofthe mass

worker combined its own self-valorization as a refusal of factory

work and the extension ofits power over all mechanisms ofsocial

reproduction. Its program was to create a real alternative to the

system ofcapitalist power. The organization ofmass trade unions,

the construction of the welfare state, and social-democratic reform-

ism were all results ofthe relations offorce that the mass worker

defined and the overdetermination it imposed on capitalist develop-

ment. The communist alternative acted in this phase as a counter-

power within the processes ofcapitalist development.

Today, in the phase ofworker militancy that corresponds to

the post-Fordist, informational regimes of production, there arises

the figure ofthe social worker. In the figure ofthe social worker the various threads ofimmaterial labor-power are being woven to-410

T H E D E C L I N E A N D F A L L O F E M P I R E

gether. A constituent power that connects mass intellectuality and

self-valorization in all the arenas of the flexible and nomadic produc-

tive social cooperation is the order ofthe day. In other words, the

program ofthe social worker is a project of constitution. In today’s productive matrix, the constituent power oflabor can be expressed

as self-valorization of the human (the equal right of citizenship for

all over the entire sphere ofthe world market); as cooperation (the

right to communicate, construct languages, and control communi-

cations networks); and as political power, or really as the constitution

ofa society in which the basis ofpower is defined by the expression

ofthe needs ofall. This is the organization ofthe social worker

and immaterial labor, an organization ofproductive and political

power as a biopolitical unity managed by the multitude, organized

by the multitude, directed by the multitude—absolute democracy

in action.

The posse produces the chromosomes ofits future organization.

Bodies are on the front lines in this battle, bodies that consolidate in

an irreversible way the results ofpast struggles and incorporate a

power that has been gained ontologically. Exploitation must be not

only negated from the perspective of practice but also annulled in its

premises, at its basis, stripped from the genesis of reality. Exploitation

must be excluded from the bodies of immaterial labor-power just as

it must be from the social knowledges and affects of reproduction

(generation, love, the continuity ofkinship and community relation-

ships, and so forth) that bring value and affect together in the same

power. The constitution ofnew bodies, outside ofexploitation, is a

fundamental basis ofthe new mode ofproduction.

The mode ofproduction ofthe multitude reappropriates

wealth from capital and also constructs a new wealth, articulated

with the powers ofscience and social knowledge through coopera-

tion. Cooperation annuls the title ofproperty. In modernity, private

property was often legitimated by labor, but this equation, if it ever

really made sense, today tends to be completely destroyed. Private

property ofthe means ofproduction today, in the era ofthe hegem-

ony ofcooperative and immaterial labor, is only a putrid and tyranni-

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411

cal obsolescence. The tools ofproduction tend to be recomposed

in collective subjectivity and in the collective intelligence and affect

ofthe workers; entrepreneurship tends to be organized by the

cooperation ofsubjects in general intellect. The organization ofthe

multitude as political subject, as posse, thus begins to appear on the

world scene. The multitude is biopolitical self-organization.

Certainly, there must be a moment when reappropriation and

self-organization reach a threshold and configure a real event. This

is when the political is really affirmed—when the genesis is complete

and self-valorization, the cooperative convergence of subjects, and

the proletarian management ofproduction become a constituent

power. This is the point when the modern republic ceases to exist

and the postmodern posse arises. This is the founding moment of

an earthly city that is strong and distinct from any divine city. The

capacity to construct places, temporalities, migrations, and new

bodies already affirms its hegemony through the actions of the

multitude against Empire. Imperial corruption is already under-

mined by the productivity ofbodies, by cooperation, and by the

multitude’s designs ofproductivity. The only event that we are still

awaiting is the construction, or rather the insurgence, ofa powerful

organization. The genetic chain is formed and established in ontol-

ogy, the scaffolding is continuously constructed and renewed by

the new cooperative productivity, and thus we await only the

maturation ofthe political development ofthe posse. We do not

have any models to offer for this event. Only the multitude through

its practical experimentation will offer the models and determine

when and how the possible becomes real.

M ILITANT

In the postmodern era, as the figure of the people dissolves, the militant is the one who best expresses the life of the multitude: the agent of biopolitical production and resistance against Empire. When we speak of the militant, we are not thinking of anything like the sad, ascetic agent of the Third International whose soul was deeply permeated by Soviet state reason, the same way the will of the pope was embedded in the hearts of the knights 412

T H E D E C L I N E A N D F A L L O F E M P I R E

of the Society of Jesus. We are thinking of nothing like that and of no one who acts on the basis of duty and discipline, who pretends his or her actions are deduced from an ideal plan. We are referring, on the contrary, to

something more like the communist and liberatory combatants of the

twentieth-century revolutions, the intellectuals who were persecuted and exiled in the course of anti-fascist struggles, the republicans of the Spanish civil war and the European resistance movements, and the freedom fighters of all the anticolonial and anti-imperialist wars. A prototypical example of this revolutionary figure is the militant agitator of the Industrial Workers of the World. The Wobbly constructed associations among working people

from below, through continuous agitation, and while organizing them gave rise to utopian thought and revolutionary knowledge. The militant was the fundamental actor of the ‘‘long march’’ of the emancipation of labor from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, the creative singularity of that gigantic collective movement that was working-class struggle.

Across this long period, the activity of the militant consisted, first of all, in practices of resistance in the factory and in society against capitalist exploitation. It consisted also, through and beyond resistance, in the collective construction and exercise of a counterpower capable of destructuring the power of capitalism and opposing it with an alternative program of government.

In opposition to the cynicism of the bourgeoisie, to monetary alienation, to the expropriation of life, to the exploitation of labor, to the colonization of the affects, and so on, the militant organized the struggle. Insurrection was the proud emblem of the militant. This militant was repeatedly martyred in the tragic history of communist struggles. Sometimes, but not often, the normal structures of the rights state were sufficient for the repressive tasks required to destroy the counterpower. When they were not sufficient, however, the fascists and the white guards of state terror, or rather the black mafias in the service of ‘‘democratic’’ capitalisms, were invited to lend a hand to reinforce the legal repressive structures.

Today, after so many capitalist victories, after socialist hopes have

withered in disillusionment, and after capitalist violence against labor has been solidified under the name of ultra-liberalism, why is it that instances of militancy still arise, why have resistances deepened, and why does struggle continually reemerge with new vigor? We should say right away that this T H E M U L T I T U D E A G A I N S T E M P I R E

413

new militancy does not simply repeat the organizational formulas of the old revolutionary working class. Today the militant cannot even pretend to be a representative, even of the fundamental human needs of the exploited.

Revolutionary political militancy today, on the contrary, must rediscover what has always been its proper form: not representational but constituent activity. Militancy today is a positive, constructive, and innovative activity. This is the form in which we and all those who revolt against the rule of capital recognize ourselves as militants today. Militants resist imperial command in a creative way. In other words, resistance is linked immediately with a constitutive investment in the biopolitical realm and to the formation of cooperative apparatuses of production and community. Here is the strong novelty of militancy today: it repeats the virtues of insurrectional action of two hundred years of subversive experience, but at the same time it is linked to a new world, a world that knows no outside. It knows only an inside, a vital and ineluctable participation in the set of social structures, with no possibility of transcending them. This inside is the productive cooperation of mass intellectuality and affective networks, the productivity of postmodern biopolitics. This militancy makes resistance into counterpower and makes rebellion into a project of love.

There is an ancient legend that might serve to illuminate the future

life of communist militancy: that of Saint Francis of Assisi. Consider his work. To denounce the poverty of the multitude he adopted that common

condition and discovered there the ontological power of a new society. The communist militant does the same, identifying in the common condition of the multitude its enormous wealth. Francis in opposition to nascent capitalism refused every instrumental discipline, and in opposition to the mortification of the flesh (in poverty and in the constituted order) he posed a joyous life, including all of being and nature, the animals, sister moon, brother sun, the birds of the field, the poor and exploited humans, together against the will of power and corruption. Once again in postmodernity we find ourselves in Francis’s situation, posing against the misery of power the joy of being.

This is a revolution that no power will control—because biopower and

communism, cooperation and revolution remain together, in love, simplicity, and also innocence. This is the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist.

N O T E S

P R E F A C E

1. On the declining sovereignty ofnation-states and the transformation of

sovereignty in the contemporary global system, see Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

2. On the concept ofEmpire, see Maurice Duverger, ‘‘Le concept d’em-

pire,’’ in Maurice Duverger, ed., Le concept d’empire (Paris: PUF, 1980), pp. 5–23. Duverger divides the historical examples into two primary

models, with the Roman Empire on one side and the Chinese, Arab,

Mesoamerican, and other Empires on the other. Our analyses pertain

primarily to the Roman side because this is the model that has animated

the Euro-American tradition that has led to the contemporary world

order.

3. ‘‘Modernity is not a phenomenon ofEurope as an independent system, but ofEurope as center.’’ Enrique Dussel, ‘‘Beyond Eurocentrism: The

World System and the Limits ofModernity,’’ in Fredric Jameson and

Masao Miyoshi, eds., The Cultures of Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 3–31; quotation p. 4.

4. Two interdisciplinary texts served as models for us throughout the writing ofthis book: Marx’s Capital and Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.

5. Ours is certainly not the only work that prepares the terrain for the

analysis and critique ofEmpire. Although they do not use the term

‘‘Empire,’’ we see the work ofnumerous authors oriented in this direction;

they include Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Arjun Appadurai, Gayatri

Spivak, Edward Said, Giovanni Arrighi, and ArifDirlik, to name only

some ofthe best known.

1 . 1 W O R L D O R D E R

1. Already in 1974 Franz Schurmann highlighted the tendency toward a

global order in The Logic of World Power: An Inquiry into the Origins,

Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics (New York: Pantheon, 1974).

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2. On the permutations ofEuropean pacts for international peace, see Leo

Gross, ‘‘The Peace ofWestphalia, 1648–1948,’’ American Journal of International Law, 42, no. 1 (1948), 20–41.

3. Danilo Zolo, Cosmopolis: Prospects for World Government, trans. David McKie (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), is the one who expresses most

clearly the hypothesis that the paradigm ofthe project ofthe new world

order should be located back in the Peace ofVienna. We follow his

analysis in many respects. See also Richard Falk, ‘‘The Interplay ofWest-

phalia and Charter Conception ofInternational Legal Order,’’ in C. A.

Blach and Richard Falk, eds., The Future of International Legal Order

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 1:32–70.

4. Hans Kelsen, Das Problem des Souvera¨nita¨t und die Theorie des Vo¨lkerrechts: Beitrag zu einer Reinen Rechtslehre (Tu¨bingen: Mohr, 1920), p. 205. See also Principles of International Law, (New York: Rinehart, 1952), p. 586.

5. Kelsen, Das Problem des Souvera¨nita¨t, p. 319.

6. See Hans Kelsen, The Law of the United Nations (New York: Praeger, 1950).

7. On the legal history ofthe United Nations, see AlfRoss, United Nations: Peace and Progress (Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster Press, 1966); Benedetto Conforti, The Law and Practice of the United Nations (Boston: Kluwer Law International, 1996); Richard Falk, Samuel S. Kim, and Saul H.

Mendlovitz, eds., The United Nations and a Just World Order (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991).

8. On the concept of‘‘domestic analogy’’ both from the genealogical point

ofview and from that ofinternational juridical politics, see Hedley Bull,

The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1977); and above all Hidemi Suganami, The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For a critical and realistic perspective against conceptions ofa ‘‘domestic analogy,’’ see James N. Rosenau,

Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

9. See Norberto Bobbio, Il problema della guerra e le vie della pace (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1984).

10. For Norberto Bobbio’s position on these arguments, see primarily Il terzo assente (Turin: Edizioni Sonda, 1989). In general, however, on recent lines ofinternationalist thought and on the alternative between statist and cosmopolitan approaches, see Zolo, Cosmopolis.

11. See the work ofRichard Falk, primarily A Study of Future Worlds (New York: Free Press, 1975); The Promise of World Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); and Explorations at the Edge of Time (Philadelphia: N O T E S T O P A G E S 8 – 1 3

417

Temple University Press, 1992). The origin ofFalk’s discourse and its

idealist reformist line might well be traced back to the famous initial

propositions posed by Grenville Clark and Louis B. Sohn, World Peace

through World Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958).

12. In Section 2.4 we will discuss briefly the work ofauthors who challenge the traditional field ofinternational relations from a postmodernist perspective.

13. ‘‘Capitalism was from the beginning an affair of the world-economy . . .

It is a misreading ofthe situation to claim that it is only in the twentieth century that capitalism has become ‘world-wide.’ ’ Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 19. The most complete reference on this point is Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 3 vols. (New York: Academic Press, 1974–1988). See also Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1995).

14. See, for example, Samir Amin, Empire of Chaos (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992).

15. For our analyses ofthe Roman Empire we have relied on some ofthe

classic texts, such as Gaetano de Sanctis, Storia dei Romani, 4 vols. (Turin: Bocca, 1907–1923); Hermann Dessau, Geschichte der ro¨manischen Keiserzeit, 2 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1924–1930); Michael Rostovzeff, Social and

Economic History of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926); Pietro de Francisci, Genesi e struttura del principato augusteo (Rome: Sampaolesi, 1940); and Santo Mazzarino, Fra Oriente ed Occidente (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1947).

16. See Johannes Adam Hartung, Die Lehre von der Weltherrschaft im Mittelalter (Halle, 1909); Heinrich Dannenbauer, ed., Das Reich: Idee und Gestalt

(Stuttgart: Cotta, 1940); Georges de Lagarde, ‘‘La conception me´die´val

de l’ordre en face de l’umanisme, de la Renaissance et de la Reforme,’’

in Congresso internazionale di studi umanistici, Umanesimo e scienza politica (Milan: Marzorati, 1951); and Santo Mazzarino, The End of the Ancient

World, trans. George Holmes (New York: Knopf, 1966).

17. See Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1992). The renewal ofjust war theory in the 1990s is demonstrated

by the essays in Jean Bethke Elshtain, ed., Just War Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992).

18. One should distinguish here between jus ad bellum (the right to make war) and jus in bello (law in war), or really the rules ofthe correct conduct ofwar. See Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 61–63 and 90.

19. On the GulfWar and justice, see Norberto Bobbio, Una guerra giusta?

Sul conflitto del Golfo (Venice: Marsilio, 1991); Ramsey Clark, The Fire 418

N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 4 – 1 7

This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf (New York: Thunder’s Mouth

Press, 1992); Ju¨rgen Habermas, The Past as Future, trans. Max Pensky (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1994); and Jean Bethke Elshtain,

ed., But Was It Just? Reflections on the Morality of the Persian Gulf War (New York: Doubleday, 1992).

20. For the influence ofNiklas Luhmann’s systematism on international juridical theory, see the essays by Gunther Teubner in Gunther Teubner and

Alberto Febbrajo, eds., State, Law, and Economy as Autopoietic Systems

(Milan: Giuffrè, 1992). An adaptation ofJohn Rawls’s ethico-juridical

theories was attempted by Charles R. Beitz in Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

21. This concept was introduced and articulated in James Rosenau, ‘‘Gover-

nance, Order, and Change in World Politics,’’ in James Rosenau and

Ernst-Otto Czempiel, Governance without Government (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1992).

22. At one extreme, see the set ofessays assembled in V. Rittenberger, ed., Beyond Anarchy: International Cooperation and Regimes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

23. See Hans Kelsen, Peace through Law (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1944).

24. On Machiavelli’s reading ofthe Roman Empire, see Antonio Negri, Il

potere costituente (Milan: Sugarco, 1992), pp. 75–96; in English, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1999).

25. For a reading ofthe juridical passage from modernity to postmodernity,

see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of

the State-Form (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1994), chaps.

6 and 7.

26. It is strange how in this internationalist debate almost the only work of Carl Schmitt that is taken up is Der Nomos der Erde im Vo¨lkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Cologne: Greven, 1950), when really precisely in this context his more important work is Verfassungslehre, 8th ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993), and his positions developed around the

definition ofthe concept ofthe political and the production ofright.

27. In order to get a good idea ofthis process it may be enough to read

together the disciplinary classics ofinternational law and international

economics, linking their observations and prescriptions, which emerge

from different disciplinary formations but share a certain neorealism, or

really a realism in the Hobbesian sense. See, for example, Kenneth Neal

Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979); N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 8 – 2 3

419

and Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

28. In order to get an initial idea of the vast and often confused literature on this topic, see Gene Lyons and Michael Mastanduno, eds., Beyond

Westphalia? State Sovereignty and International Intervention (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Arnold Kanter and Linton Brooks, eds.,

U.S. Intervention Policy for the Post–Cold War World (New York: Norton, 1994); Mario Bettati, Le droit d’ingeŕence (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1995); and Maurice Bernard, La fin de l’ordre militaire (Paris: Presses de Sciences Politiques, 1995).

29. On the ethics ofinternational relations, in addition to the propositions of Michael Walzer and Charles Beitz already cited, see also Stanley Hoff-mann, Duties beyond Borders (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1981); and Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel, eds., Traditions of International

Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

30. We are refering here to the two classic texts: Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, trans. David Lowenthal (New York: Free Press, 1965); and Edward Gibbon, The

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 vols. (London: Penguin, 1994).

31. As Jean Ehrard has amply shown, the thesis that the decline ofRome

began with Caesar was continually reproposed throughout the historiog-

raphy ofthe age ofEnlightenment. See Jean Ehrard, La politique de Montesquieu (Paris: A. Colin, 1965).

32. The principle ofthe corruption ofpolitical regimes was already implicit in the theory ofthe forms ofgovernment as it was formulated in the

Sophistic period, which was later codified by Plato and Aristotle. The

principle of‘‘political’’ corruption was later translated into a principle of historical development through theories that grasped the ethical schemes

ofthe forms ofgovernment as cyclical temporal developments. Ofall the

proponents of different theoretical tendencies who have embarked on

this endeavor (and the Stoics are certainly fundamental in this regard),

Polybius is the one who really described the model in its definitive form,

celebrating the creative function of corruption.

1 . 2 B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N

1. The passage from disciplinary society to the society of control is not

articulated explicitly by Foucault but remains implicit in his work. We

follow the excellent commentaries of Gilles Deleuze in this interpretation.

See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986); and ‘‘Post-scriptum 420

N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 3 – 2 5

sur les socie´teś de controˆle,’’ in Pourparlers (Paris: Minuit, 1990). See also Michael Hardt, ‘‘The Withering ofCivil Society,’’ Social Text, no. 45

(Winter 1995), 27–44.

2. See primarily Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 1:135–145. For other treatments of

the concept ofbiopolitics in Foucualt’s opus, see ‘‘The Politics ofHealth

in the Eighteenth Century,’’ in Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 166–182; ‘‘La naissance de la me´decine sociale,’’ in Dits et ećrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 3:207–228, particularly p. 210; and ‘‘Naissance de la biopolitique,’’ in Dits et ećrits, 3:818–825.

For examples ofwork by other authors following Foucault’s notion of

biopolitics, see Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, eds., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1992), pp. 133–142; and Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1979).

3. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Les mailles du pouvoir,’’ in Dits et ećrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 4:182–201; quotation p. 194.

4. Many thinkers have followed Foucault along these lines and successfully

problematized the welfare state. See primarily Jacques Donzelot, L’invention du social (Paris: Fayard, 1984); and Franc¸ois Ewald, L’e´tat providence (Paris: Seuil, 1986).

5. See Karl Marx, ‘‘Results ofthe Immediate Process ofProduction,’’ trans.

Rodney Livingstone, published as the appendix to Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1976), 1:948–1084. See also Antonio Negri, Marx beyond Marx, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano (New York: Autonomedia, 1991).

6. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).

7. See Gilles Deleuze and Feĺix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1987).

8. See, for example, Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Poststructuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1987), chaps. 6

and 7. When one adopts this definition ofpower and the crises that

traverse it, Foucault’s discourse (and even more so that ofDeleuze and

Guattari) presents a powerful theoretical framework for critiquing the

welfare state. For analyses that are more or less in line with this discourse, see Claus Offe, Disorganized Capitalism: Contemporary Transformations of Work and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985); Antonio Negri, Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings (London: Red Notes, 1988); and the essays by Antonio Negri included in Michael Hardt and Antonio

N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 6 – 2 8

421

Negri, Labor of Dionysus (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1994), pp. 23–213.

9. The notions of‘‘totalitarianism’’ that were constructed during the period of the cold war proved to be useful instruments for propaganda but

completely inadequate analytical tools, leading most often to pernicious

inquisitional methods and damaging moral arguments. The numerous

shelves ofour libraries that are filled with analyses oftotalitarianism should today be regarded only with shame and could be thrown away with no

hesitation. For a briefsample ofthe literature on totalitarianism from the

most coherent to the most absurd, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of

Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951); and Jeanne Kirkpat-rick, Dictatorships and Double Standards (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). We will return to the concept oftotalitarianism in more detail in

Section 2.2.

10. We are referring here to the thematics of Mobilmachtung that were developed in the Germanic world primarily in the 1920s and 1930s, more or

less from Ernst Ju¨nger to Carl Schmitt. In French culture, too, such

positions emerged in the 1930s, and the polemics around them have still

not died down. The figure ofGeorges Bataille is at the center ofthis

discussion. Along different lines, on ‘‘general mobilization’’ as a paradigm ofthe constitution ofcollective labor power in Fordist capitalism, see

Jean Paul de Gaudemar, La mobilisation geńeŕale (Paris: Maspero, 1978).

11. One could trace a very interesting line of discussions that effectively develop the Foucauldian interpretation ofbiopower f

rom Jacques

Derrida’s reading ofWalter Benjamin’s ‘‘Critique ofViolence’’ (‘‘Force

ofLaw,’’ in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson,

eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice [New York: Routledge, 1992], pp. 3–67) to Giorgio Agamben’s more recent and more stimulating

contribution, Homo sacer: il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Turin: Einaudi, 1995). It seems fundamental to us, however, that all of these discussions

be brought back to the question ofthe productive dimensions of‘‘bios,’’

identifying in other words the materialist dimension of the concept be-

yond any conception that is purely naturalistic (life as ‘‘zoè’ ) or simply anthropological (as Agamben in particular has a tendency to do, making

the concept in effect indifferent).

12. Michel Foucault, ‘‘La naissance de la me´decine sociale,’’ in Dits et ećrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 3:210.

13. See Henri Lefebvre, L’ideologie structuraliste (Paris: Anthropos, 1971); Gilles Deleuze, ‘ A quoi reconnait-on le structuralisme?’’ in Franc¸ois Chaˆtelet, ed., Histoire de la philosophie, vol. 8 (Paris: Hachette, 1972), pp. 299–335; 422

N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 8 – 3 0

and Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

14. When Deleuze formulates his methodological differences with Foucault

in a private letter written in 1977, the primary point ofdisagreement

comes down precisely to just such a question ofproduction. Deleuze

prefers the term ‘‘desire’’ to Foucault’s ‘‘pleasure,’’ he explains, because desire grasps the real and active dynamic ofthe production ofsocial reality whereas pleasure is merely inert and reactive: ‘‘Pleasure interrupts the

positivity ofdesire and the constitution ofits plane ofimmanence.’’ See

Gilles Deleuze, ‘‘Deśir et plaisir,’’ Magazine Litteŕaire, no. 325 (October 1994), 59–65; quotation p. 64.

15. Feĺix Guattari has perhaps developed the extreme consequences ofthis

type of social critique, while carefully avoiding falling into the anti–‘‘grand narrative’’ style ofpostmodernist argument, in his Chaosmosis, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995). From a

metaphysical point ofview, among the followers ofNietzsche, we find

roughly analogous positions expressed in Massimo Cacciari, DRAN: meŕi-

diens de la dećision dans la penseé contemporaine (Paris: L’E

ćlat, 1991).

16. In English, see primarily the essays in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt,

eds., Radical Thought in Italy (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1996). See also Christian Marazzi, Il posto dei calzini: la svolta linguistica dell’economia e i suoi effetti nella politica (Bellinzona: Edizioni Casagrande); and numerous issues ofthe French journal Futur anteŕieur, particularly nos. 10 (1992) and 35–36 (1996). For an analysis that appropriates central

elements ofthis project but ultimately fails to capture its power, see Andre´

Gorz, Misère du preśent, richesse du possible (Paris: Galileé, 1997).

17. The framework on which this line of inquiry is built is both its great

wealth and its real limitation. The analysis must in effect be carried

beyond the constraints ofthe ‘‘workerist’’ ( operaista) analysis ofcapitalist development and the state-form. One of its limitations, for example, is

highlighted by Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 162, who insists on the fact that the

conception ofvalue in this line ofMarxist analysis may function in the

dominant countries (including in the context ofcertain streams offeminist

theory) but completely misses the mark in the context ofthe subordinated

regions ofthe globe. Spivak’s questioning is certainly extremely important

for the problematic we are developing in this study. In fact, from a

methodological point ofview, we would say that the most profound and

solid problematic complex that has yet been elaborated for the critique

of biopolitics is found in feminist theory, particularly Marxist and socialist N O T E S T O P A G E S 3 0 – 3 2

423

feminist theories that focus on women’s work, affective labor, and the

production ofbiopower. This presents the framework perhaps best suited

to renew the methodology ofthe European ‘‘workerist’’ schools.

18. The theories ofthe ‘‘turbulence’’ ofthe international order, and even

more ofthe new world order, which we cited earlier (see primarily the

work ofJ. G. Ruggie), generally avoid in their explanation ofthe causes

ofthis turbulence any reference to the contradictory character ofcapitalist relations. Social turbulence is considered merely a consequence ofthe

international dynamics among state actors in such a way that turbulence

can be normalized within the strict disciplinary limits ofinternational

relations. Social and class struggles are effectively hidden by the method

ofanalysis itself. From this perspective, then, the ‘‘productive bios’’ cannot really be understood. The same is more or less the case for the authors

ofthe world-systems perspective, who focus primarily on the cycles of

the system and systemic crises (see the works ofWallerstein and Arrighi

cited earlier). Theirs is in effect a world (and a history) without subjectivity. What they miss is the function of the productive bios, or really the

fact that capital is not a thing but a social relationship, an antagonistic relationship, one side ofwhich is animated by the productive lif

e of

the multitude.

19. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1995), for example, claims such a continuity in the role of capitalist corporations.

For an excellent contrasting view in terms ofperiodization and method-

ological approach, see Luciano Ferrari Bravo, ‘‘Introduzione: vecchie e

nuove questioni nella teoria dell’imperialismo,’’ in Luciano Ferrari Bravo, ed., Imperialismo e classe operaia multinazionale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975), pp. 7–70.

20. See, from the perspective of political analysis, Paul Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-first Century (New York: Random House, 1993); and from

the perspective ofeconomic topography and socialist critique, David

Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

21. Marx, Capital, 1:742.

22. On this point the bibliography we could cite is seemingly endless. In

effect, theories of advertising and consumption have been integrated ( just in time) into the theories ofproduction, to the point where we now

have ideologies of‘‘attention’’ posed as economic value! In any case, for

a selection ofthe numerous works that touch on this field, one would

do well to see Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon, 1989); Gary Cross, Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge,

424

N O T E S T O P A G E S 3 2 – 3 4

1993); and, for a more interesting analysis from another perspective, The

Project on Disney, Inside the Mouse (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). The production ofthe producer, however, is not only the production ofthe consumer. It also involves the production ofhierarchies,

mechanisms ofinclusion and exclusion, and so forth. It involves finally

the production ofcrises. From this point ofview, see Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-market Era (New York: Putnam, 1995); and Stanley Aronowitz and

William DiFazio, The Jobless Future (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1994).

23. We are indebted to Deleuze and Guattari and their A Thousand Plateaus for the most fully elaborated phenomenological description of this industrial-monetary-world-nature, which constitutes the first level ofthe world

order.

24. See Edward Comor, ed., The Global Political Economy of Communication (London: Macmillan, 1994).

25. See Stephen Bradley, ed., Globalization, Technologies, and Competition: The Fusion of Computers and Telecommunications in the 90s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 1993); and Simon Serfaty, The Media and

Foreign Policy (London: Macmillan, 1990).

26. See Ju¨rgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). We discuss this relationship

between communication and production in more detail in Section 3.4.

27. See Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, chaps. 6 and 7.

28. Despite the extremism ofthe authors presented in Martin Albrow and

Elizabeth King, eds., Globalization, Knowledge, and Society (London: Sage, 1990), and the relative moderation ofBryan S. Turner, Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity (London: Sage, 1990), and Mike Featherstone, ed., Global Culture, Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity (London: Sage, 1991), the differences among their various positions are really relatively

minor. We should always keep in mind that the image ofa ‘‘global civil

society’’ is born not only in the minds ofcertain postmodernist philoso-

phers and among certain followers of Habermas (such as Jean Cohen and

Andrew Arato), but also and more importantly in the Lockean tradition

ofinternational relations. This latter group includes such important theo-

rists as Richard Falk, David Held, Anthony Giddens, and (in certain

respects) Danilo Zolo. On the concept ofcivil society in the global

context, see Michael Walzer, ed., Toward a Global Civil Society (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995).

29. With the iconoclastic irony ofJean Baudrillard’s more recent writings

such as The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington: N O T E S T O P A G E S 3 5 – 3 8

425

Indiana University Press, 1995), a certain vein ofFrench postmodernism

has gone back to a properly surrealist framework.

30. There is an uninterrupted continuity from the late cold war notions of

‘‘democracy enforcing’’ and ‘‘democratic transition’’ to the imperial theo-

ries of ‘‘peace enforcing.’’ We have already highlighted the fact that many moral philosophers supported the GulfWar as a just cause, whereas

juridical theorists, following the important lead of Richard Falk, were

generally opposed. See, for example, Richard Falk, ‘‘Twisting the U.N.

Charter to U.S. Ends,’’ in Hamid Mowlana, George Gerbner, and Herbert

Schiller, eds., Triumph of the Image: The Media’s War in the Persian Gulf (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 175–190. See also the discussion

ofthe GulfWar in Danilo Zolo, Cosmopolis: Prospects for World Govern-

ment, trans. David McKie (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).

31. For a representative example, see Richard Falk, Positive Prescriptions for the Future, World Order Studies Program occasional paper no. 20 (Princeton: Center for International Studies, 1991). To see how NGOs are integrated

into this more or less Lockean framework of ‘‘global constitutionalism,’’

one should refer to the public declarations of Antonio Cassese, president

ofthe United Nations Criminal Court in Amsterdam, in addition to his

books, International Law in a Divided World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), and Human Rights in a Changing World (Philadelphia: Temple

University Press, 1990).

32. Even the proposals to reform the United Nations proceed more or less

along these lines. For a good bibliography ofsuch works, see Joseph

Preston Baratta, Strengthening the United Nations: A Bibliography on U.N.

Reform and World Federalism (New York: Greenwood, 1987).

33. This is the line that is promoted in some ofthe strategic documents

published by the U.S. military agencies. According to the present Penta-

gon doctrine, the project ofthe enlargement ofmarket democracy should

be supported by both adequate microstrategies that are based on (both

pragmatic and systemic) zones ofapplication and the continual identifica-

tion ofcritical points and fissures in the antagonistic strong cultural blocs that would lead toward their dissolution. In this regard, see the work of

Maurice Rounai ofthe Strategic Institute in Paris. See also the works on

U.S. interventionism cited in Section 1.1, note 28.

34. One should refer, once again, to the work of Richard Falk and Antonio

Cassese. We should emphasize, in particular, how a ‘‘weak’’ conception

ofthe exercise ofjudicial functions by the U.N. Court ofJustice has

gradually, often under the influence of Left political forces, been trans-

formed into a ‘‘strong’’ conception. In other words, there is a passage

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N O T E S T O P A G E S 4 1 – 4 7

from the demand that the Court of Justice be invested with the functions

ofjudicial sanction that come under the authority ofthe U.N. structure

to the demand that the court play a direct and active role in the decisions ofthe U.N. and its organs regarding norms ofparity and material justice

among states, to the point ofcarrying out direct intervention in the name

ofhuman rights.

35. See Max Weber, Economy and Society, trans. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1968), vol. 1, chap. 3,

sec. 2, ‘‘The Three Pure Types ofAuthority,’’ pp. 215–216.

1 . 3 A L T E R N A T I V E S W I T H I N E M P I R E

1. We mean to ‘‘flirt with Hegel’’ here the way Marx described in the

famous postscript to volume 1 of Capital (trans. Ben Fowkes [New York: Vintage, 1976]) ofJanuary 24, 1873 (pp. 102–103). As they did to Marx,

Hegel’s terms seem useful to us to frame the argument, but quickly we

will run up against the real limit oftheir utility.

2. This presentation is admittedly simplified, and many studies present much more sophisticated discussions ofplace. It seems to us, however, that

these political analyses always come back to a notion of‘‘defending’’ or

‘‘preserving’’ the bounded local identity or territory. Doreen Massey ar-

gues explicitly for a politics of place in which place is conceived not as

bounded but as open and porous to flows beyond, in Space, Place, and

Gender (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1994), in particular p. 5. We would contend, however, that a notion ofplace that has no

boundaries empties the concept completely ofits content. For an excellent

review ofthe literature and an alternative conception ofplace, see Arif

Dirlik, ‘‘Place-based Imagination: Globalism and the Politics ofPlace,’’

unpublished manuscript.

3. We will return to the concept ofthe nation at greater length in Sec-

tion 2.2.

4. ‘ I view location as a fundamental material attribute of human activity

but recognize that location is socially produced.’’ David Harvey, The

Limits of Capital (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1984), p. 374.

Arjun Appadurai also discusses ‘‘the production oflocality’’ in a way

consistent with Harvey and with our argument in Modernity at Large:

Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1996), pp. 178–199.

5. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953).

6. This methodological connection between critique and construction that

rests firmly on the basis ofa collective subject was articulated well in

N O T E S T O P A G E S 4 8 – 5 2

427

Marx’s own historical writings and developed by various traditions of

heterodox Marxist historiography in the twentieth century, such as the

work ofE. P. Thompson, the Italian workerist writers, and the South

Asian subaltern historians.

7. See, for example, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), which is perhaps the

best articulation, in its own delirious way, ofthe contemporary conscious-

ness ofthe triumph ofcapital.

8. For a good example ofthis deconstructionist method that demonstrates

its virtues and its limitations, see the work ofGayatri Spivak, in particular her introduction to Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 3–32.

9. See ArifDirlik, ‘‘Mao Zedong and ‘Chinese Marxism,’ ’ in Saree Makdisi,

Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca Karl, eds., Marxism beyond Marxism (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 119–148. See also ArifDirlik, ‘‘Modernism

and Antimodernism in Mao Zedong’s Marxism,’’ in ArifDirlik, Paul

Healy, and Nick Knight, eds., Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong’s Thought (Atlantic Heights, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997), pp. 59–83.

10. On the tactical ambiguities ofthe ‘‘national politics’’ ofthe socialist and communist parties, see primarily the work ofthe Austro-Marxists, such

as Otto Bauer’s Die Nationalita¨tenfrage und die Sozialdomocratie (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1924); and Stalin’s influential ‘‘Marxism and

the National Question,’’ in Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (New York: International Publishers, 1935), pp. 3–61. We will return

to these authors in Section 2.2. For a special and particularly interesting case, see Enzo Traverso, Les marxistes et la question juive (Paris: La Brèche, 1990).

11. On the cycle ofanti-imperialist struggles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (seen from the Chinese perspective), see Rebecca

Karl, Staging the World: China and the Non-West at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).

12. On the hypothesis that struggles precede and prefigure capitalist development and restructuring, see Antonio Negri, Revolution Retrieved (London: Red Notes, 1988).

13. This notion ofthe proletariat might thus be understood in Marx’s own

terms as the personification ofa strictly economic category, that is, the

subject oflabor under capital. As we redefine the very concept oflabor

and extend the range ofactivities understood under it (as we have done

elsewhere and will continue to do in this book), the traditional distinction 428

N O T E S T O P A G E S 5 5 – 6 0

between the economic and the cultural breaks down. Even in Marx’s

most economistic formulations, however, proletariat must be understood

really as a properly political category. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1994), pp. 3–21; and Antonio Negri, ‘‘Twenty Theses ofMarx,’’ in

Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca Karl, eds., Marxism beyond

Marxism (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 149–180.

14. See Michael Hardt, ‘‘Los Angeles Novos,’’ Futur anteŕieur, no. 12/13

(1991), 12–26.

15. See Luis Gomez, ed., Mexique: du Chiapas à la crise financière, Supplement, Futur anteŕieur (1996).

16. See primarily Futur anteŕieur, no. 33/34, Tous ensemble! Re´flections sur les luttes de novembre-dećembre (1996). See also Raghu Krishnan, ‘‘December 1995: The First Revolt against Globalization,’’ Monthly Review, 48, no.

1 (May 1996), 1–22.

17. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963), p. 121.

18. See Gilles Deleuze, ‘‘Postscript on Control Societies,’’ in Negatiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995),

pp. 177–182.

19. In opposition to the theories ofthe ‘‘weakest link,’’ which not only were the heart ofthe tactics ofthe Third International but also were largely

adopted by the anti-imperialist tradition as a whole, the Italian operaismo movement ofthe 1960s and 1970s proposed a theory ofthe ‘‘strongest

link.’’ For the fundamental theoretical thesis, see Mario Tronti, Operai e capitale (Turin: Einaudi, 1966), esp. pp. 89–95.

20. One can find ample and continuous documentation ofthese techniques

of disinformation and silencing in publications ranging from Le Monde

Diplomatique to Z Magazine and the Covert Action Bulletin. Noam Chomsky has tirelessly worked to unveil and counter such disinformation in

his numerous books and lectures. See, for example, Edward Herman and

Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass

Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988). The GulfWar presented an excellent example ofthe imperial management ofcommunication. See W. Lance

Bennett and David L. Paletz, eds., Taken by Storm: The Media, Public

Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War

(Boulder: Westview Press, 1992).

21. This operation offlattening the struggles in the f

orm ofan inverted

homology with the system is adequately represented by the (in other

N O T E S T O P A G E S 6 1 – 7 3

429

respects quite impressive and important) work ofImmanuel Wallerstein

and the world systems school. See, for example, Giovanni Arrighi, Ter-

ence Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein, Antisystemic Movements (London: Verso, 1989).

22. Keeping in mind the limitations we mentioned earlier, one should refer

here to the work ofFeĺix Guattari, particularly the writings ofhis final

period such as Chaosmosis, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995).

P O L I T I C A L M A N I F E S T O

1. Louis Althusser, ‘‘Machiavel et nous,’’ in E

ćrits philosophiques et politiques,

vol. 2, ed. Franc¸ois Matheron (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1995), pp. 39–168;

subsequently cited in text.

2. See Baruch Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, vol. 1 of Chief Works, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1951).

2 . 1 T W O E U R O P E S , T W O M O D E R N I T I E S

1. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Knopf, 1995), 2:1106.

2. Johannes Duns Scotus, Opus Oxoniense, Book IV, Distinctio XIII, Quaes-tio I, in Opera Omnia, vol. 8 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1969), p. 807.

3. Dante Alighieri, De Monarchia, ed. Louis Bertalot (Frankfurt: Friedrichs-dorf, 1918), Book I, chap. 4, p. 14.

4. Nicholas ofCusa, ‘‘Complementum theologicum,’’ in Opera, vol. 2

(Frankfurt: Minerva, 1962), chap. 2, fol. 93b (facsimile reproduction of

edition edited by Jacques Le Fevre [Paris: 1514]).

5. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Of Being and Unity, trans. Victor Hamm (Milwaukee: Marquette Univesity Press, 1943), pp. 21–22.

6. Carolus Bovillus (Charles de Bovelles), Il libro del sapiente, ed. Eugenio Garin (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), chap. 22, p. 73.

7. Francis Bacon, Works, ed. James Spalding, Robert Ellis, and Donald Heath (London: Longman and Co., 1857), 1:129–130.

8. Galileo Galilei, Opere (Florence: G. Berbèra Editore, 1965), 7:128–129.

9. William ofOckham, A Short Discourse on the Tyrannical Government, trans.

John Kilcullen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Book III,

chap. 16, p. 104. The translator renders the phrase ‘‘multitudo fidelium’’ as

‘‘congregation of the faithful.’’

10. See Marsilius ofPadua, Defensor Pacis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928).

430

N O T E S T O P A G E S 7 3 – 8 0

11. This revolutionary aspect ofthe origins ofmodernity can be read in its

clearest and most synthetic form in the work of Spinoza. See Antonio

Negri, The Savage Anomaly, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1991).

12. The various nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical frameworks

of negative thought, from Nietzsche to Heidegger and Adorno, are funda-

mentally right to foresee the end of modern metaphysics and to link

modernity and crisis. What these authors generally do not recognize,

however, is that there are two modernities at play here and that the crisis is a direct result oftheir conflict. For this reason they are unable to see the alternatives within modernity that extend beyond the limits ofmodern

metaphysics. On negative thought and crisis, see Massimo Cacciari, Krisis: saggio sulla crisis del pensiero negativo da Nietzsche a Wittgenstein (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976).

13. On these passages in European modernity, see Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols., trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986); and (in a completely different

intellectual and hermeneutic context) Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and

Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988).

14. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, trans. Russell Moore (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989), pp. 72–73.

15. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. Edwin Curley, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), Part IV,

Proposition 67, p. 584.

16. Ibid., Part V, Proposition 37, p. 613.

17. Our discussion draws on the work ofErnst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951); Max Horkheimer and

Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972); and Michel Foucault, ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, vol. 1 of The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997),

pp. 303–319.

18. See Jacques Chevalier, Pascal (Paris: Plon, 1922), p. 265.

19. Rene´ Descartes, ‘‘Letter to Mersenne (15 April 1630),’’ in Philosophical Letters, ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), p. 11. For the original French version, see Oeuvres complètes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1969), 1:145.

20. See Antonio Negri, Descartes politico o della ragionevole ideologia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1970).

N O T E S T O P A G E S 8 0 – 9 4

431

21. For a more recent example that continues along this transcendental line ofEuropean complacency, see Massimo Cacciari, Geo-filosofia dell’Europa (Milan: Adelphi, 1994).

22. See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans.

E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1966).

23. Ibid., ‘‘Preface to the Second Edition,’’ p. xxi.

24. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §258

Addition, p. 279 (translation modified).

25. Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), Part II, Book 10, paragraph 8, p. 150.

26. Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from the Six Books of the Commonwealth, ed. and trans. Julian Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 23 (from Book I, chap. 8).

27. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 4, ed. Roger Master and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, N.H.: University Press ofNew England, 1994), Book I, chap. 6, p. 138.

28. See Bodin, On Sovereignty.

29. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).

30. See ArifDirlik, The Postcolonial Aura (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997).

31. Adam Smith, The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), Book IV, chap. ii, paragraph 9, p. 456.

32. Ibid., Book IV, Chapter ix, paragraph 51, p. 687.

33. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §261, p. 283.

34. See Michel Foucault, ‘‘La ‘gouvernementalite´,’ ’ in Dits et ećrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 3:635–657.

35. See our discussion ofFoucault’s notion ofbiopower in Section 1.2.

36. See primarily Max Weber, Economy and Society, 2 vols., trans. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1968).

37. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (New York: Modern Library, 1967), chap. 35, ‘‘The Sublime Ones,’’

p. 111.

2 . 2 S O V E R E I G N T Y O F T H E N A T I O N - S T A T E

1. For an extensive analysis ofboth the common f

orm and the variants

throughout Europe, see Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974).

2. See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); and his essay 432

N O T E S T O P A G E S 9 4 – 9 8

‘‘Christus-Fiscus,’’ in Synopsis: Festgabe fu¨r Alfred Weber (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1948), pp. 223–235. See also Marc Leopold

Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).

3. For an analysis that links the economic transition from feudalism to capitalism to the development ofmodern European philosophy, see Franz

Borkenau, Der U

¨ bergang vom feudalen zum bu¨rgerlichen Weltbild: Studien zur

Geschichte der Philosophie der Manufakturperiode (Paris: Feĺix Alcan, 1934).

For an excellent discussion ofthe philosophical literature on this problem-

atic, see Alessandro Pandolfi, Geneálogie et dialectique de la raison mercantiliste (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996).

4. See Pierangelo Schiera, Dall’arte de governo alle scienze dello stato (Milan, 1968).

5. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

6. See E

´ tienne Balibar, ‘‘The Nation Form: History and Ideology,’’ in

E

´ tienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 86–106. See also Slavoj Z

ˇ izěk, ‘‘Le reˆve du nationalisme

explique´ par le reˆve du mal radical,’’ Futur anteŕieur, no. 14 (1992), pp. 59–82.

7. The relevant essays by Luxemburg are collected in Rosa Luxemburg,

The National Question, ed. Horace Davis (New York: Monthly Review

Press, 1976). For a careful summary of Luxemburg’s positions, see Joan

Cocks, ‘‘From Politics to Paralysis: Critical Intellectuals Answer the Na-

tional Question,’’ Political Theory, 24, no. 3 (August 1996), 518–537.

Lenin was highly critical ofLuxemburg’s position primarily because she

failed to recognize the ‘‘progressive’’ character of the nationalism (even

the bourgeois nationalism) ofsubordinated countries. Lenin thus affirms

the right to national self-determination, which is really the right to secession for all. See V. I. Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1951), pp. 9–64.

8. Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, trans. M. J. Tooley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955), Book VI, chap. 6, p. 212 (translation modified).

9. For excellent interpretations ofBodin’s work that situate it solidly in the dynamics ofsixteenth-century Europe, see Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); and Geŕard Mairet, Dieu mortel: essai de non-philosophie de l’E

´ tat

(Paris: PUF, 1987). For a more general view that traces the development

ofthe notion ofsovereignty in the long history ofEuropean political

thought, see Geŕard Mairet, Le principe de souverainete´ (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).

N O T E S T O P A G E S 9 9 – 1 0 3

433

10. See Friedrich Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsra¨son in der neueren Geschichte (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1924). See also the articles gathered by Wilhelm

Dilthey in Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation, vol. 2 of Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: Teubner, 1914).

11. With the notable exception ofthe work by Otto von Gierke, The Development of Political Theory, trans. Bernard Freyd (New York: Norton, 1939).

12. See Friedrich Meinecke, Historicism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).

13. To recognize the seeds ofHegel’s idealism in Vico, see Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R. G. Collingwood (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964); along with Hayden White, ‘‘What Is Living

and What Is Dead in Croce’s Criticism ofVico,’’ in Giorgio Tagliacozzo,

ed., Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), pp. 379–389. White emphasizes how Croce

translated Vico’s work into idealist terms, making Vico’s philsophy of

history into a philosophy ofspirit.

14. See Giambattista Vico, De Universi Juris principio et fine uno, in Opere giuridiche (Florence: Sansoni, 1974), pp. 17–343; and Johann Gottfried Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, trans. Frank Manuel (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1968).

15. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, in a rather different context, declares the absolute priority ofthe nation explicitly: ‘‘The nation exists prior to every-

thing, it is the origin ofeverything.’’ See Qu’est-ce que le Tiers E

´ tat?

(Geneva: Droz, 1970), p. 180.

16. On the work ofSieyès and the developments ofthe French Revolution,

see Antonio Negri, Il potere costituente: saggio sulle alternative del moderno (Milan: Sugarco, 1992), chap. 5, pp. 223–286.

17. For an excellent analysis ofthe distinction between the multitude and

the people, see Paolo Virno, ‘‘Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political

Theory ofExodus,’’ in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical

Thought in Italy (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1996), pp. 189–210.

18. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (New York: Appleton Century-Crofts, 1949), Chapter XII, section 8, p. 135.

19. See E

´ tienne Balibar, ‘‘Racism and Nationalism,’’ in E´tienne Balibar

and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 37–67. We will return to the question ofthe nation in the colonial

context in the next chapter.

20. See, for example, Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995).

434

N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 0 4 – 1 0 8

21. See Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers E

´ tat.

22. See Roberto Zapperi’s Introduction, ibid., pp. 7–117.

23. Well over one hundred years later Antonio Gramsci’s notion ofthe

national-popular was conceived as part of an effort to recuperate precisely this hegemonic class operation in the service ofthe proletariat. For

Gramsci, national-popular is the rubric under which intellectuals would

be united with the people, and thus it is a powerful resource for the

construction ofa popular hegemony. See Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del

carcere (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), 3:2113–20. For an excellent critique of Gramsci’s notion ofthe national-popular, see Alberto Asor Rosa, Scrittori e popolo, 7th ed. (Rome: Savelli, 1976).

24. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, trans. R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull (Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979).

25. We should note that the various liberal interpretations ofHegel, from

RudolfHaym to Franz Rosenzweig, only succeeded in recuperating his

political thought by focusing on its national aspects. See Rudolf Haym,

Hegel und sein Zeit (Berlin, 1857); Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat (Munich, 1920); and Eric Weil, Hegel et l’E

´ tat (Paris: Vrin, 1950). Rosen-

zweig is the one who best understands the tragedy ofthe unavoidable

connection between the nation and ethicality in Hegel’s thought. See

Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Willaim Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971); and the excellent interpretation ofit, Ste´phane Moses, Système et re´veĺation: la philosophie de Franz Rosenzweig (Paris: Seuil, 1982).

26. ‘‘[Socialists] must therefore unequivocally demand that the Social-

Democrats ofthe oppressing countries (ofthe so-called ‘‘great’’ nations in particular) should recognize and defend the right of the oppressed nations to self-determination in the political sense of the word, i.e., the right to political separation.’’ Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, p. 65.

27. See Malcolm X, ‘‘The Ballot or the Bullet,’’ in Malcolm X Speaks (New York: Pathfinder, 1989), pp. 23–44. For a discussion ofMalcolm X’s

nationalism, particularly in his efforts to found the Organization of Afro-

American Unity during the last year ofhis life, see William Sales, Jr.,

From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (Boston: South End Press, 1994).

28. Wahneema Lubiano, ‘‘Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense:

Policing Ourselves and Others,’’ in Wahneema Lubiano, ed., The House

That Race Built (New York: Vintage, 1997), pp. 232–252; quotation

p. 236. See also Wahneema Lubiano, ‘‘Standing in for the State: Black

N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 0 8 – 1 1 3

435

Nationalism and ‘Writing’ the Black Subject,’’ Alphabet City, no. 3 (October 1993), pp. 20–23.

29. The question of‘‘black sovereignty’’ is precisely the issue at stake in Cedric Robinson’s critique ofW. E. B. Du Bois’s support for Liberia in

the 1920s and 1930s. Robinson believes that Du Bois had uncritically

supported the forces of modern sovereignty. See Cedric Robinson,

‘‘W. E. B. Du Bois and Black Sovereignty,’’ in Sidney Lemelle and Robin

Kelley, eds., Imagining Home: Culture, Class, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 145–157.

30. Jean Genet, ‘‘Interview avec Wischenbart,’’ in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6

(Paris: Gallimard, 1991), p. 282. In general, on Genet’s experience with

the Black Panthers and the Palestinians, see his final novel, Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1992).

31. Benedict Anderson maintains that philosophers have unjustly disdained

the concept ofnation and that we should view it in a more neutral light.

‘‘Part ofthe difficulty is that one tends unconsciously to hypostatize the

existence ofNationalism-with-a-big-N (rather as one might Age-with-

a-capital-A) and then classify ‘it’ as an ideology. (Note that ifeveryone has an age, Age is merely an analytical expression.) It would, I think,

make things easier ifone treated it as ifit belonged with ‘kinship’ and

‘religion,’ rather than with ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism.’ ’ Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 5. Everyone belongs to a nation, as everyone belongs to (or has) an age, a race, a gender, and so forth. The danger here is that

Anderson naturalizes the nation and our belonging to it. We must on the contrary denaturalize the nation and recognize its historical construction

and political effects.

32. On the relationship between class struggle and the two World Wars, see

Ernst Nolte, Der Europaïsche Bu¨rgerkrieg, 1917–1945 (Frankfurt: Propy-laën Verlag, 1987).

33. The primary text to be conidered in the context ofAustrian social-

democratic theorists is Otto Bauer, Die Nationalita¨tenfrage und die Sozialde-mokratie (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1924). English translations ofexerpts from this book are included in Austro-Marxism, trans. Tom Bottomore and Patrick Goode (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).

34. See Joseph Stalin, ‘‘Marxism and the National Question,’’ in Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (New York: International Publishers, 1935), pp. 3–61.

35. We adopt this term from, but do not follow in the political perspective of, J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952).

436

N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 1 3 – 1 2 2

36. Cited in Roberto Zapperi’s Introduction to Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers E

´ tat, pp. 7–117; quotation p. 77.

2 . 3 T H E D I A L E C T I C S O F C O L O N I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

1. ‘‘The darker side ofthe Renaissance underlines . . . the rebirth ofthe

classical tradition as a justification ofcolonial expansion.’’ Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 1995), p. vi.

2. Bartolome´ de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, ed. Stafford Poole (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), p. 271. See also Lewis

Hanke, All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation between Bartolome´

de Las Casas and Juan Gines de Sepulveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974).

3. Quoted in C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1963), p. 196.

4. AimeĆeśaire, Toussaint Louverture: la re´volution franc¸aise et le problème colonial (Paris: Preśence Africaine, 1961), p. 309.

5. See Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), p. 88.

6. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1976), 1:925.

7. Karl Marx, ‘‘The British Rule in India,’’ in Surveys from Exile, vol. 2 of Political Writings (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 306.

8. Karl Marx, ‘‘The Native States,’’ in Letters on India (Lahore: Contemporary India Publication, 1937), p. 51.

9. Marx, ‘‘The British Rule in India,’’ p. 307.

10. Karl Marx, ‘‘The Future Results ofBritish Rule in India’’ in Surveys from Exile, vol. 2 of Political Writings (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 320.

11. Aijaz Ahmad points out that Marx’s description ofIndian history seems

to be taken directly from Hegel. See Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes,

Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 231 and 241.

12. Marx, ‘‘The Future Results ofBritish Rule in India,’’ p. 320.

13. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 3 and 11.

14. See Elizabeth Fox Genovese and Eugene Genovese, Fruits of Merchant

Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. vii.

15. Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, p. 8.

16. The relationship between wage labor and slavery in capitalist development is one ofthe central problematics elaborated in Yann Moulier Boutang,

N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 2 3 – 1 3 1

437

De l’esclavage au salariat: ećonomie historique du salariat bride´ (Paris: Presses universitaries de France, 1998).

17. This is one ofthe central arguments ofRobin Blackburn’s Overthrow of Colonial Slavery. See, in particular, p. 520.

18. Moulier Boutang, De l’esclavage au salariat, p. 5.

19. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 38. On the Manichaean divisions ofthe

colonial world, see Abdul JanMohamed, ‘‘The Economy ofManichean

Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,’’

Critical Inquiry, 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985), 57–87.

20. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 42.

21. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), pp. 4–5 and 104.

22. Cultural anthropology has conducted a radical self-criticism in the past few decades, highlighting how many ofthe strongest early veins ofthe

discipline participated in and supported colonialist projects. The early

classic texts ofthis critique are Geŕard Leclerc, Anthropologie et colonialisme: essai sur l’histoire de l’africanisme (Paris: Fayard, 1972); and Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973).

Among the numerous more recent works, we found particularly useful

Nicholaus Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Gov-

ernment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

23. This argument is developed clearly in Valentin Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), see esp. pp. 64, 81, and 108.

24. Ranajit Guha, An Indian Historiography of India: A Nineteenth-Century Agenda and Its Implications (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, 1988), p. 12.

25. An Inquiry into the causes of the insurrection of negroes in the island of St.

Domingo London and Philadelphia: Crukshank, 1792), p. 5.

26. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 1–40.

27. See Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 216–222.

28. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘‘Black Orpheus,’’ in ‘‘What Is Literature?’’ and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 296.

29. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘‘Preface,’’ in Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 20.

30. ‘‘In fact, negritude appears like the upbeat [ le temps faible] ofa dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy

is the thesis; the position ofnegritude as an antithetical value is the

moment of negativity. But this negative moment is not sufficient in itself, 438

N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 3 1 – 1 4 0

and these black men who use it know this perfectly well; they know that

it aims at preparing the synthesis or realization ofthe human being in a

raceless society. Thus, negritude is for destroying itself; it is a ‘‘crossing to’’ and not an ‘‘arrival at,’’ a means and not an end.’’ Sartre, ‘‘Black

Orpheus,’’ p. 327.

31. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 52.

32. Ibid., pp. 58–65.

33. See Malcolm X, ‘‘The Ballot or the Bullet,’’ in Malcolm X Speaks (New York: Pathfinder, 1989), pp. 23–44.

34. We should remember that within the sphere ofcommunist and socialist

movements, the discourse ofnationalism not only legitimated the struggle

for liberation from colonial powers but also served as a means of insisting on the autonomy and differences of local revolutionary experiences from

the models ofdominant socialist powers. For example, Chinese national-

ism was the banner under which Chinese revolutionaries could resist

Soviet control and Soviet models, translating Marxism into the language

ofthe Chinese peasantry (that is, into Mao Zedong thought). Similarly,

in the subsequent period, revolutionaries from Vietnam to Cuba and

Nicaragua insisted on the national nature ofstruggles in order to assert

their autonomy from Moscow and Beijing.

35. Charter ofthe United Nations, Article 2.1, in Leland Goodrich and

Edvard Hambro, Charter of the United Nations (Boston: World Peace

Foundation, 1946), p. 339.

36. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986), p. 168.

C O N T A G I O N

1. Louis-Ferdinand Ceĺine, Journey to the End of the Night, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: New Directions, 1983), p. 145 (translation modified); subsequently cited in text.

2. See Cindy Patton, Global AIDS / Local Context, forthcoming; and John O’Neill, ‘‘AIDS as a Globalizing Panic,’’ in Mike Featherstone, ed., Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity (London: Sage, 1990), pp. 329–342.

2 . 4 S Y M P T O M S O F P A S S A G E

1. ArifDirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 52–83; quotation p. 77.

2. See, for example, Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 29.

N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 4 0 – 1 4 8

439

3. For an explanation ofhow many postmodernist theorists conflate the

varieties ofmodernist thought under the single rubric of‘‘the Enlighten-

ment,’’ see Kathi Weeks, Constituting Feminist Subjects (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), chap. 2.

4. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), p. 25.

5. Jane Flax, Disputed Subjects (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 91.

6. What is necessary for a postmodernist critique is first to identify what

‘‘modernist’’ means in the field and then to pose a successor paradigm

that is in some way consistent with some form of postmodernist thinking.

Consider, for example, a field that might at first sight seem an unlikely

candidate for such an operation: public administration, that is, the study

ofbureaucracies. The modernist paradigm ofresearch that dominates the

field is defined by a ‘‘prescription ofneutral public administration ascribed to Wilson (separation ofpolitics from administration), Taylor (scientific

management), and Weber (hierarchical command).’’ Charles Fox and

Hugh Miller, Postmodern Public Administration: Toward Discourse (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995), p. 3. Scholars who are convinced that this

paradigm is outdated and leads to undemocratic governmental practice

can use postmodernist thinking as a weapon to transform the field. In

this case, they propose ‘‘non-foundational discourse theory’’ as a postmod-

ernist model that will create more active public interactions and thus

democratize bureaucracy (p. 75).

7. See James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro, eds., International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989); Jim George, Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)Introduction to International Relations (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publications, 1994); and Michael Shapiro and Hayward Alker, Jr., eds., Territorial Identities and Global Flows (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1996).

8. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 18.

9. Gyan Prakash, ‘‘Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography,’’ Social Text, no. 31/32 (1992), 8.

10. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), pp. 282–303.

11. Edward Said, ‘‘Arabesque,’’ New Statesman and Society, 7 (September 1990), 32.

12. Anders Stephanson gives an excellent account ofthe conceptions ofthe

United States as a ‘‘new Jerusalem’’ in Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

13. ‘‘Like most visions ofa ‘golden age,’ the ‘traditional family’ . . . evaporates on close examination. It is an ahistorical amalgam ofstructures,

440

N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 4 8 – 1 5 3

values, and behaviors that never co-existed in the same time and place.’’

Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the

Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 9.

14. Fazlur Rahman, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1984), p. 142.

15. ‘‘The fundamentalism of the humiliated Islamic world is not a tradition ofthe past but a postmodern phenomenon: the inevitable ideological

reaction to the failure of Western modernization.’’ Robert Kurz, ‘‘Die

Krise, die aus dem Osten Kam,’’ translated into Italian in L’onore perduto del lavoro, trans. Anselm Jappe and Maria Teresa Ricci (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1994), p. 16. More generally, on contemporary fallacies around notions

of tradition and group identity, see Arjun Appadurai, ‘‘Life after Primordialism,’’ in Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1996), pp. 139–157.

16. Akbar Ahmed, Postmodernism and Islam (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 32.

17. Rahman, Islam and Modernity, p. 136.

18. Robert Reich, The Work of Nations (New York: Random House, 1992), pp. 8 and 3.

19. See Arjun Appadurai, ‘‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,’’ in Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1996), pp. 27–47.

20. See, for example, Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); and Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper-reality,

trans. William Weaver (London: Picador, 1986), pp. 3–58.

21. Stephen Brown, Postmodern Marketing (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 157.

Whereas marketing practice is postmodernist, Brown points out, market-

ing theory remains stubbornly ‘‘modernist’’ (which here means positivis-

tic). Elizabeth Hirschman and Morris Holbrook also bemoan the resistance

ofmarketing theory and consumer research to postmodernist thinking in

Postmodern Consumer Research: The Study of Consumption as Text (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1992).

22. See George Yudice, ‘‘Civil Society, Consumption, and Governmentality

in an Age ofGlobal Restructuring: An Introduction,’’ Social Text, no. 45

(Winter 1995), 1–25.

23. William Bergquist, The Postmodern Organization: Mastering the Art of Irreversible Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993), p. xiii. See also the essays in David Boje, Robert Gephart, Jr., and Tojo Joseph Thatchenkery,

eds., Postmodern Management and Organizational Theory (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996).

24. See Avery Gordon, ‘‘The Work ofCorporate Culture: Diversity Manage-

ment,’’ Social Text, 44, vol. 13, no. 3 (Fall/Winter 1995), 3–30.

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441

25. See Chris Newfield, ‘‘Corporate Pleasures for a Corporate Planet,’’ Social Text, 44, vol. 13, no. 3 (Fall/Winter 1995), 31–44.

26. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

2 . 5 N E T W O R K P O W E R : U . S . S O V E R E I G N T Y

A N D T H E N E W E M P I R E

1. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed.

Max Beldt (Oxford: Blackwell, 1948), p. 37. This passage is from Federal-

ist no. 9, written by Hamilton.

2. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); and J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

3. On the Atlantic passage ofthe republican tradition f

rom the English

Revolution to the American Revolution, see Antonio Negri, Il potere

costituente (Milan: Sugarco, 1992), chaps. 3 and 4, pp. 117–222; and David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and

New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

4. Again, see Negri, Il potere costituente. See also J. G. A. Pocock, ‘‘States, Republics, and Empires: The American Founding in Early Modern Perspective,’’ in Terence Ball and J. G. A. Pocock, eds., Conceptual Change and the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press ofKansas, 1988), pp. 55–77.

5. See Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), Book VI, pp. 302–352.

6. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1994), in particular the Author’s Introduction, 1:3–16.

7. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963).

8. We are refering directly here to Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1950); but see also Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

9. For detailed analyses ofthe conflicts within the Constitution, see primarily Michael Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself (New York:

Knopf, 1986).

10. Throughout his reading ofPolybius in the Discourses, Machiavelli insists on the necessity that the Republic expand so as not to fall into corruption.

See Negri, Il potere costituente, pp. 75–97.

11. The combination ofref

ormism and expansionism in the ‘‘Empire of

Right’’ is presented wonderfully by Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: 442

N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 6 7 – 1 7 3

American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

12. Virgil, Ecologue IV, in Opera, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), verses 4–5, p. 10. The original reads, ‘‘Ultima Cumaei uenit

iam carminis aetas; / magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.’’

13. Bruce Ackerman proposes a periodization ofthe first three regimes or

phases ofU.S. constitutional history. See We The People: Foundations

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), in particular

pp. 58–80.

14. ‘‘What one shared above all was a sense ofan entirely new kind of

country, uniquely marked by social, economic, and spatial openness. ’

Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, p. 28.

15. Marx explained the economic origins ofthe United States when analyzing

the American economist Henry Charles Carey. The United States is ‘ a

country where bourgeois society did not develop on the foundation of

the feudal system, but developed rather from itself.’’ Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 884. Marx also

discusses the difference of capitalist development in the United States

(along with the other settler colonies, such as Australia), in Capital, trans.

Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1976), 1:931–940. For Tocqueville’s

analysis ofthe socioeconomic roots ofthe United States, see Democracy

in America, vol. 1, chaps. 2 and 3, pp. 26–54.

16. Thomas Jefferson ‘‘saw expansion as the indispensable concomitant of a

stable, secure, and prosperous Empire ofLiberty.’’ Robert Tucker and

David Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 162.

17. U.S. Constitution, Article I, section 2. On the three-fifths rule, see John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York: Free Press, 1977), pp. 221–225.

18. For a briefhistory ofthe crises in the Constitution precipated by black slavery from the Constitutional Convention to the Civil War, see Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself, pp. 96–105.

19. On the emergence ofthe U.S. industrial working class as a powerful

force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see David

Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on Twentieth-Century Struggles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 3–47; Stanley Aronowitz,

False Promises: The Shaping of American Working-Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), pp. 137–166; and Bruno Ramirez, When

Workers Fight: The Politics of Industrial Relations in the Progressive Era, 1898–

1916 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978).

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443

20. For a good analysis ofthe relationship between U.S. expansionism and

European imperialism in terms offoreign policy, see Akira Iriye, From

Nationalism to Internationalism: U.S. Foreign Policy to 1914 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977).

21. Cited in Frank Ninkovich, ‘‘Theodore Roosevelt: Civilization as Ideol-

ogy,’’ Diplomatic History, 20, no. 3 (Summer 1986), 221–245; quotation pp. 232–233. Ninkovich demonstrates clearly how Roosevelt’s imperialism was solidly grounded in the ideology ofthe ‘‘spread ofcivilization.’’

22. On Woodrow Wilson and the fortunes of progressive internationalism,

see Thomas Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for

a New World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

23. See Antonio Negri, ‘‘Keynes and the Capitalist Theory ofthe State,’’

in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1994), pp. 23–51.

24. The effects of Monroe’s original declaration were ambiguous at best, and Ernst May has argued that the doctrine was born as much from domestic

political pressures as international issues; see The Making of the Monroe Doctrine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). The doctrine only really became an effective foreign policy with Theodore Roo-

sevelt’s imperialist campaigns, and particularly with the project to build

the Panama Canal.

25. For the long history ofU.S. military interventions in Latin America and particularly in Central America, see Ivan Musicant, The Banana Wars: A

History of United States Military Intervention in Latin America (New York: Macmillan, 1990); Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in

Central America and the Struggle for Peace (Boston: South End Press, 1985); Saul Landau, The Dangerous Doctrine: National Security and U.S. Foreign Policy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988).

26. William Chafe poses 1968 as a shift of regime in the United States from the perspective ofa social historian: ‘‘Any historian who uses the word

‘watershed’ to describe a given moment runs the risk ofoversimplifying

the complexity ofthe historical process. However, ifthe word is em-

ployed to signify a turning point that marks the end to domination by

one constellation offorces and the beginning ofdomination by another,

it seems appropriate as a description ofwhat took place in America in

1968.’’ William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America since World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 378. Chafe captures precisely

what we mean by a shift in the constitutional regime, that is, the end of

domination by one constellation offorces and the beginning ofdomina-

tion by another. For Chafe’s analysis ofthe republican spirit ofthe move-

ments, see pp. 302–342.

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2 . 6 I M P E R I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

1. Immanuel Kant, ‘‘An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ ’

in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 54–60.

2. Michel Foucault, ‘‘What Is Enlightenment,’’ in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, vol. 1 of The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 303–319.

3. Ibid., p. 315.

4. On the relationship between modern metaphysics and political theory, see Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1991).

5. We find versions ofthis spatial configuration ofinside and outside among many ofthe contemporary philosophers we most admire—even writers

such as Foucault and Blanchot who move away from the dialectic, and

even Derrida, who dwells on that margin between inside and outside

that is the most ambiguous and most murky point ofmodern thought.

For Foucault and Blanchot, see Foucault’s essay ‘‘Maurice Blanchot: The

Thought from Outside,’’ trans. Brian Massumi, in Foucault/Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1987). For Derrida, see Margins of Philosophy, trans.

Alan Bass (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1982).

6. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. ix.

7. We are thinking here primarily ofHannah Arendt’s notion ofthe political

articulated in The Human Condition (Chicago: University ofChicago

Press, 1958).

8. For Los Angeles, see Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 221–263. For Sa˜o Paulo, see Teresa Caldeira, ‘‘Fortified Enclaves:

The New Urban Segregation,’’ Public Culture, no. 8 (1996); 303–328.

9. See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994).

10. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

11. ‘‘We have watched the war machine . . . set its sights on a new type of enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but ‘l’ennemi

quelconque’ [the whatever enemy].’’ Gilles Deleuze and Feĺix Guattari,

A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 422.

12. There are undoubtedly zones ofdeprivation within the world market

where the flow ofcapital and goods is reduced to a minimum. In some

cases this deprivation is determined by an explicit political decision (as

in the trade sanctions against Iraq), and in other cases it follows from the N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 9 0 – 1 9 9

445

implicit logics ofglobal capital (as in the cycles ofpoverty and starvation in sub-Saharan Africa). In all cases, however, these zones do not constitute an outside to the capitalist market; rather they function within the world

market as the most subordinated rungs ofthe global economic hierarchy.

13. For an excellent explanation ofFoucault’s concept ofthe diagram, see

Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seań Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 34–37.

14. See E

´ tienne Balibar, ‘‘Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?’’ in E´tienne Balibar

and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 17–28; quotation p. 21. Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield

identify something very similar as liberal racism, which is characterized

primarily by ‘‘an antiracist attitude that coexists with support for racist outcomes,’’ in ‘‘White Mythologies,’’ Critical Inquiry, 20, no. 4 (Summer 1994), 737–757, quotation p. 737.

15. Balibar, ‘‘Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?’’ pp. 21–22.

16. See Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); and ‘‘Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy ofCultural Identity,’’ Critical Inquiry, 18, no. 4 (Summer 1992), 655–685. Benn Michaels critiques the kind ofracism that

appears in cultural pluralism, but does so in a way that seems to support

a new liberal racism. See Gordon and Newfield’s excellent critique of

his work in ‘‘White Mythologies.’’

17. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 178.

18. Ibid., p. 209.

19. See Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). On her formulation ofthe reactionary reversal ofthe slogan ‘‘The personal is the

political,’’ see pp. 175–180. For her excellent analysis ofthe ‘‘intimate

public sphere,’’ see pp. 2–24.

20. The liberal order ofEmpire achieves the kind of‘‘overlapping consensus’’

proposed by John Rawls in which all are required to set aside their

‘‘comprehensive doctrines’’ in the interests oftolerance. See John Rawls,

Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). For a critical review ofhis book, see Michael Hardt, ‘‘On Political Liberalism,’’

Qui Parle, 7, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 1993), 140–149.

21. On the (re)creation ofethnic identities in China, for example, see Ralph Litzinger, ‘‘Memory Work: Reconstituting the Ethnic in Post-Mao

China,’’ Cultural Anthropology, 13, no. 2 (1998), pp. 224–255.

22. Gilles Deleuze, ‘‘Postscript on Control Societies,’’ in Negotiations, trans.

Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 177–

182; quotation p. 179.

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23. See Phillipe Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

24. See Aristotle, De generatione et corruptione, trans. C. J. F. Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). In general, on the philosophical conceptions ofgeneration and corruption, see Reiner Schu¨rmann, Des he´ge´monies briseés (Mouvezin: T.E.R., 1996).

R E F U S A L

1. See in particular Gilles Deleuze, ‘‘Bartleby, ou la formule,’’ in Critique et clinique (Paris: Minuit, 1993), pp. 89–114; and Giorgio Agamben,

‘‘Bartleby o della contingenza,’’ in Bartleby: la formula della creazione (Macerata: Quodlibet, 1993), pp. 47–92.

2. J. M. Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 151.

3. E

´ tienne de La Boe´tie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, trans. Harry Kurz (New York: Free Life Editions, 1975), pp. 52–53. In French, Discours de la servitude volontaire, in Oeuvres complètes (Geneva: Slatkine, 1967), pp. 1–57; quotation p. 14.

I N T E R M E Z Z O : C O U N T E R - E M P I R E

1. Gilles Deleuze and Feĺix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Lane, and Helen Lane (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press,

1983), p. 239.

2. One ofthe best historical accounts ofthe IWW is contained in John Dos

Passos’s enormous novel USA (New York: Library ofAmerica, 1996).

See also Joyce Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: an I.W.W. Anthology (Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 1964).

3. ‘‘It would be possible to write a whole history ofthe inventions made

since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against

working-class revolt.’’ Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1976), 1:563.

4. On the changing relation between labor and value, see Antonio Negri,

‘‘Twenty Theses on Marx,’’ in Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Re-

becca Karl, eds., Marxism Beyond Marxism (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 149–180; and Antonio Negri, ‘‘Value and Affect,’’ boundary2, 26, no.

2 (Summer 1999).

5. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 29 (translation modified).

6. One ofthe most important novels ofthe Italian Resistance is Elio Vit-

torini’s Uomini e no (Men and not men) in which being human means

being against. Nanni Balestrini’s tales about class struggle in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s take up this positive determination ofbeing-against. See

N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 1 2 – 2 1 5

447

in particular Vogliamo tutto (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971); and The Unseen, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1989).

7. Yann Moulier Boutang argues that the Marxian concept ofthe ‘‘industrial

reserve army’’ has proven to be a particularly strong obstacle to our

understanding the power ofthis mobility. In this framework the divisions

and stratifications ofthe labor force in general are understood as predetermined and fixed by the quantitative logic ofdevelopment, that is, by the

productive rationalities ofcapitalist rule. This rigid and univocal command is seen as having such power that all forms of labor power are considered

as being purely and exclusively determined by capital. Even unemployed

populations and migrating populations are seen as springing from and

determined by capital as a ‘‘reserve army.’’ Labor power is deprived of

subjectivity and difference since it is considered completely subject to the iron laws ofcapital. See Yann Moulier Boutang, De l’esclavage au salariat (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998).

8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J.

Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 465 (no. 868, November

1887–March 1888).

9. We describe exodus as one ofthe motors ofthe collapse ofReal Socialism

in our Labor of Dionysus (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1994), pp. 263–269.

10. The first passage is from Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Erfahrung und Armut,’’ in

Gesammelte Schriften, ed. RolfTiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhaüs-

sen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), vol. 2, pt. 1, pp. 213–219; quotation

p. 215. The second passage is from ‘‘The Destructive Character,’’ in

Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1978),

pp. 302–303.

11. On the migrations ofsexuality and sexual perversion, see Franc¸ois Peraldi, ed., Polysexuality (New York: Semiotext(e), 1981); and Sylvère Lotringer, Overexposed: Treating Sexual Perversion in America (New York: Pantheon, 1988). Arthur and Marilouise Kroker also emphasize the subversiveness

ofbodies and sexualities that refuse purity and normalization in essays

such as ‘‘The Last Sex: Feminism and Outlaw Bodies,’’ in Arthur and

Marilouise Kroker, eds., The Last Sex: Feminism and Outlaw Bodies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993). Finally, the best source for experiments

ofcorporeal and sexual transformations may be the novels ofKathy Acker;

see, for example, Empire of the Senseless (New York: Grove Press, 1988).

12. On posthuman permutations ofthe body, see Judith Halberstam and Ira

Livingston, ‘‘Introduction: Posthuman Bodies,’’ in Judith Halberstam and

Ira Livingston, eds., Posthuman Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University 448

N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 1 5 – 2 2 1

Press, 1995), pp. 1–19; and Steve Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1993). For another interesting explo-

ration ofthe potential permutations ofthe human body, see Alphonso

Lingis, Foreign Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1994). See also the performance art ofStelarc, such as Stelarc, Obsolete Body: Suspensions (Davis, Calif.: J. P. Publications, 1984).

13. The primary texts that serve as the basis for a whole range of work that has been done across the boundaries ofhumans, animals, and machines

are Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of

Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); and Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, esp. pp. 1–8. Numerous studies have been published in the 1990s, particularly in the United States, on the political potential of

corporeal nomadism and transformation. For three of the more interesting

feminist examples from very different perspectives, see Rosi Braidotti,

Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Camilla Griggers, Becoming-Woman in Postmodernity (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1996); and Anna Camaiti Hostert, Passing (Rome: Castelvecchi, 1997).

14. Control and mutation are perhaps the defining themes ofcyberpunk

fiction. It is sufficient to see the seminal text, William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984). The most fascinating explorations of these

themes, however, are probably found in the novels of William Burroughs

and the films ofDavid Cronenberg. On Burroughs and Cronenberg,

see Steve Shaviro, Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), pp. 101–121.

15. This counsel against normalized bodies and normalized lives was perhaps the central principle ofFeĺix Guattari’s therapeutic practice.

16. ‘‘The proletariat . . . appears as the heir to the nomad in the Western world. Not only did many anarchists invoke nomadic themes originating

in the East, but the bourgeoisie above all were quick to equate proletarians and nomads, comparing Paris to a city haunted by nomads.’’ Gilles

Deleuze and Feĺix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1987), p. 558, note 61.

17. See Antonio Negri’s essay on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ‘‘The Specter’s Smile,’’ in Michael Spinker, ed., Ghostly Demarcations (London: Verso, 1999) pp. 5–16.

3 . 1 T H E L I M I T S O F I M P E R I A L I S M

1. For sources on the imperialism debate from Kautsky to Lenin, see the

excellent bibliography provided in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Imperialismus N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 2 2 – 2 2 3

449

(Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1970), pp. 443–459. For the debates

over imperialism that developed between the two World Wars and

continued up to the 1960s, see the bibliography in Dieter Senghaas,

ed., Imperialismus und strukturelle Gewalt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp. 379–403. For a useful English-language summary of the debates, see

Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).

2. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 408; subsequently cited in text. For Marx’s discussion ofthe internal

‘‘barriers’’ ofcapitalist production, see also Capital, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1981), pp. 349–375.

3. The following argument raises the specter of underconsumptionist theories, which argue that the inability to consume all the commodities produced

is capitalism’s fatal flaw and will necessarily lead to collapse. Many Marxist and non-Marxist economists have convincingly argued against any idea

that the capitalist tendency to produce too much or consume too little

will be catastrophic. For an evaluation ofunderconsumptionist arguments

in Marx and Luxemburg, see Michael Bleaney, Under-consumption Theories

(New York: International Publishers, 1976), pp. 102–119 and 186–201;

and Ernest Mandel, Introduction to Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2, trans.

David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 69–77. See also

Nikolai Bukharin’s influential critique ofRosa Luxemburg in Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, ed. Kenneth Tarbuck, trans. RudolfWich-mann (London: Allen Lane, 1972), pp. 151–270. We should point out

that economic necessity based on quantitative calculations is sometimes

the form but never the substance of Marx’s or Luxemburg’s arguments.

Any necessity is really historical and social. What Marx and Luxemburg

identified was an economic barrier that helps explain how capital has

historically been driven or induced to expand, to move outside itselfand

incorporate new markets within its realm.

4. For Marx’s analysis ofthe abstinence theory ofcapitalist consumption,

see Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1976),

pp. 738–746, and Capital, 3:366.

5. ‘‘The total mass ofcommodities, the total product, must be sold, both

that portion which replaces constant and variable capital and that which

represents surplus-value. Ifthis does not happen, or happens only partly,

or only at prices that are less than the price ofproduction, then although

the worker is certainly exploited, his exploitation is not realized as such for the capitalist and may even not involve any realization of the surplus

value extracted.’’ Marx, Capital, 3:352.

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6. Ibid., 3:353.

7. On the expansion ofproduction and markets, see Marx, Grundrisse,

p. 419; Capital, 1:910–911; 2:470–471; 3:349–355.

8. ‘‘The true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself. ’ Marx, Capital, 3:358.

9. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzchild (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), pp. 365–366 and 467. Luxemburg’s analysis ofcapitalist accumulation, her critiques ofMarx, and

her theory ofthe collapse ofcapitalism have all been highly contested

ever since her book first appeared. For good summaries ofthe issues at

stake, see Mandel’s Introduction to Capital, 2:11–79, especially pp. 62–

69; Joan Robinson, Introduction to Luxemburg, The Accumulation of

Capital, pp. 13–28; and Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), pp. 202–207.

10. Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 308.

11. Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, p. 358.

12. Ibid., p. 372.

13. RudolfHilferding, Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development, ed. Tom Bottomore (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,

1981), p. 314.

14. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (London: Verso, 1998), p. 40.

15. On uneven development and the geographical differences of capitalist

expansion, see David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1984); and Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature,

Capital, and the Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984).

16. Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, p. 446.

17. ‘‘Like the power ofwhich it is the most global expression, imperialism

is not a notion that can form the object of any explicit definition that

orginates from economic concepts. Imperialism can only be grasped on

the basis ofa fully developed theory ofthe state.’’ Michel Aglietta, A

Theory of Capitalist Regulation, trans. David Fernbach (London: New Left Books, 1979), p. 30.

18. See primarily V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1939), and Notebooks on Imperialism, vol. 39 of Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977).

19. See Hilferding, Finance Capital, in particular pp. 183–235. Hilferding’s analysis relies heavily on Marx’s theory ofthe equalization ofthe general

rate ofprofit through competition; see Capital, 3:273–301.

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451

20. Karl Kautsky, ‘‘Zwei Schriften zum Umlernen,’’ Die Neue Zeit, April 30, 1915, p. 144. Excerpts from Kautsky’s writings on imperialism are included in Karl Kautsky: Selected Political Writings, ed. and trans. Patrick Goode (London: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 74–96.

21. V. I. Lenin, ‘‘Preface to N. Bukharin’s Pamphlet, Imperialism and the

World Economy,’’ in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers,

1964), 22:103–107; quotation p. 106. See also Lenin, Imperialism,

pp. 111–122. We should note here that although Lenin is certainly correct

in claiming that Kautsky’s position is a deviation from Marx’s method

when he ignores the potential conflicts and practical opportunities ofthe

present situation, Kautsky’s reading ofthe tendency toward a unified

world market does indeed find resonance in Marx’s work, particularly in

his articles on colonialism in India, where he posed a linear tendency of

imperialist development toward the formation of a world market. See in

particular Karl Marx, ‘‘The Future Results ofBritish Rule in India,’’ in

Surveys from Exile, vol. 2 of Political Writings (London: Penguin, 1973), pp. 319–325.

22. Lenin, ‘‘Preface to N. Bukharin’s Pamphlet, Imperialism and the World

Economy,’’ p. 107.

23. See Antonio Negri, La fabbrica della strategia: 33 lezioni su Lenin (Padua: CLEUP, 1976).

24. On Lenin’s debt to Hobson, see Giovanni Arrighi, The Geometry of Imperialism: The Limits of Hobson’s Paradigm, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 23–27.

25. Cecil Rhodes, cited in Lenin, Imperialism, p. 79.

26. It is particularly important to give credit where credit is due today,

when we seem to be confronted with numerous versions of historical

revisionism. Poor Gramsci, communist and militant before all else, tor-

tured and killed by fascism and ultimately by the bosses who financed

fascism—poor Gramsci was given the gift of being considered the founder

ofa strange notion ofhegemony that leaves no place f

or a Marxian

politics. (See, for example, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics [London: Verso, 1985], especially pp. 65–71.) We have to defend ourselves against such

generous gifts!

27. See Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s ‘‘Capital,’’ trans. Peter Burgess (London: Pluto Press, 1977).

28. On the missing volume on the wage, see Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond

Marx, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano (New

York: Autonomedia, 1991), pp. 127–150; and Michael Lebowitz, Beyond

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Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class (London: Macmillan, 1992). On the question ofthe existence ofa Marxist theory ofthe state,

see the debate between Norberto Bobbio and Antonio Negri in Norberto

Bobbio, Which Socialism? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).

29. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 408.

30. Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, trans.

Patricia Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 64.

C Y C L E S

1. ‘ I occasionally get just as tired ofthe slogan ‘postmodern’ as anyone else, but when I am tempted to regret my complicity with it, to deplore its

misuses and its notoriety, and to conclude with some reluctance that it

raises more problems than it solves, I find myselfpausing to wonder

whether any other concept can dramatize the issues in quite so effective

and economical a fashion.’’ Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 418.

2. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the

Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994).

3. Ibid., p. 332.

3 . 2 D I S C I P L I N A R Y G O V E R N A B I L I T Y

1. See James Devine, ‘‘Underconsumption, Over-investment, and the Ori-

gins ofthe Great Depression,’’ Review of Radical Political Economics, 15, no. 2 (Summer 1983), 1–27. On the economic crisis of1929, see also

the classic analysis ofJohn Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), which focuses on speculation as the

cause ofthe crisis; and, more recently, Geŕard Dumeńil and D. Le´vy, La dynamique du capital: un siècle d’ećonomie americaine (Paris: PUF, 1996). More generally, on the theoretical problems that the 1929 crisis bequeathed to

twentieth-century political economy, see Michel Aglietta, A Theory of

Capitalist Regulation, trans. David Fernbach (London: New Left Books, 1979); and Robert Boyer and Jacques Mistral, Accumulation, inflation, crises (Paris: PUF, 1978).

2. John Maynard Keynes was perhaps the person with the clearest foresight

at the Versailles Conference. Already at the conference and then later in

his essay ‘‘The Economic Consequences ofPeace,’’ he denounced the

political egotism ofthe victors which would become one ofthe contribut-

ing factors to the economic crisis of the 1920s.

3. This type ofinterpretation ofthe economic and political crisis of1929

should be contrasted very strongly to ‘‘revisionist’’ historiographical con-N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 4 1 – 2 4 3

453

ceptions in the style ofFranc¸ois Furet, Ernst Nolte, and Renzo De

Felice. It demonstrates the great importance ofthe economic element in the definition ofthe political choices ofthe twentieth century. The

revisionist histories, on the contrary, read the developments ofthe century as a linear progression ofideas that are often posed in dialectical opposition, with fascism and communism occupying the defining poles. See,

for example, Franc¸ois Furet, Le passe´ d’une illusion: essai sur l’ideé communiste au XXe siècle (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995), especially the chapter in which he discusses the relationship between communism and fascism

(pp. 189–248).

4. See Jon Halliday, A Political History of Japanese Capitalism (New York: Pantheon, 1975), pp. 82–133.

5. It is above all the ‘‘liberal’’ historiography ofauthors such as Arthur Meier Schlesinger that has insisted on the synthetic characteristics ofAmerican

progressivism. See his Political and Social Growth of the American People, 1865–1940, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1941). See also Arthur

Ekirch, Jr., Progressivism in America: A Study of the Era from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974).

6. This is the central development traced by Michel Aglietta in A Theory of Capitalist Regulation, and by Benjamin Coriat in L’atelier et le chronomètre (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1979). See also Antonio Negri, ‘‘Keynes and

the Capitalist Theory ofthe State,’’ in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,

Labor of Dionysus (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1994), pp. 23–51; and ‘‘Crisis ofthe Planner-State: Communism and Revolutionary Organisation,’’ in Revolution Retrieved (London: Red Notes, 1988), pp. 91–148. A good analysis ofthe New Deal and Keynesianism is also

provided by Suzanne de Brunhoff, The State, Capital, and Economic Policy, trans. Mike Sonenscher (London: Pluto Press, 1978), pp. 61–80.

7. The notion ofdiscipline developed by Michel Foucault certainly has a

different focus from the one we employ here, but we are refering to the

same practices and the same globality ofapplication. Foucault’s primary

theoretical concerns are that discipline is deployed through institutional

architectures, that the power ofdiscipline is located not in some central

source but in the capillary formations at its point of exercise, and that

the subjectivities are produced by internalizing discipline and enacting its practices. This is all equally valid for our consideration here. Our primary focus, however, is on how the practices and relationships of disciplinarity that originated in the factory regime came to invest the entire social

terrain as a mechanism ofboth production and government, that is, as a

regime ofsocial production.

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8. The fundamental text that describes this development and anticipates its results is Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972),

which was written in the mid-1940s. Numerous other works followed

in the description ofdisciplinary society and its implacable development

as a ‘‘biopolitical society,’’ works coming out of different cultural and

intellectual traditions but completely coherent in defining the tendency.

For the two strongest and most intelligent poles ofthis range ofstudies,

see Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), for what we might call the Anglo-German pole; and Michel Foucault,

Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), for the Latin pole.

9. Freda Kirchwey, ‘‘Program ofAction,’’ Nation, March 11, 1944,

pp. 300–305; cited in Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of

Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1983), p. 103.

10. On the spread ofthe New Deal model to the other dominant countries

after the Second World War, see Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the

Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000

(New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 347–437; and Franz Schurmann,

The Logic of World Power: An Inquiry into the Origins, Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics (New York: Pantheon, 1974).

11. On the history ofthe decolonization process in general, see Marc Ferro, Histoire des colonisations: des conqueˆtes aux inde´pendences, XIIIe–XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1994); Frank Ansprenger, The Dissolution of the Colonial Empires (London: Routledge, 1989); and R. F. Holland, European Decolonization, 1918–1981 (London: Macmillan, 1985).

12. On the effect of U.S. hegemony on decolonization struggles, see Gio-

vanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1994),

pp. 69–75; and Franc¸ois Chesnais, La mondialisation du capital, rev. ed.

(Paris: Syros, 1997).

13. Harry S. Truman, Public Papers (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1947), p. 176; cited in Richard Freeland, The

Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York: Schocken, 1971), p. 85. On the rigid bipolar ideological divisions imposed by the

cold war, see again Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,

pp. 373–395; and Schurmann, The Logic of World Power.

14. On the decentering ofmanufacturing and service production (coupled

with the centralization ofcommand), see two books by Saskia Sassen,

The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study in International Investment and N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 4 7 – 2 4 8

455

Labor Flow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), especially pp. 127–133; and The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 22–34. More generally, on the

mobility ofcapital and the countervailing or limiting factors, see David

Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1984), pp. 417–422.

15. See Wladimir Andreff, Les multinationales globales (Paris: La Dećouverte, 1995); and Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation-State: The Rise of

Regional Economies (New York: Free Press, 1995).

16. On the resistances ofpeasants to capitalist discipline, see James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 235 and passim.

17. On the economic projects ofmodernization in Mao’s China, see Maurice

Meisner, Mao’s China and After, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1986), pp. 113–139.

18. Robert Sutcliffe, for example, writes, ‘‘No major country has yet become rich without having become industrialized . . . Greater wealth and better

living standards under any political system are closely connected with

industrialization.’’ Robert Sutcliffe, Industry and Underdevelopment (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1971).

19. On global and peripheral Fordism, see primarily Alain Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles: The Crises of Global Fordism, trans. David Marcey (London: Verso, 1987); and ‘‘Towards a Global Fordism?’’ New Left Review, no.

132 (1982), 33–47. On the reception ofLipietz’s work among Anglo-

American economists, see David Ruccio, ‘‘Fordism on a World Scale:

International Dimensions ofRegulation,’’ Review of Radical Political Economics, 21, no. 4 (Winter 1989), 33–53; and Bob Jessop, ‘‘Fordism and Post-Fordism: A Critical Reformulation,’’ in Michael Storper and Allen

Scott, eds., Pathways to Industrialization and Regional Development (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 46–69.

20. See, for example, Giovanni Arrighi and John Saul, ‘‘Socialism and Eco-

nomic Development in Tropical Africa,’’ in Essays on the Political Economy of Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), pp. 11–43; John

Saul, ‘‘Planning for Socialism in Tanzania,’’ in Uchumi Editorial Board,

ed., Towards Socialist Planning (Dar Es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1972), pp. 1–29; and Terence Hopkins, ‘‘On Economic Planning in

Tropical Africa,’’ Co-existence, 1, no. 1 (May 1964), 77–88. For two appraisals ofthe failure ofeconomic development strategies and planning

in Africa (but which both still imagine the possibility of an ‘‘alternative’’

socialist development), see Samir Amin, Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a

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Global Failure (London: Zed Books, 1990), especially pp. 7–74; and

Claude Ake, Democracy and Development in Africa (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1996).

21. For an interesting personal account ofthe Bandung Conference and its

significance, see Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the

Bandung Conference (New York: World, 1956). The major speeches delivered at the conference are included in George McTurnan Kahin, The

Asian-African Conference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956). On the nonalignment movement, see Leo Mates, Nonalignment: Theory and Current Policy (Belgrade: Institute for International Politics and Economics, 1972); and M. S. Rajan, Nonalignment and Nonalignment Movement (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing, 1990).

22. On nomadism and the constitution ofsubjectivities, see Gilles Deleuze

and Feĺix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1987), especially pp. 351–423.

23. On the formal and real subsumption in Marx, see primarily Karl

Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1976), pp. 1019–38.

P R I M I T I V E A C C U M U L A T I O N S

1. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1976), p. 918.

2. See primarily Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); and Andre Gunder

Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York:

Monthly Review Press, 1967).

3 . 3 R E S I S T A N C E , C R I S I S , T R A N S F O R M A T I O N

1. On crisis and the restructuring ofcapitalist production in the 1960s and 1970s, see Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide (New York: Basic Books, 1984). On the financial and economic crisis,

see Robert Boyer and Jacques Mistral, Accumulation, inflation, crises (Paris: PUF, 1978).

2. See Antonio Negri, ‘‘Marx on Cycle and Crisis,’’ in Revolution Retrieved (London: Red Notes, 1988), pp. 43–90.

3. See the historical essays ‘‘Do You Remember Revolution?’’ written col-

lectively and ‘‘Do You Remember Counter-revolution?’’ by Paolo Virno

in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in Italy (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1996), pp. 225–259. See also Paolo

Carpignano, ‘‘Note su classe operaia e capitale in America negli anni

N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 6 2 – 2 6 8

457

sessanta,’’ in Sergio Bologna, Paolo Carpignano, and Antonio Negri, Crisi e organizzazione operaia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976), pp. 73–97.

4. On the ‘‘welfare explosion of the 1960s,’’ see Frances Fox Piven and

Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1971), in particular pp. 183–199. See also Piven and

Cloward, The New Class War: Reagan’s Attack on the Welfare State and Its Consequences (New York: Pantheon, 1982).

5. See Luciano Ferrari Bravo, ‘‘Introduzione: vecchie e nuove questioni

nella teoria dell’imperialismo,’’ in Luciano Ferrari Bravo, ed., Imperialismo e classe operaia multinazionale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975), pp. 7–70.

6. Claude Ake goes so far as to characterize the entire world capitalist system as a conflict between ‘‘bourgeois countries’’ and ‘‘proletarian countries’’

in Revolutionary Pressures in Africa (London: Zed Books, 1978), p. 11.

7. This Third Worldist perspective is implicit in much ofthe writing of

Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, and Samir Amin.

8. For a thorough historical account ofthe events and the protagonists at

the Bretton Woods Conference, see Armand Van Dormael, Bretton

Woods: Birth of a Monetary System (London: Macmillan, 1978). For a

historical account that gives a broader view ofthe comprehensive U.S.

preparation for hegemony in the postwar period by posing the economic

planning at Bretton Woods together with the political planning at Dum-

barton Oaks, see George Schild, Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks:

American Economic and Political Postwar Planning in the Summer of 1944

(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).

9. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1994), p. 278–279.

10. On the international financial crisis that began in the 1970s with the

collapse of the Bretton Woods mechanisms, see Peter Coffey, The World

Monetary Crisis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974); and Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, pp. 300–324.

11. On Eurodollar finance as an element of the crisis, see Jeffry Frieden,

Banking on the World: The Politics of American International Finance (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), pp. 79–122.

12. On the convertibility ofthe dollar and the Nixon maneuver in 1971, see

David Calleo and Benjamin Rowland, America and the World Political

Economy: Atlantic Dreams and National Realities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), pp. 87–117; and Coffey, The World Monetary

Crisis, pp. 25–42.

13. On the limits ofFordism and the need for capital to find a post-Fordist schema ofproduction and accumulaton, see Benjamin Coriat, L’atelier et

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le robot: essai sur le fordisme et la production de masse à l’aˆge de l’eĺectronique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1990).

14. Fredric Jameson argues that the social struggles ofthe 1960s in the First World, particularly in the United States and France, follow in the line

of (and even derive from) the powerful decolonization and liberation

movements in the Third World during the 1950s and 1960s. See Fredric

Jameson, ‘‘Periodizing the 60s,’’ in Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971–1986

(Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1988), 2:178–208, espe-

cially pp. 180–186.

15. See Giovanni Arrighi, ‘‘Marxist Century, American Century: The Making

and Remaking ofthe World Labor Movement,’’ in Samir Amin, Gio-

vanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein, Trans-

forming the Revolution: Social Movements and the World System (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 54–95.

16. Robin Kelley provides an exemplary account ofthe dynamics ofproletar-

ian refusal and the creation of alternative forms of life in his wonderful

U.S. black working-class history, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994).

17. In ecological thought, too, at least in its most productive paradigms, we can see clearly that the ‘‘nature’’ in question is equally human and nonhuman; ecology involves not just the preservation ofthings, but the produc-

tion ofrelationships and the production ofsubjectivity as well. See Feĺix

Guattari, Les trois ećologies (Paris: Galileé, 1989); and Verena Andermatt Conley, Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought (London: Routledge, 1997). Franco Piperno continues this ‘‘ecological’’ line of

thought, albeit in a different register, in Elogio dello spirito pubblico meridio-nale (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1997).

18. In her effort to think the importance and real limits of the ‘‘outside,’’

Rosa Luxemburg may have been the first great ecological thinker ofthe

twentieth century. The best examples ofMarxist ecological thought in

authors such as Andre´ Gorz and James O’Connor adopt a form of argu-

ment similar to Luxemburg’s anti-imperialist position (although their

work does not derive directly from hers): capitalist production necessarily implies an expansion into and destruction ofnature, which not only has

tragic consequences for life on the planet but also undermines the future

viability ofcapitalism itself. For Andre´ Gorz, see Ecology as Politics, trans.

Patsy Vigderman and Jonathan Cloud (Boston: South End Press, 1980);

for James O’Connor, see ‘‘Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical

Introduction,’’ Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 1, no. 1 (1989), 11–38.

19. ‘‘Late capitalism thus appears as the period in which all branches ofthe economy are fully industrialized for the first time; to which one could

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459

further add . . . the increasing mechanization of the superstructure.’’

Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. Joris De Bres (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 190–191.

20. ‘‘This purer capitalism ofour own time thus eliminated the enclaves of

precapitalist organization it had hitherto tolerated and exploited in a

tributary way.’’ Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), p. 36.

21. We do not mean to suggest that capital can perpetually through techno-

logical advances reconcile its destructive relationship with its (human and nonhuman) environment. What technological advance can do is shift the

terrain ofconflict and defer the crisis, but limits and antagonisms remain.

22. Stanley Aronowitz offers a useful reassessment of the panoply of U.S.

social movements in the 1960s in The Death and Rebirth of American

Radicalism (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 57–90.

23. Again see Kelley, Race Rebels, especially pp. 17–100 on the hidden histories ofresistance.

24. On the history of the refusals posed by U.S. feminist movements in the

1960s and 1970s, see Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1989).

25. See, for example, Judith Butler, ‘‘Merely Cultural,’’ New Left Review, no.

227 ( January–February 1998), 33–44. The most influential text for the

political interpretation of‘‘new social movements’’ along these lines is

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: To-

wards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

26. See Antonio Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century, trans. James Newell (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989).

27. Fredric Jameson, for example, argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union was ‘‘due, not to its failure, but to its success, at least as far as modernization is concerned.’’ See his ‘‘Actually Existing Marxism,’’ in Saree Makdisi,

Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca Karl, eds., Marxism Beyond Marxism (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 14–54; quotation p. 43. More generally on

how cold war propaganda (from both sides) blinded us to the real move-

ments ofsocial history within the Soviet regime, see Moshe Lewin, The

Making of the Soviet System (New York: Pantheon, 1985).

28. See Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, trans. Max Eastman (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1937); and Cornelius Castoriadis, Devant la guerre (Paris: Fayard, 1981). See also a series ofarticle by Denis Berger on

the collapse ofthe Soviet Union, ‘‘Perestroı¨ka: la re´volution reéllement

existante?’’ Futur anteŕieur, no. 1 (1990), 53–62; ‘‘Que reste-t-il de la perestroı¨ka?’’ Futur anteŕieur, no. 6 (1991), 15–20; and ‘‘L’Unione Sovie´tique à l’heure du vide,’’ Futur anteŕieur, no. 8 (1991), 5–12.

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29. It seems to us that one could make a parallel argument about the changing social practices ofthe Chinese proletariat in the post-Mao era leading up

to the ‘‘Cultural Fever’’ movement in the 1980s. See Xudong Zhang,

Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Zhang makes clear the fabulous creativity released during this

period.

3 . 4 P O S T M O D E R N I Z A T I O N

1. The texts that set the terms for an enormous literature that debates the periodization ofthe phases ofmodern production are Daniel Bell, Coming

of Post-industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973); and Alain Toura-ine, Post-industrial Society, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Random House, 1971).

2. See Manuel Castells and Yuko Aoyama, ‘‘Paths towards the Informational

Society: Employment Structure in G-7 Countries, 1920–90,’’ International Labour Review, 133, no. 1 (1994), 5–33; quotation p. 13.

3. On the false historical analogies that contributed to the debt crisis of Third World countries, see Cheryl Payer, Lent and Lost: Foreign Credit

and Third World Development (London: Zed Books, 1991).

4. The classic presentations ofthe theories ofunderdevelopment and depen-

dency are Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin

America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967); and Fernando En-

rique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin

America, trans. Marjory Mattingly Urquidi (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1979). For a very concise critique ofstages ofdevelopment

arguments, see Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 3–5.

5. The discourse ofdevelopment was an illusion, but it was a real and

effective illusion that established its own structures and institutions of

power throughout the ‘‘developing’’ world. On the institutionalization

ofdevelopment, see Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Mak-

ing and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 73–101.

6. For a critique ofthe developmentalist ideology ofdependency theories,

see ibid., pp. 80–81.

7. See, for example, Claude Ake, A Political Economy of Africa (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1981), p. 136. This is also the general framework presented in

the work ofAndre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin.

8. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Knopf, 1995), 2:367.

N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 8 6 – 2 9 1

461

9. Franc¸ois Bar, ‘‘Information Infrastructure and the Transformation of Manufacturing,’’ in William Drake, ed., The New Information Infrastructure: Strategies for U.S. Policy (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995), pp. 55–74; quotation p. 56.

10. See Robert Chase and David Garvin, ‘‘The Service Factory,’’ in Gary

Pisano and Robert Hayes, eds., Manufacturing Renaissance (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1995), pp. 35–45.

11. See Castells and Aoyama, ‘‘Paths towards the Informational Society,’’

pp. 19–28.

12. Manuel Castells describes the most subordinated regions ofthe global

economy as a ‘‘Fourth World.’’ See his essay ‘‘The Informational Economy

and the New International Division ofLabor,’’ in Martin Carnoy, Manuel

Castells, Stephen Cohen, and Fernando Enrique Cardoso, The New Global

Economy in the Information Age (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), pp. 15–43.

13. Castells and Aoyama, ‘‘Paths towards the Informational Society,’’ p. 27.

14. Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace (New York: Plenum Press, 1997).

15. On the comparison between the Fordist and Toyotist models, see Benja-

min Coriat, Penser à l’envers: travail et organisation dans l’entreprise japonaise (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1994). For a briefhistory ofthe early developments ofToyota production methods, see Kazuo Wada, ‘‘The Emergence

ofthe ‘Flow Production’ Method in Japan,’’ in Haruhito Shiomi and

Kazuo Wada, eds., Fordism Transformed: The Development of Production

Methods in the Automobile Industry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 11–27.

16. We are thinking primarily ofJu¨rgen Habermas’s conceptual division be-

tween communicative and instrumental action in works such as The

Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). For an excellent critique ofthis Habermasian division, see

Christian Marazzi, Il posto dei calzini: la svolta linguistica dell’economia e i suoi effetti nella politica (Bellinzona, Switzerland: Casagrande, 1995), pp. 29–34.

17. For a definition and analysis ofimmaterial labor, see Maurizio Lazzarato,

‘‘Immaterial Labor,’’ in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical

Thought in Italy (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1996), pp. 133–147. See also the glossary entry on immaterial labor at the end

ofthe same collection, p. 262.

18. Peter Drucker understands the passage toward immaterial production in

extreme terms. ‘‘The basic economic resource—‘the means ofproduc-

tion,’ to use the economist’s term—is no longer capital, nor natural

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N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 9 1 – 2 9 9

resources (the economist’s ‘land’), nor ‘labor.’ It is and will be knowledge. ’

Peter Drucker, Post-capitalist Society (New York: Harper, 1993), p. 8.

What Drucker does not understand is that knowledge is not given but

produced and that its production involves new kinds ofmeans ofproduc-

tion and labor.

19. Robert Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1991), p. 177. What is most important to Reich is in fact that advantage—and finally national dominance—will

be won in the global economy along the lines ofthese new divisions,

through the geographical distribution ofthese high- and low-value tasks.

20. See Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1976), pp. 131–137.

21. See Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), especially pp. 78–88.

22. Marx in his time conceived cooperation as the result ofthe actions of

the capitalist, who functioned like an orchestra conductor or a field

general, deploying and coordinating productive forces in a common ef-

fort. See Capital, 1:439–454. For an analysis ofthe contemporary dynamics ofsocial and productive cooperation, see Antonio Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century, trans. James Newell (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989).

23. See Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

24. On the network enterprise, see Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 151–200.

25. Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Viking, 1995), p. 158.

26. A number ofItalian scholars read the decentralization ofnetwork produc-

tion in the small and medium-sized enterprises ofnorthern Italy as an

opportunity to create new circuits of autonomous labor. See Sergio Bologna and Andrea Fumagalli, eds., Il lavoro autonomo di seconda generazione: scenari del postfordismo in Italia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997).

27. On the growth of‘‘producer services’’ in concentrated centers ofcontrol, see Sassen, The Global City, pp. 90–125.

28. Peter Cowhey, ‘‘Building the Global Information Highway: Toll Booths,

Construction Contracts, and Rules ofthe Road,’’ in William Drake, ed.,

The New Information Infrastructure (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995), pp. 175–204; quotation p. 175.

29. On rhizomatic and arborescent structures, see Gilles Deleuze and Feĺix

Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1987), pp. 3–25.

N O T E S T O P A G E S 3 0 0 – 3 0 7

463

30. On the false egalitarian promises of the ‘‘information superhighway’’ in the United States, see Herbert Schiller, Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America (New York: Routledge, 1996), especially pp. 75–89. For a more global analysis ofthe unequal distribution of

information and technology, see William Wresch, Disconnected: Haves and Have-Nots in the Information Age (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996).

3 . 5 M I X E D C O N S T I T U T I O N

1. For an analysis ofthe passages ofMarx’s and Engel’s work that deal with

the theory ofthe state, see Antonio Negri, ‘‘Communist State Theory,’’

in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1994), pp. 139–176.

2. See M. C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1993). The complex relationship among the Dutch administration, traditional Javanese authorities, and economic powers at the be-

ginning ofthe twentieth century is described beautifully in Pramoedya

Ananta Toer’s great four-volume historical novel, The Buru Quartet, trans.

Max Lane (London: Penguin Books, 1982–1992).

3. See Brian Gardner, The East India Company (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971); and Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Randlords (New York: Athe-neum, 1986).

4. Marx argued that the greater concentration and centralization ofcapital

acted against the forces of competition and was thus a destructive process

for capital. See Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1981), pp. 566–573. Lenin took up this same argument in his

analysis ofthe monopoly phase ofcapital: monopolies destroy competi-

tion, which is the foundation of capitalist development. See V. I. Lenin,

Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1939), pp. 16–30.

5. See, for example, Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams:

Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (New York: Simon and

Schuster, 1994).

6. The concept ofthe ‘‘autonomy ofthe political,’’ which belongs to the

tradition ofpolitical theology, was given its first great definition by the political theologian Thomas Hobbes. The concept was raised to even

greater heights by Carl Schmitt; see principally The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,

1976); and Verfassungslehre, 8th ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993).

The political is understood here as the foundation of every social relation-464

N O T E S T O P A G E 3 1 2

ship and the originary evaluation or ‘‘decision’’ that constructs the sphere ofpower and thus guarantees the space oflife. It is interesting to note

that Schmitt’s conception ofthe political is ineluctably tied to the juridical definition ofthe nation-state and inconceivable outside ofits realm.

Schmitt himself seems to recognize this fact after having witnessed the

catastrophe ofthe German nation-state. See Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der

Erde im Vo¨lkerrecht des jus publicum europaeum (Cologne: Greven Verlag, 1950). The most extensive consideration ofSchmitt’s conception ofthe

political that we know is contained in Carlo Galli, Genealogia della politica: C. Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero politico moderno (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996).

This critique ofScmitt’s concept ofthe ‘‘autonomy ofthe political’’ should

also be applied to the various positions that in some way derive from his

thought. At two extremes we can cite Leo Strauss, who tried to appro-

priate Schmitt’s concept under his own liberal conception ofnatural right,

and Mario Tronti, who sought to find in the autonomy ofthe political

a terrain that could support a compromise with liberal political forces in

a period when the Western European communist parties were in deep

crisis. For Strauss’s interpretation ofSchmitt’s text and their ambiguous

relationship, see Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1995). For Tronti, see L’autonomia del politico (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977).

7. There are numerous excellent critiques ofthe media and their purported

objectivity. For two good examples, see Edward Said, Covering Islam:

How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Pantheon, 1981); and Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky,

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988).

8. See, for example, Elise Boulding, ‘‘IGOs, the UN, and International

NGOs: The Evolving Ecology ofthe International System,’’ in Richard

Falk, Robert Johansen, and Samuel Kim, eds., The Constitutional Founda-

tions of World Peace (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 167–188; quotation p. 179.

9. For characterizations ofthe activities ofvarious kinds ofNGOs, see

John Clark, Democratizing Development: The Role of Voluntary Organizations (West Hartford, Conn.: Kumarian Press, 1990); Lowell Livezey, Nongov-ernmental Organizations and the Ideas of Human Rights (Princeton: The Center ofInternational Studies, 1988); and Andrew Natsios, ‘‘NGOs and

the UN System in Complex Humanitarian Emergencies: Conflict or

Cooperation?’’ in Peter Diehl, ed., The Politics of Global Governance: International Organizations in an Independent World (Boulder: Lynne Reiner, 1997), pp. 287–303.

N O T E S T O P A G E S 3 1 3 – 3 1 8

465

10. James Petras, ‘‘Imperialism and NGOs in Latin America,’’ Monthly Review, 49 (December 1997), 10–27.

11. See Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), Book VI, pp. 302–352.

12. See G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

13. On the transformation from a model of bodies to a functional model in

the U.S. Constitution, see Antonio Negri, Il potere costituente: saggio sulle alternative del moderno (Milan: Sugarco, 1992), chap. 4, pp. 165–222.

14. It is interesting to note here that, at least since the constitutionalism ofthe Weimar Republic, the continental European tradition ofconstitutional

thought has also adopted these principles, which were presumed to belong

only to the Anglo-Saxon world. The fundamental texts for the German

tradition in this regard are Max Weber, Parlament und Regierung im neu-

geordneten Deutschland (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1918); Hugo

Preuss, Staat, Recht und Freiheit (Tu¨bingen: Mohr, 1926); and Hermann Heller, Die Souveranita¨t (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1927).

15. Generally the analyses that come from the Left are the ones that insist most strongly that the genesis ofEmpire activates the ‘‘bad’’ forms of

government. See, for example, E

´ tienne Balibar, La crainte des masses (Paris:

Galileé, 1997), a book which in other regards is extremely open to the

analysis ofthe new processes ofthe (mass) production ofsubjectivity.

16. For an analysis ofthese processes and a good discussion ofthe relevant

bibliography, see Yann Moulier Boutang, ‘‘La revanche des externaliteś:

globalisation des ećonomies, externaliteś, mobilite´, transformation de l’eć-

onomie et de l’intervention publique,’’ Futur anteŕieur, no. 39–40 (Fall 1997), pp. 85–115.

17. It should be clear from what we have said thus far that the theoretical condition underlying our hypotheses has to involve a radically revised

analysis ofreproduction. In other words, any theoretical conception that

regards reproduction as simply part ofthe circulation ofcapital (as classical economics, Marxian theory, and neoclassical theories have done) cannot

deal critically with the conditions ofour new situation, particularly those resulting from the political-economic relations of the world market in

postmodernity. Our description ofbiopower in Section 1.2 is the begin-

ning ofsuch a revised analysis ofreproduction. For the definition ofsome

fundamental elements that relate to the integration of labor, affect, and

biopower, see Antonio Negri, ‘‘Value and Affect’’ and Michael Hardt,

‘‘Affective Labor,’’ boundary2, 26, no. 2 (Summer 1999).

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18. We are refering once again to the work of Michel Foucault and to Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation ofit. See our discussion in Section 1.2.

19. This first variable and the analysis ofthe functioning ofthe network in constitutional terms relates in certain respects to the various autopoietic theories ofnetworks. See, for example, the work ofHumberto Maturana

and Francisco Varela. For an excellent analysis ofsystems theory in the

context ofpostmodern theories, see Cary Wolfe, Critical Environments

(Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1998).

20. The various advances in systems theories contribute also to our under-

standing ofthis second variable. Niklas Luhmann’s work has been the

most influential for the analysis ofautopoietic systems in terms oflegal

and social philosophy.

21. Jameson offers an excellent critique of ‘‘the conception of mass culture as sheer manipulation.’’ He argues that although mass culture is ‘‘managed,’’ it nonetheless contains utopian possibilities. See Fredric Jameson,

‘‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,’’ in Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 9–34.

22. See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994); and Comments on the Society of the

Spectacle (London: Verso, 1990).

23. Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Totality as Conspiracy,’’ in The Geopolitial Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 9–84.

24. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 200.

25. See Brian Massumi, ed., The Politics of Everyday Fear (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1993).

3 . 6 C A P I T A L I S T S O V E R E I G N T Y

1. Gilles Deleuze and Feĺix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Lane, and Helen Lane (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press,

1983), p. 224.

2. On Deleuze and Guattari’s conception ofthe axiomatic ofcapital, see

Gilles Deleuze and Feĺix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1987), pp. 452–473.

3. Robert Blanche´, Axiomatics, trans. G. B. Keene (New York: Free Press ofGlencoe, 1962), pp. 30–31.

4. There is, ofcourse, one element oftranscendence and segmentation that

is essential to the functioning of capital, and that is class exploitation.

This is a boundary, however flexible or indiscernible it may be at times,

that capital must maintain throughout society. Class divisions continue

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467

to be centrally effective in the new segmentations that we investigate

later in this section.

5. See Michel Foucault, ‘‘La ‘gouvernementalite´,’ ’ in Dits et ećrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 3:635–657; and Il faut defendre la socie´te´ (Paris: Seuil/

Gallimard, 1997).

6. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1994), pp. 257–259.

7. See Michael Hardt, ‘‘The Withering ofCivil Society,’’ Social Text, no.

45 (Winter 1995), 27–44.

8. For an excellent explanation ofFoucault’s conception ofthe diagram,

see Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seań Hand (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1988), pp. 34–37.

9. On the relation between identity and belonging and on the constitution of a ‘‘whatever’’ subjectivity, see Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1993).

10. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzchild (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), p. 446.

11. The classic work in this regard is Samir Amin’s Accumulation on a World Scale, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).

12. See Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 221–263.

13. Michel Aglietta has demonstrated clearly in structural terms the violent and dictatorial powers ofmonetary regimes. See his La violence de la

monnaie (Paris: PUF, 1982). See also the essays in Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway, eds., Global Capital, National State, and the Politics of Money (London: Macmillan, 1995).

4 . 1 V I R T U A L I T I E S

1. On this style ofpolitical theorizing, see C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962); and Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the

Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

2. On the immanent relation between politics and ontology, see Antonio

Negri, The Savage Anomaly, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1991); and Baruch Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, in The Chief Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover Press, 1951), pp. 1–278.

3. On postmodern right and postmodern law, see Michael Hardt and

Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1994), chap. 6, pp. 217–261.

468

N O T E S T O P A G E S 3 5 5 – 3 5 7

4. See Re´mi Brague, Du temps chezPlaton et Aristote (Paris: PUF, 1982).

5. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1989), pp. 327–385.

6. The measure ofvalue means its orderly exploitation, the norm ofits

social division, and its capitalist reproduction. Certainly Marx goes beyond Marx, and one should never pretend that his discussions oflabor and

value are only a discourse on measure: beyond value, labor is always the

living power ofbeing. See Antonio Negri, ‘‘Twenty Theses on Marx,’’

in Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca Karl, eds., Marxism

Beyond Marxism (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 149–180.

7. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), p. 119 (1129b30).

8. On the virtual, see Gilles Deleuze and Feĺix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1994); and Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1988), pp. 94–

103. Our conception ofvirtuality and its relationship to reality is some-

what different from the one that Deleuze derives from Bergson, which

distinguishes between the passage from the virtual to the actual and that

from the possible to the real. Bergson’s primary concern in this distinction and in his affirmation of the virtual-actual couple over the possible-real

is to emphasize the creative force of being and highlight that being is not merely the reduction ofnumerous possible worlds to a single real world

based on resemblance, but rather that being is always an act ofcreation

and unforeseeable novelty. See Henri Bergson, ‘‘The Possible and the

Real,’’ in The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), pp. 91–106. We certainly do recognize the need

to insist on the creative powers ofvirtuality, but this Bergsonian discourse is insufficient for us insofar as we also need to insist on the reality of the being created, its ontological weight, and the institutions that structure

the world, creating necessity out ofcontingency. On the passage from

the virtual to the real, see Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Paris: PUF, 1964); and Brian Massumi, ‘‘The Autonomy of Affect,’’ Cultural Critique, no. 31 (Fall 1995), 83–109.

9. Marx’s discussions ofabstraction have a double relation to this discourse ofvirtuality and possibility. One might do well in fact to distinguish

between two Marxian notions ofabstraction. On the one hand, and on

the side ofcapital, abstraction means separation from our powers to act,

and thus it is a negation ofthe virtual. On the other hand, however, and

on the side oflabor, the abstract is the general set ofour powers to act,

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469

the virtual itself. See Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano (New York: Autonomedia,

1991); and Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 83–111.

10. On the relation between the singular and the common, see Giorgio

Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis:

University ofMinnesota Press, 1993).

11. See primarily Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967).

12. See Bernard Aspe and Muriel Combes, ‘‘Du vampire au parasite,’’ Futur anteŕieur, no. 35–36 (1996), 207–219.

13. On the priority ofresistance to power, see Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans.

Seań Hand (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1988), p. 89:

‘‘The final word on power is that resistance comes first. ’

14. This dialectic ofobstacle and limit, with respect to the power ofthe mind on the one hand and political power on the other, was well understood by

that current ofthe phenomenology ofsubjectivity that (in contrast to the

Heideggerian current) recognized Nazism and thus the capitalist state as

the true limit ofhistorical progress. From Husserl to Sartre we find the

central effort to transform limit into threshold, and in many ways Foucault takes up this same line. See Edmund Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: North-western University Press, 1970); Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Quentin Hoare (London: Verso, 1990); and Deleuze, Foucault.

15. See Jacques Rancière, La mesentante: politique et philosophie (Paris: Galileé, 1995).

16. One example ofsuch a Kantian reverie is Lucien Goldmann, Mensch,

Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants (Zurich: Europa Verlag, 1945).

17. See Karl Marx, ‘‘On the Jewish Question,’’ in Early Writings, trans.

Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1975),

pp. 211–241.

18. See Paul Virilio, L’insecurite´ du territoire (Paris: Stock, 1976).

19. On the importance ofthe linguistic in the contemporary economy, see

Christian Marazzi, Il posto dei calzini: la svolta linguistica dell’economia e i suoi effetti nella politica (Bellinzona: Casagrande, 1995).

20. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Turin: Einaudi, 1995).

21. On this conception ofthe machinic, see Feĺix Guattari, L’inconscient machi-nique: essais de schizo-analyse (Fontenay-sous-Bois: Encres/Recherches, 470

N O T E S T O P A G E S 3 6 7 – 3 7 7

1979); and Gilles Deleuze and Feĺix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Lane, and Helen Lane (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1983).

22. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1976), pp. 554–555.

23. Obviously when we speak about a materialist telos we are speaking about a telos that is constructed by subjects, constituted by the multitude in

action. This involves a materialist reading ofhistory which recognizes

that the institutions ofsociety are formed through the encounter and

conflict ofsocial forces themselves. The telos in this case in not predetermined but constructed in the process. Materialist historians such as Thu-

cydides and Machiavelli, like the great materialist philosophers such as

Epicurus, Lucretius, and Spinoza, have never negated a telos constructed

by human actions. As Marx wrote in the introduction to the Grundrisse,

it is not the anatomy ofthe ape that explains that ofhumans but, vice

versa, the anatomy ofhumans that explains that ofthe ape (p. 105). The

telos appears only afterwards, as a result ofthe actions ofhistory.

4 . 2 G E N E R A T I O N A N D C O R R U P T I O N

1. See Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, Considerations of the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, trans. David Lowenthal (New York: Free Press, 1965); and Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the

Roman Empire, 3 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1993).

2. See Machiavelli, Discourses, trans. Leslie Walker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); and Antonio Negri, Il potere costituente (Milan: Sugarco, 1992), pp. 75–96.

3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).

4. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B.

Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 170.

5. Massimo Cacciari provides a stimulating analysis ofthe f

ortunes and

decline ofthe idea ofEurope with his usual erudition in Geo-filosofia

dell’Europa (Milan: Adelphi, 1994).

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 99 (sec. 24).

7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967), vol. 8, pt. 1, p. 77; cited in Cacciari, Geo-filosofia dell’Europa, p. 9. The original passage reads, ‘‘Ich habe den Geist Europas in mich genommen—nun will ich den Gegenschlag thun!’’

8. See Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971).

N O T E S T O P A G E S 3 7 7 – 3 9 6

471

9. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Theses ofthe Philosophy ofHistory,’’ in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 253–264; quotation

p. 254 (Thesis 2).

10. On the fortunes of European irrationalism, see Georg Lukaćs, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (London: Merlin, 1980).

11. We are referring primarily to Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jac-

ques Derrida.

12. See Hans Ju¨rgen Krahl, Konstitution und Klassenkampf (Frankfurt: Neue Kritik, 1971).

13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1914–16, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University ofChicago Press,

1979), pp. 79–80 (August 1 and 2 and September 2, 1916).

14. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1961), p. 74.

15. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963).

16. Gilles Deleuze often sings the praises of American literature for its nomadism and deterritorializing powers. It seems that for Deleuze, America

represents a liberation from the closed confines of European conscious-

ness. See, for example, ‘‘Whitman’’ and ‘‘Bartleby, ou la formule,’’ in

Critique et clinique (Paris: Minuit, 1993), pp. 75–80 and 89–114.

17. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1983).

18. See Antonio Gramsci, ‘‘Americanism and Fordism,’’ in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 279–318.

19. Hannah Arendt has become a favorite author for political theorists in the United States and Europe who want to reconceive politics. See, for

example, the essays in Bonnie Honig, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995); and Craig Calhoun and John McGowan, eds., Hannah Arendt and the Meaning

of Politics (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1997).

20. On the philosophical conceptions ofgeneration and corruption, see

Reiner Schu¨rmann, Des he´ge´monies briseés (Mouvezin: T.E.R., 1996).

4 . 3 T H E M U L T I T U D E A G A I N S T E M P I R E

1. Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 430 (Book XI, Chapter 1).

2. Plotinus, Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), p. 63 (1.6.8).

472

N O T E S T O P A G E S 3 9 9 – 4 0 5

3. On the military powers ofEmpire, see Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone, 1991).

4. On the constitution oftime, see Antonio Negri, La costituzione del tempo (Rome: Castelvecchi, 1997); and Michael Hardt, ‘‘Prison Time,’’ Genet:

In the Language of the Enemy, Yale French Studies, no. 91 (1997), 64–79.

See also Eric Alliez, Capital Times, trans. Georges Van Den Abeel (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1996).

5. See Ju¨rgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). Andre´ Gorz similarly recognizes

only a fraction of the proletariat as relating to the new communicative

lines ofproduction in Farewell to the Working Class, trans. Michael Sonenscher (Boston: South End Press, 1982).

6. Here we are following the intriguing etymology that Barbara Cassin gives for the term ‘‘philosophy.’’

7. On the constitutive notion ofthe encounter, see Louis Althuser’s late

works written after his confinement in the 1980s, in particular ‘‘Le courant souterrain du mateŕialisme de la rencontre,’’ in E

ćrits philosophiques et

politiques, vol. 1 (Paris: STOCK/IMEC, 1994), pp. 539–579.

I N D E X

administration: modern, 88–89, 99;

364–365; command over, 60, 314,

imperial, 339–343

344–346, 392

affect. See labor, affective

black nationalism, 107–109

Agamben, Giorgio, 366

Bodin, Jean, 84, 97–99

Ahmed, Akbar, 149

Bovillus, 72

AIDS pandemic, 136

Braudel, Fernand, 225, 236

Althusser, Louis, 63–64, 91

Bretton Woods accords, 244, 264–266

American Revolution, 160–164, 381

Bruno, Giordano, 77

Amin, Samir, 76–77, 334

Burke, Edmund, 104–105

anarchists, 350

Bush, George, 180

Anderson, Benedict, 95, 107

Caliban, 81–82

anthropology, 125–126, 187

Castells, Manuel, and Yuko Aoyama,

antihumanism, 91–92

286

apartheid, 125, 190–191, 194

Ceĺine, Louis-Ferdinand, 134–136

Appadurai, Arjun, 151

Ceśaire, Aime´, 117, 130

Appiah, Anthony, 138

Chaplin, Charlie, 159

architecture, 188, 190, 337

Chatterjee, Partha, 133–134

Arendt, Hannah, 163–164, 381, 387

Chiapas uprising, 54–56

Aristotle, 201, 356, 401

Christianity, 21, 36, 373

Arrighi, Giovanni, 238–239

citizenship, global, 361, 400, 403

asystemic movements, 60

civil society, 25, 328–329; global, 7,

Auerbach, Erich, 46

311

Augustine ofHippo, 207, 390, 393

Coetzee, J. M., 203–204

autonomists, 214

cold war, 178–182

autonomy ofthe political, 307

colonialism, 70, 76–77, 114–129,

axiomatic ofcapital, 326–327

199–200, 305–306; struggles against,

Bacon, Francis, 72

42–43, 106, 130–134; and the

Balibar, E

´ tienne, 192

United States, 170–171. See also

Bandung Conference, 107, 250

decolonization

barbarians, 213–218

communication, 29, 32–35, 395, 404;

Bauer, Otto, 111

among struggles, 54–59; in

being-against, 210–214, 361

production, 289–298, 364–365

Benjamin, Walter, 215, 377

communications industries, 33, 346–347

Bhabha, Homi, 143–145

communism, 63, 237, 294, 350, 413

biopower, 23–27, 89, 389, 405–406; as

community, 45, 145, 358; and the

agent ofproduction, 29, 30, 32,

nation, 95, 97, 106–108, 113

474

I N D E X

Conrad, Joseph, 135

Dirlik, Arif, 86, 138

constituent power, 47, 59, 63,

disciplinary government, 242–243,

184–185, 358, 406, 410; in the U.S.

247–248, 250–254

Constitution, 162, 165

disciplinary society, 22–24, 88–89,

cooperation, 294–296, 366–367,

329–332

395–396, 401–402, 410–411;

discipline, 97, 158–159, 453n7; refusal

abstract, 296

of, 260–262, 273–279

corporate culture, 153

dispositif, 23, 63, 329–330

corporations, transnational, 31, 304–309

Duns Scotus, 71

corruption, 20–21, 201–203, 389–392;

Dutch East India Company, 305

cycle of, 163, 166

courts, international and supra-

East India Company, 305–306

national, 38

Empire, definition ofconcept, xiv–xv

Cowhey, Peter, 298

English Revolution, 162

crisis, 385–387; ofinstitutions,

Eurocentrism, 70, 76–77, 86, 120

196–197; ofEurope, 374–380. See

event, 26, 28, 41, 49, 61, 411. See also

also modernity, as crisis

singularity

cyberpunk, 216

exception, state of, 16–17, 26, 39

cycles ofstruggles, 50–52, 54, 261

exodus, 76, 212–214, 364, 367;

anthropological, 215–217

Dante Alighieri, 71, 73

expansive tendency: ofEmpire,

Davis, Mike, 337

166–169; ofcapital, 222–228

Debord, Guy, 188–189, 321–323

exploitation, 43, 53, 208–210, 385

decentralization ofproduction,

245–246, 294–297

Falk, Richard, 36

Declaration ofIndepencence, 165, 169,

family, 148, 197

171

Fanon, Franz, 124–125, 129, 131–132

decline and fall of Empire, 20–21,

fear, 323, 339, 388

371–374

Federalist, 161

decolonization, 245–246

feminist movements, 274

deconstruction, 47–48

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 105

Deleuze, Gilles, and Feĺix Guattari, 25,

Fordism, 240, 242, 247–248, 256, 409;

28, 193–194, 206–207, 210, 302,

decline of, 267–268; versus Toyota

326

model, 289–290

delinking, 206, 283–284

Foucault, Michel, 13, 22–25, 28,

Descartes, Rene´, 79–80, 390

88–89, 327–330; and humanism,

desertion, 212–214

91–92; on the Enlightenment,

De Sica, Vittorio, 158

183–184

deterritorialization, xii, 45, 52, 61, 124;

Francis ofAssisi, 413

ofproduction, 294–297; operated by

Frankfurt School, 25, 143

capital, 206, 326, 346–347. See also

French Revolution, 101–102, 104, 113,

lines offlight

117–118, 381

development theories, 282–284. See also

Fukuyama, Francis, 189

underdevelopment theories

fundamentalism, 146–150, 312, 399

diagram, 329–330

dialectics, 51–52, 187–188; ofidentity,

Galileo Galilei, 72–73

103, 115, 127–132; critique of, 140,

Gates, Bill, 296

144–145, 359, 378–379

general intellect, 29, 364

I N D E X

475

general will, 85, 88, 96

United States, 172, 177–179; Marxist

Genet, Jean, 109

critiques of, 221–234, 270–272, 332

Gibbon, Edward, 20–21, 371–372

industrial reserve army, 447n7

Gilroy, Paul, 128

Industrial Workers ofthe World,

Gingrich, Newt, 348

207–208, 214, 412

globalization, 3, 8–9, 32, 55, 136, 348,

information infrastructure, 298–300

362; from below, xv, 43–45, 52, 59

internationalism, 45–46, 49–50, 145

governmentality, 88, 327–328

international relations, as academic

Gramsci, Antonio, 233, 383

discipline, 141–142

guaranteed income, 403

Internet, 299

Guilbaut, Serge, 382–383

intervention and sovereignty, 18, 35–38

Intifada, 54–56. See also Palestinians

Italian economy, 288–289

Habermas, Ju¨rgen, 33–34, 404

Haitian revolution, 123, 128. See also

Jackson, Andrew, 168–169

L’Ouverture, Toussaint

Jameson, Fredric, 154, 187, 272, 323

Harraway, Donna, 91, 218

Jefferson, Thomas, 168–169, 182, 381

Harvey, David, 154

justice, 18–19, 82, 356

Hegel, G. W. F., 42, 129, 328, 340,

just war, 12, 36–37

375; on modern sovereignty, 81–84,

86–88, 90

Kant, Immanuel, 80–81, 183

Heidegger, Martin, 378

Kautsky, Karl, 229–231

Herder, J. G., 100–101

Kelsen, Hans, 5–6, 8, 15

Hilferding, Rudolf, 226, 229–230

Keynes, John Maynard, 243

historia rerum gestarum. See res gestae

Keynesianism, 242

historicism, 99–100

history: end of, 64, 189, 367–368;

La Boe´tie, E´tienne de, 204

suspension of, 11

labor, 358; immaterial, 29, 53,

history, as academic discipline, 126

290–294; abstract, 292; affective,

Hobbes, Thomas, 7–8, 83–85, 87, 323,

292–293, 364–365

388; on the people, 102–103

Las Casas, Bartolome´ de, 116

Hobson, John, 232

League ofNations, 175

homohomo, 72, 81, 204, 216

legitimation, 33–35, 38, 41, 89–90

homo tantum, 203–204

Lenin, V. I., 229–234

humanism, 77–78, 91–92, 285. See also

Levy, Pierre, 289

Renaissance humanism

liberal politics, 188–189

human rights, 107, 313

Lincoln, Abraham, 172

hybridity, 142–146, 216; management

lines offlight, 48, 123–124

of, 172; and constitution, 316–319

local versus global, 44–46, 362

Locke, John, 7–8

ideology, 404

Los Angeles rebellion, 54–56

immanence, 64, 77, 91–92, 157, 377,

L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 116–118

402; discovery of, 70–74; of modern

love, 78, 186, 413

power, 82; ofimperial power, 161,

Lubiano, Wahneema, 108

164, 373–374; ofcapital, 326–329

Luhmann, Niklas, 13, 15

imperialism, 31, 265, 332; in contrast to

Luxemburg, Rosa: on nationalism,

Empire, xii–xiii, 9, 166–167, 374;

96–97; critique ofimperialism, 224,

struggles against, 42–43, 58; and the

228, 233–234, 270, 333

476

I N D E X

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 63–65, 90, 156,

79, 82, 87, 97; in contrast to the

234, 308, 388; on ancient Rome, 15,

people, 103, 113, 194–195, 316, 344;

162–163, 166, 372–374; on

powers of, 209–218, 357–363;

constituent power, 184–185

imperial corruption of, 391–392;

Machiavellianism, 162–163

rights of, 396–407

mafia, 37, 342

Musil, Robert, 69–70, 284–285, 289

Malcolm X, 107–108, 132

naked life, 204, 366

management and organization theory,

nation, modern concept of, 93–105

152–153

nationalism, struggles against, 42–43.

manifesto, 63–66

See also black nationalism; subaltern

market, 86. See also world market

nationalism

marketing, 151–152

nationalist socialism, 111–113

Marsilius ofPadua, 73

national liberation struggles. See

Marx, Karl, 43, 57, 62, 185, 206,

colonialism, struggles against

349–350, 363, 367; on British

nation-state, xi–xii, 43, 109–110, 236,

colonialism, 118–120; on the United

335–336

States, 168–169; on capitalist

nation-states, system of, 40, 310–311

expansion, 221–224; the missing

Native Americans, 169–171

volumes of Capital, 234–237; on

natural right theories, 99

capitalist crisis, 261, 266–267; theory

ne´gritude, 130–131

ofvalue, 355. See also general

network power, 161–163

intellect; subsumption, formal and

network production, 294–297

real; Vogelfrei

New Deal, 51, 176, 180, 381; on global

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels,

level, 241–244, 265

63–65, 226, 304

New Left, 179

mass intellectuality, 29, 410

new social movements, 275

measure ofvalue, 86, 354–359, 392

Nicholas ofCusa, 71–72

media, the, 311–312, 322–323

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 90, 213, 359, 375, 378

Melville, Herman, 203–204

Nixon, Richard, 266

militant, the, 411–413

nomadism, 76, 212–214, 362–364

miscegenation, 362–364

non-governmental organizations

mobility ofpopulations, 213, 253, 275,

(NGOs), 35–37, 312–314

344: and suffering, 154–155; right to,

non-place ofpower, 188, 190, 203,

396–400

210, 319, 353, 384; and construction

modernity, 46–47, 69–74; as crisis,

ofa new place, 216–217, 357

74–78, 90, 109; postmodernist

non-work, 273

critique of, 140–143, 155

nuclear weapons, 345–347

modernization, 249–251, 280–281,

284–286

omni-crisis, 189, 197, 201

money, 346–347

ontology, 47–48, 62, 206, 354–364;

Monroe Doctrine, 177–178

absence of, 202, 391

Montesquieu, 20–21, 371–372

outside versus inside, 45, 183–190,

More, Thomas, 73

353–354, 444n5; ofcapitalist

Morris, William, 50

development, 221–228, 233–234,

Moulier Boutang, Yann, 123–124

257–258

multitude, 60–66, 73–74, 90, 161, 164,

overproduction and underconsumption,

353; negated by modern sovereignty,

222–225, 449n3

I N D E X

477

Palestinians, 109

reproduction, social, 28, 64, 85,

parasitical nature ofEmpire, 359–361

273–274, 385, 465n17. See also

Pascal, Blaise, 79–80

biopower

peace, 19, 75, 83, 94, 181, 189; as

republicanism, 184, 208–218

virtue ofEmpire, 10–11, 14, 60,

res gestae, 47–48, 52, 61, 63, 368–369

167, 353

rhizome, 299, 397

people, the, 102–105, 194–195,

Rhodes, Cecil, 228, 232

311–314, 316; decline of, 344, 411

right and law, 17; international, 4,

Persian GulfWar, 12, 13, 180, 309

9–10, 14, 33, 38; supranational,

philosophy, 48–49

9–10, 16, 17; imperial, 21, 62

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 72

rights. See multitude, rights of

place-based movements, 44

Roman Empire, 10, 20–21, 163, 166,

Pocock, J. G. A., 162

298, 314–315, 371–373

police, 12, 17–18, 20, 26, 87; and

Roman Republic, 162–163

imperial intervention, 37–39, 189

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 242, 348

political theory, 63, 388

Roosevelt, Theodore, 174–175, 177,

Polybius, 163, 166, 314–316, 371

242

posse, 407–411

Rosenzweig, Franz, 377

postcolonialist theories, 137–139,

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 85, 87, 303

143–146

royal prerogatives ofsovereignty,

post-Fordism, 55, 409–410

38–39, 343, 360

posthuman, 215

postmodernist theories, 137–143

Said, Edward, 125, 146

postmodernity, 64–65, 187, 237

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 129–131

postmodernization, 272, 280–282,

Schmitt, Carl, 16, 377–378, 463n6

285–289

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 81–82

poverty, 156–159

secularism, 71–73, 91, 161

Prakash, Gyan, 146

segmentations, social, 336–339

primitive accumulation, 94, 96,

service economies, 286–287, 293

256–259, 300, 326

Sieyès, Emmanuel-Joseph, 101, 104,

progressivism, 174–176

113

proletariat, 49–50, 63, 256–257, 402;

singularity, 57, 61, 73, 78, 87, 103,

defined, 52–53

395–396, 408. See also event

property, private and public, 300–303,

slavery, 120–124, 212; in the United

410

States, 170–172, 177

Smith, Adam, 86–87

racism: modern, 103, 191–195;

smooth space, 190, 327, 330

imperial, 190–195

socialist discipine, 214

Rahman, Fazlur, 148–149

social wage, 403

Rawls, John, 13, 15

society ofcontrol, 23–27, 198,

reappropriation, 404–407, 411

318–319, 329–332

reciprocity, 131–132

sovereignty: modern, 69–70, 83–90;

refusal, 203–204, 208–209

national, 95–105; in conflict with

Reich, Robert, 150–151, 291–292

capital, 325–328

Renaissance humanism, 70–74, 76, 91,

Soviet Revolution, 123, 133, 176–177,

115, 140, 162, 164, 356

240–241

representation, 84–85, 104–105, 125,

Soviet Union, collapse of, 179, 214,

134

276–279

478

I N D E X

spectacle, 321–323, 347

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 163, 168–169,

Spinoza, Baruch, 65–66, 91–92,

375

185–186, 204, 359; on immanence,

totalitarianism, 112–113, 278

73, 77–78

transcendental apparatus, 78–85,

Stalin, Joseph, 112

164–165; as the state, 325–329

state: patrimonial and absolutist, 93–95;

translation, 50–51, 57

modern, 90, 134; capitalist; 232–233,

Truman, Harry S., 249

235–237, 242, 304–309. See also

truth, 155–156

transcendental apparatus

strikes: France, 54–56; South Korea,

ultra-imperialism, 230–231

54–56

underdevelopment theories, 283–284

structuralism, 28

United Nations, 4–6, 8, 18, 31, 40,

subaltern nationalism, 105–109,

132, 181, 309

132–134, 335–336

U.S. constitutional history, phases of,

subjectivity, production of, 32, 52,

167–168

195–197, 321, 331, 378; new circuits

variable capital, 294, 405

of, 269, 275, 402

Versailles Conference, 241

subsumption, formal and real, 25,

Vico, Giambattista, 100

255–256, 271–272, 317, 364, 386

Vietnam War, 178–179, 260, 275

superstition, 323

Virgil, 167

superstructure, 27, 30, 385–386

virtual, 357–360, 366

surplus value, realization of, 222–224

Vogelfrei, 157–158

tactics and strategy, 58–59, 63

Wallerstein, Immanuel, 334

Taylorism, 240, 242, 247–248,

Weber, Max, 41, 88–90, 340, 377

255–256, 267–268, 383, 409

welfare state, 301

teleology, 51–52, 100, 165, 383;

William ofOccam, 73

materialist, 63–66, 368, 395–396,

Wilson, Woodrow, 174–176, 180, 242

403–407, 470n25

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 378–379

temporality, 401–403

working class, industrial, 53, 256, 402

Thatcher, Margaret, 348

world market, 150–154, 190, 235–237,

Third Worldism, 264

251–256, 310, 332–335; construction

Third World versus First World, xiii,

of, 221–222, 346. See also delinking

253–254, 263–264, 333–335,

World War I, 233

362–363

World War II, 243

Thucydides, 182

Tiananmen Square events, 54, 56

Zavattini, Cesare, 158

Document Outline

TITLE PAGE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CONTENTS

PREFACE

PART 1 / THE POLITICAL CONSTITUTION OF THE PRESENT

1.1 / WORLD ORDER

1.2 / BIOPOLITICAL PRODUCTION

1.3 / ALTERNATIVES WITHIN EMPIRE

PART 2 / PASSAGES OF SOVEREIGNTY

2.1 / TWO EUROPES,TWO MODERNITIE

2.2 / SOVEREIGNTY OF THE NATION-STATE

2.3 / THE DIALECTIC OF COLONIAL OVEREIGNTY

2.4 / SYMPTOM OF PASSAGE

2.5 / NETWORK POWER: U.S.SOVEREIGNTY AND THE NEW EMPIRE

2.6 / IMPERIAL OVEREIGNTY

INTERMEZZO / COUNTER-EMPIRE

PART 3 / PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION

3.1 / THE LIMITS OF IMPERIALISM

3.2 / DISCIPLINARY GOVERNABILITY

3.3 / RESISTANCE,CRISIS,TRANSFORMATION

3.4 / POSTMODERNIZATION,OR THE INFORMATIZATION OF PRODUCTION

3.5 / MIXED CON TITUTION

3.6 / CAPITALIST OVEREIGNTY, OR ADMINISTERING THE GLOBAL SOCIETY OF CONTROL

PART 4 / THE DECLINE AND FALL OF EMPIRE

4.1 / VIRTUALITIES

4.2 / GENERATION AND CORRUPTION

4.3 / THE MULTITUDE AGAINST EMPIRE

NOTES

INDEX