..../.
contents
TABLE
OF CONTENTS OF EMPIRE
PREFACE xi
PART 1 The
Political Constitution of the Present, 1-66
1.1 World Order, 3-21
1.2 Biopolitical
Production, 22-41
1.3 Alternatives within
Empire, 42-66
PART 2 Passages
of Sovereignty, 67-204
2.1 Two Europes, Two
Modernities, 69-92
2.2 Sovereignty of the
Nation-State, 93-113
2.3 The Dialectics of
Colonial Sovereignty, 114-136
2.4 Symptoms of Passage,
137-159
2.5 Network Power: U.S.
Sovereignty and the New Empire, 160-182
2.6 Imperial
Sovereignty, 183-204
INTERMEZZO:
COUNTER-EMPIRE, 205-218
PART 3 Passages
of Production, 219-350
3.1 The Limits of
Imperialism, 221-239
3.2 Disciplinary
Governability, 240-259
3.3 Resistance, Crisis,
Transformation, 260-279
3.4 Postmodernization,
or The Informatization of Production, 280-303
3.5 Mixed Constitution,
304-324
3.6 Capitalist
Sovereignty, or Administering the Global Society of
Control,
325-350
PART 4 The
Decline and Fall of Empire, 351-413
4.1 Virtualities,
353-369
4.2 Generation and
Corruption, 370-392
4.3 The Multitude
against Empire, 393-413
Notes, 415-472
Index, 473-478
End of table of
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.........
notes
SUMMARY
NOTES ON THE TEXT OF EMPIRE
A
new world order
In the Preface, H&N
succinctly tell what they are going to argue. They
discern a new world order and, dubbing it
"Empire," explain that it is the new
sovereignty rising to replace that of nation-states
as they decline. National sovereignties characterized
the imperialist order of the modernist period. They
expanded their sway outward to colonies. This
established a center and a border or an interior and
a related exterior. Empire, as opposed to that kind
of old imperialism, has no such center. It is a
deterritorialized apparatus of rule "that
progressively incorporates the entire global realm
within its open, expanding frontiers." (xii) The
US is not the center of Empire.
This change signals
"a passage within the capitalist mode of
production." (xiii) The spatial divisions of
modernist imperialism--nation, colony,
"first-second-third" worlds--have been
replaced by a smooth world with global flows. Labor
in this new space has changed from industrial factory
labor into "communicative, cooperative, and
affective labor." (xiii) Such labor creates
wealth that H&N call "biopolitical
production, the production of social life itself, in
which the economic, the political, and the cultural
increasingly overlap and invest one another."
(xiii)
"Empire" is a
theoretical concept with four attributes: (1) It has
no territorial boundaries but
"encompasses the spatial totality" of the
globe. (xiv) (2) It "suspends history and
thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity."
(xiv) (3) It "creates the very world it
inhabits" by operating on all registers of the
social order. It aims to rule social life in its
entirety and thus "presents the paradigmatic
form of biopower."(xv) (4) It aims
for "a perpetual and universal peace
outside of history" (i.e., outside of time).
(xv)
With this theoretical
concept as their template, H&N propose to trace
the genealogy (the Foucaultian ring of the term is
not accidental) of Empire. It developed largely in
European and American modes of capitalist production.
Now it is unlimited to any geographical region of the
globe. (xvi) H&N refer to the resistance to
Empire that resides in the "desires of the
multitude." They vaguely suggest that this
resistance "prefigures an alternative global
society." (xvi) (That vagueness will persist at
the end of the book, where they try to suggest how
Empire will decline and fall.)
H&N explain the
structure of their book. Part 1 introduces the
"general problematic of Empire." (xvi)
Parts 2 and 3 trace the passage from modernity
(imperialism) to postmodernity (Empire) from
two complementary genealogical standpoints--political
sovereignty of the nation state and its decline;
and production, which means not only economics
but subjectivity itself. (xvii) Part 4 is their
attempt to show that the alternative to Empire will
emerge from within its universal production
process--a heavily flawed attempt, as it turns out.
(xvii)
A newly defined
"multitude" will resist
H&N are
seeking nothing less than to redefine the foundations
of human identity. They want their redefinition to
replace that of the modernist individual who could
identify himself or herself apart from the processes
of society and nature. The modernist self, they
believe, no longer fits in the hyperventilated
activity of globalized capitalism. They draw upon
postmodern thought to lead us through the transition
from the old kind of person to the new. Terms from
the twofold inquiry into "Capitalism and
Schizophrenia" by Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus)
inform their account. They borrow from both D&G
and Marx to set the tone of this account.
Their hypothesis of a
new human subjectivity results from their revision of
the Marxist program to meet the conditions of Empire.
It is for them axiomatic that resistance from the
multitude (which is Marx's proletariat transformed)
will occur in the globalized "non-place" of
postmodern production. The great problematic of
Empire is to glimpse what form the resistance will
take and how it will transform Empire from within.
H&N range far and
wide in pursuing these daring ideas. They invite the
readers to enter the text anywhere and circle around
as they wish (the same invitation offered by D&G
in A Thousand Plateaus). But Empire is
not as unhinged as this might suggest. Part 1 (on the
political constitution of the present) and Part 2 (on
the passages to the new imperial sovereignty) lie on
the near side of a pivotal chapter titled, "Intermezzo:
Counter-Empire" (205-218). Following
that we come to Part 3 (on the passages of production
toward the global society of control) and Part 4
(speculations on the decline and fall of Empire).
The authors thus situate
"Intermezzo" at the center of their
analysis and prognostication. It recaps the political
insights of the first two parts. It forecasts their
findings on the altered processes of production found
in Empire--and what those changes suggest about
subjectivity and the multitude.
One way to pursue the
contributions and the shortcomings of the book as a
whole, then, is to read with extra attention this
essential hinge at the center of it,
"Intermezzo: Counter-Empire." I try to do
this in the following paragraphs.
Labor, as multitude, is
no longer limited to a place
Who will contest and
overthrow "the forces of Empire"? they ask
at the start of the "Intermezzo." (205) As
Marxists, H&N do not feel the need to explain why
resistance to Empire is the main issue
of their book. It is axiomatic, inherent in the
dialectical materialism at the very heart of the
master's vision of world development.
When they take up the
"new regime of production" (205) in Part 3,
we will see that they are trying to incorporate the
novel conditions of Empire into their Marxist
framework. In the process they will adjust Marxist
theory so that it can accommodate those conditions
(of which Marx of course could have known nothing in
his lifetime).
In
"Intermezzo," H&N assert that
resistance to Empire must first be no less global
than Empire itself. (206) For inspiration, they refer
us to two examples of global resistance from the
past, the old Wobblies (IWW--International Workers of
the World) and St. Augustine's vision from early
medieval Christianity of a "universal, catholic
community." (207)
H&N then explore the
political form that resistance will take in
postmodern Empire. They start by asking whether the
old modernist democratic vision of a "radical
republican tradition" may suggest how resistance
will work in "the terrain of a postmodern
republicanism." (208) This interrogation leads
them to explain how place functioned in
the old modernist system and how that function has
altered in the new postmodernist system of Empire. In
the old system, when capital exploited labor and
labor resisted exploitation, the resulting dialectic
created a determinate place of exploitation. It
was localized and quantified in the factory. (208-9)
The old industrial strike took place against the
factory. In the conditions of Empire, capital
exploits labor throughout the "entire social
domain" not just in the factory. (209) This
universalization of the dialectical struggle yields a
non-localized and non-quantifiable place--a non-place.
((209)
In this non-place,
capital now exploits not "specific productive
activities" but labor's "universal capacity
to produce." (209) Labor, now unlimited to a
place, has great power to produce (and to resist). It
now encompasses the totality of the mental and
physical energy and the desire "of the multitude
of mobile and flexible workers" who are socially
diffused throughout Empire. (209)
In this human totality
H&N find "the revolutionary formalism of
modern republicanism." (210) In the old
determinate place of exploitation, individual and
collective subjects resisted. In the new non-place,
the multitude at work has a general power to work and
to resist that confers on the non-place itself
"a brain, heart, torso, and limbs,
globally." (210) H&N apparently see in this
general power the potential, at least, for exercising
a "postmodern republicanism" that would
constitute resistance to Empire from within.
Given the
"globality" of Empire's domination and
control of the multitude and given the
"globality" of the multitude in the process
of producing, H&N locate "postmodern
republicanism"--which they seem to equate with
"resistance"--au milieu, within
Empire, "on the basis of the lived experience of
the global multitude." (210-211) The "lived
experience" presumably gives substance to the
mere "formalism" of modern republicanism.
The first element of
this republicanism-as-resistance within the non-place
of Empire is "the will to be against" found
within the multitude. (210) Being-against, say
H&N, is the "key to every active political
position" in the new world of Empire. (211) And
the political aim of being-against is always to
subvert the power of imperial sovereignty, which is
the enemy of the multitude. (212)
Observing actual
practices of resistance in the contemporary world,
H&N identify "desertion, exodus, and
nomadism" as archetypal strategies of the
multitude against the power of Empire--presumably a
manner of exercising postmodern republicanism. (212)
The history of modernity teaches that labor mobility
and migration traditionally disrupted power; and
because of this disruptive potential, capital wielded
exceptional violence against it. Slavery was its most
extreme form. (212) H&N find that the power of
modern mobility was as nothing compared to postmodern
mobility of the multitude in Empire. Parodying the
Communist Manifesto, they declare, "A specter
haunts the world and it is the specter of
migration." (213)
But the multitude's
power to resist Empire through massive migration is
merely "destructive." H&N are looking
to the multitude to create a constructive alternative
within/against Empire. It should be nothing less than
"the counter-Empire." This will be "a
new global vision, a new way of living in the
world." (214) In the remainder of
"Intermezzo" H&N attempt to point the
way to that new way of living. In the process they
give us glimpses of the new subjectivity of humanity,
which replaces the liberal humanist subjectivity of
Enlightenment-based modernity.
The new way of living
will come from the multitude acting as "new
barbarians." They will "destroy with an
affirmative violence and trace new paths of life
through their own material existence." (215)
We get a sense of the
author's meaning by observing early "barbaric
deployments" in the realm of the body itself. By
this H&N mean the current preoccupation with
"corporeal relations and configurations of
gender and sexuality." (215) Body piercing and
dressing in drag, as they see them, bear the heavy
weight of an "anthropological exodus." This
is the early manifestation of a republicanism that is
against imperial civilization. (215) It is the
manifestation of a "concrete invention of a
first new place in the non-place" of Empire.
(216)
But these early signs of
bodily resistance are not enough to bring a new way
of living within Empire, promising though they may
be. We need a new "political artifice, an
artificial becoming." (216) A substantively new
politics can only come in with changes in the
"regimes and practices of production."
(217) Into this concept H&N fold their previously
observed notions of nomadism and migration,
barbarianism, and anthropological metamorphosis. In
the latter they see the power of tools to become
creative prostheses of the multitude. What comes out
of this new activity of labor will be the new
subjectivity suited to life within the non-place of
Empire, "liberating us from the conditions of
modern humanity." (217)
This political goal
writes "finis" to the deconstructive work
of postmodern criticism, say H&N. Derrida and
others helped us exit from modernity but failed to
offer up an alternative politics that would work in
postmodernity. The politics of
"counter-Empire" developed by H&N
provide us with a worthy new task, according to the
authors. That task is to construct
"ontologically new determinations of the human,
of living." (217) This is what postmodern
republicanism comes to in the end.
"Intermezzo"
concludes with a hortatory message for the multitude
who will create counter-Empire. The struggle on the
new imperial terrain, H&N say, promises great
possibilities for "creation and liberation"
so long as the multitude persists in being-against
and in desiring liberation. It has the power to
"push through Empire to come out the other
side." (218)
The chapters that
sandwich "Intermezzo" provide the details
of the analysis and program summarized above.
Empire
exercises sovereignty through "biopolitics"
A close reading of one
additional section, on "imperial
command"--from Part 3, Passages of Production,
Chapter 3.6, Capitalist Sovereignty, or Administering
the Global Society of Control--helps to fill in
H&N's picture of the multitude at work within
imperial command (343-348).
In this brief discussion
of the operation of "imperial command"
under the conditions of Empire, H&N first get rid
of old modernist theories of sovereignty. The new
command is no longer responding to the state of
perpetual warfare seen in Hobbes (343). Nor is it
responding any longer to the commercial need for the
security of contracts seen in Locke and Hume (344).
Such modernist formulations of sovereignty no longer
apply because of the "social eruption" of
the global multitude (344). The productive multitude
has replaced "the concept of the People"
(344).
The People were (a)
constructed into a single subject by the modernist
sovereign power and then (b) used as the legitimating
source of that same sovereign power that constructed
it. Under Empire we have no more of that kind of
tautologically derived control (344). The multitude
does not behave like the People. It does not become a
singularity that is subject to an external sovereign
command. It remains mobile, flexible, and perpetually
differentiating (344).
Because of this, it can
be controlled only in its internal social relations,
"in the biopolitical context of its
existence" (344). In the notion of biopolitics,
H&N get to the heart of Empire. Empire has no
outside and no inside, no perch from which to control
or be controlled. Labor in the form of the multitude
is as ubiquitous as are capitalist production and
control in themselves.
Empire thus faces a
delicate balancing act. It must control the multitude
so that its potential for "absolute democratic
power" does not overthrow capitalist domination.
However, Empire must stop short of destroying the
multitude through control. For Empire depends on the
multitude's "autonomous forces of
production" to fuel its existence. (344) Without
the multitude's cooperative productivity (which
resides in itself and is not a response to external
compulsion), Empire would fall from within. (At this
point, H&N do not say whether they are advocating
the balancing act or simply describing what they see
in operation.)
H&N then explain the
three global tools by which Empire maintains
"the general equilibria of the global
system" (345)--doing the balancing act. They are
(a) the absolute power of destruction through nuclear
bombs; (b) supranational monetary arbitration; (c)
and the deterritorializing power of global
communication. (345-347)
Of these three,
communication ("ether" in their
terminology) is the greatest tool. It brings
"society entirely and globally" under its
regime. And it is the only means by which an
alternative to current conditions of Empire could
ever be proposed. (347) That is as far as H&N go
here toward revolution from within. But they suggest
that the situation is "extremely open" to
change. (348) It is so because the
multitude--"all those who contribute to the
interactive production of communication"--are
imbued with massive power. (348)
Make no mistake: in the
end H&N look for revolution. Their enthusiasm for
barbarian violence against the society of control
breaks out often in the course of the last half of
the book. And the key is the "productive
cooperation" of the multitude through the
deterritorialized "ether" of global
communication. This makes "labor power as a
whole capable of constituting itself in
government." (350).
As clear as that may
seem, the program for revolution never emerges in
Empire. H&N settle for a threefold declaration of
human rights. The three rights are (1) global
citizenship, (2) a social wage and a guaranteed
income for all, and (3) the right to reappropriate
the means of biopolitical production. The latter
means that the multidude would have the right to
"self-control and autonomous
self-production." (400-407)
H&N here seem to be
reconstructing Marx's original romantic resolution of
the revolution, the withering away of the state.
Indeed, in the manifesto-like coda to this chapter on
"Capitalist Sovereignty," they declare, in
italics, "Big Government Is Over!"
(348) They pay their respects to big government's
past success in redistributing social wealth and
serving equality and democracy in the modernist
period. But "those times are over." (349)
Now the struggle, transferred from the People to the
multitude, is boundless because of the boundlessness
of desire in the multitude. H&N do not
acknowledge their dependence at this point in the
text on Deleuze & Guattari's concept of desire
but it is obvious in their declaration:
"We...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." (349) Thus they take us on
a Deleuzian line of flight to the romantic future
that has yet to push through Empire to the other
side.
End of summary notes on the text of Empire.
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evaluation
EVALUATION
OF EMPIRE
Close readings of parts
of Empire of course omit much of the
sweep of H&N's metanarrative. But my selected
close readings give a feel for the grain of their
thinking. This emboldens me to end with the following
evaluative comments.
In the months before 11
September 2001, Empire's appearance
became something like a media event. The first press
run must have sold out across the country. Our local
bookseller gave up trying to get a copy for me after
more than a month. Amazon.com finally came to my
rescue. Hardt gave an interview on NPR and appeared
in other venues to promote the book. He quickly
gained pundit status.
Emily Eakin's 7 July
2001 piece in The New York Times asked,
"What is the next big idea? Buzz is growing for
'Empire.'" Her article seemed attuned more to
the release of a new Michael Jackson album than of a
grand intellectual effort to reconceptualize the
future of the world. Although her article took a
beating from scholars more interested in intellectual
rigor than in buzz, it caught the sense that people
in and out of the academy were ripe for a new way to
see.
The irony of Eakin's
question, expressed in the postmodern moment, held my
attention: the big idea of postmodernist thinkers,
after all, was that big ideas don't work any more.
Yet H&N were daring to advance a really big idea
in the teeth of all the differentiating and
deconstructing that had been going on for thirty
years.
I had recently decided
that postmodernists had mainly done what they could
do to serve our culture. They were incapable, I
thought, of providing a workable way out of the
impasse of politics into which they had talked
themselves and us. When the buzz about Empire
suggested that a couple of neo-Marxist visionaries
were creating an opening through the impasse of
postmodernism, it sounded exciting. My hunch is that
many who shared the feeling of excitement hoped the
book would open a way out of the postmodern dead-end.
H&N have taken hard
knocks from critics for the glaring failings of their
book. While I think these knocks are deserved, my
main evaluative comment on Empire is
affirmative. H&N deserve credit for trying to
address the right question: now that modernity has
passed and postmodern conditions operate around the
world, can a fresh concept of those conditions help
us understand events and perhaps even assist us to
direct their course?
It took imagination and
an eclectic brand of scholarship for H&N to
engulf and pass beyond the limits of a postmodernist
view. They borrowed from critics of modernity such as
Foucault and Deleuze & Guattari to craft a
vocabulary and the outline of a model that would
apply to the new order of the world and the new shape
of subjectivity. In doing so they were demonstrating
how poorly the liberal humanist vocabulary and the
model of modernity fitted the conditions now being
experienced by people around the world. They sensed
that the new millennium demanded daring of thought
akin to that which Enlightenment thinkers produced
several hundred years ago when they imagined the
modern age into being.
11 September 2001 did
many things to us. One of them was to demonstrate how
poorly the old modernist concepts of nationhood and
international engagement explain contemporary
conditions. Another was to make us aware how poorly
the postmodernist rhetoric of "difference"
and "hyperreality" served when we needed to
talk about global forces that spew terrorist attacks
on very real skyscrapers filled with very real
victims.
With 9-11, we learned
that fortress America exists no longer. We are in the
midst of the antagonists to our hegemony, just as
they are in our midst. We learned that the global
metropolis is a reality. Along with our leader,
George W. Bush, we learned quickly that, in spite of
his initial inclination on taking office, the US
cannot choose a limited degree of engagement with
world affairs. We cannot turn our back on the world
because there is no "world" outside the
space that we occupy along with the rest of humanity.
A reading of Empire
makes 9-11 lessons such as these more meaningful. H&N's
cheeky attempt to provide new concepts and rhetoric
for the politico-economic condition of the
present-day world deserves an E for effort. Their
description in the first half of the book of
"the political constitution of the present"
and "passages of sovereignty" can help one
to construct some meaning out of the seeming chaos
that has visited us since 9-11.
But Empire
remains a heroically flawed performance. Alan
Wolfe in The New Republic online
captured the breadth of its failing in vivid terms:
"Empire is to social and political
criticism what pornography is to literature."
Wolfe and others present detailed particulars of Empire's
failing. The flaws that struck me most forcibly were
the following: H&N's neo-Marxism lacks
seriousness; their concept of the multitude, though
colorfully appealing, is a mere romance; their
imaginative reformulation of contemporary reality
leads them to no program for achieving their
revolutionary ends, despite their passionate desire
for one.
(1)
NEO-MARXISM AS PARODY
H&N attempt to bend
Marxist theory into a new shape that will account for
the radically new condition of world order. To take
the whole Marxist model of production, surplus value,
and class conflict and seek to adapt it to the
digital age of capitalism is a daring and commendable
project. The result is intellectually exhilarating.
Often it is unconvincing. Sometimes the result seems
like arch parody.
H&N render the new
order in neo-Marxist terms, heavily seasoned with
Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, that at times
reads almost like a political take-off on
"Saturday Night Live." Class dialectic
disappears. The factory setting where Marxist labor
sweated and capital exploited transforms into an
ethereal everyplace. The gritty workers of Marx
become an inchoate mass of biopower with mystical
omnipresence, almost like green goo. The multitude
contains a gross barbarian vitality that will assure
resistance to imperial order without ever taking it
over. The postmodern society of control, which is
everywhere, replacing the exploitative capitalist
class of Marx, opens itself to the destructive power
of the multitude's productive force, which is also
everywhere.
The parodic overtones
show up usually in the italicized manifesto-like
conclusions to chapters, where H&N pull out
rhetorical stops. Assertions seem designed to take
your breath away if they do not at first amuse by
their sweep.
From "Political
Manifesto:" "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." (64)
From "The
Poor:" "...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." (158)
From "Cycles:"
"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." (239)
From "Primitive
Accumulations:" "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." (256)
From
"Commons:" "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." (301)
From
"Militant:" "Once again in
postmodernity we find ourselves in Francis's [of
Assisi] 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,
in simplicity, and also innocence." (413)
It is not that such
assertions lack the power to open your mind to a new
way of thinking about the world. It is just that they
do not aggregate into a coherent theoretical whole
worthy of standing in place of the classical Marxist
vision that inspires H&N.
(2)
THE ROMANCE OF THE MULTITUDE
The driving life-force
of Empire is not the structure of postmodern
sovereignty; it is the cooperative productivity (a
basic Marxist category) of labor as it has
metamorphosed into "the multitude" of
Empire. H&N's concept of multitude accounts for
the disappearance of the workplace; it accounts for
the emergence of the non-place (that is, every place)
as the locus of productive endeavor. It suggests the
ontological change in the nature of globalized power
(the macrocosm) as well as in the nature of human
subjectivity (the microcosm), which has ceased to be
"the People" of modernist nation states.
Empire is "an empty machine," driven by the
multitudinous biopower that it contains. (62)
I applaud the ambitious
attempt to characterize humanity at work in the
cyberspace and hyperreality that have come to
characterize the contemporary world. But the very
daring of the attempt transforms the concept into a
romantic vision that loses contact with the ground.
This hits you particularly at a moment when news from
Afghanistan takes your mind back into the heavily
striated space of guerilla war and the
black-and-white reality of hideouts carved from
caves. Marx's proletariat could exist only in a place
where there was a productive capitalist capacity. By
ruling out the limits on the place of production,
H&N envision a proletariat-as-multitude existing
everywhere and performing the identical role
worldwide. This simply defies the diversity of
cultural identities that persist no matter how dense
the digital network has become. Our sudden need to
know more about the cultures embedded in Islamic
religion after 9-11 drives home the point.
John Gray, quoted by
Emily Eakin, said it forcefully: "Empire
theorizes the current state of the world
in a way which produces romantically alluring phrases
that gloss over the actual conflicts,
discontinuities, uncertainties and sheer
unknowability of the world and its power relations
today."
As noted earlier,
H&N are attempting to reconceptualize the human
subject by drawing upon the "philosophy of
desire" (an inaccurate term) developed by
Deleuze & Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus
and Anti-Oedipus.
This is a worthy and understandable attempt. D&G
abandoned the liberal humanist concept of the modern
individual. H&N needed support for just such a
move of their own. However, by grafting a
"post-humanist" notion of the individual
onto their postmodernist revision of Marx, they left
the ordinary life of getting and spending, fighting
and cooperating, somewhere in the dust.
I suspect that the
concept of the multitude contains a useful insight
into the way globalization is coming to operate. But
the concept here remains in the realm of rhapsody,
along with Marx's original romantic vision of the
withering away of the state. I am betting that
"the multitude" will be a favorite on the
topic list of symposia around the circuit. Through
further discussion, it may gain greater clarity and
currency and survive the negative commentary on it
(such as this).
(3)
A NON-PROGRAM FOR A NON-PLACE
Writing a review online
at Amazon.com, Benjamin R. Bates, a graduate student
at the University of Georgia, complained that H&N
"provide too little in the way of resistant
strategies." The book is "properly
descriptive and normative" in his view, but it
"lacks the prescriptive action that this
analysis needs to be complete."
Also online, at
barnesandnoble.com, Slavoz Zizek, a Slovenian
political philosopher, zeroed in on the main problem
of H&N's project. It fails in his view to show
how "the present global socio-economic process
will create the needed space for such radical
measures [as] the ones that Marx tried to develop in
his explanation of how the proletarian revolution
would eliminate the basic antagonism of the
capitalist means of production. In this respect, Empire
remains a pre-Marxist book." (Sueddeutsche
Zeitung, n.d.)
Hardt blithely
acknowledged the lack of an action agenda in an email
exchange with Zizek, according to the Eakin article.
"Yes, it's true we don't know what the
revolution should be," Hardt wrote. "Yeah,
well, I don't know either," Zizek, according to
Hardt, answered.
We feel this lack of a
political program especially when H&N tamely
advance their notions of a "postmodern
republicanism." It is a tame response indeed to
the radically new conditions of globalized capitalism
that they describe so colorfully and forcefully.
Their three political
freedoms are vapid. They would be disastrous if
implemented, as Zizek himself illustrated in
discussing the implications of the right to
"global citizenship:" "...it would
mean the total 'destruction' of the carrying out of
global laws and even the abolition of state borders.
Under the present conditions, such steps would
trigger an invasion of the USA and western Europe by
cheap labor from India, China and Africa, which would
result in a people's revolt against
immigrants...."
Finally, Empire
suffers from a fuzzy logic at its very heart. On
one hand, Empire is everywhere. There is no movement
outside it. On the other hand, the multitude have the
power to create "counter-Empire." That
raises issues of ontology that H&N do not
directly address. This logical fuzziness at the
center of their project underscores their failure to
produce an action agenda. If the grounds of imperial
existence were clear, the means of altering it would
emerge. But they are not clear, and they do not
emerge.
End of evaluation of
Empire. Go to frame at left and click on
other options.
quotes
QUOTABLE
QUOTES FROM EMPIRE
NEW SUBJECTIVITY:
"We need to identify a theoretical schema that
puts the subjectivity of the social movements of the
proletariat at center stage in the processes of
globalization and the constitution of global
order." (235)
DECENTERING: In the post
World War II period, "through the decentering of
productive flows [a Deleuzian term], new regional
economies and a new global division of labor began to
be determined. There was no global order yet, but an
order was being formed." (247)
MOBILITY IN
GLOBALIZATION: "The constitution of a 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." (253) [My
italics. Both terms come from Deleuze &
Guattari's Thousand Plateaus; they constitute the
basic D&G metaphor that differentiates nomadic
(rhizomatic) from hierarchical (arborescent--from
root to connected branches) structures of reality.]
VIETNAM WAR A TURNING
POINT: "The various struggles [peasants in 'Nam,
industrial working class, new intellectual
proletariat] converged against one common enemy: the
international disciplinary order....The long
cycle of struggles against the disciplinary regimes
[a Foucaultian concept] had reached maturity and
forced capital to modify its own structures and
undergo a paradigm shift." (261)
MODERNIZATION AT AN END:
"The processes of becoming human and the nature
of the human itself were fundamentally transformed in
the passage defined by modernization. (para) In our
times, however, modernization has come to an end. In
other words, industrial production is no longer
expanding its dominance over other economic forms and
social phenomena." (285)
THE NEW PRODUCTION OF
SUBJECTIVITY: "...the formation of the 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...the mechanisms of political
subjection. Here is where the primary site of
struggle seems to emerge, on the terrain of the
production and regulation of subjectivity."
(321)
THIRD WORLD LIBERATION:
"[The Third World] is destroyed when throughout
the ontological terrain of globalization the most
wretched of the earth becomes the most powerful
being, because its new nomad singularity is the most
creative force and the omnilateral movement of its
desire is itself the coming liberation." (363)
THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE
MULTITUDE: "The multitude has internalized the
lack of place and fixed time; it is mobile and
flexible....The coming imperial universe, blind to
meaning, is filled by the multifarious totality of
the production of subjectivity." (380)
THE SINGULARITY OF THE
MULTITUDE: "The multitude affirms its
singularity by inverting the ideological illusion
that all humans on the global surfaces of the world
market are interchangeable." (395)
End of quotable
quotes from Empire. Go to frame at left and
click on other options.
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