Siah
17-09-04, 09:02
Empire
This extract from 'Empire ', drawn from the book's preface, argues that the transformations of the new global order make the emerging Empire quite different from previous eras of imperial dominance and capitalist expansion, opening new spaces for political projects seeking to construct a truly democratic global society.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
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 of economic and cultural exchanges.
Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule - 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.
The passage to Empire emerges from the twilight of modern sovereignty. In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries and barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.
Most significant, the spatial divisions of the 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.
Many locate the ultimate authority that rules over the processes of globalization 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 the imperialist oppressor.
Both these views rest on the assumption that the United States has simply donned the mantle of global power that the European nations have now let fall. If the nineteenth century was a British century, the twentieth century has been an American century; or really if modernity was European, then postmodernity is American. The most damning charge critics can level, then, is that the United States is repeating the practices of old 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 of sovereignty has emerged, contradicts both these views. The United 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.
We should emphasise that we use 'Empire' here not as a metaphor, which would require demonstration of the resemblances between today's world order and the Empires of Rome, China the Americas, and so forth, but rather as a concept, which calls primarily for a theoretical approach. The concept of Empire is characterised 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 of Empire presents itself not 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 they way they were always meant to be. In other words, Empire presents its rule not as a transitory moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with no territorial boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history.
Third, the rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depths of the 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 of its rule is social life in its entirety, and thus Empire presents the paradigmatic form of biopower.
Finally, although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace - a perpetual and universal peace outside of history.
The Empire we are faced with wields enormous powers of oppression and destruction, but that fact should not make us nostalgic in any way for the old forms of domination. The passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the force 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 of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global 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.
.................................................. ..............................
Michael Hardt is Assistant Professor in the Literature Program at Duke University. Antonio Negri is an independent writer and researcher and an inmate at Rebibbia Prison, Rome. He has been a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Paris and a Professor of Political Science at the University of Padua.
Excerpted from Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, published by Harvard University Press.
This extract from 'Empire ', drawn from the book's preface, argues that the transformations of the new global order make the emerging Empire quite different from previous eras of imperial dominance and capitalist expansion, opening new spaces for political projects seeking to construct a truly democratic global society.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
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 of economic and cultural exchanges.
Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule - 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.
The passage to Empire emerges from the twilight of modern sovereignty. In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries and barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.
Most significant, the spatial divisions of the 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.
Many locate the ultimate authority that rules over the processes of globalization 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 the imperialist oppressor.
Both these views rest on the assumption that the United States has simply donned the mantle of global power that the European nations have now let fall. If the nineteenth century was a British century, the twentieth century has been an American century; or really if modernity was European, then postmodernity is American. The most damning charge critics can level, then, is that the United States is repeating the practices of old 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 of sovereignty has emerged, contradicts both these views. The United 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.
We should emphasise that we use 'Empire' here not as a metaphor, which would require demonstration of the resemblances between today's world order and the Empires of Rome, China the Americas, and so forth, but rather as a concept, which calls primarily for a theoretical approach. The concept of Empire is characterised 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 of Empire presents itself not 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 they way they were always meant to be. In other words, Empire presents its rule not as a transitory moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with no territorial boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history.
Third, the rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depths of the 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 of its rule is social life in its entirety, and thus Empire presents the paradigmatic form of biopower.
Finally, although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace - a perpetual and universal peace outside of history.
The Empire we are faced with wields enormous powers of oppression and destruction, but that fact should not make us nostalgic in any way for the old forms of domination. The passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the force 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 of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global 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.
.................................................. ..............................
Michael Hardt is Assistant Professor in the Literature Program at Duke University. Antonio Negri is an independent writer and researcher and an inmate at Rebibbia Prison, Rome. He has been a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Paris and a Professor of Political Science at the University of Padua.
Excerpted from Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, published by Harvard University Press.