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Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.
The new men of Empire 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 of modern critique dedicated to denouncing the
dualisms of modernity. The standpoint of that critical tradition, however, is
situated in the paradigmatic place of modernity itself, both "inside" and
"outside," at the threshold or the point of crisis. 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 characterization of the mandate of the
Enlightenment: Sapere aude (dare to know), emerge from the present state of
"immaturity," and celebrate the public use of reason at the center of the 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 positions, but rather with
the political system of the French Fifth Republic, in which a large public
sphere for political exchange was taken for granted. His response nonetheless
insists once again on the necessity of straddling the border that links what
traditionally would be considered the "inside" of subjectivity and the "outside"
of the public sphere-even though in Foucault's terms the division is inverted so
as to divide the "inside" of the system from the "outside" of subjectivity.
[2]
The rationality of modern critique, its center of gravity, is posed on this
border.
Foucault does add another line of inquiry that seeks to go beyond these
boundaries and the modern conception of the public sphere. "What is at stake . .
. is this: How can the growth of capabilities [capacités] 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 of the Enlightenment returns to the
same Enlightenment standpoint. In this ebb and flow between inside and outside,
the critique of modernity does not finally go beyond its terms and limits, but
rather stands poised on its boundaries.
This same notion of a border place that serves as the standpoint for the
critique of the system of power-a place that is both inside and outside-also
animates the critical tradition of modern political theory. Modern republicanism
has long been characterized by a combination of realistic foundations and
utopian initiatives. Republican projects are always solidly rooted within the
dominant historical process, but they seek to transform the realm of politics
that thus creates an outside, a new space of liberation. The three highest
examples of this critical tradition of modern political theory, in our opinion,
are Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Marx. Their thought is always grounded within the
real processes of the constitution of modern sovereignty, attempting to make its
contradictions explode and open the space for an alternative society. The
outside is constructed from within.
For Machiavelli, the constituent power that is to found a democratic politics is
born out of the rupture of the medieval order and through the necessity of
regulating the chaotic transformations of modernity. The new democratic
principle is a utopian initiative that responds directly to the real historical
process and the demands of the epochal crisis. In Spinoza, too, the critique of
modern sovereignty emerges from within the historical process. Against the
deployments of monarchy and aristocracy, which can only remain limited forms,
Spinoza defines democracy as the absolute form of government because in
democracy all of society, the entire multitude, rules; in fact, democracy is the
only form of government in which the absolute can be realized. For Marx,
finally, every liberatory initiative, from wage struggles to political
revolutions, proposes the independence of use value against the world of
exchange value, against the modalities of capitalist development-but that
independence exists only within capitalist development itself. In all these
cases the critique of modernity is situated within the historical evolution of
the forms of power, 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 of a new republic, Spinoza's democratic
liberation of the multitude, and Marx's revolutionary abolition of the 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 of rupture that allows a shift of perspective, nor that our
project cannot profit from these modern critical foundations. Machiavellian
freedom, Spinozist desire, and Marxian living labor are all concepts that
contain real transformative power: the power to confront reality and go beyond
the given conditions of existence. The force of these critical concepts, which
extends well beyond their ambiguous relation to modern social structures,
consists primarily in their being posed as ontological demands.[4] The power of
the modern critique of modernity resides precisely where the blackmail of
bourgeois realism is refused -in other words, where utopian thought, going
beyond the pressures of homology that always limit it to what already exists, is
given a new constituent form.
The limitations of these critiques become clear when we question their power to
transform not only the objective we are aiming for, but also the standpoint of
critique. One briefexample should be sufficient to illustrate this difficulty.
The fifth part of Spinoza's Ethics is perhaps the highest development of the
modern critique of modernity. Spinoza takes on the theoretical challenge to
establish full knowledge oftruth and discover the path of the liberation of the
body and the mind, positively, in the absolute. All other modern metaphysical
positions, particularly those transcendental positions of which 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 development of the unity oftrue knowledge and the powerful body
along with the absolute construction of singular and collective immanence. Never
before had philosophical thought so radically undermined the traditional
dualisms of European metaphysics, and never before, consequently, had it so
powerfully challenged the political practices of transcendence and domination.
Every ontology that does not bear the stamp of human creativity is cast aside.
The desire (cupiditas) that rules the course of the existence and action of
nature and humans is made love (amor)-which invests at once both the natural and
the divine. And yet, in this final part of the Ethics, this utopia has only an
abstract and indefinite relation to reality. At times, setting out from this
high level of ontological development, Spinoza's thought does attempt to
confront reality, but the ascetic proposal halts, stumbles, and disappears in
the mystical attempt to reconcile the language of reality and divinity. Finally,
in Spinoza as in the other great modern critics of modernity, the search for an
outside seems to run aground and propose merely phantasms of mysticism, negative
intuitions of the absolute.
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 of inside and outside itself, 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 of the notion
of sovereignty. Modern sovereignty has generally been conceived in terms of a
(real or imagined) territory and the relation of that 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 of nature. The bounded space of civil 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 metaphorically in spatial terms as an outside
within the human mind, a continuation of nature deep within us. Here the
sovereignty of the Selfrests on a dialectical relation between the natural order
of drives and the civil order of reason or consciousness. Finally, modern
anthropology's various discourses on primitive societies function as the outside
that defines the bounds of the civil world. The process of modernization, in all
these varied contexts, is the internalization of the outside, that is, the
civilization of nature.
In the imperial world, this dialectic of sovereignty 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 thunderstorms
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 understood as outside, that is, they are not seen as
original and independent of the artifice of the civil order. In a postmodern
world all phenomena and forces are artificial, or, as some might say, part of
history. The modern dialectic of inside and outside has been replaced by a play
of degrees and intensities, of hybridity and artificiality. The outside has also
declined in terms of a rather different modern dialectic that defined the
relation between public and private in liberal political theory. The public
spaces of modern society, which constitute the place of liberal 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 of the
individual is exposed in the presence of others and there seeks recognition.[7]
In the process of postmodernization, 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
of malls, 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 of diverse
populations, creating a series of protected interior and isolated spaces.[8]
Alternatively, consider how the banlieu of Paris has become a series of
amorphous and indefinite spaces that promote isolation rather than any
interaction or communication. Public space has been privatized to such an extent
that it no longer makes sense to understand social organization in terms of a
dialectic between private and public spaces, between inside and outside. The
place of modern 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 of the society of the 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 of politics. 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
place outside where we act in the presence of others, has been both
universalized (because we are always now under the gaze of others, monitored by
safety cameras) and sublimated or de-actualized in the virtual spaces of the
spectacle. The end of the outside is the end of liberal 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
of history, 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 of imperialist,
interimperialist, and anti-imperialist wars is over. The end of that history has
ushered in the reign of peace. Or really, we have entered the era of minor 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 of power (between the army and the
police, the CIA and the FBI) is increasingly vague and indeterminate.
In our terms, the end of history that Fukuyama refers to is the end of the
crisis at the center of modernity, the coherent and defining conflict that was
the foundation and raison d'être for modern sovereignty. History has ended
precisely and only to the extent that it is conceived in Hegelian terms-as the
movement of a dialectic of contradictions, a play of absolute negations and
subsumption. The binaries that defined modern conflict have become 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 of
sovereignty. 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
everywhere.[11] The end of the crisis of modernity has given rise to a
proliferation of minor and indefinite crises, or, as we prefer, to an omni-
crisis.
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 of the world market would constitute the point of
arrival of this 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 of modern power, the world
market might serve adequately-even though it is not an architecture but really
an anti-architecture-as the diagram of imperial power.[13] The striated space of
modernity constructed places that were continually engaged in and founded on a
dialectical play with their outsides. The space of imperial 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 of modernity gives way to an omnicrisis in the imperial
world. In this smooth space of Empire, there is no place of power-it is both
everywhere and nowhere. Empire is an ou-topia, or really a non-place.
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 of all 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 decolonization struggles and civil rights movements.
Certain specific traditional practices of racism have undoubtedly declined, and
one might be tempted to view the end of the apartheid laws in South 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 of segregation 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
antiracism positions itself against the notion of biological 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 of biological
determinism: ifour differences are socially and culturally determined, then all
humans are in principle equal, of one ontological order, one nature.
With the passage to Empire, however, biological differences have been replaced
by sociological and cultural signifiers as the key representation of racial
hatred and fear. In this way imperial racist theory attacks modern anti-racism
from the rear, and actually coopts 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 of individuals and their abilities or aptitudes are not the result of
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 of our 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.
Étienne 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 of
race. 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 compatibility 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 segregation. Nonetheless, it
is a pluralist theoretical position: all cultural identities are equal in
principle. This pluralism accepts all the differences of who 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 of social separation. The theoretical
substitution of culture for race or biology is thus transformed paradoxically
into a theory of the preservation of race.[16] This shift in racist theory 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 itself
is a theory of segregation, not a theory of hierarchy. 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
students 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 of their performance. According to imperial theory, then, racial supremacy
and subordination are not a theoretical question, but arise through free
competition, a kind of market meritocracy of culture.
Racist practice, of course, 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 of a central support: it no longer has a theory of
racial superiority that was seen as grounding the modern practices of racial
exclusion. According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, though, "European
racism . . . has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation of someone
as Other . . . Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in
relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming
traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves . . . From the viewpoint
of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside."[17]
Deleuze and Guattari challenge us to conceive racist practice not in terms of
binary divisions and exclusion but as a strategy of differential inclusion. 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 of the racial Other. White supremacy functions rather through
first engaging alterity and then subordinating differences according to degrees
of deviance 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 of racial exclusions; certainly
they are crisscrossed with numerous lines of racial 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 of racial hierarchy.
Difference is not written in law, and the imposition of alterity does not go to
the extreme of otherness. 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 regimes of everyday 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 of
modern 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 of a people is intimately involved in this operation. A people is
defined not simply in terms of a 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 terms of a 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 of course shot through with lines of conflict and antagonism, 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 of place. The
central moment of modern 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 of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
Imperial racism, by contrast, looking forward perhaps to the twenty-first
century, rests on the play of differences and the management of micro-
conflictualities within its continually expanding domain.
On the Generation and Corruption of Subjectivity
The progressive lack of distinction between inside and outside has important
implications for the social production of subjectivity. One of the central and
most common theses of the 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 of social forces. In this sense, modern social theory
progressively emptied out any notion of a presocial subjectivity and instead
grounded the production of subjectivity in the functioning of major social
institutions, such as the prison, the family, the factory, and the school.
Two aspects of this production process should be highlighted. First,
subjectivity is a constant social process of generation. 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 of diapers) are the production processes of subjectivity. In a
reflexive way, then, through its own actions, the subject is acted on,
generated. Second, the institutions provide above all a discrete place (the
home, the chapel, the classroom, the shop floor) where the production of
subjectivity is enacted. The various institutions of modern society should be
viewed as an archipelago of factories of subjectivity. In the course of a life,
an individual passes linearly into and out of these 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 of subjectivation: "School tells us, 'You're not at home anymore';
the army tells us, 'You're not in school anymore.'"[18] Nevertheless, within the
walls of each 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 of reach of factory
discipline. This clearly delimited place of the institutions is reflected in the
regular and fixed form of the subjectivities produced.
In the passage to imperial society, the first aspect of the 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 postmodernism is what you have when the
modern theory of social constructivism is taken to its extreme and all
subjectivity is recognized 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 of the production of
subjectivity 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 of the
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.
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 indeterminate. One should not think that the crisis of the
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 of the prison means that carceral
logics and techniques have increasingly spread to other domains of society. 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 of the place of the
production corresponds to the indeterminacy of the form of the subjectivities
produced. The imperial social institutions might be seen, then, in a fluid
process of the generation and corruption of subjectivity.
This passage is not isolated to the dominant countries and regions, but tends to
be generalized to different degrees across the world. The apologia of colonial
administration always celebrated its establishment of social and political
institutions in the colonies, institutions that would constitute the backbone of
a new civil society. Whereas in the process of modernization the most powerful
countries export institutional forms to the subordinated ones, in the present
process of postmodernization, 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 is continually modulating and
corrupting the institutional forms around it. The imperial society of control is
tendentially everywhere the order of the day.
The Triple Imperative of Empire
The general apparatus of imperial 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 of race, 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 of them. A veil of
ignorance 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 of the various
constituent subjectivities. The resulting public space of power neutrality makes
possible the establishment and legitimation of a universal notion of right that
forms the core of the Empire. The law of inclusionary 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.
The second moment of imperial control, its differential moment, 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 of commonality 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 of the 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 of the transition from socialism to
capitalism.[21] These differences are imagined to be "cultural" rather than
"political," under the assumption that they will not lead to uncontrollable
conflicts but will function, rather, as a force of peaceful regional
identification. In a similar fashion, many official promotions of
multiculturalism 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 of command.
Whereas colonial power sought to fix pure, separate identities, Empire thrives
on circuits of movement and mixture. The colonial apparatus was a kind of mold
that forged fixed, distinct castings, but the imperial society of control
functions through modulation, "like a self-deforming cast that changes
continually, 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.
In a certain sense, then, the colonial might be considered more ideological and
the imperial more pragmatic. Consider as an example of imperial strategy the
practice of New England factories and Appalachian coal mines at the beginning of
the 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 of intense 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 of labor management on a Central American banana
plantation.[23] Multiple ethnic divisions among the workers function as an
element of control in the labor process. The transnational corporation addresses
with different methods and degrees of exploitation and repression each of the
ethnic groups of workers-variously of European and African descent and from
different Amerindian groups. Antagonisms and divisions among the workers along
the various lines of ethnicity and identification prove to enhance profit and
facilitate control. Complete cultural assimilation (in contrast to juridical
integration) is certainly not a priority of imperial 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 of variables that are in a
constant state of flux. 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.
"Divide and conquer" is thus not really the correct formulation of imperial
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 of the Empire is
incorporate, differentiate, manage.
At the beginning of Part 2 we elaborated a notion of modern sovereignty as
crisis: a crisis defined in the continual conflict between, on the one hand, the
plane of immanent forces of the desire and cooperation of the 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 of microconflicts. The contradictions of imperial 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 important 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 of decomposition or mutation
with none of the 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 of generation and
composition, a moment of metamorphosis that potentially frees spaces for change.
We have to forget all the commonplace images 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 of form-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 of Empire
does not indicate any teleology or any end in sight. In other words, the crisis
of modern sovereignty was not temporary or exceptional (as one would refer to
the stock market crash of 1929 as a crisis), but rather the norm of modernity.
In a similar way, corruption is not an aberration of imperial 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 of the
absence of any ontology. In the ontological vacuum, corruption becomes
necessary, objective. Imperial sovereignty thrives on the proliferating
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 of alteration and
metamorphosis, the antifoundational foundation, the deontological mode of being.
Wehave thus arrived at a series of distinctions that conceptually mark the
passage from modern to imperial sovereignty: from the people to the multitude,
from dialectical opposition to the management of hybridities, from the place of
modern sovereignty to the non-place of Empire, from crisis to corruption.
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 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 Étienne de La
Boétie 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 Boétie 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 Boétie'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.
While this Heavenly City is on pilgrimage on earth, it calls out all peoples and
so collects a society of aliens, 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 monuments to the deserters will represent also
those who died in the war because every one of them died cursing the war and
envying the happiness of the deserter. Resistance is born of desertion.
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 of modernity as crisis to our analyses
of the first articulations of a 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 of what type of political subjectivities might contest and overthrow
the forces of Empire, because those subjectivities will arrive only on the
terrain of production. It is as if at this point we can see only shadows of the
figures that will animate our future. Let us therefore descend into the hidden
abode of production to see the figures at work there.
Even when we manage to touch on the productive, ontological dimension of the
problematic and the resistances that arise there, however, we will still not be
in the position-not even at the end of this 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 of experiments advanced through the genius of collective
practice will certainly be necessary today to take that next concrete step and
create a new social body beyond Empire.
Our study set out from the hypothesis that the power of Empire and the
mechanisms of imperial sovereignty can be understood only when confronted on the
most general scale, in their globality. We believe that toward the end of
challenging and resisting Empire and its world market, it is necessary to pose
any alternative at an equally global level. Any proposition of a 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 of ghetto. 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 contested only on its own level of generality and by
pushing the processes that it offers past their present limitations. We have to
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 of a
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 together all populations and all languages in a common
journey could accomplish this. The divine city is a universal city of aliens,
coming together, cooperating, communicating. Our pilgrimage on earth, however,
in contrast to Augustine's, has no transcendent telos beyond; it is and remains
absolutely immanent. Its continuous movement, 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 of the World (IWW) is the
great Augustinian project of modern times. In the first decades of the 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 of the Wobblies
was indeed an immanent pilgrimage, creating a new society in the shell of the
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 of that 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 of IWW
militancy; and second, the name is said to derive from the mispronunciation of a
Chinese cook in Seattle, "I Wobbly Wobbly." The primary focus of the IWW was the
universality of its project. Workers of all 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 of modern 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 of Empire, can we construct a powerful non-place and realize it
concretely, as the terrain of a postmodern republicanism?
In order to address this problematic, allow us a briefdigression. We mentioned
earlier that Marx's theoretical method, in line with the tradition of modern
critiques of modernity, is situated in the dialectic between inside and outside.
Proletarian struggles constitute -in real, ontological terms-the motor of
capitalist development. They constrain capital to adopt ever higher levels of
technology and thus transform labor processes.[3] The struggles force capital
continually to reform the relations of production and transform the relations of
domination. From manufacturing to large-scale industry, from finance capital to
transnational restructuring and the globalization of the market, it is always
the initiatives of organized labor power that determine the figure of capitalist
development. Through this history the place of exploitation 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, sabotage, 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 of capitalist development is completely determined in the
dual standpoint of the 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 of capitalist exploitation are expanding everywhere, not
limited to the factory but tending to occupy the entire social terrain. Onthe
other hand, social relations completely invest the relations of production,
making impossible any externality between social production and economic
production. 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 of
mobile and flexible workers; and at the same time it is intellectual energy and
linguistic and communicative construction of the multitude of intellectual and
affective laborers.[4]
The inside defined by use value and the outside of exchange value are nowhere to
be found, and hence any politics of use value, which was always based on an
illusion of separability, is now definitely inconceivable. That does not mean,
however, that production and exploitation have ceased. Neither have innovation
and development nor the continuous restructuring of relations of power come to
an end. On the contrary, today more than ever, 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 of freedom, desire, and living labor, is what takes place in the
non-place of the postmodern relations of production. Empire is the non-place of
world 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 of
opening 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 of the lived experience of the 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 of political 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 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 of the
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 of power 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 of oppression. And yet we still resist and
struggle.
One should not exaggerate these logical paradoxes. Even though on the new
terrain of Empire exploitation and domination often cannot be defined in
specific places, they nonetheless exist. The globality of the command they
impose represents the inverted image-something like a photo negative-of the
generality of the multitude's productive activities. And yet, this inverted
relation between imperial power and the power of the multitude does not indicate
any homology. In effect, imperial power can no longer discipline the powers of
the multitude; it can only impose control over their general social and
productive capacities. From the economic point of view, the wage regime is
replaced, as a function of regulation, by a flexible and global monetary system;
normative command is replaced by the procedures of control and the police; and
the exercise of domination 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 of the 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 "against-men."[6] Today the generalized being-against of the
multitude 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 of imperial control it may be
desertion. Whereas beingagainst in modernity often meant a direct and/or
dialectical opposition of forces, 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 of the places of power. Throughout the history of
modernity, the mobility and migration of the 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 of the labor force. The
history of black slavery in the Americas demonstrates both the vital need to
control the mobility of labor and the irrepressible desire to flee on the part
of the slaves: from the closed ships of the 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 of exploitation 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 of
the technological conditions of labor. This history would substantially
reconfigure the Marxian conception of the stages of the organization of labor,
which has served as the theoretical framework for numerous authors up to
Polanyi.[7]
Today the mobility of labor power and migratory movements is extraordinarily
diffuse and difficult to grasp. Even the most significant population movements
of modernity (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 of migration. All the
powers of the old world are allied in a merciless operation against it, but the
movement is irresistible. Along with the flight from the socalled Third World
there are flows of political refugees and transfers of intellectual labor power,
in addition to the massive movements of the agricultural, manufacturing, and
service proletariat. The legal and documented movements are dwarfed by
clandestine migrations: the borders of national 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 if they 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 of imperial
reproduction; but positively, what pulls forward is the wealth of desire and the
accumulation of expressive and productive capacities that the processes of
globalization have determined in the consciousness of every individual and
social group-and thus a certain hope. Desertion and exodus are a powerful form
of class struggle within and against imperial postmodernity. This mobility,
however, still constitutes a spontaneous level of struggle, and, as we noted
earlier, it most often leads today to a new rootless condition of poverty and
misery.
A new nomad horde, a new race of barbarians, will arise to invade or evacuate
Empire. Nietzsche was oddly prescient of their destiny in the nineteenth
century. "Problem: where are the barbarians of the 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 of the power
of desertion and exodus, the power of the nomad horde, than the fall of the
Berlin Wall and the collapse of the entire Soviet bloc? In the desertion from
"socialist discipline," savage mobility and mass migration contributed
substantially to the collapse of the system. In fact, the desertion of
productive cadres disorganized and struck at the heart of the disciplinary
system of the bureaucratic Soviet world. The mass exodus of highly 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 of the labor force can
indeed express an open political conflict and contribute to the destruction of
the regime. What we need, however, is more. We need a force capable of not only
organizing the destructive capacities of the multitude, but also constituting
through the desires of the multitude an alternative. The counter-Empire must
also be a new global vision, a new way of living in the world.
Numerous republican political projects in modernity assumed mobility as a
privileged terrain for struggle and organization: from the so-called Socians of
the 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 of the 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. Postmodern
republicanism, ifit is to arise, must face a similar task.
Those who are against, while escaping from the local and particular constraints
of their human condition, must also continually attempt to construct a new body
and a new life. This is a necessarily violent, barbaric passage, but as Walter
Benjamin says, it is a positive barbarism: "Barbarisms? Precisely. We affirm
this in order to introduce a new, positive notion of barbarism. 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 encounter 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 general, but we can
recognize them today first and foremost in corporeal relations and
configurations of gender and sexuality.[11] Conventional norms of corporeal and
sexual relations between and within genders are increasingly open to challenge
and transformation. Bodies themselves transform and mutate to create new
posthuman bodies.[12] The first condition of this 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 hybridizations.[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 of
the configuration of republicanism "against" imperial civilization. The
anthropological exodus is important primarily because here is where the
positive, constructive face of the mutation begins to appear: an ontological
mutation in action, the concrete invention of a 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 of modernity.
This notion of anthropological 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 allencompassing 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
of the body, such as piercings and tattoos, punk fashion and its various
imitations, are all initial indications of this corporeal transformation, but in
the end they do not hold a candle to the kind of radical mutation needed here.
The will to be against really needs a body that is completely incapable of
submitting 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, however, 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 of mixture 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 of a
homohomo produced by art and knowledge, and that Spinoza spoke of a powerful
body produced by that highest consciousness that is infused with love. The
infinite paths of the barbarians must form a new mode of life. Such
transformations will always remain weak and ambiguous, however, so long as they
are cast only in terms of form and order. Hybridity itself is an empty gesture,
and the mere refusal of order simply leaves us on the edge of nothingness-or
worse, these gestures 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 of production. On
the terrain of production we will be able to recognize that this mobility and
artificiality do not merely represent the exceptional experiences of small
privileged groups but indicate, rather, the common productive experience of the
multitude. As early as the nineteenth century, proletarians were recognized as
the nomads of the 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 migrations. The anthropological
metamorphoses of bodies are established through the common experience of labor
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 of anthropological mutation
both in individual terms and in terms of collective social life. The
contemporary form of exodus and the new barbarian life demand that tools become
poietic prostheses, liberating us from the conditions of modern 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 of use value
disappears from the imperial terrain, the new forms of labor power are charged
with the task of producing anew the human (or really the posthuman). This task
will be accomplished primarily through the new and increasingly immaterial forms
of affective and intellectual labor power, in the community that they
constitute, in the artificiality that they present as a project.
With this passage the deconstructive phase of critical 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 of the human, of living-a powerful 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 deconstruction, to these new terrains of possibility-but we should remember that this is a fable and nothing more. The force that must instead drive forward theoretical practice to actualize these terrains of potential metamorphosis is still (and ever more intensely) the common experience of the new productive practices and the concentration of productive labor on the plastic and fluid terrain of the new communicative, biological, and mechanical technologies. Being republican today, then, means first of all struggling within and constructing against Empire, on its hybrid, modulating terrains. And here we should add, against all moralisms and all positions of resentment and nostalgia, that this new imperial terrain provides greater possibilities for creation and liberation. The multitude, in its will to be-against and its desire for liberation, must push through Empire to come out the other side.
NOTES
2.6 IMPERIAL SOVEREIGNTY
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
of Minnesota Press, 1991).
5. We find versions of this spatial configuration of inside and outside among
many of the 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 of modern 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 of Chicago 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 of Hannah Arendt's notion of the political
articulated in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago 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 Félix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), p. 422.
12. There are undoubtedly zones of deprivation within the world market where the
flow of capital 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 implicit logics
of global capital (as in the cycles of poverty 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 of the global economic hierarchy.
13. For an excellent explanation of Foucault's concept of the diagram, see
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sea´n Hand (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 34-37.
14. See Étienne Balibar, "Is There a 'Neo-Racism'?" in Étienne 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 of Cultural Identity," Critical Inquiry, 18, no. 4 (Summer 1992), 655-
685. Benn Michaels critiques the kind of racism 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 of
the reactionary reversal of the slogan "The personal is the political," see pp.
175-180. For her excellent analysis of the "intimate public sphere," see pp. 2-
24.
20. The liberal order of Empire achieves the kind of "overlapping consensus"
proposed by John Rawls in which all are required to set aside their
"comprehensive doctrines" in the interests of tolerance. See John Rawls,
Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). For a critical
review of his book, see Michael Hardt, "On Political Liberalism," Qui Parle, 7,
no. 1 (Fall/Winter 1993), 140-149.
21. On the (re)creation of ethnic 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.
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 of generation and corruption, see Reiner Schürmann, Des hégémonies brisées (Mouvezin: T.Efir., 1996).
REFUSAL
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. Étienne de La Boétie, 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.
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