Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri tells a story with 2
main characters: the Empire and the Multitude.
1) Empire
Empire is the form of sovereignty that exists
under conditions of globalization. Hardt and Negri are responding to the debate
over whether global capitalism has caused sovereignty to decline by arguing
that while the nation-state’s sovereignty is indeed declining this does on mean
that sovereignty per se is declining.
Rather sovereignty has been re-scaled from the
level of the nation state to the level of the global. Of course, state institutions
continue to exist. But now, when governments intervene to keep the peace, their
police forces (whether in Seattle in the US or in Genoa in Italy) act in the
name of empire (the US in Iraq) in much the same way that the US judges act in
the name of the American people.
The difference is that “America” is a national
identity that is articulated to a given territory, while Empire, since
it is global, is deterritorialized.
Empire is an
original contribution to debates over the fate of sovereignty in a globalized
world.
2) The Multitude
The second main character in Hardt and Negri's Empire
is the multitude. Hardt and Negri see the coming of Empire and the imperial
world as good news. Both the imperial world and capitalism are oppressive forms
of power that are like parasites upon our labor power. The conditions that
define Empire will enable the possibility of the overthrow of these oppressive
forms of power and the self-organization of democracy.
The constituent power that will constitute this
new world of absolute democracy is the multitude.
As capital reorganizes itself globally to take
advantage of a global labor pool and as capital organizes this activity through
global communication networks, it gradually crosses the barriers from one
nation to another or between home and factory.
By developing increasingly mobile subjects to
serve its needs, the imperial world paves the way for a democracy that will no
longer be limited by exclusionary national boundaries but will become truly
global.
As the protests organized against global
capital and a global war on terror illustrate, the very communication networks
that are outside national control and that facilitate the movement and fluidity
of capital, can also facilitate the self-organization of democratic action at a
new global level by a new political subject, the multitude.
Today, revolution on a global scale against
capital and on behalf of labor has reentered the academic discourse with the
publication of Hardt and Negri’s Empire
In this post-911 era, critiques of nation, nationalism
and patriotism are controversial to say the least. Nationalism may be on the
skids but patriotism certainly seems to be alive and well in middle America.
Hardt and Negri's critique of nationalism is apt and
timely. They anticipated with almost uncanny accuracy the emergence of
international coalitions and police forces like those that are operating as we
speak.
In addition to describing the sunset of nationalism,
Antonio Negri's book explores the sunrise of globalism. This phase of
their account warrants some critical attention.
Briefly, the book offers an effective argument for
globalism as a socio-political singularity; and in this respect, Hardt and Negri
diverge from the views of, say, Anna Tsing who portrays globalization as an
imagined collection of "hit or miss convergences" rather than a
"single claimant as a world-making system" ("The Global
Situation," Cultural Anthropology 15 (3): 334).
While their argument for globalism as a real and
unified force is intriguing, their argument for the formative role played by
popular resistance in postmodern sovereignty is vague
Hardt and Negri open their case in Empire by
arguing that nation-state based systems of power are rapidly unraveling under
the onslaught of world capitalism.
Globalization cannot be understood as a simple process of de-regulating
world markets.
The term ‘Empire’ as they use it
refers not to a system in which tribute flows from peripheries to great capital
cities (the Greek Empire, the Roman Empire, the British Empire). Their interpretation of “Empire” refers to a
fluid, diffuse, anonymous global network … flows of people, information, and
wealth which are too fast, vigorous, and disorderly to be monitored and
controlled from a metropolitan, urban control center.
The old conformist idea of empire
is that of the existence of a statist world of ruling class and proletariat, of
a dominant core and a subject periphery.
This statist world is breaking down
and is being replaced by a less dichotomous and more intricate and complicated
pattern of inequality.
It is generally thought that if the
contemporary world system can be described as an empire, it is because of the
overwhelming concentration of financial, diplomatic and military power in
American hands.
The overlords of Washington and New
York themselves no longer shy away from the word “imperialism,” (or
pre-emptive, or hegemonic …etc…) as a description of their planetary ambitions
and agendas.
Hardt and Negri reject neoconservative
views and any suggestion that America can be seen as an imperialist power in
the traditional meaning of the word imperialist. They argue that Empire (note the upper case
form and the absence of any definite article) EXCLUDES any state-based
imperialism.
Hardt and Negri argue that the new
world order can be seen is almost the same way as we view the old statist,
traditional state/city based idea of empire with its constitutionally defined
concepts of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy (the Roman Empire is the
classic example here). Monarchy,
aristocracy, and democracy were mixed together to enable Rome to become the
master of the Mediterranean world.
The new world order can be seen as
analogous structure:
- US nuclear supremacy represents the
monarchical principle
- The economic wealth of the G8 and
transnational corporations represent the aristocratic principle
- The internet and the information
revolution represent the democratic principle
Reviewers, critics, and supporters
of H&N have reduced these three principles down to:
So where do this put us. If we stay with the comparisons of Empire
with empire, are we witnessing the rise and ascendancy or global capitalism or
are we witnessing the beginning of the end … the decline of global capitalism.
Overall Hardt and Negri think we are witnessing the beginning of
the end …
Hardt and Negri do not believe that Empire emerged from the defeat
of systemic challenges to capital.
They see the emergence of Empire as a resounding testimony to the
heroic mass struggles that shattered the old Eurocentric regime of national
states and colonialism.
The conclusion that Hardt and Negri draw in Empire,
and this is the main point of their book, is that contemporary globalization
(which they term Empire), though it certainly introduces new forms of
capitalist command and exploitation, is heartily to be welcomed because it is
capital's latest concession to the force of insurgent subjectivity. Though as
always (until now) this concession has been provided on capital's own terms, it
contains the seeds of another globalization, the counter-Empire of
global communism. There should be no nostalgia for the decline of the
traditional working class. The political subjectivity that emerges within this
phase of history is the most expansive and most fundamental political subject
of all: the multitude is about to come into its own.
Hardt and Negri locate their thesis of Empire in an
immense historical sweep that runs from the Roman Empire to the present day,
across a vast geographical swathe from Europe to the U.S. to the former Soviet
Union to all corners of the colonial and postcolonial world, and in a range of
disciplines from philosophy to juridical theory to economics.
What makes their approach so productive, and what gives
it its power, is that it constitutes a new theory of history, concerned to
disentangle the plane of immanence from the plane of transcendence.
In Empire, claim Hardt and Negri, the most dramatic
historical transformation is that capitalist command is now also immanent to
(and has really subsumed) society; but its hold on production is also now
absolutely arbitrary. Hence the ferocity of the interventions we have seen in
Iraq and Kosovo--"the pure exercise of command, without any proportionate
or adequate reference to the world of life" (391).
It is difficult to discuss in detail all the components
of Empire's argument. Central themes, however, include:
·
Hardt
and Negri's differentiation of Empire (immanent, mobile, and hybrid) from imperialism
(composed of a network of transcendent nation-states, fixed boundaries, and
clear demarcations);
·
their
rewriting of the history of modernity, isolating both a revolutionary strain
initiated by Renaissance humanism (and associated with Machiavelli, Spinoza,
and Marx) and a conservative reaction (associated with Hobbes, Kant, and
Hegel);
·
their
praise of the expansiveness of the U.S. constitution compared to the rotting
aristocracy of Eurocentrism;
·
their
use of the Foucauldian concept of biopower;
They borrow this concept of biopolitics from Michel Foucault. Biopolitics concerns not a way of life but
biological life itself – our body as a species, biological processes, and the
supervision of a “population.” Forms of
power that arose in the 17th century, according to Foucault, sought
to take charge of life. Forms of
knowledge that facilitated this shift in the organization of power include the
rise of public health, demography, and eugenics. In this way the life and health of the
population became a central political preoccupation. Production is biopolitical for H&N but
economic production is also biopolitical.
The multitude is a biopolitical form of life that exists purely on the
plane of immanence (p 293).
·
their
redescription of late capitalism in terms of immaterial labor;
·
their
contrast between constituent and constituted power.
Likewise, it would be futile to cover the many
questions and problems that the book raises. Inevitably, at every turn Hardt
and Negri set themselves up for criticisms and objections.
There is much that would require further elaboration
and specification:
·
Perhaps
they treat some colleagues/scholars very off-handedly. Descartes and Rousseau,
Bhabha and Said are each dismissed in a paragraph or two
·
Can
the Second World War be so simply described as "a civil war [between state
and multitude] cloaked in the guise of conflicts among sovereign states"
(110)?
·
Does
the U.S. really always "have to answer the call" for intervention in
regional conflicts (181)--what about Israel or Sierra Leone?
·
Is
their description of the "multitude of the poor" (157) not a return
to the discredited Marxist idea of immiseration in its image of proletarian
destitution?
·
Why
do they wish to hold on the concept of value (rather than wealth) beyond
measure?
But such objections would be missing the point--in part
because the point is precisely that in their grand and confident manner, Hardt
and Negri have set the stage for a series of potential explorations that could
follow up on each and every one of these queries.
It is also worth commenting on the
book's tone. Empire is littered with exclamation marks and with
the various indicators of absolute self-belief ("in fact" or
"actually" this, "really" the other), not to mention the
most brutal of put-downs (Amnesty International and Oxfam, for instance,
described as "mendicant orders of Empire" [36]).
Let us begin with a brief
historical analysis of the two major characteristics of "modernity,"
namely immanence and distinction.
Immanence, they contend, names the trend that gained strength as the Middle
Ages passed into modernity. It refers to the increasingly strong conviction
that authority and its allies (truth, virtue, and beauty) are rooted in the
world rather than in heaven. Regarding immanence, H&N have overemphasized
the hermetic thinkers of the late middle ages and underemphasized the
contribution of Augustinian thought to the shaping of modern social life.
Their handling of distinction,
both intellectual (reason) and territorial (borders), is balanced and
insightful. Moreover, their analysis makes it clear that the role played by distinction
in the history of nationalism implicates an array of related concepts, notably
culture, race, and gender, all of which help to distinguish external people and
experiences from all that is internal and national.
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