Empire Notes: The Decentered Kind – Ch. 1.1-Ch. 2.2 - Yousuf
1.1 World Order
1.2 Biopolitical Production
1.3 Alternatives within the Empire
2.1 Two Europes, Two Modernities
2.2 Sovereignty of the Nation-State
On the logic of Tendencies in H&N:
One of the first things that SHOULD strike readers of Hardt and Negri’s Empire is their use of Marx’s language of tendencies to describe the emerging phenomenon they term Empire. Rather than delineating an overnight shift in the constitution of the world’s present, H&N’s aim is to capture the tendency, the trend, the inclination in the movements and transformations of global sovereignty, exploitation, value and production. The logic of tendency can be applied to their claims about the emergence of Empire as a globalized, de-centered structure of command, that superimposes itself above and over the sovereignty of nation-states. From the perspective of the tendency, this does not imply the end of the nation-state today, but rather its gradual displacement from a position of hegemony in the field of both international and domestic production and command, by the new and still emerging global sovereignty of Empire. Another place where the logic of tendencies should be applied is in their discussion of “immaterial labor” as the new hegemonic form of production. This is noted numerous other times in Empire, but it is perhaps best explained in a passage from their newest book, Multitude, in the Excursus titled “Method: In Marx’s Footstep’s”.
“We already employed Marx’s notion of the tendency when we claimed earlier that the contemporary economy is defined by a hegemony of immaterial production. Even though immaterial labor is not dominant in quantitative terms, our claim is that it has imposed a tendency on all other forms of labor, transforming them in accordance with its own characteristics, and in that sense it has adopted a hegemonic position. Remember that, as Marx himself notes in the opening pages of Capital, when he studied industrial labor and capitalist productions they occupied only a portion of the English economy, a smaller portion of the German and other European economies, and only an infinitesimal fraction of the global economy. In quantitative terms agriculture was certainly still dominant, but Marx recognized in capital and industrial labor a tendency that would act as the motor of future transformations. When orthodox Marixsts tell us today that the numbers of the industrial working class worldwide have not declined and that therefore industrial labor and the factory must remain the guiding core of all Marxist analysis, we have to remind them of Marx’s method of the tendency. Numbers are important, but the key is to grasp the direction of the present, to read which seeds will grow and which wither. Marx’s great effort in the mid-nineteenth century was to interpret the tendency and project capital, then in its infancy as a complete social form.” (Multitude, 141)
Jumping to a previous section, we see how this relates directly to their use of the concept of immaterial labor:
“In the final decades of the twentieth century, industrial labor lost its hegemony and in its stead emerged “immaterial labor,” that is, labor that creates immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response. …When we claim that immaterial labor is tending toward the hegemonic position we are not saying that most of the workers in the world today are producing primarily immaterial goods. On the contrary, agricultural labor remains, as it has for centuries, dominant in quantitative terms, and industrial labor has not declined in terms of numbers globally. Immaterial labor constitutes a minority of the global labor, and it is concentrated in some of the dominant regions of the globe. Our claims, rather, is that immaterial labor has become hegemonic in qualitative terms and has imposed a tendency on other forms of labor and society itself. Immaterial labor, in other words, is today in the same position that industrial labor was 150 years ago, when it accounted for only a small fraction of global production and was concentrated in a small part of the world but nonetheless exerted hegemony over all other forms of production. Just as in that phase all forms of labor and society itself had to industrialize, today labor and society have to informationalize, become intelligent, become communicative, become affective.” (Multitude, 108-109).
This approach of the tendency is infused throughout H&N’s argument. It establishes the importance of grasping the direction of capital and production in order to comprehend the best form of resistance possible today that might allow us to move through and beyond the social relation of Empire. It also reminds us to guard against the recycling of old methods of resistance that today might no longer be antagonistic to Empire, but instead can end up coinciding with the logic of Empire’s exploitation (for example, see section 2.3 on postcoloniality, postmodernism, and hybridity as resistance)
1.1 The Juridical constitution of EMPIRE: The world of appearances?
Empire begins with an analysis of the world order from a juridical perspective. This is necessary because they are beginning from the world of appearances, and where we first perceive Empire is in how it expresses itself, and it expresses its influence on world order juridically. The model of the United Nations suits their purposes, although it is obviously incomplete and ambiguous, because it represents the first juridical instantiation of the emergence of Empire. Therefore, the Hobbesian and Lockean (monarchic and liberal, respectively) lines of thought that are resurrected to deal with the UN miss the point because they are still only capable of understanding the relations of force within the global system that the UN is supposed to represent in terms of its relation to nation-states. In H&N’s minds, they (theorists who resurrect Hobbes and Locke to deal with globalization) fail, as do world systems theorists such as Wallerstien, to grasp what is fundamentally new about the current moment.
“Without underestimating these real and important lines of continuity, however, we think it is important to note that what used to be conflict or competition among several imperialist powers has in important respects been replaced by the idea of a single power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common notion of right that is decidedly postcolonial and postimperialist. This is really the point of departure for our study of Empire: a new notion of right, or rather, a new inscription of authority and a new design of the production of norms and legal instruments o coercion that guarantee contracts and resolve conflicts.” (emphasis added, Empire, 9).
1.2 Biopolitics and the Realm of Production
In Chapter 1.2, Biopolitical Production, H&N immediately clarify the limitations of the previous chapter’s focus on the juridical. “Juridical concepts and juridical systems always refer to something other than themselves. Through the evolution and exercise of right, they point toward the material condition that defines their purchase on social reality.” (Empire, 22). This focus on the material realm of production, as the realm of essences, is the first concrete instantiation of their claim that they are approaching Empire from a Marxist perspective.
Biopower? Here we see again an articulation of what is new about our present moment. While their work is grounded in Foucault’s idea of a disciplinary society, H&N also go beyond Foucault, through Foucault. Therefore, their borrowing from Deleuze of a new society of control is not so much a break from disciplinary society as it is an articulation of the full extension of the logic of discipline beyond geographically identifiable institutions, and into the internalized realm of social life itself. This is the concept of absolute biopolitical power.
“In disciplinary society, then, the relationship between power and the individual remained a static one: the disciplinary invasion of power corresponded to the resistance of the individual. By contrast, when power becomes entirely biopolitical, the whole social body is comprised by power’s machine and developed in its virtuality. This relationship is open, qualitative, and affective…Power is thus expressed as a control that extends throughout the depths of the consciousnesses and bodies of the population—and at the same time across the entirety of social relations.” (Empire, 24).
One useful way I’ve been thinking about this shift is in regards to Althusser’s essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”. Althusser argues that at any given historical moment, there can be a plethora of ISA’s, but there is always one particular dominant one; during his time, he thought it was the institution of the school. During ours—and here we are blurring the discontinuities between Althusser and H&N a little bit too much, but I think its useful anyway—rather than the school exercising hegemony, and if there is a hegemonic disciplinary institution that best represents a passage to society of control, perhaps we can identity it as the media. I think the media is a useful example because it I not as geographically identifiable as other previous disciplinary institutions such as the prison, hospital, school, or family, all of which exercise discipline by inviting into the confines of their space. Rather, the media infuses a social control on an individual basis, through the television set, and does so through the production of spectacles.
?? What are other people’s ideas on this? Is it a bad comparison?? How does the media relate to the society of control, etc.??
One of the most important aspects of this passage in biopolitical production from a disciplinary society to a society of control is the withering away of civil society; which can also be expressed as the replacement of a dialectical logic of mediatory command over society with a more immediate and internalized form of control. (see Hardt’s “Withering away of Civil Society,” or Labor of Dionysus, pp. 257-261)
At the end of this chapter, they come back to the recognition of the limitations inherent in any attempts to grasp what is new about Empire through juridical concepts. The old laws of international order are no longer helpful in attempting to grasp the current moment, and instead mislead us, like the resurrection of Hobbesian and Lockean forms of thought. This is why they place emphasis not on an absence of rationality of the present, but on a new one, namely that of “biopolitical technologies,” biopolitical production.
“Social production and juridical legitimation should not be conceived as primary and secondary forces nor as elements of the base and superstructure, but should be understood rather in a state of absolute parallelism and intermixture, coextensive throughout biopolitical society. In Empire and its regime of biopower, economic production and political constitution tend increasingly to coincide.” (Empire, 41).
1.3 Is Resistance Possible in the face of Empire?
This chapter is the first time we see concretely the assertion by H&N of the core autonomous thesis: that capital can only respond to the creative power, or potential of labor, and that in fact it is that resistance of labor through its creative power that is in turn the life blood that capital feeds off.
“One might even say that the construction of Empire and its global networks is a response to the various struggle against the modern machines of power, and specifically to class struggle driven by the multitude’s desire for liberation. The multitude called Empire into being.” (Empire, 43).
This is also the moment when many might begin to accuse H&N of celebrating the arrival of Empire, in contrast to most other theorists on the left, especially in the US, who are caught up with constantly condemning the evil of globalization. They would be right to accuse H&N of partially celebrating the arrival of Empire, but it is up to us to say whether we agree with this or not. They claim to be in good company in their celebration of this new form of sovereignty.
“We claim that Empire is better in the same way that Marx insists that capitalism is better than the forms of society and modes of production that came before it. Marx’s view is grounded on a healthy and lucid disgust for the parochial and rigid hierarchies that preceded capitalist society as well as on a recognition that the potential for liberation is increased in the new situation.”
One of many places we might point to in Marx to find such celebratory potential out of the arrival of Capitalism would be his chapter on cooperation in Vol. 1 of Capital. Ch. 13 of Capital describes the process whereby producers at the individual level, producing at home, exclusively for a home market of use values, are transformed into producers at the co-operative level of the factory, producing collectively with others, in a set geographical location that enables cooperation to take place. The consequences of this are as follows according to Marx:
“Not only do we have her an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of co-operation, but the creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one.” (Emphasis added, Capital, Vol 1, 443).
Therefore, it is not only the leaving behind of the oppressive nature of the modern world, but also the new productive power that the subject of Empire, the Multitude, is capable of, that H&N find celebratory.
This break from much of the current Left’s take on globalization manifests itself for H&N over concrete political projects as well. Specifically, they stand against the “localization of struggles” as an alternative to Empire. They do so for a number of reasons. One, as the chapter title notes, because we are all already within Empire, and according to them, to search for a local outside would be just as futile as to search for a Third World outside. Concrete examples of resistance that refuses the logic of locality might be the Zapatista struggle in Chiapas, or the struggle by the movement of unemployed workers (MTDs) in Argentina. Those theorists still working with old concepts can only understand the Zapatista movement as an attempt to secede from the sovereignty of the Mexican state, and from the attack of neoliberal globalization as well, and to create another state within it. But if we listen to the actions and words of the Zapatistas themselves, they are constantly asserting the necessity for the struggle to be global, and in place of accepting charity and solidarity from abroad (although much is needed and accepted) they often encourage us to go home and fight our own struggles, for the battle against the global enemy of neoliberalism can only be won, according to them, but posing a global solution. The other aspect I can think of in Zapatista practice that goes against locality is the moment of Encuentro.
Similarly, the MTD’s of Argentina understand their struggle as a global one, and they travel to the world social forum with the expressed purpose of circulating their struggle and encountering others who are attempting to do the same in their attempts to fight the global problem. Numerous exchanges between the MST landless movement of Brazil and the various MTD’s in Argentina have also been established in a recognition of the necessity to search beyond the local for answers to problems that are sometimes immediately only understandable as local.
Finally, the attack on locality, which is correspondingly an attack on a search for an outside to Empire from which we can resist it, leads to the necessarily for an immediately global struggle, simultaneously within and against Empire. Specifically, this is a refutation of the relevance of the weakest link thesis of fighting Capitalism, but more importantly, it is an affirmation of the necessity to comprehend struggle in a-spacial terms today. Therefore, they say that in order “to achieve significance, every struggle must attack at the heart of Empire, at its strength.” But this heart of Empire has no correlation to a geographical point. Rather, this heart can be accessed and attacked from any geographical point, this is part of what is unique and vulnerable about Empire, yet simultaneously its greatest productive strength (think cooperation, and socialization of production). “In short, this new phase is defined by the fact that these struggles do not link horizontally, but each one leaps vertically, directly to the virtual center of Empire.”
???My question here is on defining more concretely what this “virtual” center of Empire is, and how it can be accessed. Again the concept of the virtual is still slightly unclear to me, those more familiar with the work of Deleuze and Guattari might be able to help out here…???
My final question for this section regards the following passage:
“From one perspective Empire stands clearly over the multitude and subjects it to the rule of its overarching machine, as a new Leviathan. At the same time, however, from the perspective of social productivity and creativity, from what we have been calling the ontological perspective, the hierarchy is reversed. The multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude—as Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that survives only by sucking off the blood of the living.” (emphasis added, Empire, 62).
So, in this passage we see again the influence of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking and concepts on H&N. “Apparatus of capture” is the title of chapter 13 in Deleuze and Guattari’s A 1000 Plateaus. ???Would anyone with more extensive knowledge of D&G be willing to explain the meaning of this phrase, and how it might differ from, elaborate on, or relate to Marx’s concept of capital, vampire-like, only being able to suck the living life-blood of labor in order to survive???
2.1 A History of Modern European Philosophy
This chapter represents on of many sections in Empire that can be read on its own and be found extremely valuable. In addition to the excerpts on, or rather, against locality, and Ch 2.3 on postcoloniality and postmodernism, and others, this chapter would be more useful as an introduction to modern European philosophy. In just this chapter, they seem to account for a major whole in much of the work reflecting on modern philosophy, and also in the actual philosophy itself. They do so by identifying three philosophical trends.
1) “The revolutionary discovery of the plan of immanence”
2) “The reaction against these immanent forces and the crisis in the form of authority”
3) “The partial and temporary resolution of this crisis in the formation of the modern state as a locus of sovereignty that transcends and mediates the plan of immanent forces” (emphasis added, Empire, 70).
It is not accidental that these three philosophical trends that emerge from each other, appear to operate dialectically, just like H&N’s description of the colonial world and the racism it produces.
“Although modern sovereignty emanated from Europe, however, it was born and developed in large part through Europe’s relationship to its outside, and particularly through its colonial project and the resistance of the colonized. Modern sovereignty emerged, then as the concept of European reaction and European domination both within and outside its borders. They are two coextensive and complementary faces of one development: rule within Europe and European rule over the world.” (Empire, 70).
Therefore, H&N describe the evolution of mediation in response to the threat of immanence. Nature and experience are mediated through the filter of phenomena. Human knowledge is mediated through the reflection of the intellect. The ethical world is mediated through the schematism of reason. “What is at play is a form of mediation, or really a reflexive folding back and a sort of weak transcendence, which relativizes experience and abolishes every instance of the immediate and absolute in human life and history.” Why is this insertion of mediation necessary? “Because claiming that humans could immediately establish their freedom in being would be a subversive delirium.” (Emipre, 79).
They go on to identify the first masterful philosophical argumentation of the necessity for mediation as the work of Rene Descartes. Therefore, I would ask, is what they are really against the very idea of the split between subject and object??? If someone could tie the two together more for me, that would help: mediation tied to subject and object. And in its place, would they offer simply the concept of the production of subjectivity as the permanent and all-encompassing process of life, the terrain over which the battle for life is fought on, over which the multitude can be exploited just as equally as it can liberate itself??
Their critique develops into a critique of Hegel’s philosophy specifically, who they identify as having developed the political solution to the crisis of European modernity: the transcendent power embodied by a realization of Absolute on Earth, the State. Interestingly, they find in the humanist tradition the potential for a subversive approach to this solution of the State. Rather than absolutizing humanism, the way many contemporary theorists do, they celebrate it as useful for its time (while later celebrating the feminist critique of humanism, best articulated in Haraway’s “Cyborg”, as useful for our current moment). “Sovereignty is thus defined both by transcendence and by representation, two concepts that the humanist tradition has posed as contradictory.” (Empire, 84).
Here posing one of those great SAT analogies is useful for me.
European modernity : Capitalism
Form : Content
This relationship is best described by Adam Smith, who begins with a theory of industry that poses a contradiction between private enrichment and public interest. The first synthesis of these two is the “invisible hand” of the market. Then, the political transcendental of the modern state is define (by Smith) as an economic transcendental. “Smith’s theory of value was the soul and substance of the concept of the modern sovereign state”(86). The genius of Hegel then becomes apparent. “In Hegel, the synthesis of the theory of modern sovereignty and the theory of value produced by capitalist political economy if finally realized, just as in his work there is a perfect realization of the consciousness of the union of the absolutist and republican aspects—that is, the Hobbesian and Rousseauian aspects—of the theory of modern sovereignty.”(86-87). Essentially, Hegel synthesizes Hobbes and Rousseau on the one hand, with Adam Smith on the other, and mediates the two concepts with the transcendent sovereignty of the state. Tying the argument back into previous chapters, H&N claim that “the realization of modern sovereignty is the birth of biopower”(89).
2.2 We the People
While 2.1 focused on the state, 2.2 focuses on the nation. First distinction H&N make is between the patrimonial state on the one hand, and the nation-state on the other. Here the patrimonial state best represents the political form of rule between the king and his subjects dominant under feudalism. While they agree that there are many continuities between the two, an important development in the passage between then is that “the feudal order of the subject yielded to the disciplinary order of the citizen”(95). Here, the represented group shifts from passive, in the form of the subject, as subject to the King, to active, in the form of, citizen, as citizen of the Nation. The second relation to sovereignty is presented as much more participatory and voluntary, and correspondingly requires such an approach.
Most importantly, the concept of a nation “reifies sovereignty in the most rigid way; they make the relation of sovereignty into a thing (often by naturalizing it) and thus weed out every residue of social antagonism. The nation”, therefore, “is a kind of ideological shortcut that attempts to free the concepts of sovereignty and modernity from the antagonism and crisis that define them”(95).
Sovereignty, however, they claim has been studied more as an administrative process than it has as an antagonistic point of class conflict. Therefore, they see the French Revolution as a trauma in the heart of the crisis of modernity, and the development of the French Republic, as the final most complete resolution to that crisis. Here, they go back to the distinction in European philosophy between the people, as embodied and represented by the nation, and the multitude, as that body of people that is un-representable. “Whereas the multitude is an inconclusive constituent relation, the people is a constituted synthesis that is prepared for sovereignty.”
Here, it might be useful to explore what they mean by constituent: I’ll borrow from the glossary of Radical Thought in Italy: “Constituent Power: This term refers to a form of power that continually creates and animates a set of juridical and political frameworks. Its perpetually open processes should be contrasted with the static and closed character of constituted power. The revolutionary dynamic of constituent power is itself the constitution of a republic; when the revolutionary forces are closed down or reined in to a constituted framework, the constituent moment too has passed.” (Radical Thought in Italy, 261).
