Hardt Michael, Negri Antonio. Empire

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

2.6

IMPERIAL SOVEREIGNTY

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 char-

acterization 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.

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 posi-

tions, but rather with the political system of the French Fifth Repub-

lic, 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

184 PASSAGES OF SOVEREIGNTY

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.

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 [capacite

s] 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.’’

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 moder-

nity 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. Repub-

lican projects are always solidly rooted within the dominant histori-

cal 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 con-

structed 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

IMPERIAL SOVEREIGNTY 185

that responds directly to the real historical process and the demands

of the epochal crisis. In Spinoza, too, the critique of modern sover-

eignty emerges from within the historical process. Against the de-

ployments 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 multi-

tude, rules; in fact, democracy is the only form of government in

which the absolute can be realized. For Marx, ﬁnally, every libera-

tory 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 indepen-

dence exists only within capitalist development itself. In all these

cases the critique of modernity is situated within the historical evolu-

tion 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 de-

sire, 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 con-

cepts, which extends well beyond their ambiguous relation to mod-

ern social structures, consists primarily in their being posed as onto-

logical demands.

The power of the modern critique of modernity

resides precisely where the blackmail of bourgeois realism is re-

fused—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.

186 PASSAGES OF SOVEREIGNTY

The limitations of these critiques become clear when we ques-

tion their power to transform not only the objective we are aiming

for, but also the standpoint of critique. One brief example 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 of truth 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 develop-

ment of the unity of true 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, Spino-

za’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.

There Is No More Outside

The domains conceived as inside and outside and the relationship

between them are conﬁgured differently in a variety of modern

discourses.

The spatial conﬁguration of inside and outside itself,

IMPERIAL SOVEREIGNTY 187

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 gener-

ally 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 meta-

phorically in spatial terms as an outside within the human mind, a

continuation of nature deep within us. Here the sovereignty of the

Self rests 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.’’

Certainly we continue to have forests and crickets and thunder-

storms 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 under-

stood as outside, that is, they are not seen as original and indepen-

dent 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 re-

188 PASSAGES OF SOVEREIGNTY

placed by a play of degrees and intensities, of hybridity and artiﬁc-

iality.

The outside has also declined in terms of a rather different

modern dialectic that deﬁned the relation between public and pri-

vate 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.

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 pro-

tected interior and isolated spaces.

Alternatively, consider how the

banlieu of Paris has become a series of amorphous and indeﬁnite

spaces that promote isolation rather than any interaction or commu-

nication. 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.

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

IMPERIAL SOVEREIGNTY 189

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.

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’e

tre 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 be-

come blurred. The Other that might delimit a modern sovereign

Self has 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 every-

where.

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.

190 PASSAGES OF SOVEREIGNTY

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.

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.

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 omni-

crisis 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.

Imperial Racism

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 de-

colonization 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

IMPERIAL SOVEREIGNTY 191

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 anti-

racism 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: if our 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 co-

opts 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

192 PASSAGES OF SOVEREIGNTY

their blood or their genes, but are due to their belonging to different

historically determined cultures.

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. E

tienne 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.

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 compati-

bility 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 segrega-

tion. Nonetheless, it is a pluralist theoretical position: all cultural

identities are equal in principle. This pluralism accepts all the differ-

ences 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.

This shift in racist theory