Hardt Michael, Negri Antonio. Empire

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IMPERIAL SOVEREIGNTY 193

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 stu-

dents 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 theoreti-

cal 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. Ac-

cording to Gilles Deleuze and Fe

lix 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 eccen-

tric and backward waves . . . From the viewpoint of racism, there

is no exterior, there are no people on the outside.’’

Deleuze and

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Guattari challenge us to conceive racist practice not in terms of

binary divisions and exclusion but as a strategy of differential inclu-

sion. 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 engag-

ing 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 exclu-

sions; 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 re-

gimes 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

IMPERIAL SOVEREIGNTY 195

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 antago-

nism, 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 manage-

ment 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

196 PASSAGES OF SOVEREIGNTY

of diapers) are the production processes of subjectivity. In a reﬂexive

way, then, through its own actions, the subject is acted on, gener-

ated. 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 any-

more’; the army tells us, ‘You’re not in school anymore.’ ’’

Never-

theless, 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 post-

modernism is what you have when the modern theory of social

constructivism is taken to its extreme and all subjectivity is recog-

nized 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.

IMPERIAL SOVEREIGNTY 197

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 indeter-

minate. 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.’’

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 soci-

ety. 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

198 PASSAGES OF SOVEREIGNTY

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.

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.

IMPERIAL SOVEREIGNTY 199

The second moment of imperial control, its differential mo-

ment, 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 capital-

ism.

These differences are imagined to be ‘‘cultural’’ rather than

‘‘political,’’ under the assumption that they will not lead to uncon-

trollable 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 contin-

ually, from one instant to the next, or like a sieve whose pattern

changes from one point to the next.’’

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.

200 PASSAGES OF SOVEREIGNTY

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.

Multiple ethnic divisions among the workers function as an element

of control in the labor process. The transnational corporation ad-

dresses with different methods and degrees of exploitation and

repression each of the ethnic groups of workers—variously of Euro-

pean 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 ju-

ridical 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.

IMPERIAL SOVEREIGNTY 201

‘‘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.

From Crisis to Corruption

At the beginning of Part 2 we elaborated a notion of modern

sovereignty as crisis: a crisis deﬁned in the continual conﬂict be-

tween, 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 impor-

tant 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.

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

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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 proliferat-

ing 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 anti-

foundational foundation, the deontological mode of being.

We have thus arrived at a series of distinctions that conceptually

mark the passage from modern to imperial sovereignty: from the