Hardt Michael, Negri Antonio. Empire

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COUNTER-EMPIRE 213

Today the mobility of labor power and migratory movements

is extraordinarily diffuse and difﬁcult to grasp. Even the most sig-

niﬁcant 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 so-

called 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 globaliza-

tion 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 post-

modernity. 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.’’

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,

214 INTERMEZZO

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.

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. Post-

modern republicanism, if it is to arise, must face a similar task.

New Barbarians

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,

COUNTER-EMPIRE 215

barbaric passage, but as Walter Benjamin says, it is a positive barba-

rism: ‘‘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 encoun-

ter 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.’’

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 gen-

eral, but we can recognize them today ﬁrst and foremost in corporeal

relations and conﬁgurations of gender and sexuality.

Conventional

norms of corporeal and sexual relations between and within genders

are increasingly open to challenge and transformation. Bodies them-

selves transform and mutate to create new posthuman bodies.

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 hybrid-

izations.

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 republi-

canism ‘‘against’’ imperial civilization. The anthropological exodus

is important primarily because here is where the positive, construc-

tive face of the mutation begins to appear: an ontological mutation

216 INTERMEZZO

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 all-

encompassing control.

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 indica-

tions 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!)

In addition to being radically unprepared for normalization, how-

ever, 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

COUNTER-EMPIRE 217

simply leaves us on the edge of nothingness—or worse, these ges-

tures 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.

Even when their lives remain

ﬁxed in one geographical location (as is most often the case), their

creativity and productivity deﬁne corporeal and ontological migra-

tions. 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 intellec-

tual 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.

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 pow-

218 INTERMEZZO

erful 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 decon-

struction, to these new terrains of possibility—but we should re-

member 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 con-

centration 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 multi-

tude, in its will to be-against and its desire for liberation, must push

through Empire to come out the other side.

PART

PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION

3.1

THE LIMITS OF IMPERIALISM

The world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of it is

being divided up, conquered, and colonised. To think of these stars

that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can

never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of

that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.

Cecil Rhodes

For a large portion of the twentieth century, the critique

of imperialism has been among the most active and urgent arenas

of Marxist theory.

Many of these arguments are today certainly

outdated and the situation they refer to is utterly transformed. This

does not mean, however, that we have nothing to learn from them.

These critiques of imperialism can help us understand the passage

from imperialism to Empire because in certain respects they antici-

pated that passage.

One of the central arguments of the tradition of Marxist think-

ing on imperialism is that there is an intrinsic relation between

capitalism and expansion, and that capitalist expansion inevitably

takes the political form of imperialism. Marx himself wrote very

little about imperialism, but his analyses of capitalist expansion are

central to the entire tradition of critique. What Marx explained most

clearly is that capital constantly operates through a reconﬁguration of

the boundaries of the inside and the outside. Indeed, capital does

not function within the conﬁnes of a ﬁxed territory and population,

but always overﬂows its borders and internalizes new spaces: ‘‘The

tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept

222 PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION

of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome.’’

This restive character of capital constitutes an ever-present point of

crisis that pertains to the essence of capital itself: constant expansion is

its always inadequate but nonetheless necessary attempt to quench

an insatiable thirst. We do not mean to suggest that this crisis and

these barriers will necessarily lead capital to collapse. On the con-

trary, as it is for modernity as a whole, crisis is for capital a normal

condition that indicates not its end but its tendency and mode of

operation. Capital’s construction of imperialism and its move be-

yond it are both given in the complex play between limits and bar-

riers.

The Need for an Outside

Marx analyzes capital’s constant need for expansion ﬁrst by focusing

on the process of realization and thus on the unequal quantitative

relationship between the worker as producer and the worker as

consumer of commodities.

The problem of realization is one of

the factors that drives capital beyond its boundaries and poses the

tendency toward the world market. In order to understand the

problem we have to start out from exploitation. ‘‘To begin with,’’

we read in the Grundrisse, ‘‘capital forces the workers beyond neces-

sary labour to surplus labour. Only in this way does it realize

itself, and create surplus value’’ (p. 421). The wage of the worker

(corresponding to necessary labor) must be less than the total value

produced by the worker. This surplus value, however, must ﬁnd

an adequate market in order to be realized. Since each worker must

produce more value than he or she consumes, the demand of the

worker as consumer can never be an adequate demand for the

surplus value. In a closed system, the capitalist production and

exchange process is thus deﬁned by a series of barriers: ‘‘Capital,

then, posits necessary labour time as the barrier to the exchange

value of living labour capacity; surplus labour time as the barrier

to necessary labour time; and surplus value as the barrier to surplus

labour time’’ (p. 422). All these barriers ﬂow from a single barrier

deﬁned by the unequal relationship between the worker as producer

and the worker as consumer.