Hardt Michael, Negri Antonio. Empire

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VIRTUALITIES 363

have been the emigrants and the ﬂows of population that have

destroyed old and new boundaries. Indeed, the postcolonial hero

is the one who continually transgresses territorial and racial bound-

aries, who destroys particularisms and points toward a common

civilization. Imperial command, by contrast, isolates populations in

poverty and allows them to act only in the straitjackets of subordi-

nated postcolonial nations. The exodus from localism, the transgres-

sion of customs and boundaries, and the desertion from sovereignty

were the operative forces in the liberation of the Third World.

Here more than ever we can recognize clearly the difference Marx

deﬁned between emancipation and liberation.

Emancipation is the

entry of new nations and peoples into the imperial society of control,

with its new hierarchies and segmentations; liberation, in contrast,

means the destruction of boundaries and patterns of forced migra-

tion, the reappropriation of space, and the power of the multitude

to determine the global circulation and mixture of individuals and

populations. The Third World, which was constructed by the colo-

nialism and imperialism of nation-states and trapped in the cold

war, is destroyed when the old rules of the political discipline of

the modern state (and its attendant mechanisms of geographical and

ethnic regulation of populations) are smashed. It is destroyed when

throughout the ontological terrain of globalization the most

wretched of the earth becomes the most powerful being, because its

new nomad singularity is the most creative force and the omnilateral

movement of its desire is itself the coming liberation.

The power to circulate is a primary determination of the

virtuality of the multitude, and circulating is the ﬁrst ethical act of

a counterimperial ontology. This ontological aspect of biopolitical

circulation and mixture is highlighted even more when it is con-

trasted with other meanings attributed to postmodern circulation,

such as market exchanges or the velocity of communication. Those

aspects of speed and circulation belong, rather, to the violence of

imperial command.

Exchanges and communication dominated by

capital are integrated into its logic, and only a radical act of resistance

can recapture the productive sense of the new mobility and hybridity

364 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF EMPIRE

of subjects and realize their liberation. This rupture, and only this

rupture, brings us to the ontological terrain of the multitude and

to the terrain on which circulation and hybridization are biopolitical.

Biopolitical circulation focuses on and celebrates the substantial

determinations of the activities of production, self-valorization, and

freedom. Circulation is a global exodus, or really nomadism; and

it is a corporeal exodus, or really miscegenation.

General Intellect and Biopower

We insisted earlier on the importance and limitations of Marx’s

notion of ‘‘general intellect’’ (Section 1.2). At a certain point in

capitalist development, which Marx only glimpsed as the future,

the powers of labor are infused by the powers of science, communi-

cation, and language. General intellect is a collective, social intelli-

gence created by accumulated knowledges, techniques, and know-

how. The value of labor is thus realized by a new universal and

concrete labor force through the appropriation and free usage of

the new productive forces. What Marx saw as the future is our era.

This radical transformation of labor power and the incorporation

of science, communication, and language into productive force

have redeﬁned the entire phenomenology of labor and the entire

world horizon of production.

The danger of the discourse of general intellect is that it risks

remaining entirely on the plane of thought, as if the new powers

of labor were only intellectual and not also corporeal (Section 3.4).

As we saw earlier, new forces and new positions of affective labor

characterize labor power as much as intellectual labor does. Bio-

power names these productive capacities of life that are equally

intellectual and corporeal. The powers of production are in fact

today entirely biopolitical; in other words, they run throughout

and constitute directly not only production but also the entire realm

of reproduction. Biopower becomes an agent of production when

the entire context of reproduction is subsumed under capitalist rule,

that is, when reproduction and the vital relationships that constitute

it themselves become directly productive. Biopower is another

VIRTUALITIES 365

name for the real subsumption of society under capital, and both

are synonymous with the globalized productive order. Production

ﬁlls the surfaces of Empire; it is a machine that is full of life, an

intelligent life that by expressing itself in production and reproduc-

tion as well as in circulation (of labor, affects, and languages) stamps

society with a new collective meaning and recognizes virtue and

civilization in cooperation.

The powers of science, knowledge, affect, and communication

are the principal powers that constitute our anthropological virtual-

ity and are deployed on the surfaces of Empire. This deployment

extends across the general linguistic territories that characterize the

intersections between production and life. Labor becomes increas-

ingly immaterial and realizes its value through a singular and contin-

uous process of innovation in production; it is increasingly capable

of consuming or using the services of social reproduction in an

ever more reﬁned and interactive way. Intelligence and affect (or

really the brain coextensive with the body), just when they become

the primary productive powers, make production and life coincide

across the terrain on which they operate, because life is nothing

other than the production and reproduction of the set of bodies

and brains.

The relationship between production and life has thus been

altered such that it is now completely inverted with respect to how

the discipline of political economy understands it. Life is no longer

produced in the cycles of reproduction that are subordinated to the

working day; on the contrary, life is what infuses and dominates

all production. In fact, the value of labor and production is deter-

mined deep in the viscera of life. Industry produces no surplus

except what is generated by social activity—and this is why, buried

in the great whale of life, value is beyond measure. There would

be no surplus if production were not animated throughout by social

intelligence, by the general intellect and at the same time by the

affective expressions that deﬁne social relations and rule over the

articulations of social being. The excess of value is determined

today in the affects, in the bodies crisscrossed by knowledge, in

366 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF EMPIRE

the intelligence of the mind, and in the sheer power to act. The

production of commodities tends to be accomplished entirely

through language, where by language we mean machines of intelli-

gence that are continuously renovated by the affects and subjec-

tive passions.

It should be clear at this point what constitutes social cooperation

here on the surfaces of imperial society: the synergies of life, or

really the productive manifestations of naked life. Giorgio Agamben

has used the term ‘‘naked life’’ to refer to the negative limit of

humanity and to expose behind the political abysses that modern

totalitarianism has constructed the (more or less heroic) conditions

of human passivity.

We would say, on the contrary, that through

their monstrosities of reducing human beings to a minimal naked

life, fascism and Nazism tried in vain to destroy the enormous

power that naked life could become and to expunge the form in

which the new powers of productive cooperation of the multitude

are accumulated. One might say in line with this idea that the

reactionary deliriums of fascism and Nazism were unleashed when

capital discovered that social cooperation was no longer the result

of the investment of capital but rather an autonomous power, the

a priori of every act of production. When human power appears

immediately as an autonomous cooperating collective force, capital-

ist prehistory comes to an end. In other words, capitalist prehistory

comes to an end when social and subjective cooperation is no

longer a product but a presupposition, when naked life is raised up

to the dignity of productive power, or really when it appears as

the wealth of virtuality.

The scientiﬁc, affective, and linguistic forces of the multitude

aggressively transform the conditions of social production. The ﬁeld

on which productive forces are reappropriated by the multitude is a

ﬁeld of radical metamorphoses—the scene of a demiurgic operation.

This consists above all in a complete revision of the production of

cooperative subjectivity; it consists in an act, that is, of merging

and hybridizing with the machines that the multitude has reappro-

priated and reinvented; it consists, therefore, in an exodus that is

VIRTUALITIES 367

not only spatial but also mechanical in the sense that the subject

is transformed into (and ﬁnds the cooperation that constitutes it

multiplied in) the machine. This is a new form of exodus, an exodus

toward (or with) the machine—a machinic exodus.

The history

of the modern worker and of the subject of modern sovereignty

already contains a long catalogue of machinic metamorphoses, but

the hybridization of humans and machines is no longer deﬁned by

the linear path it followed throughout the modern period. We have

reached the moment when the relationship of power that had

dominated the hybridizations and machinic metamorphoses can

now be overturned. Marx recognized that the conﬂict between

workers and machines was a false conﬂict: ‘‘It took both time

and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish between

machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer

their attacks from the material instruments of production to the

form of society which utilizes these instruments.’’

Now the new

virtualities, the naked life of the present, have the capacity to take

control of the processes of machinic metamorphosis. In Empire the

political struggle over the deﬁnition of machinic virtuality, or really

over the different alternatives of the passage between the virtual

and the real, is a central terrain of struggle. This new terrain of

production and life opens for labor a future of metamorphoses that

subjective cooperation can and must control ethically, politically,

and productively.

Res Gestae/Machinae

In recent years there has been much talk of the end of history,

and there have also been made many justiﬁed objections to the

reactionary celebrations of an end of history that would see the

present state of rule as eternal. It is certainly true, nonetheless, that

in modernity the power of capital and its institutions of sovereignty

had a solid hold on history and exerted their rule over the historical

process. The virtual powers of the multitude in postmodernity signal

the end of that rule and those institutions. That history has ended.

Capitalist rule is revealed as a transitory period. And yet, if the

368 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF EMPIRE

transcendent teleology that capitalist modernity constructed is com-

ing to an end, how can the multitude deﬁne instead a materialist

telos?

We will be able to respond to this question only after conduct-

ing a phenomenological and historical analysis of the relationship

between virtuality and possibility, that is, after responding to the

question if, how, and when the virtuality of the multitude passes

through possibility and becomes reality. The ontology of the possible

is in this sense the central terrain of analysis. This problematic has

been posed by authors from Luka

cs to Benjamin, from Adorno to

the later Wittgenstein, from Foucault to Deleuze, and indeed by

nearly all those who have recognized the twilight of modernity. In

all of these cases the question was posed against such tremendous

metaphysical obstacles! And we can now see how pallid their re-

sponses were with respect to the enormity of the question. What

is certain today is that the problematic does not risk repeating the

old models of the metaphysical tradition, even the most powerful

ones. In fact, every metaphysical tradition is now completely worn

out. If there is to be a solution to the problem, it cannot help being

material and explosive. Whereas our attention was ﬁrst drawn to

the intensity of the elements of virtuality that constituted the multi-

tude, now it must focus on the hypothesis that those virtualities

accumulate and reach a threshold of realization adequate to their

power. This is the sense in which we speak of general intellect and

its articulations in knowledge, affect, and cooperation; and similarly

the sense in which we speak of the various forms of the collective

exodus of those nomadic movements of the multitude that appro-

priate spaces and renew them.

Here we are dealing with two passages. The ﬁrst consists in

the fact that virtuality totalizes the ﬁeld of the res gestae. Virtuality

steps forward and demonstrates that the capacity of the historia rerum

gestarum to dominate the active virtual singularities has deﬁnitively

expired. This is the historia that comes to an end when the new

virtualities emerge as powerful and liberate themselves from a being

that is invested hegemonically by capital and its institutions. Today

VIRTUALITIES 369

only the res gestae are charged with historical capacities, or rather,

today there is no history, only historicity. The second passage con-

sists in the fact that these singular virtualities as they gain their

autonomy also become self-valorizing. They express themselves as

machines of innovation. They not only refuse to be dominated by

the old systems of value and exploitation, but actually create their

own irreducible possibilities as well. Here is where a materialist

telos is deﬁned, founded on the action of singularities, a teleology

that is a resultant of the res gestae and a ﬁgure of the machinic logic

of the multitude.

The res gestae, the singular virtualities that operate the connec-

tion between the possible and the real, are in the ﬁrst passage outside

measure and in the second beyond measure. Singular virtualities,

which are the hinge between possible and real, play both these

cards: being outside measure as a destructive weapon (deconstructive

in theory and subversive in practice); and being beyond measure

as constituent power. The virtual and the possible are wedded as

irreducible innovation and as a revolutionary machine.

4.2

GENERATION AND CORRUPTION

You can not spill a drop of American blood without spilling the

blood of the whole world . . . [O]ur blood is as the ﬂood of the

Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into

one. We are not a nation, so much as a world; for unless we may

claim all the world for our sire, like Melchisedec, we are with-

out mother or father . . . Our ancestry is lost in the universal

paternity . . . We are the heirs of all time, and with all nations

we divide our inheritance.

Herman Melville

Fate has willed it that America is from now on to be at the center

of Western civilization rather than on the periphery.

Walter Lippmann

There is no escaping American business.

Louis-Ferdinand Ce

line

The theory of the constitution of Empire is also a theory

of its decline, as European theorists of Empire have recognized for

the last several thousand years. Already in Greco-Roman antiquity,

Thucydides, Tacitus, and Polybius all recounted the sequence of

rise and fall, as did later the Fathers of the Church and the theorists

of early Christianity. In none of these cases when speaking of Empire

was it simply a matter for them of repeating the classical theory of the

alternation between ‘‘positive’’ and ‘‘negative’’ forms of government,

because Empire by deﬁnition goes beyond this alternation. The

internal crisis of the concept of Empire, however, became com-

pletely clear only in the Enlightenment period and the period of

GENERATION AND CORRUPTION 371

the construction of European modernity, when authors such as

Montesquieu and Gibbon made the problem of the decadence of

the Roman Empire one of the central topoi of the analysis of the

political forms of the modern sovereign state.

Rise and Fall (Machiavelli)

In classical antiquity the concept of Empire already presupposed

crisis. Empire was conceived in the framework of a naturalist theory

of the forms of government; and, even though it breaks the cyclical

alternation of good and bad forms, it is not exempt from the destiny

of the corruption of the city and civilization as a whole. History

is dominated by Thyche (Fortune or Destiny), which at times

inevitably ruins the perfection that Empire achieves. From Thucyd-

ides to Tacitus and from Athens to Rome, the necessary equilibrium

between the forms of common life and command was situated in

this linear destiny. Polybius’ analyses of the Roman Empire broke

with this conception of the cyclical character of historical develop-

ment whereby the human construction of the political constantly

shifts from the good to the bad forms of the city and power:

from monarchy to tyranny, from aristocracy to oligarchy, and from

democracy to anarchy, and then eventually begins a new cycle.

Polybius claimed that the Roman Empire broke with this cycle by

creating a synthesis of the good forms of power (see Section 3.5).

Empire is thus understood not so much as rule over universal space

and time, but rather as a movement that gathers together the spaces

and the temporalities through the powers of the social forces that

seek to liberate themselves from the natural cyclical character of

the time of history. Surpassing the line of destiny, however, is

aleatory. The synthesis of the good forms of government, the

government of civic virtue, can defy destiny but cannot replace

it. Crisis and decline are determinations that every day must be

overcome.

During the European Enlightenment, authors such as Montes-

quieu and Gibbon rejected the naturalist conception of this process.

The decline of Empire was explained in social scientiﬁc terms as a

372 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF EMPIRE

result of the impossibility of making last the historical and social

constructions of the multitude and the virtue of its heroes. The

corruption and decline of Empire were thus not a natural presuppo-

sition, determined by the cyclical destiny of history, but rather a

product of the human impossibility (or at least the extreme difﬁculty)

of governing an unlimited space and time. The limitlessness of

Empire undermined the capacity to make the good institutions

function and last. Nonetheless, Empire was an end toward which

the desire and the civic virtue of the multitude and its human

capacities to make history all tended. It was a precarious situation

that could not support unbounded space and time, but instead

ineluctably limited the universal aims of government to ﬁnite politi-

cal and social dimensions. The Enlightenment authors told us that

the government that approximates perfection will be constructed

with moderation across limited space and time. Between Empire

and the reality of command, therefore, there was a contradiction

in principle that would inevitably spawn crises.

Machiavelli, looking back at the conception of the ancients

and anticipating that of the moderns, is really the one who offers

us the most adequate illustration of the paradox of Empire.

clariﬁed the problematic by separating it from both the naturalizing

terrain of the ancients and the sociological terrain of the moderns,

presenting it, rather, on the ﬁeld of immanence and pure politics.

In Machiavelli, expansive government is pushed forward by the

dialectic of the social and political forces of the Republic. Only

where the social classes and their political expressions are posed in

an open and continuous play of counterpower are freedom and

expansion linked together, and hence only there does Empire be-

come possible. There is no concept of Empire, Machiavelli says,

that is not a decisively expansive concept of freedom. Precisely in

this dialectic of freedom, then, is where the elements of corruption

and destruction reside. When Machiavelli discusses the fall of the

Roman Empire, he focuses ﬁrst and foremost on the crisis of civil

religion, or really on the decline of the social relation that had

uniﬁed the different ideological social forces and allowed them

to participate together in the open interaction of counterpowers.