Hardt Michael, Negri Antonio. Empire

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GENERATION AND CORRUPTION 383

operation that cast the U.S. global hegemony as the natural and

ineluctable consequence of the crisis of Europe.

Paradoxically, even the ferocious European nationalisms,

which had led to such violent conﬂicts over the ﬁrst half of the

century, were eventually displaced by a competition over who

could better express a strong Americanism. Lenin’s Soviet Union

in fact may have heard the siren song of Americanism most clearly.

The challenge was to replicate the results of the capitalism that had

achieved its pinnacle in the United States. The Soviets argued

against the means the United States employed and claimed instead

that socialism could attain the same results more efﬁciently through

hard labor and the sacriﬁce of freedom. This terrible ambiguity also

runs throughout Gramsci’s writings on Americanism and Fordism,

one of the fundamental texts for understanding the American prob-

lem from the European point of view.

Gramsci saw the United

States, with its combination of new Taylorist forms of the organiza-

tion of labor and its powerful capitalist will to dominate, as the

inevitable reference point for the future: it was the only path for

development. For Gramsci, it was then a matter of understanding

whether that revolution would be active (like that of Soviet Russia)

or passive (as in Fascist Italy). The consonance between American-

ism and state socialism should be obvious, with their parallel paths

of development on the two sides of the Atlantic throughout the

cold war, which led ﬁnally to dangerous competitions over space

exploration and nuclear weapons. These parallel paths simply high-

light the fact that a certain Americanism had penetrated into the

heart of even its strongest adversary. The twentieth-century devel-

opments of Russia were to a certain extent a microcosm for those

of Europe.

The refusal of European consciousness to recognize its decline

often took the form of projecting its crisis onto the American utopia.

That projection continued for a long time, as long as lasted the

necessity and urgency to rediscover a site of freedom that could

continue the teleological vision of which Hegelian historicism is

perhaps the highest expression. The paradoxes of this projection

384 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF EMPIRE

multiplied, to the point where European consciousness, faced with

its undeniable and irreversible decline, reacted by going to the other

extreme: the primary site of competition, which had afﬁrmed and

repeated the formal power of the U.S. utopia, now represented its

complete overturning. Solzhenitsyn’s Russia became the absolute

negative of the most caricatural and apologetic images of the U.S.

utopia in the guise of Arnold Toynbee. It should come as no surprise

that the ideologies of the end of history, which are as evolutionary

as they are postmodern, should appear to complete this ideological

mess. The American Empire will bring an end to History.

We know, however, that this idea of American Empire as the

redemption of utopia is completely illusory. First of all, the coming

Empire is not American and the United States is not its center.

The fundamental principle of Empire as we have described it

throughout this book is that its power has no actual and localizable

terrain or center. Imperial power is distributed in networks, through

mobile and articulated mechanisms of control. This is not to say

that the U.S. government and the U.S. territory are no different

from any other: the United States certainly occupies a privileged

position in the global segmentations and hierarchies of Empire.

As the powers and boundaries of nation-states decline, however,

differences between national territories become increasingly rela-

tive. They are now not differences of nature (as were, for example,

the differences between the territory of the metropole and that of

the colony) but differences of degree.

Furthermore, the United States cannot rectify or redeem the

crisis and decline of Empire. The United States is not the place

where the European or even the modern subject can ﬂee to resolve

its uneasiness and unhappiness; there was no such place. The means

to get beyond the crisis is the ontological displacement of the subject.

The most important change therefore takes place inside humanity,

since with the end of modernity also ends the hope of ﬁnding

something that can identify the self outside the community, outside

cooperation, and outside the critical and contradictory relationships

that each person ﬁnds in a non-place, that is, in the world and the

GENERATION AND CORRUPTION 385

multitude. This is where the idea of Empire reappears, not as a

territory, not in the determinate dimensions of its time and space,

and not from the standpoint of a people and its history, but rather

simply as the fabric of an ontological human dimension that tends

to become universal.

Crisis

Postmodernization and the passage to Empire involve a real conver-

gence of the realms that used to be designated as base and superstruc-

ture. Empire takes form when language and communication, or

really when immaterial labor and cooperation, become the domi-

nant productive force (see Section 3.4). The superstructure is put

to work, and the universe we live in is a universe of productive

linguistic networks. The lines of production and those of representa-

tion cross and mix in the same linguistic and productive realm. In

this context the distinctions that deﬁne the central categories of

political economy tend to blur. Production becomes indistinguish-

able from reproduction; productive forces merge with relations of

production; constant capital tends to be constituted and represented

within variable capital, in the brains, bodies, and cooperation of

productive subjects. Social subjects are at the same time producers

and products of this unitary machine. In this new historical forma-

tion it is thus no longer possible to identify a sign, a subject, a

value, or a practice that is ‘‘outside.’’

The formation of this totality, however, does not eliminate

exploitation. It rather redeﬁnes it, primarily in relation to communi-

cation and cooperation. Exploitation is the expropriation of cooper-

ation and the nulliﬁcation of the meanings of linguistic production.

Consequently, resistances to command continually emerge within

Empire. Antagonisms to exploitation are articulated across the global

networks of production and determine crises on each and every

node. Crisis is coextensive with the postmodern totality of capitalist

production; it is proper to imperial control. In this respect, the

decline and fall of Empire is deﬁned not as a diachronic movement

but as a synchronic reality. Crisis runs through every moment of

the development and recomposition of the totality.

386 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF EMPIRE

With the real subsumption of society under capital, social

antagonisms can erupt as conﬂict in every moment and on every

term of communicative production and exchange. Capital has be-

come a world. Use value and all the other references to values and

processes of valorization that were conceived to be outside the

capitalist mode of production have progressively vanished. Subjec-

tivity is entirely immersed in exchange and language, but that does

not mean it is now paciﬁc. Technological development based on

the generalization of the communicative relationships of production

is a motor of crisis, and productive general intellect is a nest of

antagonisms. Crisis and decline refer not to something external to

Empire but to what is most internal. They pertain to the production

of subjectivity itself, and thus they are at once proper and contrary

to the processes of the reproduction of Empire. Crisis and decline

are not a hidden foundation nor an ominous future but a clear

and obvious actuality, an always expected event, a latency that is

always present.

It is midnight in a night of specters. Both the new reign of

Empire and the new immaterial and cooperative creativity of the

multitude move in shadows, and nothing manages to illuminate

our destiny ahead. Nonetheless, we have acquired a new point of

reference (and tomorrow perhaps a new consciousness), which

consists in the fact that Empire is deﬁned by crisis, that its decline

has always already begun, and that consequently every line of antago-

nism leads toward the event and singularity. What does it mean,

practically, that crisis is immanent to and indistinguishable from

Empire? Is it possible in this dark night to theorize positively and

deﬁne a practice of the event?

Generation

Two central impediments prevent us from responding to these

questions immediately. The ﬁrst is presented by the overbearing

power of bourgeois metaphysics and speciﬁcally the widely propa-

gated illusion that the capitalist market and the capitalist regime of

production are eternal and insuperable. The bizarre naturalness of

GENERATION AND CORRUPTION 387

capitalism is a pure and simple mystiﬁcation, and we have to disabuse

ourselves of it right away. The second impediment is represented

by the numerous theoretical positions that see no alternative to the

present form of rule except a blind anarchic other and that thus

partake in a mysticism of the limit. From this ideological perspective,

the suffering of existence cannot manage to be articulated, become

conscious, and establish a standpoint of revolt. This theoretical

position leads merely to a cynical attitude and quietistic practices.

The illusion of the naturalness of capitalism and the radicality of

the limit actually stand in a relationship of complementarity. Their

complicity is expressed in an exhausting powerlessness. The fact is

that neither of these positions, neither the apologetic one nor the

mystical one, manages to grasp the primary aspect of biopolitical

order: its productivity. They cannot interpret the virtual powers of

the multitude that tend constantly toward becoming possible and

real. In other words, they have lost track of the fundamental produc-

tivity of being.

We can answer the question of how to get out of the crisis only

by lowering ourselves down into biopolitical virtuality, enriched by

the singular and creative processes of the production of subjectivity.

How are rupture and innovation possible, however, in the absolute

horizon in which we are immersed, in a world in which values

seem to have been negated in a vacuum of meaning and a lack of

any measure? Here we do not need to go back again to a description

of desire and its ontological excess, nor insist again on the dimension

of the ‘‘beyond.’’ It is sufﬁcient to point to the generative determina-

tion of desire and thus its productivity. In effect, the complete

commingling of the political, the social, and the economic in the

constitution of the present reveals a biopolitical space that—much

better than Hannah Arendt’s nostalgic utopia of political space—

explains the ability of desire to confront the crisis.

The entire

conceptual horizon is thus completely redeﬁned. The biopolitical,

seen from the standpoint of desire, is nothing other than concrete

production, human collectivity in action. Desire appears here as

productive space, as the actuality of human cooperation in the

388 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF EMPIRE

construction of history. This production is purely and simply human

reproduction, the power of generation. Desiring production is gen-

eration, or rather the excess of labor and the accumulation of a power

incorporated into the collective movement of singular essences, both

its cause and its completion.

When our analysis is ﬁrmly situated in the biopolitical world

where social, economic, and political production and reproduction

coincide, the ontological perspective and the anthropological per-

spective tend to overlap. Empire pretends to be the master of that

world because it can destroy it. What a horrible illusion! In reality

we are masters of the world because our desire and labor regenerate

it continuously. The biopolitical world is an inexhaustible weaving

together of generative actions, of which the collective (as meeting

point of singularities) is the motor. No metaphysics, except a deliri-

ous one, can pretend to deﬁne humanity as isolated and powerless.

No ontology, except a transcendent one, can relegate humanity to

individuality. No anthropology, except a pathological one, can

deﬁne humanity as a negative power. Generation, that ﬁrst fact of

metaphysics, ontology, and anthropology, is a collective mechanism

or apparatus of desire. Biopolitical becoming celebrates this ‘‘ﬁrst’’

dimension in absolute terms.

Political theory is forced by this new reality to redeﬁne itself

radically. In biopolitical society, for example, fear cannot be em-

ployed, as Thomas Hobbes proposed, as the exclusive motor of

the contractual constitution of politics, thus negating the love of

the multitude. Or rather, in biopolitical society the decision of the

sovereign can never negate the desire of the multitude. If those

founding modern strategies of sovereignty were employed today

with the oppositions they determine, the world would come to a

halt because generation would no longer be possible. For generation

to take place, the political has to yield to love and desire, and that

is to the fundamental forces of biopolitical production. The political

is not what we are taught it is today by the cynical Machiavellianism

of politicians; it is rather, as the democratic Machiavelli tells us, the

power of generation, desire, and love. Political theory has to reorient

itself along these lines and assume the language of generation.

GENERATION AND CORRUPTION 389

Generation is the primum of the biopolitical world of Empire.

Biopower—a horizon of the hybridization of the natural and the

artiﬁcial, needs and machines, desire and the collective organization

of the economic and the social—must continually regenerate itself

in order to exist. Generation is there, before all else, as basis and

motor of production and reproduction. The generative connection

gives meaning to communication, and any model of (everyday,

philosophical, or political) communication that does not respond

to this primacy is false. The social and political relationships of

Empire register this phase of the development of production and

interpret the generative and productive biosphere. We have thus

reached a limit of the virtuality of the real subsumption of productive

society under capital—but precisely on this limit the possibility of

generation and the collective force of desire are revealed in all

their power.

Corruption

Opposed to generation stands corruption. Far from being the neces-

sary complement of generation, as the various Platonic currents of

philosophy would like, corruption is merely its simple negation.

Corruption breaks the chain of desire and interrupts its extension

across the biopolitical horizon of production. It constructs black

holes and ontological vacuums in the life of the multitude that not

even the most perverse political science manages to camouﬂage.

Corruption, contrary to desire, is not an ontological motor but

simply the lack of ontological foundation of the biopolitical practices

of being.

In Empire corruption is everywhere. It is the cornerstone and

keystone of domination. It resides in different forms in the supreme

government of Empire and its vassal administrations, the most re-

ﬁned and the most rotten administrative police forces, the lobbies

of the ruling classes, the maﬁas of rising social groups, the churches

and sects, the perpetrators and persecutors of scandal, the great

ﬁnancial conglomerates, and everyday economic transactions.

Through corruption, imperial power extends a smoke screen across

the world, and command over the multitude is exercised in this

putrid cloud, in the absence of light and truth.

390 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF EMPIRE

It is no mystery how we recognize corruption and how we

identify the powerful emptiness of the mist of indifference that

imperial power extends across the world. In fact, the ability to

recognize corruption is, to use a phrase of Descartes’s, ‘‘la faculte

la mieux partage

e du monde,’’ the most widely shared faculty in

the world. Corruption is easily perceived because it appears immedi-

ately as a form of violence, as an insult. And indeed it is an insult:

corruption is in fact the sign of the impossibility of linking power

to value, and its denunciation is thus a direct intuition of the lack

of being. Corruption is what separates a body and a mind from

what they can do. Since knowledge and existence in the biopolitical

world always consist in a production of value, this lack of being

appears as a wound, a death wish of the socius, a stripping away

of being from the world.

The forms in which corruption appears are so numerous that

trying to list them is like pouring the sea into a teacup. Let us try

nonetheless to give a few examples, even though they can in no way

serve to represent the whole. In the ﬁrst place, there is corruption as

individual choice that is opposed to and violates the fundamental

community and solidarity deﬁned by biopolitical production. This

small, everyday violence of power is a maﬁa-style corruption. In

the second place, there is corruption of the productive order, or

really exploitation. This includes the fact that the values that derive

from the collective cooperation of labor are expropriated, and what

was in the biopolitical ab origine public is privatized. Capitalism is

completely implicated in this corruption of privatization. As Saint

Augustine says, the great reigns are only the enlarged projections

of little thieves. Augustine of Hippo, however, so realistic in this

pessimistic conception of power, would be struck dumb by today’s

little thieves of monetary and ﬁnancial power. Really, when capital-

ism loses its relationship to value (both as the measure of individual

exploitation and as a norm of collective progress), it appears immedi-

ately as corruption. The increasingly abstract sequence of its func-

tioning (from the accumulation of surplus value to monetary and

ﬁnancial speculation) is shown to be a powerful march toward

GENERATION AND CORRUPTION 391

generalized corruption. If capitalism is by deﬁnition a system of

corruption, held together nonetheless as in Mandeville’s fable by

its cooperative cleverness and redeemed according to all its ideolo-

gies on right and left by its progressive function, then when measure

is dissolved and the progressive telos breaks down, nothing essential

remains of capitalism but corruption. In the third place, corruption

appears in the functioning of ideology, or rather in the perversion

of the senses of linguistic communication. Here corruption touches

on the biopolitical realm, attacking its productive nodes and ob-

structing its generative processes. This attack is demonstrated, in

the fourth place, when in the practices of imperial government the

threat of terror becomes a weapon to resolve limited or regional

conﬂicts and an apparatus for imperial development. Imperial com-

mand, in this case, is disguised and can alternately appear as cor-

ruption or destruction, almost as if to reveal the profound call

that the former makes for the latter and the latter for the former.

The two dance together over the abyss, over the imperial lack

of being.

Such examples of corruption could be multiplied ad inﬁnitum,

but at the base of all these forms of corruption there is an operation

of ontological nulliﬁcation that is deﬁned and exercised as the

destruction of the singular essence of the multitude. The multitude

must be uniﬁed or segmented into different unities: this is how the

multitude has to be corrupted. This is why the ancient and modern

concepts of corruption cannot be translated directly into the post-

modern concept. Whereas in ancient and modern times corruption

was deﬁned in relation to the schemas and/or relations of value

and demonstrated as a falsiﬁcation of them in such a way that it

could at times play a role in the change among the forms of govern-

ment and the restoration of values, today, in contrast, corruption

cannot play a role in any transformation of the forms of government

because corruption itself is the substance and totality of Empire.

Corruption is the pure exercise of command, without any propor-

tionate or adequate reference to the world of life. It is command

directed toward the destruction of the singularity of the multitude

392 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF EMPIRE

through its coercive uniﬁcation and/or cruel segmentation. This is

why Empire necessarily declines in the very moment of its rise.

This negative ﬁgure of command over productive biopower

is even more paradoxical when viewed from the perspective of

corporeality. Biopolitical generation directly transforms the bodies

of the multitude. These are, as we have seen, bodies enriched with

intellectual and cooperative power, and bodies that are already

hybrid. What generation offers us in postmodernity are thus bodies

‘‘beyond measure.’’ In this context corruption appears simply as

disease, frustration, and mutilation. This is how power has always

acted against enriched bodies. Corruption also appears as psychosis,

opiates, anguish, and boredom, but this too has always happened

throughout modernity and disciplinary societies. The speciﬁcity of

corruption today is instead the rupture of the community of singular

bodies and the impediment to its action—a rupture of the produc-

tive biopolitical community and an impediment to its life. Here

we are thus faced with a paradox. Empire recognizes and proﬁts

from the fact that in cooperation bodies produce more and in

community bodies enjoy more, but it has to obstruct and control this

cooperative autonomy so as not to be destroyed by it. Corruption

operates to impede this going ‘‘beyond measure’’ of the bodies

through community, this singular universalization of the new power

of bodies, which threaten the very existence of Empire. The paradox

is irresolvable: the more the world becomes rich, the more Empire,

which is based on this wealth, must negate the conditions of the

production of wealth. Our task is to investigate how ultimately

corruption can be forced to cede its control to generation.