Blackwood Project 2001. Geoff Boucher
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
This work has probably had the most enthusiastic reviews since Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar’s Reading Capital (1965), by the most influential figures on the Left in the trans-Atlantic academic milieu. For Étienne Balibar (co-author of Reading Capital with Louis Althusser and now leading postmarxist theorist), the work “claims to lay the foundations for a teleology of class struggles and militancy even more substantially ‘communist’ than the classical Marxist one”. “What Hardt and Negri offer,” adds Slavoj Žižek (leading postmarxist philosopher and Lacanian psychoanalyst), “is nothing less than a rewriting of The Communist Manifesto for our time”. Fredric Jameson, Marxist writer of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), expands on this, calling the work a “prophetic call for energies to come” and a “comprehensive new historical narrative” that constitute a “positive and enabling vision of the future” (citations from the jacket cover).
Empire argues that a new global economic and political order is materialising before our eyes, one qualitatively different to the world order of imperialism that dominated the twentieth century. “Empire,” Hardt and Negri propose, “is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world” (xi). While accepting that the globalisation of production and the internationalisation of markets effectively diminishes the sovereignty of the nation state, Hardt and Negri believe that sovereignty - the ability to regulate behaviour - has actually increased. “Our basic hypothesis is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire” (xii).
The main thesis of Empire is therefore an ultra-imperialism theory. The major antagonism of the “new world order” is not that between proletariat and bourgeoisie, nor the inter-imperialist rivalries between the metropolitan capitalist powers, but the antagonism between “Empire” and “the multitude”. One consequence is that we can expect that conflict between semi-colonial countries and the imperialist metropolis is likely, whereas imperialist war is unlikely. Another consequence is that social conflict is likely to take the form of popular confrontation with the representatives of Empire - multinationals, metropolitan governments, semi-colonial client regimes - and that conventional class conflict is unlikely. To summarise this in a slogan, we might say that Empire presents “Regis Debray meets Naomi Klein”. Hence, the anti-capitalist movement and the current American “war on terrorism” are paradigmatic of Empire. Secondly, “Empire” is profoundly decentred. There is no dominant capitalist nation lying at the centre of Empire. There is no super-state entity (“world government,” or whatever) coming into being or existing in secret behind the scenes - this is not a conspiracy theory. Instead, Empire is a sort of “headless” global nation state and unified world market. It has everything that a nation state has - unified market, legislative system, monopoly of violence, ideological apparatuses - except for the state itself. Hardt and Negri somewhere refer to Empire epigrammatically as “Rawls plus Luhmann”. This refers to an entire system of moral norms and legal frameworks regulating market relations and political relations between actors (companies, governments, organisations, individuals) - “Rawls” — together with a total system logic of astonishing complexity, that distributes the functions of Empire (policing, governance, regulation, ideology) across the system’s actors without ever needing a central “brain” in the form of a world state and world government - “Luhmann”.
Imperialism represented the extension of the power and influence of the metropolitan nation states beyond their borders. Empire, by contrast, cannot be organised around the hegemony of a nation state: “Empire establishes no territorial centre of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers” (xii). It is, in the terminology of post-structuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “a decentred and deterritorializing apparatus of rule” (xii). Empire, therefore, accounts for the logic of numerous developments in contemporary social theory, postmodern culture, postcolonial theory and post-structuralist philosophy. Empire exists in the complex new spaces of global social production, where “the economic, the political and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another” (xiii). This profoundly decentred reality cannot be understood as the imperial project of a particular centre to dominate any periphery or peripheries. Instead, Empire is characterised primarily by “a lack of boundaries” (xiv), by the encompassing of the spatial totality within a universal mode of governance. This leads to the second characteristic of empire, namely its atemporal character, its necessary mode of self-presentation as a regime without temporal duration located at the “end of history”. Empire extends its domination throughout the social - it does not emanate from one instance of the social (the economic, for instance) and move from there to colonise the rest, but rather exists simultaneously in all registers of existence to create the phenomenal and structural properties of the world. Finally, empire always comes armed to the teeth bearing the sign of the pax impericum, the universal peace of an ahistorical closure to all alternatives.
Grasping for the dialectical rose within the cross of the present, Hardt and Negri propose that “although Empire may have played a role in putting an end to colonialism and imperialism, it nonetheless constructs its own relationships of power based on exploitation that are in many respects more brutal than those it destroyed” (43). Far from this being a depressing prospect or a cause for delirious accommodation, Hardt and Negri commence an analysis of the “new possibilities [for] the forces of liberation” (xv), a counter-empire that would organise global flows (of wealth, power and culture) differently, invent new democratic possibilities and a new constituent power. Empire confronts the multitude, with their multiple forms of resistance, transgression and struggle. Modelled on Karl Marx’s Capital and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, Hardt and Negri venture a synthesis of Marxism and contemporary philosophy, in the context of globalisation and resistance.
The daring hypothesis of Hardt and Negri is that the UN is the juridical expression of the new form of sovereignty of Empire. They recognise that the UN exists within the framework of “legitimate” national sovereignty (pacts and treaties between national states) and that it is only the latest in a series of European and international transnational forums for the regulation of “peaceful coexistence” in modernity. “This process of legitimation is effective only insofar as it transfers sovereign right to a real supranational centre” (5). Behind the proposal for the UN lay the Kantian notion of a European government founded on universal norms, today appearing as the demand for “cosmopolitan democracy”. That is, Hans Kelsen, intellectual architect of the concept of an international legislation and world governance now enshrined in the UN, represented the lineage of Enlightenment modernisation. To reduce the UN to a forum for the legitimation of US hegemony in the postwar period, or a thermometer for the global balance of forces, the argument implies, would be to mistake the conjunctural specificities of the project for its role in the constitution of a historical logic operating through then contemporary actors. Despite the many ambiguities of the UN between 1945 and 1989, this was the crucible for Empire. Theories of the UN have been polarised between “Hobbesian” (the UN is a social contract between the warring national atoms) and “Lockean” variants (the UN is a global civil society ensuring the liberty of all constitutional citizens). These alternatives transpose the classical concept of state sovereignty onto the international arena, particularly the mythical transition from an international state of nature into the civil society of the UN. Kelsen’s question is the radical one: what forms of power already exist that might be assembled into a world order? This is why imperial sovereignty is a paradigm shift - it operationalises a virtual alternative lying beside the model of classical sovereignty and different to it.
Hans Kelsen was a neo-Kantian positivist of the Vienna School during the 1920s and is regarded as the theoretical architect of the United Nations. According to Kelsen, an effective legal order has to be hierarchically unified under a fundamental legal norm. The law therefore consists of increasingly complex and practically oriented “applications” of this fundamental principle. A legal system is inherently rational, since it can be traced back to this principle of foundation or unification. For Kelsen, this fundamental principle has to be supported by effective coercion. The state and the law are therefore the same thing. The unity of the state is founded upon the unity of the legal system and ultimately, therefore, upon the existence of this fundamental principle. Kelsen denied that the state could be thought of as a subject that exercises power. The state is not “sovereign” by analogy with a monarch exercising ultimate power in a nation. Instead, the state is the material personification of the unity of the law. Obviously, this theory poses two major problems: the factual disunity of actually existing legal codes (which are far from rational and generally reflect a complex history of conflicts and compromises) and the mysterious origins of this foundational principle. These problems are posed less sharply when considering an “artificial” entity such as the United Nations, since the entire pre-history of class and social conflict is precisely not deposited in such a body. Instead, its foundational documents play the role of this fundamental principle, and this principle (assuming that it can actually be identified in the charter of the UN) offers normative guidance for the further development of the United Nations, namely, to rationally elaborate this principle and not to “water it down” with the compromises and deals of Realpolitik.
Empire is therefore “the idea of a single power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common notion of right that is decidedly postcolonial and postimperialist” (9). Juridical transformations are an index of massive social transformations, and the legal changes point beyond international law framed by treaties and contracts. The genealogy of imperial juridical relations can be traced to Rome: “there the concept of Empire united juridical categories and universal ethical values, making them work together as an organic whole” (10). (Therefore Empire instantiates Hegelian ethical life as the maximal unity of ethics, governance and the social.) The concept of the “just wars” of empire reveals the ethical politics at the heart of this unitary juridical framework, which combines spatial and temporal totalities under one concept of right. “Empire presents its order as permanent, eternal and necessary” (11).
International right and perpetual peace are therefore par excellence the significations of imperial law. The revival of “just wars” as a conceptual defense of intervention is therefore symptomatic. “The traditional concept of just war involves the banalisation of war and the celebration of it as an ethical instrument” (12). Instead of the traditional justification of war as defense, Empire tends to frankly legitimate the ability of the military to secure peace and order. Indeed, the “just wars” of Empire proceed at once under the sign of war against the Diabolically Evil Enemy and as a banal police action in the routine repression of the peripheral barbarians, of which “the Gulf War gave us perhaps the first fully articulated example” (13).
Empire cannot be characterised solely in terms of what it negates (the decline of the nation state, the end of inter-imperialist rivalries, the deregulation of the world economy), because it is very different from the sheer anarchy of the market. It is simultaneously a hierarchical system that includes a comprehensive imperial morality and structures of legitimation. The paradox of Empire is that it functions as a form of governance without government.
“Governance,” according to the concept’s architect, Michel Foucault, refers to the “conduct of conduct”. Conduct implies not “behaviour,” in the everyday sense of “going about one’s business,” but rather moral conduct, in the Aristotelian sense of “right conduct”. Foucault takes conduct to mean the underlying framework of norms that shapes any ethical judgement or political intervention, by making some options appear as “right conduct” and relegating others to the realm of prohibited or proscribed actions - the unthinkable, the obscene, the immoral and the amoral. It is therefore a process of selection that precedes any conscious decision and - without turning the person (hereafter, the agent, or subject) into a robot, nevertheless ensures that spontaneous ethical and political actions tend overwhelmingly to conform to mainstream social values. The conduct of conduct is the therefore the process of shaping these very underlying normative frameworks, through macro-scale social processes of regulation, transformation and intervention. Governance, as the conduct of conduct, is therefore the web of social relations, institutional powers and ethical frameworks that fundamentally shapes any localised norms of action (any conduct). It is similar to the Hegelian concept of ethical life, of the concrete universality of a “whole way of life” that takes place under the sign of certain absolute values (for instance, liberty, democracy and the individual) whose denial is regarded as monstrous and evil (19). Governance is what makes government (the administration of persons and things in the service of the state, the constitution and enactment of legislative and regulatory frameworks) possible, since without the kinds of institutional and social compliance that governance ensures, government would face intractable and continuous dissent.
Imperial governance takes the form of the “machine” of “continual contractualisation” that “creates a continuous call for authority” (14). (This is contemporary theory-babble for the theory of the social contract: the social contract (and therefore the state, civil government and the rule of law) springs into being in response to a demand from within the “state of nature” (that is, the market) to ensure the reciprocal honouring of the contract implied in any exchange transaction, particularly the exchange of labour power for wages.) “The machine,” Hardt and Negri continue elliptically, “seems to predetermine the exercise of authority and action across the entire social space” and this constitutes the “imperial paradigm” (14). Previous imperialist dynamics (colonialism, imperialism) concentrated on legitimating the dynamics leading towards a world order, whereas with Empire this world order seems to spring forth, fully formed, as a new world order. “The paradigm shift is defined ... by the recognition that only an established power, overdetermined with respect to and relatively autonomous from the sovereign nation states, is capable of functioning as the centre of the new world order” (15).
This hyper-abstract series of circumlocutions can have only one meaning. Because the new world order is a capitalist world order (shaped, therefore, by incessant serial contracts between owners of commodities), once this world order is constituted on the foundation of a world economy, an indivisible global economy that is greater than the sum of cross-border transactions (that is, not just an international economy), this global capitalist world order must inevitably undermine the sovereignty of the nation state and render any project of imperial domination by any particular alliance of nation states radically untenable. “Governance” steps forward in this context as a headless variant of the concept of the mode of production - the economic instance, together with the appropriate legal, military and ideological apparatuses, but deprived of the state bureaucracy and any representative government - that is, as a (typical) Foucauldian effort to recycle Marxian concepts under assumed names.
“Once again,” conclude Hardt and Negri — proceeding smoothly from evasion to diversion, via the rhetorical non sequitur “once again” — “the ancient notions of Empire help us to articulate better the nature of this world order in formation” (15). Empire works by making an appearance as a force for the resolution of conflicts, not as an aggressor intent on conquest. The initial task of Empire is therefore the formation of a consensus regarding its legitimate authority as a “police force” standing above all particular conflicts. This consensus revolves upon the right of Empire to make decisions regarding exceptional situations and cases:
“in order to take control of and dominate such a completely fluid situation, it is necessary to grant the intervening authority (1) the capacity to define, every time in an exceptional way, the demands of intervention; and (2) the capacity to set in motion the forces and instruments that in various ways can be applied to the diversity and plurality of the arrangements in crisis” (17).
(This shift from abstract circumlocution to diversionary emphasis on the (wholly irrelevant) “illustrations from the classics,” can only be read as a symptom.)
Imperial right therefore functions as a series of techniques (of diplomacy, treaty negotiation, legal injunction and military intervention) that is “founded on a state of permanent exception and the power of the police” (17), and it functions to transform international and domestic law into “the administrative law of the cosmopolitical society” (17). Indeed, within Empire, “supranational law powerfully overdetermines domestic law” (17). Evidence for this proposition is found in the “right of intervention” built into the UN Charter but effectively held by the powerful states. Hardt and Negri claim that before Empire, states intervened to force compliance with voluntary accords (for instance, human rights declarations). Now they intervene on the basis of “any type of emergency” in the name of a universal consensus. That is, the reference that backs intervention is not a formal document but a concept of universal values: “the right of the police is legitimated by universal values” (18).
This leads to an initial definition:
“the developing imperial power as a science of the police that is founded on a practice of just war to address continually arising emergencies” (18)
which sparks comparisons with the Roman Empire after its official conversion to Christianity.
This is nothing less than the “material constitution of the new planetary order” (19) where the final forms of authority and legitimation are as yet undecided. Yet the decisive initial step is taken, namely, the emergence of a consensus such that the moral disposition of the individual citizens tends to spontaneously conform to the ethical, juridical and political categories of Empire. “Empire is emerging today as the centre that supports the globalisation of productive networks” (20). Simultaneously, however, this constitution of Empire “will not be embodied in the consensus that is articulated in the multitude” (20).