Empire Part 2
Passages of Sovereignty (67-204) and Intermezzo: Counter-Empire (205-218)
I. (2.1) Two Europes, Two Modernities
(69-92)
A. Introduction
[conflict at heart of modernity] (69-70)
1. Intra-European crisis
a. Immanent forces of desire (revolutionary discovery of Renaissance)
b. Transcendent authority (counter-revolutionary installation of authority)
c. Partial mediation by modern sovereignty (formation of nation-state)
2. Colonial project and resistance of the colonized
B. The
Revolutionary Plane of Immanence [narrative of history of ideas] (70-74)
1. Affirmation of mundane powers: plane of immanence
2. Examples:
a. Philosophy:
(1) Early 14th C: Scotus: singularity of being: against analogy
(2) 15th C “humanists”: Nicolas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola,
Bovillus
(3) 16th -17th C: Philosophers / Scientists: Francis
Bacon, Galileo
b. Politics:
(1) Occam: Church = the faithful
(2) Marsilius of Padua: grounding Republic in the citizenry
(3) Spinoza: absolute democracy
3. NB: two points about this section
a. This is a narrative of history of ideas: i.e., of symptoms of material
forces driving change
b. There are always immantentist voices, albeit marginalized: against the
epochalism of H&N
C. Modernity
as Crisis [17th Century counter-revolution] (74-78)
1. Counter-revolution: transcendent constituted Power against the immanent
constituent power
2. Manufactured lack / death [civil war]: new Power preys upon
survival fears of masses
3. Modernity as crisis [how to handle the new powers of immanent / capitalist
production]:
a. Internal European reaction: bureaucracy and absolutism
b. External expansion and subordination of others [counter-revolution on
global scale]
(1) early: conquest and gold
(2) later: colonialism
(a) mercantilist trade exclusivities
(b) plantation production
(c) African slave trade
4. Spinoza as the “savage anomaly”
D. The
Transcendental Apparatus [Enlightenment as counter-revolutionary] (78-83)
1. Principal task of Enlightenment: dominate immanence w/o old realist
dualisms
a. “Transcendental apparatus”: discipline formally free subjects: functional
mediating dualism
(1) immanent triad of strength [science] - desire [knowledge]
- love [ethics]
(2) replaced by filter of phenomena - reflection of intellect
– schematism of reason
b. “Reflexive folding back and a sort of weak transcendence”:
(1) relativizes experience
(2) makes self-constitution of multitude yield to pre-constituted
order
(3) forbids the immediacy of establishment of freedom
c. Pre-existing pattern forms experience to guarantee truth, order, God, etc.
2. Figures: Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel
3. Hegel in the context of colonialism
a. Master-slave dialectic
b. Europe as culmination of history: temporality of the dialectic: totality:
the state
E. Modern
Sovereignty [relation of politics and metaphysics] (83-87)
1. Transcendentalism: response to challenge of liberated singularities
and revolutionary multitude
a. Tapping into yet controlling the productive power of immanence
b. W/o recourse to old inhibiting medieval transcendence
2. Construction of a transcendent political apparatus
a. Hobbes:
(1) sovereign as God on Earth
(a) assumption of civil war as originary state
(b) guarantee survival by contracting multitude’s power
to a sovereign Power
(2) sovereign defined by contract’s double-edged sword (association
? subjugation)
(a) transcendence: but founded on immanent logic of human relations
(b) representation: but alienates sovereign from the multitude
b. Schema used for monarchy but also applicable to oligarchy and “democracy”
[Rousseau]
3. Capitalist content of form of sovereign authority:
a. Affirmation of market as foundation of values of social reproduction
b. Adam Smith: contradiction of private enrichment and public interest
synthesized by:
(1) invisible hand of the market [but this is precarious and
fleeting]
(2) political economy forms conditions of autonomy of
the market [still not secure]
(3) state must be final, rational, mediator of interests: single
value of society and labor
4. Hegel synthesizes form [Hobbes/Rousseau] and content [Adam Smith] of
modern sovereignty
F. The
Sovereignty Machine [police Power: transforms multitude into ordered totality]
(87-90)
1. Bureaucracy = organ of transcendental sovereignty machine: from command
to function
2. Foucault: governmentality
3. Weber:
a. Modernity as scission: creative multitude against state re-appropriation
b. Three forms of closure of crisis
(1) traditional quasi-natural legitimation
(2) charisma
(3) bureaucratic rationality
c. Interweaving of the three forms means that closure is as conflictual
as genesis of modernity
4. Critics of modernity: Heidegger, Lukács, Horkheimer, Adorno:
all see the waning of modernity
G. Humanism
After the Death of Man (91-92)
1. Two distinct notions of humanism
a. Target of 1960s anti-humanism: man as non-natural / transcendental source
of value
b. Affirmed in Renaissance as destroying transcendence of God over man
/ nature
2. We can link the two as both critiques of transcendence and affirmations
of immanence
II. (2.2) Sovereignty of the Nation-State (93-113)
A. Introduction
(93): nation as continuation of development of modern sovereignty [after
monarchies]
B. Birth
of the Nation (93-97)
1. Absolutism as form required to rule feudalism [even as it crumbles beneath
capitalism]
2. Continuities of absolutist kingdom and nation
a. Spiritual identity of the nation vs. king’s divine body as legitimation
b. New form of abstraction: biological blood, spatial territory, linguistic
community
3. Differences
a. Feudal subject [passive] becomes disciplinary citizen [active but controlled]
b. Nation as new way of overcoming crisis of modern sovereignty: reification
of relation
c. New material conditions: new equilibrium of capitalism and the state:
“modernization”
C. The
Nation and the Crisis of Modernity (97-101)
1. Jean Bodin: must be a victory in real struggle to construct the state
2. Natural rights school:
a. Legitimation of administrative machine
b. Distribution of transcendent sovereignty through real forms of administration
3. Historicism: subjectivity of the historical process:
a. Vico
b. Herder: sovereignty through continuity of territory, population, and
the nation
c. Thus nation is now condition of possibility of all human action and
of social life
D. The
Nation’s People (101-105)
1. Sieyès links nation and bourgeoisie:
a. Nation as constructive [revolutionary] political concept
b. Become spiritual construct [reactionary]
2. People ? nation ? sovereignty:
a. Retrogressive mystification
b. Because “the people” is a product of the modern nation-state
3. People into multitude [“every nation must make the multitude into a people”]
a. People: identity, homogeneity, exclusionary, constituted, single will,
legitimates Power
b. Multitude: multiplicity, plane of singularities, open set of relations,
internally different,
inclusively related to outside, constituent
4. Two mechanisms to make the multitude into a people
a. Colonial racism
b. Representation [of the whole population by a hegemonic group, race,
class]
5. Counter-revolutionaries agree: national sovereignty from spiritual construction
of identity
6. Modern sovereignty now: “unitary experience of a nation-subject and
its imagined community”
E. Subaltern
Nationalism [double-edged sword] (105-109)
1. Progressive:
a. Line of defense vs powerful nations and as ideological weapon against
myths of inferiority
b. Commonality of potential community: unification of diverse populations
2. Regressive
a. Repress internal differences
b. Becomes only way to imagine community
3. Example of black nationalism in US
a. Progressive
(1) Malcolm X: shift focus from civil rights [Congress]
to human rights [UN]
(2) practices of economic self-determination unifying community
b. Regressive: posing uniformity and homogeneity of black community
4. Paradox of subaltern nationality:
a. Only progressive when nation doesn’t exist
b. Because when nation becomes basis of sovereignty, then Power is constituted
F. Totalitarianism
of the Nation-State (109-113)
1. Question: does the nation-state solve the crisis of modern sovereignty?
Many on Left say yes.
2. Hardt and Negri answer: NO! Just look at the barbarisms of nation-states
in the 20th Century
a. National socialism
b. Socialism and nationalism
(1) nationalist movements w/in the socialist International
(2) social-democratic reformism: neo-Kantians: nationality
= modernization
(a) they mistook nation as transcendent for nation as transcendental
(b) didn’t see [bourgeois] nation-states as against the multitude
(3) Bolshevism: Stalin reterritorializes communism on Russia
c. Nationalist socialism = national socialism because national sovereignty
is at heart of both
d. Cold war concept of “totalitarianism” misses the point:
(1) totalized and disciplined social life is the anti-multitude
par excellence
(2) “the people” as organic = founding myth that blocks
creativity of the multitude
III. (2.3) The
Dialectics of Colonial Sovereignty (114-136)
A. Introduction
(114-115):
1. Internal identity and external difference
2. Regulation of flows: economic foundation of European nation-states
B. Humankind
in One and Many (115-120)
1. Utopian tendencies along w/ globalization sustain project of counter-Empire
[no nostalgia]
2. Examples
a. De Las Casas: humanity is one and equal, but only as potentially European
/ Christian
b. L’Ouverture: reflects rhetoric of French Republic, but he won freedom
in armed struggle
c. Marx: British are brutes in India, but are agents of modernization vs.
“Oriental despotism”
C. The
Crisis of Colonial Slavery (120-124)
1. American slave production within capitalist world system
a. Cap. created new slave systems, which in turn foreshadow European production
models
b. Slavery provides pedestal of super-exploitation: primes pump of English
take-off
2. “Second feudalism” in S and E Europe
3. Slave revolt is indispensable political lever:
a. abolitionism is secondary:
b. slavery still economically viable at time of its overthrow
(1) NB: Blackburn: do not make slavery a necessary
stage of modernization
(2) because then we might think it was worth the terrible price
that “was paid”
(a) but it wasn’t paid by those who benefitted
(b) and the price is still being paid
4. For Hardt and Negri, capital is always reterritorializing on the creations
of the multitude
a. NB: we have to beware interpreting this as a “natural force” of “living
labor”
b. the line of flight is part of the abstract machine itself:
c. although only actualized by real struggle of living people
D. The
Production of Alterity (124-126)
1. Manichaean (binary) logic of exclusion
2. Alterity produced by discourse: homogenization and essentialization
a. Anthropology as public instruction in European superiority
b. History writing puts colonial peoples as primitive stages in march of
civilization
E. The
Dialectic of Colonialism (127-129)
1. Dialectic
a. Difference pushed to the extreme
b. Becomes foundation of the self as negated other
2. Reality is non-dialectical, but “proliferating multiplicities”
3. Thus it is the abstract machine of colonialist discourse that produces
dialectical identity
4. Utility of analyses of colonial dialectic: Fanon and Sartre
a. Denaturalization of racial and cultural difference
b. Reveals violent struggle as basis of colonialism
c. Reveals potential for subversion: must move from dialectical recognition
to real struggle
F. The
Boomerang of Alterity (130-132)
1. Revolutionary dialectic of representations:
a. Négritude as affirmation of the denigrated
b. Now become active force of the Other
2. But this is just cultural representation, when it is [armed]
political struggle that counts
a. There is no dialectical resolution to this counter-violence:
b. But it is not positive construction either
G. The
Poisoned Gift of National Liberation [delivery of new nation to world market]
(132-34)
1. The equation of nationalism and modernization is a “perverse trick”
a. Always a delegation of struggle to a leading party
b. A new bourgeoisie in charge of modernization
2. Final passage to Empire as a “chain of representation” leading to market
submission
a. Multitude represented by people
b. People represented by nation
c. Nation represented by the state [administration / “new bourgeoisie”]
d. Nation-state subjected to world market
H. Contagion
(134-136)
1. Colonialist imaginary of native disease: civilization and contagion
2. Contagion is only an image of fecundity, of life: AIDS as globalized
contagion
IV. (2.4) Symptoms of Passage [postmodernist
and postcolonialist theories] (137-159)
A. Introduction
(137-139)
1. Pomo and postcolonial theories are symptoms only: they mistake the real
enemy
2. They fight Enlightenment / imperialist binary regimes, but Empire loves
difference
B. Politics
of Difference [postmodernist theory] (139-143)
1. Postmodernist theories attack modern binaries: they draw on Lyotard,
Baudrillard, Derrida
a. They attack only one wing of modernity, the counter-revolution
b. They attack the dialectic by deconstructing borders: e.g., International
relations theory (IR)
2. Thus pomo theories attack the old enemy and in so doing even help Empire
C. The
Liberation of Hybridities, or Beyond Colonial Binaries [postcolonial theory]
(143-146)
1. Homi Bhabha: pomo / postcolonialist theories coalesce as attacks on
modern sovereignty
a. Power = binary exclusion, so liberation = locality, hybridity, differential
flow
b. “Hierarchy” and “binary” are equivalent terms
(1) but Empire rules by management of locality, hybridity,
and differential flows
(2) no binaries, but new forms of hierarchy
2. Once again they are symptoms of passage [though might be good tools
for retro-readings]
D. Fundamentalism
and./or Postmodernism (146-150)
1. Fundamentalism as another symptom of passage to Empire
2. Islamic and Christian fundamentalisms as opposition to modernity and
modernization
a. They call for return to an [illusory] past
b. Pomo: they invent the past they want to return to
3. Oversimplifying: pomo appeals to winners of globalization and fundamentalisms
to the losers
E. The
Ideology of the World Market (150-154)
1. Anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism / affirmation of difference
par excellence
a. World market = deconstruction of nation-state boundaries
b. No “smooth” space, but global networks of Power: differentiated and
mobile structures
2. Examples in marketing, management, production
a. Marketing is clearly pomo: targeted markets, niches, multiplication
of difference
(1) NB: for Deleuze these are multiplications
of diversity, not difference
(2) that is, properties of constituted beings
b. Production cycles: “just in time” = no inventories, tight loop
btw sales and production
c. Management: corporate culture: diversity management
d. Production processes: informatized networks
F. Truth
Commissions (154-56)
1. There’s nothing outdated about certain aspects of Enlightenment
a. Stability is a great benefit to those in forced diasporas
b. Truth is a great benefit to those coming out of dictatorial terror
2. What is important is control of production of mobility and truth
G. The
Poor (156-159)
1. Poor as foundation of the multitude [limit of {non-industrial} proletarianization]
2. As constantly called into production cycles [target of mobile capital],
the poor is power
3. Traditional Marxist hatred of the mobility and indiscipline of the poor
4. The subjugated have absorbed the exploited [wage-workers] to form the
multitude
V. (2.5) Network Power: U.S. Sovereignty
and the New Empire (160-182)
A. Introduction
(160)
1. US as exception to modern sovereignty
2. And so as basis for imperial sovereignty
B. The
American Revolution and the Model of Two Romes (161-164)
1. Not a transfer of power, but an immanent arrangement of the multitude:
democratic networks
2. Two Roman models
a. Republican Rome [Republican Machiavellianism]
(1) Power as constituent power: emerging from immanent social
dynamics
(2) Social basis is always conflictual: emergence from play
of counter-powers
b. Imperial Rome [Polybius]
(1) Mixed constitution: monarchy, aristocracy, democracy
(2) Disequilibrium = symptom of corruption
3. Reports of American novelty
a. Tocqueville: limits of democratic revolution
b. Arendt: invention of modern politics: space of freedom [on basis of
constituted Power]
C. Extensive
Empire (164-167)
1. Three aspects of US Constitution
a. Immanent, productive power: synergies of multitude when properly ordered
b. Self-reflection / dialectical ballet: sovereign Power ruling over the
multitude
c. Threat of transcendence finessed by open expansiveness [new territories
/ states]
2. Resembles Roman expansion [at least w/in Italian peninsula]:
a. Inclusive, not exclusive
b. Imperial, not imperialist
3. Empire as “universal republic”: network of powers and counter-powers
in open system
4. Contrast with European modernity
a. Modernity as bounded, Power at limit; Empire as re-creating itself in
expansion
b. Modernity as built for [inter-state] war; Empire as based on peace [and
police action]
D. Open
Frontiers (167-172)
1. Four stages in US history
a. 1776-1890 (pp. 168-172) [Declaration through Reconstruction and closing
of frontier]
b. 1890-1917 (pp. 172-176) [Progressive era through Wilson and League of
Nations]
c. 1917-1965 (pp. 176-179) [New Deal through height of Cold War]
d. 1965-1991 (pp. 179-182) [social movements of 60s through collapse of
Soviet empire]
2. Stage One: 1776-1876:
a. Frontier: open process: resolution of 1776 immanence / 1787 transcendence
(1) liberty as basis
(2) civil society w/o feudal / aristocratic or absolutist bureaucracy
b. Subordinations
(1) exclusion of Native American
(2) exclusive inclusion of black slaves / women
c. This is a crisis for free self-constitution of immanent social power
of a free people
d. Civil War: struggle [for management of hybridities in open expansion:
preview of Empire]
(1) over space of nation [slavery and the new territories]
(2) over creation of a new people [vs. diverse properties
of constituted society]
(a) NB: the form of the Am Rev was given by the colonial assemblies
(b) which already reflected British social divisions [free
male property holders]
E. The
Closure of Imperial Space [Stage Two: 1890-1917] (172-176)
1. Progressive era as management of crisis of closing of frontier: class
division and monopolies
2. Two lines of response
a. Theodore Roosevelt: traditional European imperialism: Philippines
b. Woodrow Wilson:
(1) international peace through League of Nations as network
of powers
(2) modeled on original logic of US Constitution
F. American
Imperialism [Stage Three: 1917-1975] (176-179)
1. New Deal as response to threat of Bolshevism [NB: and threat of US fascism!]
2. Imperialism as constant thread in US history
a. Struggles to maintain black slavery and super-exploitation of black
labor
(1) NB: since 1787 limits federal power and maintains states’
rights
(2) we cannot see this imperialism as constituting a central
transcendent Power
(a) but as forming barriers to stop internal self-constitution
of the multitude
(b) as opposed to Empire’s management of differential flows
b. Monroe Doctrine
(1) defense against European imperialism
(2) allowing for our own imperialism
c. Cold War: protecting “Free World” or maintaining Euro-imperialism:
d. Vietnam / Tet offensive as turning point
(1) last imperialist war ends in military defeat
(2) constituent power reborn as New Left: Black Power,
feminism, student anti-war
(3) Empire thus as response to 60s
G. Beyond
the Cold War (179-182)
1. Cold War:
a. Paradox of Reagan’s boast
(1) Did he defeat the Soviets in the Cold War?
(2) Or did Soviet Communism collapse because it is an impossible
system?
(3) H&N say the latter, although Cold War isolation
helped Soviet self-destruction
b. Real effect of Cold War: US leadership in construction of Empire
2. International police power now in US hands: Gulf War as birth of New
World Order
a. Conducted not in national interest
b. But in name of global right
3. Institutional backing for claim to right: UN, IMF, WB, WTO, NGOs all
call for US force
4. Reasons for US leadership
a. Continuity of leadership role in Cold War
b. Imperial tendency of US Constitution:
(1) global expansion of internal US project
(2) Empire right as “internal and constitutive institutional
process”
(3) no frontier, but “open space of imperial sovereignty”
[C Asia as Wild West?]
VI. (2.6) Imperial Sovereignty (183-204)
A. Introduction
(183-186)
1. Critique of modernity is itself modern: always at crisis point, the
border
2. Examples
a. Philosophy: Kant, Foucault
b. Political theory: inside searching for an outside: inside still assumed
as foundation
(1) modern republicanism: realistic foundations and utopian
initiatives:
(2) Machiavelli, Spinoza, Marx
c. There is real transformative power in these critiques:
(1) they are “ontological demands”: new form to thought
(2) that refuse the “blackmail of bourgeois realism”
3. Limits of critiques: they do not target the [modernist] position of
critique as search for outside
B. There
Is No More Outside (186-190)
1. Modernity posits control of territory vs the outside: society, psychology,
anthropology
2. In Empire, there is little distinction of inside and outside: “spectacle”
as “non-place of politics”
a. Nature
(1) Empire is postmodern: “external” nature is recognized as
socially constructed
(2) Instead of inside / outside, play of degrees &
intensities, hybrids & artifacts
b. Public - private
(1) modernist public spaces [the town square]
(2) pomo privatization [the mall]
c. Military
(1) no more war
(2) only police action / Homeland Security
3. “End of history” = end of [crisis of] modernity: proliferation of minor
and indefinite crises
4. Capitalist market has always fought borders [but national economies
wanted them]
a. World market as diagram of imperial power [Foucault / Deleuze sense
of “diagram”]
b. Smooth space not homogeneous, but locally / immanently defined
C. Imperial
Racism [shift from biology to culture] (190-195)
1. Modern biological racism: modern anti-racism as anti-bio-essentialist
/ social-constructivist
2. Pomo racism is both anti-biological and social-constructivist
a. But it is essentialist: a cultural essentialism leading to “clash of
civilizations”
b. Thus internal race cops and equivalence of ‘politics of difference’
/ ‘identity politics’
3. Segregation, not hierarchy: ‘equal but separate’:
a. Hierarchy is no longer fixed and eternal
b. But contingent, constructed on basis of cultural practices [‘Asian emphasis
on education’]
4. Race practice
a. no longer modern exclusionary dialectic of Same and Other
b. but pomo ‘differential inclusion’ and management
D. On
the Generation and Corruption of Subjectivity (195-198)
1. Modernity
a. Continual process of generation of subjectivities in material practices
of interpellation
b. Institutional archipelago: discrete forms and passages [‘you’re not
at school anymore’]
2. Empire:
a. Subjectivities are produced in an ever more intense way
b. But no longer in discrete institutions and forms
(1) more patriarchy even though nuclear family is ‘falling
apart’
(2) more police even though prisons are bigger than ever
(3) more [coerced] ‘learning’ even though schools are ‘failing’
E. The
Triple Imperative of Empire (198-201)
1. Inclusive: ‘law of inclusionary neutral indifference’: ‘give me your
poor ....’
2. Differential: proliferation and celebration of multiculturalism
a. Pomo management of given diversity [constituted products]
b. Vs. process of immanent self-constitution [constituent process]: Deleuzean
difference
3. Managerial:
a. Modern molds: stamping identities and forming distinctions in diversity
b. Pomo modulation, manipulation of control parameters
(1) examples of mixing populations of workers to manage diversity
(2) but this was standard practice on slave plantations [intra
African diversity]
(3) modern racism = binary-theory; colonial practice already diversity-managerial
F. From
Crisis to Corruption (201-203)
1. Corruption must be seen as amoral process of decomposition to reach
new creative potentials
2. Thus imperial rule functions by breaking down [any one order must be
able to be reformed]
3. ‘Absence of any ontology’ (202) is sloppy:
a. absence of any fixed order of products
b. to maintain access to production process so that it can be tinkered
with
G. Refusal
(203-204)
1. Literary examples of refusal of transcendent authority
a. Bartleby: stasis
b. Michael K: movement
2. But such refusal is only a beginning: the real challenge is construction
of plane of immanence
VII. Intermezzo: Counter-Empire
(205-218)
A. Introduction
(205-206)
1. Turning point in argument: from forms of order to processes of production
2. Contestatory subjectivities are formed via insertion into production
regimes
3. This book will is only theory: alternatives are only created in practice
[but there are relays]
B. One
Big Union! (206-208)
1. Augustine as universalist [but with obedience to transcendence as telos
of human praxis]
2. IWW as modern universalists: spoke all the languages
3. Hardt and Negri: as postmodern republicans
C. The
Non-Place of Exploitation (208-210)
1. Modernity: Marx:
a. Proletarian as inside / outside of capitalist development: as motor
via contestation
b. Point where use value is turned into exchange value
2. Empire: non-place of exploitation: abstract labor: general power
D. Being-Against:
Nomadism, Desertion, Exodus (210-214)
1. Disobedience is healthy: but why do people obey?
2. Resistance is everywhere: Empire can only control rather than discipline
3. Mobility of labor
a. Importance to modernity
b. Huge tide of Imperial mobility
(1) Who will be the new barbarians?
(2) Exodus of skilled labor helped bring down Soviets
4. How can mobility and refusal become constitutive and positively constructive?
E. New
Barbarians (214-218)
1. Corporeal experimentation: “anthropological exodus”: uses [Imperial]
hybrids and mutation
2. Real change not of products/diversity, but control of process of production
3. Immaterial labor as locus of change
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