Empire Part 3: Passages of Production (219-350)
I. (3.1) The Limits of Imperialism
(221-239)
A. Introduction
(221-222)
1. Intrinsic relation of capitalism and expansion: reconfiguration of inside
and outside
2. Crisis is normal mode of capitalism
B. The
Need for an Outside [realization] (222-225)
1. Realization of surplus value [sales] necessary
a. Insufficient consumption base [profit = gap of use / exchange value
of labor power]
b. This gets worse as labor becomes more productive [% variable capital
shrinks]
2. Thus capital must expand consumption / realization
a. Intensifying existing markets [new needs and wants: credit]
b. New workers [but new proles will bring same problem of insufficient
consuming power]
c. New non-capitalist markets in which to sell commodities
3. Thus outside of capitalism is essential: motor that drives Europe to
world dominance
C. Internalizing
the Outside [capitalization] (225-229)
1. Must reinvest realized surplus value
a. New constant capital [particularly new materials]
(1) imperialism as pillage
(2) retains outside as such
b. New variable capital
(1) capitalist imperialism
(2) capitalize = internalize the outside
(3) this is process of formal subsumption
(a) maintains uneven development
(b) to create an organism [different parts co-ordinated in
overall function]
2. Fundamental contradiction of capitalist expansion [realization vs capitalization]
a. Realization needs an outside
b. Capitalization needs to internalize that outside
3. Thus it needs ever new conquests: but the earth is finite
4. H&N as non-economistic: insistence on the political moment
D. Equalization
and Subsumption [Lenin] (229-231)
1. Toolbox for production of anti-imperialist subjectivity
2. Critiques of political positions of Hilferding / Kautsky while maintaining
their economic analysis
a. Hilferding: Imperialism impedes equalized rate of profit [which drives
techno innovation]
b. Kautsky: “ultra-imperialist” phase
3. Lenin moves along line: analyzes reality and poses political project
E. From
Imperialism to Empire (231-234)
1. Imperialism as export of European nations’ civil war potential:
a. Ideology as transforming the multitude into a people that can conquer
and colonize
b. Initial articulation of concept of hegemony
2. Imperialism as obstacle to capitalist competition [monopolies, protectionism]
3. Thus either Empire [post-imperialist global capitalist order] or world
communist revolution
F. The
Missing Volumes of Capital (234-237)
1. Real motor of transition from imperialism to Empire is global struggle
of proletariat
2. Paradox in Marx’s thought: the original plan of Capital: three missing
volumes
a. Wage / wage earners: political and historical writings on class struggle
b. State: specific analyses of national politics would have bogged down
the general theory
c. World market: thus only after world market can a theory of the state
be written
(1) global tendency inherent in capitalism from the start
(2) decline of nation-state [its equivalence w/ capital] is
telos of capital - state relation
3. Class struggle is now completely open: capital vs multitude w/o nationalist
mediation
G. Cycles
(237-239)
1. Empire as qualitative passage or simply as another turn of the capitalist
cycle?
2. Critique of cyclical theories (e.g., Giovanni Arrighi) as ignoring human
input to history
a. Braudelian / World Systems theory reading of US crisis of 1970s
b. turning point from 1st phase (material expansion) to 2nd phase (financial
expansion)
3. But no way to recognize an event, a paradigm shift, a rupture
II. (3.2) Disciplinary Governability
[standpoint of Power] (240-259)
A. Introduction
(240-241)
1. Capitalist overinvestment and proletarian under-consumption leading
to1929 crash
a. Taylorism and high productivity
b. Fordism and high wages for organized industrial workers in dominant
countries
c. Colonial expansion: divvying up spoils of war
2. Only US New Deal is creative response; beginnings of process of surpassing
imperialism
B. A New
Deal for the World (241-244)
1. US New Deal as synthesis of US imperialism (TR) and reformism (Wilson)
2. Modern welfare state: investment in social factory: modernist disciplinary
government
a. Taylorist labor, Fordist wage regime, Keynesian economic regulation
b. Structuring entire society: civil society = state (direct: public works
or indirect: regulation)
c. Productive subjectivities: welfare not a dole, but worker training:
skills and motivation
3. US entry into WWII: tying fate of New Deal to crisis of European imperialism
4. Post war reconstruction as New Deal for the world w/ US hegemony:
a. Global discipline: biopower: population control, family wage, collective
bargaining
b. Dollar as king: Marshall Plan, Bretton Woods, US military power
C. Decolonization,
Decentering, and Discipline [3 aspects of global New Deal] (244-249)
1. Decolonization: from standpoint of dominant powers
a. Colonies of defeated powers [Germany, Italy, Japan] were divvied up
b. Cold War binarized decolonization struggles and forced US to become
imperialist heir
(1) Vietnam War: end of decolonization; final US imperialism
(2) afterwards, the new world market becomes organized
2. Decentralization of production
a. Neocolonialism [1960-75]: old hierarchies still in place [TW as raw material source]
b. Transnational corporations [post 1975]
(1) as motor of reorganization
(a) transfer of technology
(b) mobilization of labor force
(c) connection of flows of wealth
(2) decisive stage in making Empire:
(a) cutting production loose from nation-states
(b) frees process of equalization of rates of profit
(3) new postcolonial states encouraged transnationals and were
formed by them
(4) new regional economies and new global division of labor:
moving to Empire
3. Disciplinary society
a. Transforming mobilization of peasants from liberation to production
(1) ideological model of modernization: Fordism, Taylorism,
welfare state
(2) the first two were never widely realized: only pockets
of high wages
b. But disciplinary society was spread, w/ enthusiastic support of socialist
states
D. Into
and Out of Modernity (249-251)
1. Modernization of the Third World was the whole point of the Cold War
a. Modernization led to new production of subjectivities beyond disciplinary
modernity
b. And beyond Cold War binaries
2. Mechanisms of modern sovereignty no longer sufficient to control these
new subjectivities
E. Toward
a New Global Paradigm (251-254)
1. World market begins to regulate global network of capital circulation:
a. Still only formal and tendency
b. Paradoxical procedure via diversity and diversification
2. Effects of tendency to world market unification
a. Wide spread of disciplinary model brings TW into system, but
as ghetto
b. “Wage emancipation”
(1) liberation from colonial or neo-colonial territories [peasants
torn from land]
(2) leads to a deterritorialized desire: a new desire for liberation
c. Transversal or rhizomatic mobility of labor:
(1) search for freedom and formation of new desires: nomadism
(2) macroeconomic effects:
(a) difficult to manage national labor markets: TW at
heart of the 1st as ghetto
(b) spur to reform of capitalist regimes: articulate command
and mobility
F. Real
Subsumption and the World Market (254-256)
1. Two types of subsumption
a. Formal subsumption: extension of domain of capitalism
b. Real subsumption: intensification of capitalist integration
(1) world market and equalization or management of rates of
profit on world scale
(2) requires disciplinary transformation of social and productive
relations
2. Critique of implicit Marxian economism:
a. World market is not just an economic process of move from formal to
real subsumption
b. Historical / political moment: laboring subjectivities push capital
past modernist discipline
G. Primitive
Accumulations (256-259)
1. New figure of proletariat: [see page 52]: all forms of labor, not just
industrial working class
2. Primitive accumulation is a social process: production of capitalists
and proletarians
3. English model
a. Creation of proletarians: divorcing direct and small producer from means
of production:
(1) no more artisans or peasants
(2) enclosure of common lands, driving peasants away, punishing
vagabonds
b. Creation of capitalists: Capital 1.31
(1) JP: capital is a social relation, not money or even machines
(a) owners of means of production employing
(b) proletarians: those with only labor power to sell
(2) system: colonies, national debt, modern taxation, protectionist
system
(a) colonies = Atlantic triangle, India
(b) national debt = government bonds sold to rich w/ interest
[paid by taxes]
(c) modern taxation = consumption taxes [higher percentage
of income of poor]
(d) protectionism = two part system with colonies
i) prevention of colonial manufacture
ii) monopoly trade to metropolitan merchants
4. English model not the only one; each experience unique; however two general models
a. English / European model
(1) wealth from outside [colonies]
(2) command from inside [evolution of domestic society]
b. Rest of world [including US]
(1) wealth from inside [newly protected industry or freed up
agricultural trade]
(2) command from outside [transformation of European-imposed
colonial authority]
5. Postmodern / Empire primitive accumulation
a. Play between inside / outside has declined
b. Nature of labor and wealth changes
(1) “immaterial” wealth and labor
(2) “informatized” production networks: simultaneity of social
production
III. (3.3)
Resistance, Crisis, Transformation [standpoint of multitude] (260-279)
A. Introduction
(260-261)
1. Vietnam as focal point of 60s struggles against international disciplinary
order
2. These struggles force capital to modify its structures and undergo paradigm
shift
B. Two,
Three, Many Vietnams [1960s struggles] (261-264)
1. International capitalist crisis in late 60s caused by proletarian struggles
that decrease profit
2. Different struggles in different regions
a. Dominant countries:
(1) general refusal of work (esp. factory work) and affirmation
of non-work
(a) JP: of course, refusal of work is not refusal to work (that
is, to produce)
(b) but refusal of working for someone else (i.e.,
refusal of [alienated] labor)
(2) subversion of divisions of labor market by worker demands
for high social wage
(a) separation by class, race, sex, ethnicity
(b) fluidity
(c) hierarchies
(3) attack on capitalist command: [general strikes in 68]
b. Subordinate countries [peasants and proletarians]
(1) proletarian wage demands that destabilized international
economic system
(2) also, new subjectivities by modernization: virtual
unity of global proletariat
3. Accumulation of struggles undermined international hierarchies preventing global worker unity
a. British Empire grants “aristocracy of labor” status to British workers
b. Decline of imperialism weakens 1st World worker privilege:
(1) no more export of civil war
(2) since international proles now organized and dangerous
c. Thus end of “Third Worldism”:
(1) primary antagonism no longer 1st [capital] vs 3rd [labor]
(2) thus no more revolutionary priority to TW
d. HN critiques of Third Worldism
(1) ignores worker struggles in 1st and 2nd Worlds
(2) ignores tendency to global worker unity in convergence
of struggles
C. Capitalist
Response to the Crisis [1970s reaction] (264-269)
1. Post war US econ hegemony: Bretton Woods: global New Deal via IMF, WB,
Fed Reserve
a. Relative free trade and gold standard backing dollar
b. Monetary stabilization allows financing of reform
(1) through surplus exports to US
(2) guaranteed by strong stable dollar
c. “Quasi-imperialist” US leadership
2. Crisis from convergence of struggles
a. 1st world worker demands raised cost of stabilization and reform
b. TW struggles undermined extraction of superprofits
3. Crisis takes form of US trade balance leaning to Europe and Japan
a. 68 struggles and Vietnam setback dissolves stabilization
(1) relatively free circulation of capital
(2) strong Eurodollar
(3) political parity among dominant countries
b. Nixon decouples dollar from gold, pushing US debt onto Europe
c. 1970s crisis becomes structural:
(1) dissolution of Bretton Woods, naked US hegemony revealed
(2) need for new paradigm becomes apparent
(a) HN note on relation of individual capitalist and systemic
crisis
(b) crisis as the “creative destruction” of capitalist system
i) transforming substance of crisis: overproduction
ii) into new system of command: new relations of production
4. Two paths for capitalist response
a. Repression:
(1) reversing social gains of 60s [backlash]
(2) separating and disaggregating labor market [attack on unions]
(3) re-establishing control over production cycle
(a) downsizing of corporate labor forces
(b) control of social mobility and fluidity via new technology
i) previously, new technologies involved both
a) immediate production [Taylorism]
b) and social reproduction [Fordism]
ii) 1970s automation pushes these to the breaking point:
a) old command doesn’t work with these new forces
b) in other words, big government / big unions no longer applicable
b. Changing composition of proletariat: integration of new production into
new society
(1) capital is always reactive: only workers act and invent new capital forms
(2) thus US maintains its hegemony due to strength of its [non-industrial]
proletariat
(a) general refusal to work and new social experiments: “life
style”
(b) forces capital to respond to new proletarian subjectivity:
“quality of life”
D. The
Ecology of Capital (269-272)
1. Capital seemed doomed at time of WWI:
a. Imperialism would run into an “ecological” crisis by exhausting its
outside
b. Finite imperialism would then self-destruct in wars
2. How to explain capitalism’s health today?
a. Reform of capital: conserves its outside: but this is false: expansion
is increasing
b. Continuation of same processes:
(1) ecological crisis still to come, but in distant future
(2) even though there still are vast non-capitalist resources
and labor markets
c. Shift from formal to real subsumption: intensive endo-capitalism
(1) modern formal subsumption: look for new natural resources
(2) postmodern real subsumption: produce your own nature [informatization]
E. Assault
on the Disciplinary Regime (272-276)
1. New margin of freedom for workers through increased welfare and discipline
a. Workers used dissent and struggle
(1) to raise social value of labor power
(2) to expand set of needs and desires for “necessary labor”
(a) social struggle over wages: quality of life, type of family,
etc
(b) all of which decreases profits
2. All this changes not only wages, but also quality of work itself [need
for creativity expression]
a. Site of New Left: cultural struggle is immediately political and economic
b. Refusal of work and social/pol/econ experiments [communes, co-operatives]
(1) student movements: intellectual labor
(2) feminism: “reproduction”: social and biological: positing
biopower
(a) political content of “personal” and “private” relationships
(b) revaluation of “women’s work” = affective and personal
care
3. New social values of co-operation, communication, affectivity, flexibility
= new production
4. Again, here is the real New Left
a. Not just the political value of cultural struggle versus narrow economism
b. But the indistinguishability of economics, politics, and culture in
regime of biopower
5. Again, it is proletarian struggle that provides form of next capitalist
production regime
a. Capital always happy to stay where it is
b. Its problem is how to react to and stay on top of new production demanded
by proles
F. The
Death Throes of Soviet Discipline (276-279)
1. Collapse of Soviet system is a watershed marker of new system
2. Caused by inability of system to go beyond modernist discipline
a. Intellectual workers of Soviet system demanded freedom and creativity
b. But the bureaucratic system could not handle these demands
3. Soviet refusal of work was same struggle as elsewhere against modernist
discipline
a. Glasnost and perestroika: too little, too late
b. Withdrawal of consensus among intellectual workers was key [since they
are pomo key]
IV. (3.4) Postmodernization, or the Informatization
of Production (280-303)
A. Introduction
(280-282)
1. Usual view: three phases of economic history
a. Agriculture/resource extraction-dominant
b. Industrial/durable goods-dominant: modernization
c. Service/information-dominant: postmodernization or informatization
2. This view ignores
a. Qualitative change
(1) industrialization of agriculture in modernization
(2) informatization of agriculture and industry in postmodernization
b. Hierarchies in regional / global economies (thus creating historical
illusions)
(1) agricultural/resource economy societies in modern or postmodern
setting
(a) are NOT “developing”
(b) but are structurally dependent in world system
(2) thus NO analogy with, let’s say, agricultural France in
15th C
(a) because agriculture was dominant type of economic production
at the time
(b) thus France was not dependent upon other powers but was
a leader
B. Illusions
of Development (282-284)
1. Development theories overlook global system positioning and focus on
internal structure
2. HN critique underdevelopment theories
a. Two valid historical claims
(1) underdevelopment was created during imperialism via position
in global system
(2) dominant countries had developed in isolation (weak trade
or protectionism )
b. Leading to an erroneous conclusion: isolation will lead to development
today
c. But this is also an historical illusion which ignores
(1) strength of current world market
(2) and hence ability to punish attempts at isolation or independent
action (Argentina)
C. Informatization
(284-289)
1. End of modernization: industrial production no longer expanding dominance
over other sectors
a. Symptom of this is expansion of service industry in core regions
(1) health care, education, finance, transportation, entertainment,
advertising
(2) central role of knowledge, information, affect, communication
b. Postmodern economy is thus an “informational economy”
2. But this doesn’t mean industry disappears, but it does mean it is being
informatized
3. Two models of core pomo economy
a. Service economy: US, UK, Canada: rapid decline in industry and growth
in services
b. Info-industrial economy: Japan, Germany: informatization of surviving
industries
4. Subordinate regions: new industrial production sites:
a. False picture:
(1) dominant / core = service
(2) first subordinate / first periphery = industry
(3) second subordinate / second periphery = agriculture
b. Thus generating developmental illusion: new industrial production is
a step toward core
c. Critique of this developmental illusion
(1) export of fixed capital at highest stage of development
(2) thus new industrial production is subordinate in global
economy
(3) whereas it had previously been support for the dominance
of the core economies
5. Modernization is no longer the key to economic competitiveness (but
informatization is)
a. To move into a mid-level position you don’t want to attract industrial
production
b. But instead software production, etc. (e.g., Ireland)
6. We now see large, mixed economies even in subordinate positions (India,
Brazil)
a. Thus simple presence of dominant form of production
b. Doesn’t mean these nations are poised to become themselves globally
dominant
7. Italian example demonstrates this
a. Didn’t complete industrialization before developing informatization
b. Thus ALL “national” economies are now mixed economies, varying only
in degree
D. The
Sociology of Immaterial Labor [pomo labor] (289-294)
1. Info as market data: change in factory labor: from Fordism to “Toyotism”
a. Fordism = mass production of fixed models, no feedback between sales
and production
b. “Toyotism” = tight feedback btw sales and production: “just in time”
production
2. Productive communication in service industries: immaterial labor
a. Symbol-manipulation is widespread: “we think like computers”
(1) JP: outdated computationalist model of cognition: computer
as model of “mind”
(2) actually, today we have flipped these terms
(a) we have computers modeled on the brain [connectionism]
(b) or even machines modeled on organisms [embodied mind: Brooks
robots]
(3) but this doesn’t contradict HN’s biopower perspective
(a) actually it strengthens it, for now we see
(b) multitude’s very life is the basis of all production: as
model as well as source
b. Types of immaterial labor
(1) symbolic-analytical services:
(a) Reich’s typology of high-value labor
i) problem-solving; problem-identifying; strategic brokering
ii) JP: does this include “thinking outside the box”: i.e.,
critical creativity?
a) critical: examining presuppositions of previous paradigm
b) creative: developing a new paradigm, a new set of presuppositions
c) these are pattern recognition / reformation vs [discrete] symbolic
d) and embodied, biological shortcuts are best at patterns [vs neural nets?]
(b) leading to new division of labor: low-value data entry
HN side note on homogenization of labor: all labor now tending to abstract
labor: symbol manipulation
(2) affective labor:
(a) model:
i) HN say limit of [computational and connectionist] computer models here
ii) JP: that’s true, but can embodied mind model hold?
a) one might say only organisms have affects
b) but for HN “affect” seems merely to mean “feeling”
c) which is subjective appropriation
d) rather than interactive and powerful [DG: “what can a body do?”]
(b) features: human contact and interaction:
i) production of affect
ii) traditionally names “women’s work”
(c) produces biopower
i) that is, a connected, communicating networked society
ii) JP: here we can see a DG sense of affect:
a) how can we connect with others?
b) and thus form new bodies politic
3. Recap: three types of informatized / immaterial labor
a. Informatization of production
b. Symbolic-analytical tasks
c. Affective production
4. All these have co-operation immanent to the labor itself
a. Contra the old Marxist [and hylomorphic] notion of labor power as “variable
capital”
(1) only capital has organizing powers; labor is chaotic /
passive
(2) and needed capital to bring workers together in teams
b. But today wealth and productivity = co-operative networks via immaterial
labor
c. A “spontaneous and elementary communism”
E. Network
Production (294-297)
1. Decentralization of production [vs modernist centralization]
2. Network [vs modernist assembly line]
3. Immaterial labor is deterritorialized labor: abstract co-operation
a. Weakens labor bargaining [collective or otherwise]
b. Corresponding centralization of control over production:
(1) supervision of labor: “virtual panopticon” [keystroke monitoring,
etc]
(2) management, planning, finance in a few cities [NY, London,
Tokyo]
F. Information
Highways (297-300)
1. Production:
a. Analogies: Roman roads, 19th C railroads
b. But info highway is unique: it is immanent to the production:
(1) info is the commodity itself
(2) production and circulation coincide
2. Politics: combination of democratic and oligopolistic mechanisms
a. Horizontal / rhizomatic [many to many] network
b. Vertical / centralized [one to many] broadcast [media mergers, Internet
channels, etc]
G. Commons
[against privatization of public property] (300-303)
1. Cycles of privatization
a. Direct privatization: enclosures, etc.
b. Mediated privatization: public development of resources, then privatization
(1) rise and fall of welfare state
(2) privatization of energy, communication [and water]
2. What is the operative notion of the common today?
a. We are in a radical commonality
(1) languages, communication networks, interactive services
(2) what is produced is co-operation itself
b. Private property becomes more nonsensical here [more abstract and transcendental]
(1) co-operation is a non-exhaustive good
(2) but that doesn’t mean its juridical power is diminished
c. New notion of commons needed
(1) DG: constructing concepts / “common names” as social / ontological project
(2) HN: commons as the “incarnation, production, liberation
of the multitude”
V. (3.5) Mixed Constitution (304-324)
A. Introduction
(304-305)
1. Multinational corporations in Empire have changed state - capitalist
relation
2. Must remember that state has always acted in the interest of the collective
capitalist
B. When
Giants Rule the Earth (305-309)
1. Different configurations of state - capitalist relation
a. 18th and 19th C: state
(1) in Europe: relatively unobtrusive
(2) outside Europe: even less (before colonial administration):
the great “companies”
(a) Dutch East India Company [Java]
(b) British East India Company [India]
b. 19th and 20th C crises
(1) in Europe and America: monopoly threat to competition so
state had to regulate
(2) in colonies: establishment of large colonial administrations
[1857: British in India]
c. Contemporary Empire: freedom of multinationals from nation state
(1) many on left see this as apocalyptic: corporations rule
unfettered
(2) HN: regulations on corporations still exist, but displaced
from nation-states
(a) national political crises:
i) political no longer sphere of consensus building and interest mediation
ii) now consensus determined by international economics:
a) trade balance, currency value, threat of capital flight
b) now determine government policies [or else: Argentina]
iii) national government now in networks of command: WTO, WB, IMF
a) national politics are now management rather than interest mediation
b) inter-governmental competition for mobile capital
(b) decline of an independent space for national revolutions
i) state can no longer transform a society
ii) so resisting the state, or trying to take it over, are
obsolete modernisms
(c) national democratic state now part of global corporate
command networks
2. Thus corporations are not free of ALL control just because of decline
of nation state.
C. The
Pyramid of Global Constitution (309-314)
1. At first glance, an empirical mess of control structures
2. Closer look reveals pyramidal structure
a. Pinnacle: unification [of constituted Power]
(1) military superpower: US: hegemony on use of force
(2) economic control: G7 nation-states:
(a) control global financial instruments (currencies, bonds,
etc)
(b) and hence regulate trade
(3) cultural and biopolitics: UN [Security Council; UNESCO,
UNICEF]
b. Second level: articulation [of global flows]
(1) networks of capital, technology, population flows set up
by corporations
(2) general set of nation states grouped into territorial organizations
[EU, NAFTA]
(a) filters of global circulation
(b) capture and distribute flows of wealth
(c) discipline their own populations [as much as still possible]
c. Third level: representation [of popular interests]
(1) UN General Assembly
(2) global civil society
(a) media networks: allegedly the vox populi
(b) religions [though fundamentalisms often strive to take
over states]
(c) NGOs
i) types:
a) syndicalist / trade union
b) missionary vocation
c) unrepresented peoples [indigenous]
ii) functions
a) compatible with and supporting Empire
b) but this is not all: they represent life force, biopower of the multitude
D. Polybius
and Imperial Government (314-316)
1. Analogy with Polybius
a. Monarchy: unification: top level: US military force
b. Aristocracy: articulation: second level: nation-state and corporate
economy
c. Democracy: representation: third level: media, NGOs: popular interests
2. Shift from tripartite [social class] to trifunctional model [executive,
judicial, representative]
a. Abstract functions
b. Held in equilibrium by checks and balances
3. Today we seem to be in a throwback to Polybius and the genetic moment:
a. Unbalanced relations of force
b. Or even the co-existence of the bad forms: tyranny, oligarchy, mob superstition
E. Hybrid Constitution (316-319)
1. But rather than analogy with past, we need a fresh pomo analysis:
2. Two axes of transformation
a. Hybridization rather than mixture of powers
(1) imperial monarchy is military guarantee of functioning
of world “market”
(a) but its not centralized like Rome
(b) nor is market exclusively vertical exploitation: it is
also horizontal flow
(2) aristocratic economy merges with this function though
(a) as it must construct networks of producers and consumers
(b) especially in areas of immaterial labor
(3) democratic representation is a hybrid as well: negotiating
entrance into market
b. Temporal [subjectivity production]
(1) monarchy as regulating social labor and reproduction
(2) aristocracy as regulation co-operation of social actors
(3) democratic: overdetermined by Empire:
(a) control of multitude [rather than discipline]
(b) “non-place of Power”
F. Struggle
over the Constitution (319-321)
1. Rhizomatic, networked Imperial constitution sets new sites of struggle
2. Three key variables
a. Common and singular: network must function, but never against those
in power
b. Command and self-identification of subject: legitimation of system:
willing obedience
c. Production of subjectivity and autonomous resistance of subjects
3. Thus each subject must be obedient [subject to] and independent, productive,
creative
a. JP: the “person” be split into passive political subject and active
productive subject
b. HN: thus production of subjectivity is the primary site of struggle
G. Spectacle
of the Constitution (321-324)
1. This site of struggle is obscured by the spectacle: isolation by image
consumption
2. New degree of media power: no conspiracy, but as if conspiracies existed
3. Fear as dominant feeling [negative, isolating affect: decreasing co-operative
power]
VI. (3.6) Capitalist Sovereignty, or Administering
the Global Society of Control (325-350)
A. Introduction
(325-332)
1. Contradiction of modern sovereignty and capital
a. Modern sovereignty as transcendence, as overcoding and striation
(1) transcendence of sovereign
(2) fixed boundaries of territories, populations, social functions,
etc
b. Capital as immanence, conjunction of deterritorialized and decoded flows
(1) immanent features of capitalism
(a) primitive accumulation deterritorializes labor
(b) monetarization creates common measure of value
(c) laws of capital functioning are historically variable:
i) rate of profit
ii) rate of exploitation
iii) realization of surplus value
(2) in other words, capital functions as an axiomatic [relations
prior to terms]
(a) reciprocal determination prior to determination in any
one field
(b) set of relations that are incarnated differently in different
circumstances
(3) or in still other terms, capital sets up a “smooth space”
2. History of modernity is history of attempts to mediate this contradiction
[tends to immanence]
a. Move from absolutism to governmentality
b. Withering of civil society as mediator of immanent capital and transcendent
sovereignty
(1) Fordist - Keynesian big gov / big labor vs Imperial decline
of big labor
(2) can be seen as move from disciplinary to control society
(a) discipline is immanent to subjectivities, although institutions
are transcendent
(b) HN reading of Foucault
i) dispositif as general strategy behind actual exercise
ii) diagram as virtual design [locus of virtual sovereignty]
iii) institutions as incarnations of diagram
(c) today in control society:
i) collapse of transcendent institutions
a) extension of discipline
b) hybrid subjectivities
ii) such immanence corresponds to axiomatics of capital
a) modern subjectivities: mass produced, fixed, replaceable parts
b) pomo subjectivities: simultaneous production in multiple sites: hybrid
B. A Smooth
World (332-336)
1. Conflict of imperialism and capitalism [striation vs smooth space]
2. End of effectiveness of “Third World” as outside point of resistance
[see p. 264]
a. Localists argue “Third World” is abstraction from real difference
b. Vs. world systems theory nomenclature of core and periphery which lumps
together
(1) HN: both are outmoded logics of locating TW as point of
resistance / revolution
(2) no more outside: all economies are mixes and hybrids
differing only in degree
(a) in the former TW there’s hi-tech info production
(b) in the core there’s
i) sweatshop industrial labor in core
ii) and agriculture and raw material extraction [Louisiana]
3. Revolutionary nationalism is just nostalgia
a. Decline of nation state not just rhetoric to disempower revolutionary
nationalists
b. Nations are inherently state-telic and transcendent sovereignty over
the multitude
C. The
New Segmentations (336-339)
1. Immanence / smooth space do not = equality: Empire = proximity
of unequal populations
2. This potential urban crisis must be finessed by new segmentations
a. Architecture, public planning, public transportation
b. Politics of labor: lower cost of labor
(1) by fostering competition among labor: temporal flexibility
and spatial mobility
(2) process of reproleterianization: e.g., length of working
day
c. Financial and monetary flows
(1) finance capital goes to low labor cost areas
(2) recalcitrant countries are destroyed by capital flight
d. Fear of violence, poverty, unemployment:
(1) content of communication is fear
(2) struggle among the poor for work to allay this fear
D. Imperial
Administration (339-343)
1. How does administration work in an immanent but still segmented Empire?
a. Modern administration
(1) linear integration of conflicts
(2) rational normalization of social life
b. Imperial administration
(1) fractal
(2) control of differences
2. Three negative principles of Imperial administration
a. Separation of political ends from bureaucratic means: “procedural autonomy”
(1) differential and multiple instrumental logics
(2) not universality and uniformity, but singularity and adequacy
b. Disseminating and differentiating of social groups: treat everyone differently
c. Fundamentally non-strategic administration: legitimated through indirect
means
(1) police and military logics
(2) economic logics
(3) ideological and communicative logics
3. These three are unified by the basic value of Imperial administration:
local effectiveness
a. Analogies with medieval European feudalisms vs monarchies or modern
mafias vs states
b. Legitimacy and consent garnered in Empire by local effectiveness
E. Imperial
Command (343-348)
1. Imperial command
a. Separate from administration
b. Exercised through biopolitical control: not discipline and normalization
c. Destruction of the myth of the People ruled by its legitimate representatives
2. Government of the multitude w/in real subsumption: prevention of absolute
democracy
3. Three means of Imperial control: the bomb (Washington); money (NY);
ether (LA)
a. The bomb: [monarchic] force horizon of absolute control of biopower
(1) modern state monopoly on legitimate force
(a) civil peace: remove arms from the anarchic mob
(b) national defense: defend against outside enemy
(2) Empire:
(a) civil peace: police action
(b) national defense:
i) nuclear horizon is unthinkable for interstate wars
ii) wars are now only civil wars subject to Imperial police
action
b. Money: [aristocratic] regulation of economic exchanges
(1) neither determinate location nor transcendent status
(2) immanent control of market through networks regulated in
global cities
c. Ether: [democratic] management of communications
(1) sovereignty doesn’t control communications, but is articulated
through it
(2) completely deterritorialized space of communication
F. Big
Government Is Over! (348-350)
1. Gingrich battle cry in 94 fell apart because of need to regulate new
info superhighway
2. HN want to appropriate that battle cry:
a. In modernity, big government was agent of redistribution of social wealth
b. In postmodernity, it is only despotism, regulating production of subjectivities
3. No more nostalgia for state Power: but does that mean HN are only anarchists?
a. But state or anarchy is only a hylomorphic forced choice
b. That ignores the self-ordering capacity of the multitude
c. Especially now in networked and co-operative communicative society
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