Empire by Antonio Negri, Professor Michael Hardt Read Free Book Online Page A

modalities ofdisciplinarity and/or control, disrupts
    the linear and totalitarian figure ofcapitalist development. Civil
    society is absorbed in the state, but the consequence ofthis is an
    explosion ofthe elements that were previously coordinated and
    mediated in civil society. Resistances are no longer marginal but
    active in the center ofa society that opens up in networks; the
    individual points are singularized in a thousand plateaus. What
    Foucault constructed implicitly (and Deleuze and Guattari made
    explicit) is therefore the paradox of a power that, while it unifies
    and envelops within itselfevery element ofsocial life (thus losing
    its capacity effectively to mediate different social forces), at that
    very moment reveals a new context, a new milieu ofmaximum
    plurality and uncontainable singularization—a milieu ofthe event.8
    These conceptions ofthe society ofcontrol and biopower
    both describe central aspects ofthe concept ofEmpire. The concept
    ofEmpire is the framework in which the new omniversality of
    subjects has to be understood, and it is the end to which the new
    paradigm ofpower is leading. Here a veritable chasm opens up
    between the various old theoretical frameworks of international
    law (in either its contractual and/or U.N. form) and the new reality
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    T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T
    ofimperial law. All the intermediary elements ofthe process have
    in fact fallen aside, so that the legitimacy of the international order
    can no longer be constructed through mediations but must rather
    be grasped immediately in all its diversity. We have already acknowl-
    edged this fact from the juridical perspective. We saw, in effect,
    that when the new notion ofright emerges in the context of
    globalization and presents itselfas capable oftreating the universal,
    planetary sphere as a single, systemic set, it must assume an immediate
    prerequisite (acting in a state ofexception) and an adequate, plastic,
    and constitutive technology (the techniques ofthe police).
    Even though the state ofexception and police technologies
    constitute the solid nucleus and the central element ofthe new
    imperial right, however, this new regime has nothing to do with
    the juridical arts ofdictatorship or totalitarianism that in other times
    and with such great fanfare were so thoroughly described by many
    (in fact too many!) authors.9 On the contrary, the rule oflaw
    continues to play a central role in the context ofthe contemporary
    passage: right remains effective and (precisely by means of the state
    ofexception and police techniques) becomes procedure. This is
    a radical transformation that reveals the unmediated relationship
    between power and subjectivities, and hence demonstrates both the
    impossibility of‘‘prior’’ mediations and the uncontainable temporal
    variability ofthe event.10 Throughout the unbounded global spaces,
    to the depths of the biopolitical world, and confronting an unfore-
    seeable temporality—these are the determinations on which the
    new supranational right must be defined. Here is where the concept
    ofEmpire must struggle to establish itself, where it must prove its
    effectiveness, and hence where the machine must be set in motion.
    From this point ofview, the biopolitical context ofthe new
    paradigm is completely central to our analysis. This is what presents
    power with an alternative, not only between obedience and disobe-
    dience, or between formal political participation and refusal, but
    also along the entire range oflife and death, wealth and poverty,
    production and social reproduction, and so forth. Given the great
    difficulties the new notion of right has in representing this dimension
    B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N
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    ofthe power ofEmpire, and given its inability to touch biopower
    concretely in all its material aspects, imperial right can at best only
    partially represent the underlying design ofthe new constitution
    ofworld