|
May 30, 2004
As have seen, Hardt and Negri's exploring of the sovereign power that governs the present-day world as the political form of capitalist globalisation takes them beyond the juridical perspective to analyzing the transformation of the paradigm of rule from the perspective of biopolitical production.
By this they mean ‘the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another’. As we have seen they utilise both Foucault’s concept of the society of control, and Foucault’s insights into the nature of biopower (i.e. a ‘form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it').
Many would throw up their hands by now. They would have waded
ed resolutely through a woefully obscurantist pseudo-philosophical obstacle course bristling with jargon. Hardt and Negri have little to say, they
would conclude
Hardt and Negri now shift from the production of life to considering corporations and communication. In this subsection they displace a liberal internationalism that focuses on international institutions of governance:
"In asking ourselves how the political and sovereign elements of the imperial machine come to be constituted, we find that there is no need to limit our analysis to or even focus it on the established supranational regulatory institutions. The U.N. organizations, along with the great multi- and transnational finance and trade agencies (the IMF, the World Bank, the GATT, and so forth), all become relevant in the perspective of the supranational juridical constitution only when they are considered within the dynamic of the biopolitical production of world order. The function they had in the old international order, we should emphasize, is not what now gives legitimacy to these organizations. What legitimates them now is rather their newly possible function in the symbology of the imperial order. Outside of the new framework, these institutions are ineffectual. At best, the old institutional framework contributes to the formation and education of the administrative personnel of the imperial machine, the "dressage" of a new imperial elite."
Ther is somethning here. Recall the debates over the Iraq war between the unilateralists and those who favoured the United Nations. The UN was the touchstone for many, including philosophy.com, of the supranational juridical constitution.
|
