"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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Empire: sovereignty
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June 8, 2004
I'm going to be on the road for a few days so I will leave a chunk of text for people to chew on. If you are like me you will be finding their conception of empire to be very elusive. All we know is what it is not.
The section of the text of biopolitical production we are considering now leaves intervention behind and shifts into a new section called royal perogatives. Hardt and Negri outline what they mean by this. They say:
"What were traditionally called the royal prerogatives of sovereignty seem in effect to be repeated and even substantially renewed in the construction of Empire. If we were to remain within the conceptual framework of classic domestic and international law, we might be tempted to say that a supranational quasi- state is being formed. That does not seem to us, however, an accurate characterization of the situation. When the royal prerogatives of modern sovereignty reappear in Empire, they take on a completely different form. For example, the sovereign function of deploying military forces was carried out by the modern nation-states and is now conducted by Empire, but, as we have seen, the justification for such deployments now rests on a state of permanent exception, and the deployments themselves take the form of police actions."
They then spell out their claim:
"Our claim, rather, is that we are dealing here with a special kind of sovereignty-a discontinuous form of sovereignty that should be considered liminal or marginal insofar as it acts "in the final instance," a sovereignty that locates its only point of reference in the definitive absoluteness of the power that it can exercise. Empire thus appears in the form of a very high tech machine: it is virtual, built to control the marginal event, and organized to dominate and when necessary intervene in the breakdowns of the system (in line with the most advanced technologies of robotic production). The virtuality and discontinuity of imperial sovereignty, however, do not minimize the effectiveness of its force; on the contrary, those very characteristics serve to reinforce its apparatus, demonstrating its effectiveness in the contemporary historical context and its legitimate force to resolve world problems in the final instance."
They then conveneiently sum up their argument for us:
"We are now in the position to address the question whether, on the basis of these new biopolitical premises, the figure and the life of Empire can today be grasped in terms of a juridical model. We have already seen that this juridical model cannot be constituted by the existing structures of international law, even when understood in terms of the most advanced developments of the United Nations and the other great international organizations. Their elaborations of an international order could at the most be recognized as a process of transition toward the new imperial power. The constitution of Empire is being formed neither on the basis of any contractual or treaty-based mechanism nor through any federative source. The source of imperial normativity is born of a new machine, a new economic-industrial-communicative machine-in short, a globalized biopolitical machine. It thus seems clear that we must look at something other than what has up until now constituted the bases of international order, something that does not rely on the form of right that, in the most diverse traditions, was grounded in the modern system of sovereign nation-states."
So what does this mean?
"The impossibility, however, of grasping the genesis of Empire and its virtual figure with any of the old instruments of juridical theory, which were deployed in the realist, institutionalist, positivist, or natural right frameworks, should not force us to accept a cynical framework of pure force or some such Machiavellian position. In the genesis of Empire there is indeed a rationality at work that can be recognized not so much in terms of the juridical tradition but more clearly in the often hidden history of industrial management and the political uses of technology...This is a rationality that situates us at the heart of biopolitics and biopolitical technologies."
A pathway has been indicated.
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» prejudice from Public Opinion
yeah, I know it is a lefty critique of the US as a thug in international affairs. I accept that [Read More]
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