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July 23, 2004
Hardt & Negri argument is that empire as a form of globalization is a process powered from below. Empire is the sovereign power that governs the present-day world and it is the political form of capitalist globalisation. the so-called ‘right of intervention’ as stemming from ‘a permanent state of emergency and exception justified by the appeal to essential values of justice.
The transformation of the paradigm of rule is also looked at interms of ‘the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another’ (p.xiii). In this context, 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’ (p.23-24)). In this framework, H&N see the contemporary form of Empire as consubstantial to the existence of a dipole (which they call the ‘imperial two-headed eagle’): on the one hand ‘a juridical structure and a constituted power, constructed by the machine of biopolitical command’ (p.60), and on the other hand ‘the plural multitude of productive, creative subjectivities of globalization that have learned to sail on this enormous sea’ (p.60). This dipole today cannot exist without any one of the two terms; in other words: ‘the deterritorializing power of the multitude is the productive force that sustains Empire’ (p.61).
That is the loose and general framework of Empire.
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