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July 20, 2004
Hardt and Negri play around with the metaphor of the eagle with two heads to give an adequate initial representation of the contemporary form of Empire. They say the two heads are turned outward, each attacking the other. It is an important passage becaue they use the metaphor to link empire as judicial structure to the multiitude.
"The first head of the imperial eagle is a juridical structure and a constituted power, constructed by the machine of biopolitical command. The juridical process and the imperial machine are always subject to contradictions and crises. Order and peace-the eminent values that Empire proposes-can never be achieved but are nonetheless continually reproposed. The juridical process of the constitution of Empire lives this constant crisis that is considered (at least by the most attentive theoreticians) the price of its own development. There is, however, always a surplus. Empire's continual extension and constant pressure to adhere ever more closely to the complexity and depth of the biopolitical realm force the imperial machine when it seems to resolve one conflict continually to open others."
They say that the other head of the imperial eagle:
"...is the plural multitude of productive, creative subjectivities of globalization that have learned to sail on this enormous sea. They are in perpetual motion and they form constellations of singularities and events that impose continual global reconfigurations on the system. This perpetual motion can be geographical, but it can refer also to modulations of form and processes of mixture and hybridization....Just as Empire in the spectacle of its force continually determines systemic recompositions, so too new figures of resistance are composed through the sequences of the events of struggle....New figures of struggle and new subjectivities are produced in the conjuncture of events, in the universal nomadism, in the general mixture and miscegenation of individuals and populations, and in the technological metamorphoses of the imperial biopolitical machine."
However, they say that their metaphor breaks down and that the two-headed eagle is not really an adequate representation of the relationship between Empire and the multitude. It poses the two on the same level and thus does not recognize the real hierarchies and discontinuities that define their relationship.
They say that from one perspective Empire stands clearly over the multitude and subjects it to the rule of its overarching machine, as a new Leviathan. However, from the perspective of social productivity and creativity, from what we have been calling the ontological perspective, the hierarchy is reversed. The multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude
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