Quotes from Empire;
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt - Harvard University Press 2000
"Interactive and
cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and
minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves. THE
ANTHROPOLOGY OF CYBERSPACE IS REALLY A RECOGNITION OF THE NEW HUMAN
CONDITION" - (291)
"Today we
increasingly think like computers...." (291)
"In the dark
world of cyberpunk fiction, for example, the freedom of self-fashioning is
often indistinguishable from the powers of an all-encompassing control."
(216)
"It is now a
closed paranthesis {deconstruction} and leaves us faced with a new task:
constructing, in the non-place, a new place; constructing ontologically new
determinations of the human, of living - a powerful artificiality of being.
Donna Haraway's cyborg fable, which resides at the ambiguous boundary between
human, animal, and machine, introduces us today, much more effectively than
deconstruction, to these new terrains of possibility - but we should remember
that this is a fable and nothing more." (218)
"The process of
becoming human and the nature of the human itself were fundamentally
transformed in the passage defined by modernization" (285)
Toni Negri, The
Crisis of Political Space
"Modern systems
of communication are not subordinated to sovereignty: quite
the contrary,
sovereignty is subordinated to communication.....
In this experience
we reach an outer limit in the dissolution of the
relationship between
order and space: henceforth we can only view this
relationship within
*an other place* - an 'elsewhere' which is original in
being un-containable
within the articulation of the sovereign act.
The space of
communication is completely de-territorialised. It is absolutely
other.... What we
have here is not a residue, but a *metamorphosis*: a
metamorphosis of all
the elements of political economy and the theory of the
State, which derives
from the fact that we have entered a phase of *real
subsumption* of
society within capital.
In other words,
communication is the form of the capitalist process of
production at the
point where capital has conquered and subjected to itself
the whole of
society, in real terms, globally, by suppressing any margins of
alternative: if ever
an alternative is to be proposed, this will have to be
done through the intermediary
of the society of real subsumption, and it will
have to be
constructed within it, playing up new contradictions. The
alternative will be
posed within the 'new', in fact within the 'very new'. "
For anthropology of
cyberspace see also Negri’s approval of :
Pierre Levy,
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's emreging World in cyberspace ( NY: Plenum
Press, 1997)
More on Negri’s general
definition of Empire.
Many contemporary theorists are reluctant to recognise the globalisation
of capitalist production and its world market as a fundamentally new situation
and a significant historical shift. The theorists associated with the
world-systems perspective, for example, argue that from its inception,
capitalism has always functioned as a world economy, and therefore those who
clamor about the novelty of its globalisation today have only misunderstood its
history. Certainly, it is important to emphasise both capitalism’s continuous
foundational relationship to (or at least a tendency toward) the world market
and capitalism’s expanding cycles of development. But, without underestimating
these real and important lines of continuity, we think it is important to note
that what used to be conflict or competition among several imperialist powers
has in many important respects been replaced by the idea of a single power that
overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them
under one common notion of right that is decidedly postcolonial and
postimperialist. …
The transition we are witnessing today from traditional international
law, which was defined by contracts and treaties, to the definition and
constitution of a new sovereign, supranational world power (and thus to an
imperial notion of right), however incomplete, gives us a framework in which to
read the totalising social process of Empire. In effect, the juridical
transformation functions as a symptom of the modifications of the material
biopolitical constitution of our societies.
The concept of Empire is presented as a global concert under the
direction of a single conductor, a unitary power that maintains the social
peace and produces its ethical truths. In order to achieve these ends, the single
power is given the necessary force to conduct, when necessary, ‘just wars’ at
the borders against the barbarians and internally against the rebellious. (on
the Roman Empire, writing a genealogy of the concept of imperial sovereignty)
The appeal to a permanent state of emergency and exception is justified
by the appeal to essential values of justice. The right of the police is
legitimated by universal values.
With the appearance of Empire we are confronted no longer with the local
mediations of the universal but with a concrete universal itself. 19
Against Habermas: when he described communicative action, he still
relied on a standpoint outside of these effects of globalisation, a standpoint
of life and truth that could oppose the informational colonisation of being.
The imperial machine, however, demonstrates that this external standpoint no
longer exists. The machine is self-validating, autopoietic, that is, systemic.
It constructs social fabrics that evacuate or render ineffective any
contradiction; it creates situations in which, before coercively neutralising
difference, seem to absorb it in an insignificant play of self-generating and
self-regulating equilibria. … Contrary to the way many postmodernist accounts
would have it, however, the imperial machine, far from eliminating master
narratives, actually produces and reproduces them (ideological master
narratives in particular) in order to validate and celebrate its own power. (34)
Globalisation, insofar as it operates a real deterritorialisation of the
previous structures of exploitation and control, is really a condition for the
liberation of the multitude. (52)
Each of these struggles (Tienanmen square 89, Intifada, May 92 revolt in
LA, French strikes in 95 etc.) was specific and based on immediate regional
concerns in such a way that they could in no respect be linked together as a
globally expanding chain of revolt. …This is certainly one of the central and
most urgent political paradoxes of our time: in our much celebrated age of
communication, struggles have become all but incommunicable. (54)
Perhaps precisely because these struggles are incommunicable and thus
blocked from travelling horizontally in the form of a cycle, they are forced
instead to leap vertically and touch immediately on the global level.
New quality of social movements:
All these struggles, which pose really new elements, appear from the
beginning to be already old and outdated – precisely because they cannot
communicate, their languages cannot be translated.
One obstacle that blocks communication is the absence of a
recognition of a common enemy against which the struggles are directed. Clarifying
the nature of the common enemy is thus an essential political task.
The form in which the political should be expressed as subjectivity
today is not at all clear. A solution to this problem would have to weave
closer together the subject and the object of the project, pose them in a
relationship of immanence still more profound than that achieved by Machiavelli
or Marx and Engels, in other words, pose them in a process of
self-production.