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‘SUBTERRANEAN PASSAGESOF THOUGHT’: EMPIRE'SINSERTSNicholas Brown , Imre Szeman , AntonioNegri & Michael HardtPublished online: 09 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Nicholas Brown , Imre Szeman , Antonio Negri & MichaelHardt (2002) ‘SUBTERRANEAN PASSAGES OF THOUGHT’: EMPIRE'S INSERTS,Cultural Studies, 16:2, 193-212, DOI: 10.1080/09502380110107553

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Abstract

Scattered throughout Hardt and Negri’s Empire are a number of short sec-tions whose manifesto-like energy contrasts with the relatively expositorystyle of the main text. These passages, modeled after the scholie of Spinoza’sEthics, are meant to suggest new ways of thinking about material alreadypresented, to highlight the affective aspect of the material, and to point tohidden connections among different discursive elements. Several of thesewhich did not appear in the published version of Empire for reasons of spaceare published here for the � rst time. The matters touched on are as diverseas those in Empire itself: Totality as a philosophical problem, the gender ofbiopolitical production, the relationship between genocide and the nation-state, the possibility of hope; the paradoxes of unemployment, the functionof fear, postmodern prophecy, Hollywood’s imperial fantasy, and the para-doxical relationship between being-against and love that has puzzled andfascinated many of Empire’s readers.

Keywords

Empire; imperialism; totality; biopower; genocide; utopia; love; unem-ployment; fear; spectacle; prophecy; Hollywood

IN T H E P R E F A C E to Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest thatit is a book that can be read in any number of ways: ‘front to back, back to

front, in pieces, in a hopscotch pattern, or through correspondence (2000: xvi)’.The description of the book’s highly structured overall plan that immediately

Nicholas Brown and ImreSzeman/Antonio Negri and MichaelHardt

‘SUBTERRANEAN PASSAGES OF

THOUGHT’: EMPIRE’S INSERTS

C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 1 6 ( 2 ) 2 0 0 2 , 1 9 3 – 2 1 2

Cultural Studies ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online © 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09502380110107553

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follows this claim, however, seems to make it unlikely that one would ever takeup this injunction to read Empire in a discontinuous , fragmentary or non-linearfashion. Yet it is perhaps precisely what is not included in this brief sketch of thebook’s structure that might compel one to read Empire differently. There is nomention made of the short, italicized passages – what Hardt and Negri refer toas ‘inserts’ – that come at the end of many of the book’s 19 chapters. Dealingwith topics from ‘the poor’ to ‘primitive accumulation’, these impassioned,utopian bursts of highly charged language do indeed produce the possibility ofthinking about and reading Empire in a different way. One can imagine readingthe book by skipping along from one insert to another, a process which in turnwould lead to other, unexpected ways of working through Empire as a whole: notonly or even primarily along a different trajectory (e.g. backwards instead offorward), but also at a different register – that of affect in addition to or insteadof intellect.

In part, the ‘inserts’ are meant as an homage to Spinoza’s use of scholie in theEthics. The vast majority of commentators on Spinoza’s most famous book haveusually wanted to stress the geometrical rigour of his axiomatic presentation ofphilosophical propositions. Yet almost every one of Spinoza’s propositions comeequipped not only with a proof and its corollary, but with a scholium (sometimesmore than one) that expands on the proposition and attempts to explain its impli-cations. To some philosophers, these scholie are no doubt as big a disappointmentas the � fth and � nal part of the Ethics – mere distractions in an otherwise exemp-lary � rst instantiation of modern philosophy.1 If the propositions are as clear anddistinct as Spinoza’s imagines them to be, why is there any need for further expla-nation? But as Hardt and Negri point out, to pose this question is to fail to seethat the scholie are meant not merely to reiterate what has been establishedlogically, but ‘also point elsewhere, to unforeseen possibilities of thought’ (2000:18). In Spinoza: A Practical Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze argues that the presence ofthe scholie in Spinoza’s Ethics produces the need for a ‘double-reading’ of thetext, an affective reading in addition to the geometrical that proceeds ‘withoutan idea of the whole, where one is carried along or sat down, put in motion orat rest, shaken or calmed down according to the velocity of this or that part(Deleuze, 1988: 129)’. The inserts in Empire on topics such as manifestos, con-tagion and refusal, along with some additional ones not included in the originalbook on hope, love and fear, create together the possibility of reading Empire andthinking of Empire in just such a productively dislocating fashion. At the sametime, these inserts perform one of other functions of Spinoza’s scholie, acting asspaces in which readers can re� ect on the general problematic developed in andthrough the rest of the book – and in the other scholium.

In the original plan of Empire there was meant to be an insert correspondingto each and every one of the book’s chapters. The ‘missing’ inserts are repro-duced below in the order in which they would have originally appeared. By pub-lishing these inserts here, we do not mean to suggest either that Empire is an

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incomplete text as it stands, or that the addition of these inserts would somehowcomplete it. Neither proposition makes sense. While Hardt and Negri’s analysisof Empire is thoroughgoing and complex, it does not claim to be a totalizingvision of the new world order articulated from some irreproachable,Archimedean perspective. No book about Empire could be complete; Empire isa book that welcomes challenges, discussion and re-articulations of the claims itmakes and the positions that it takes. As for the inserts themselves, since they aremeant precisely to point in different and unexpected directions, these additionalinserts are offered as a way of continuing the discussion about where we � nd our-selves now – as a provocation to thought rather than as some kind of textual,editorial corrective.

Table 1 lists the inserts in Empire and the numbers of the chapters to whichthey correspond. The inserts not included in Empire are indicated in italics; theothers are followed by the page numbers where they can be found.

1.1: Totalities

When Lukács claimed that only ‘the totality is truth’ and when Adorno invertedthe claim saying that ‘all is untrue’, it is probable that despite the apparent con-� ict they were not really very far apart. For Lukács, in the immediate aftermathof the Soviet 1917, truth consisted in the totality of the revolutionary processthat transformed everything, because in this process everything could beredeemed. For Adorno, on the other hand, in the great calm that proceeded1968, totality meant imperialist domination plus its mirror-image of socialistdomination. This was a one-dimensional totality that reduced and disempoweredhumanity – a falsi�ed totality in itself and for itself. Would not Adorno too,however, have accepted totality as a category of philosophical understanding

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Table 1 Inserts and corresponding chapters.

1.1 Totalities Intermezzo: Love

1.2 The Gender of Biopolitical Production 3.1 Cycles (237–9)

1.3 Political Manifesto (63–6) 3.2 Primitive Accumulation (256–9)

3.3 Long Live Unemployment!

2.1 Humanism after the Death of Man (91–2) 3.4 Commons (300–3)

3.5 Fear

2.2 Camp 3.6 Big Government is Over! (348–50)

2.3 Contagion (134–6)

2.4 The Poor (156–9) 4.1 Prophet

2.5 Hope 4.2 Imperial America

2.6 Refusal (203–4) 4.3 Militant (411–13)

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when the totality could be redeemed? Is not his utopian negativity aimed at justsuch a redemption?

In order to avoid these quarrels that do not really have to do with totalitybut with redemption, a concept permitted only to those (unlike us) who havefaith, we would prefer to speak of totality in two different senses. On one hand,in fact, there is the totality of right and of the State, the tendency toward theaf� rmation of an imperial right and a new sovereignty that extends over theglobal set of social, economic, juridical and political relations of our planet. Onthe other side, however, at the same time, in the same logical space, there is theinsurgency against this right and against this new imperial authority. Totalityagainst totality, then, stand in methodological opposition.

The political scientist assumes the � rst totality as her or his terrain of study.He or she analyses the forms of power and the tendencies of its evolution,assumes obedience to authority as the objective and asks in what ways it can beproduced and guaranteed. The political scientist investigates how obedience canbe organized to insure the production of wealth and the reproduction of power.As the US Founding Fathers and the authors of the Federalist Papers wanted,political science merges with the science of the constitution, conceived as the setof rules that invest the totality of social practices and construct a political spaceadequate to the reproduction of the system. Political science (along with consti-tutional science) is a dogmatic science insofar as it assumes power as totality andwithin this totality exercises its extraordinary capacities of organizing and pre-dicting the future.

We call the other point of view ‘insurgent science’. This too conceives of thetotality as its object of study, but the total object is not power but rather whatSpinoza called ‘the democratic absolute’. Insurgent science is also a dogmaticscience, even if in an unusual way. It assumes disobedience and rebellion as itssole objects; sabotage and destruction as its functions of knowledge; refusal andinsubordination as its positive terrain. It is a dogmatic science of desire, and thusit is resolutely antidialectical. The names of things that it indicates are common,ontologically grounded and moved by passions. It is rigorously antitranscenden-tal and antiteleological: the totality it constructs is open, as open as the world ofpossibility, the world of potential. Critique, thus, functions within it as an armof the practical deconstruction of the enemy totality and the articulation of aproject in the desire of liberation. This too recalls the authors of the FederalistPapers, because, like they did, it presupposes a new ‘science of politics’ on a leveladequate to postmodern enlightenment (can we call it that?), or in any case ona level adequate to the new antagonisms of globalization. This is what testi� es tothe superiority of ‘insurgent science’ with respect to the ‘normal science’ ofpolitics, because the former rests on the process and the latter on command, theformer on constituent power and the latter on constituted power. Normalscience is thus constrained to follow in the tracks of insurgent science becauseonly it is able to discover, name and activate the new world. The two totalities are

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thus not only opposed but also asymmetrical, not only asymmetrical but also atopic– that is, they constitute different places. Whereas the normal science of politicsoperates in the transcendent realm, insurgent science is from the beginningsituated on the terrain of immanence. Here is produced concretely that totalitythat Lukács and Adorno both glimpsed as a positive utopia, an immanentredemption.

1.2: The Gender of Biopolitical Production

When Foucault discusses biopower he sees it only from above. It is patria potes-tas, the right of the father over the life and death of his children and servants.More important, it is the power of the emerging forces of governmentality tocreate, manage and control populations – the power to manage life, biopower. Arecent study by Giorgio Agamben has extended Foucault’s notion, castingbiopower as the rule of the sovereign over ‘naked life’ or ‘bare life’, life distinctfrom its various social forms (Agamben, 1998). In each case, what is at stake inpower is life itself. This Foucauldian view of biopower, however, only poses thesituation from above, as the prerogative of a sovereign power. When we look atthe situation from the perspective of the labour involved in biopolitical produc-tion, on the other hand, we can begin to recognize biopower from below.

The �rst fact we see when we adopt this perspective is that the labour ofbiopolitical production is strongly con� gured as gendered labour. Indeed, variousstreams of feminist theory have already provided extensive analyses of the pro-duction of biopower from below. A current of ecofeminism, for example,employs the term biopolitics (in a way that might seem at � rst sight quitedifferent from that of Foucault) to refer to the politics of the various forms ofbiotechnology that are imposed by transnational corporations on populations andenvironments, primarily in subordinated regions of the world (see Shiva andMoser, 1995; Shiva, 1998). The ‘Green Revolution’ and other technological pro-grammes that have been cast as means of capitalist economic development haveactually brought with them both devastation for the natural environment andnew mechanisms for the subordination of women. These two effects, however,are really one. It is primarily the traditional role of women, these authors pointout, to ful� ll the tasks of reproduction that have been most severely affected bythe ecological and biological interventions. From this perspective, then, womenand nature are dominated together but they also work together in a co-operativerelationship, against the assault of biopolitical technologies, to produce andreproduce life. Staying alive: politics has become a matter of life itself, and thestruggle has taken the form of a biopower from above against a biopower frombelow.

In a very different context, numerous feminist authors in the USA haveanalysed the primary role of women’s labour in the production and reproduction

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of life. In particular, the caring labour involved in maternal work (distinguishingmaternal work from the biologically speci� c aspects of birthing labour) hasproven to be an extremely rich terrain for the analysis of biopolitical production(Ruddick, 1989). Biopolitical production here consists primarily in the labourinvolved in the creation of life – not the activities of procreation, but the creationof life involved precisely in the production and reproduction of affects. Here wecan recognize clearly how the distinction between production and reproductionbreaks down, as does that between economy and culture. Labour works directlyon the affects; it produces subjectivity, it produces society, it produces life. Affec-tive labour, in this sense, is ontological: it reveals living labour constituting a formof life and thus demonstrates again the potential of biopolitical production.2

We should say immediately, of course, that we cannot simply af� rm eitherof these perspectives in an unquali� ed way, without recognizing the enormousdangers they pose. In the � rst case, the identi�cation of women and nature risksnaturalizing and absolutizing sexual difference, in addition to posing a spon-taneous de�nition of nature itself. In the second case, the celebration of mater-nal work could easily serve to reinforce both the gendered division of labour andthe familial structures of Oedipal subjection and subjecti� cation. Even in thesefeminist analyses of material labour, it is clear how dif� cult it can be at times todislodge the potential of affective labour from both the patriarchal constructionsof reproduction and the subjective black hole of the family. These dangers,however, important though they might be, do not negate the importance ofrecognizing the potential of labour as biopower, a biopower from below.

This biopolitical context is precisely the ground for an investigation of theproductive relationship between affect and value. What we � nd here is not somuch the resistance of what might be called ‘affectively necessary labor (Spivak,1988: 154–75)’, but rather the potential of necessary affective labour. On onehand affective labour, the production and reproduction of life, has become � rmlyembedded as a necessary foundation for capitalist accumulation and patriarchalorder. On the other hand, however, the production of affects, subjectivities andforms of life present an enormous potential for autonomous circuits of valoriza-tion, and perhaps for liberation.

2.2: Camp

The concentration camp, or really the combined mechanism of the isolation andmass destruction of the enemy, of any opposed identity, constitutes the paradigmof the modern nation state. The long modern history of the ‘camp’ began in Spainin the 15th century, renewed and continued in Jacobin France and then in theUSA in its conquest of the West, to arrive � nally – after a series of other geno-cides – at the Nazi and Soviet camps in the 20th century. Modern genocide has

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a horrible history. Genocide is the negative face of the nation-State; or really, the nation-State is merely the positive face of genocide.

Nothing is more idiotic than negating the existence of these modern geno-cides as the various forms of historical revisions do, with either incredibly myopicor sublime false consciousness. For centuries the Catholic Church was the mostpowerful disseminator of such revisionist histories, effectively erasing fromhistory any memory of the exterminations of European Jews and Arabs, thecrusades against the ‘heretical’ populations, and the massacres of women whopracticed ‘witchcraft’. This Catholic tradition of fanaticism and intolerance wasadopted by the modern nation state, and the philosophers and jurists of nationalsovereignty also continued the tradition of mysti�cation. Consider, for example,how in Hegel’s theory of criminal justice, the crime is considered as a subtrac-tion from the totality and an injury to the personality of the State. The punish-ment, then, is the resuturing and restoration of the totality. Is there any betterrationalization of the fact that the destruction of an oppositional totality is not acrime but the restitution of what has been taken away? The concentration campand the holocaust of the enemy – insofar as the enemy cannot be integrated intothe identity of the nation state and this fact constitutes the absolute crime – isthe original sin of this State-form. None of the nation states are exempt from thischarge. There are of course other forms of revisionism: for example, that para-doxical form that isolates the Nazi concentration camps and the Jewish holocaustas absolute evil and thus of a radically different (metaphysical?) nature than theother genocides that came before and after. It is wrong to separate the camp andgenocide from the paradigm of the nation state. Hannah Arendt demonstratedwell how banal ‘absolute evil’ is – as banal as the ideology of the nation state isgeneral. If we do not � nd a way out of the ideology of the nation state there isno possibility of eliminating the ‘camps’. The denunciations of the ‘camp’ fromwithin the philosophy of the nation state are pure mysti�cations, which are func-tional to the construction of other nation states and thus to the construction ofother camps in pursuit of other genocides. On the other hand, what is not banalin this entire modern history of internment and genocide are only the instancesof revolt: from native American revolts to those in the Warsaw ghetto, from therevolts in the Caucases and Siberia against the brutality of Stalinist order to therevolts of Sabra, Chatila and the Intifada – and then the million micro-revolts andrefusals of wandering Jews and Carribean ‘maroonage’.

In postmodernity, when the political powers of the nation state begin todecline, we can see clearly this horrible history of the complementarity of thenation state and the ‘camp’. On one hand, in fact, today no nation state is formedor ‘reborn’ without the claim to a resurrected identity and thus a new foundhatred of the other. Historical progressions have become every more rapid insuch a way that the ideologies are quickly readable and consequences immedi-ate. On the other hand, in the � rst forms of the imperial organization of spaces,both in the enormous metropolises and at the borders of the dominant

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postmodern nations, the old relationship between sovereignty and ‘camp’ isrepeated again, but now in an equivocal, permeable, weak form. The camp ismobile, no longer � xed but � oating in the space and time of imperial society.Imperial society and the camp interpenetrate one another, like Romans and bar-barians – � rst in the subordinated and then in the dominant regions of Empire.The regions inhabited by the dominant populations are barricaded; outside, inthe spaces and time of the working day, there are mobile camps. The lives of thenations that maintain a form of internal ‘apartheid’ are organized in response tothe continuous revolt against that exclusion and division. The set of supernationsof the dominant regions of the world live behind borders policed by radar andelectronic surveillance: mass camps try to stem the irrepressible � ows of immi-gration. The prisons are at this point enormous camps, particularly in the richest,most dominant regions.

The revisionists did not succeed in negating the reality of the ‘camp’. Ratherthe camps succeeded, effectively negating the reality of the nation state and banal-izing it – because the inhabitants of the camps are the living material of the world.The prisoners at Auschwitz and Kolima were the living material of the world notbecause (even in a minimal way like Primo Levi’s ‘muslim’) of the destructivewill of the nation state. In other words, they succeeded not because of theirdeath, but like all martyrs because of their life.

2.5: Hope

It is often said that the essential feature of American literature, particularly thegreat literature of the 19th century, is hope. The hope that de�nes Americanliterature is fundamentally the same hope that animates the revolution and repub-lican spirit. In Walt Whitman’s poetry, for example, one might say that hope ulti-mately resides in comraderie, the possibility of the creation of a fraternal societyof equals.3

We � nd this same hope for a society of comrades throughout the traditionof Empire, particularly in its evolution through the constitutional projects of theUSA, despite the fact that we are well aware of the powerful mechanisms ofdomination and control that emerge with Empire. We hold hope as somethinglike a methodological principle, an antidote to the fear that surrounds us. Someof our readers, particularly those who clearly grasp the powerful determinationsof the imperial society of control, might regard this hope as simply a naive andwillful optimism. We would insist, however, that hope has nothing to do withoptimism. Several years ago, in the face of fascist advances throughout Europe,various segments of the Third International repeated the slogan ‘pessimism of theintellect, optimism of the will’. By this they meant that one should have a soberrecognition of the dire situation in which we � nd ourselves, but act, nonetheless,optimistically – as if we should act on faith despite the fact that intellectually we

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know how bad things are. We could not be further from either that pessimismor that optimism. Optimism and pessimism refer to a � eld that is too vague, theirreferents to unspeci� c, their diagnoses too detached from reality.

Hope is something altogether different. Hope is the celebration of thepossible, or rather of speci� c, existing possibilities, a celebration that dependsequally on the intellect and the will. Our hope dictates that we recognize and acton a tendency actually existing in present reality that can lead toward a poten-tial future. This hope is not utopian, if by utopian we understand the dream of afuture that is separated from the present. Hope is better conceived as a temporalvector that points from the present into the future from a speci� c location, witha determinate direction and force. Our hope indeed follows closely in line withthat of Whitman: the revolutionary hope of a society of comrades.

Intermezzo: Love

How can love be against? How can we recognize being-against essentially as love?And how can love have real political effects? We must �rst of all remember thatthe postmodern condition is an unbearable condition for the living. Heidegger’scompact language gives us an accurate description of the end of modernity andits reduction to a ‘being-for-death’ that describes both technological develop-ment and the destiny of the subject. Postmodernity, thus, opens and is immedi-ately closed. If one were to want to reopen the postmodern condition, aHeideggerian re� ection would add, this reopening could be given only by con-� ding itself to poiesis. The pastoral function over an ungraspable horizon is theonly form of life that remains to us, to reduce our anguish through an epistemo-logical displacement.

We � nd the same illusory response to the unbearableness of postmodernity,as a closed totality of repression, in every form of negative dialectics, both inAdorno’s aesthetic, mystical form and in Levinas’s and Derrida’s theological,deconstructionist forms. In all these anticipations and recognitions of post-modern being, there is certainly a moment of refusal of the existent. Certainlyneither Heidegger, Adorno, Levinas nor Derrida are conformists. Their longed-for refusal, however, is completely futile. The refusal of our desperate conditionof being is made more genteel by poetry, mystical abandon and cynicism – itshould be no surprise that the theories of ‘thin’ and ‘weak’ thought from RichardRorty to Gianni Vattimo derive from these theoretical frameworks.

Can refusal instead be presented not as the genteel manipulation of theeffects of the disaster of being but as a positive proposal? Can the postmoderncondition be subverted in terms of political struggle and untimely af� rmation?Can being-against be transformed from the radical refusal that negates everyrelation with the refused thing to a positive and independent constitution ofanother being? Can resistance become power? We are thinking of a radical,

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dogmatic and savage separation, which is what the act of resistance teaches andwhat the memory of resistance always reproposes. We are thinking of a being-against that is, in the � nal instance, a break with the Heideggerian Entschlossenheit(determination) and the overturning of the implacable Nichtigheit (futility, noth-ingness) of life. The truth of resistance consists only in this: the af� rmation oflife.

Spinoza understood this fact. In the atemporality of � rst ontology, life is con-structed by the conatus, by striving. Through the conatus, and primarily throughthe imagination, life becomes temporal, or really it is constructed and created.In the multitude, conatus and imagination become constitutive, prophetic powersand this accumulation of power appears as desire. In a � rst sense, then, the con-struction of time, affect and desiring action is ‘against’, because with the very actof af� rming themselves they break the in� nite and � at density of preconstitutedbeing. In the second place, however, when this rupture cuts every homologybetween desire and the preconstituted reality, that is, with the existent as such,the force that reconstitutes the ontological reality of the relationship with desireand desiring activity in Spinoza is amor, love. In this rupture or interruption ofbeing, only love can construct a new ontological condition and a new beingbeyond the aleatory effects of the imagination and independent of any homologywith the preconstituted reality. Love invents time.

Being-against becomes love, not because being-against is love, but becauseposing itself against the repressive temporal continuity (is there really timethere?) the possibility of love arises. Being-against tends toward love. In order tobecome being, in order to constitute being, it must construct time through love.Being-against identi� es in the interstices of being the possibility of an opening ofdesire, but only by making itself love does it constitute time and temporal being.

In the framework of Heidegger’s thought being-against is an absurdity,because if being-against were possible in the actuality of being then the subjectwould be crushed by it. By de� ning the actuality of time as totality and �atness,however, Heidegger empties it. On the other hand, we would de� ne time as apassage, a possibility and, thus, a rupture – inactuality. Being-against becomes theonly possibility of existing in time in an untimely way and the only af� rmationof time as inactuality, as open temporality. If the postmodern de� nition of timeas a concluded reality and � nite circularity were to be correct, then the onlyevent possible would the event determined by being-against. In other words,once we accept (as we should) the Heideggerian description of the end of mod-ernity and the postmodern condition, then being-against is the only humanactivity that does not merely slide across but intervenes in the � eld of being – itintervenes against it. This is the only positive practice of being: not against some-thing, but against in absolute, and tending toward an ontological af� rmation of life.If it were not against, what could this love be that we are trying to describe witha singular ontological de� nition? Is it perhaps an activity or an affect that ishomologous to domination, a frustrated desire in the solid and abstract

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temporality of postmodernity? If being-against were not to tend toward love, itwould inevitably be dominated and recuperated as an ephemeral and incoherentmoment in the �ow of the constitution of exploitation and subjugation; and itwould thus not be able to be open to the constitution of time. Being-againstis being in the untimely creativity of history. Love is the de� nition of thispossibility.

Being-against in its connection with love designates the form of constituentpolitics in postmodernity. At the moment when it is against, and thus when itfocuses on the rupture of postmodern time and is af� rmed as independent of itsdomination, love appears as labour and multitude, self-valorization and migra-tion, metamorphosis and hybridization. We will have to develop this below whenwe investigate the new being that is established in production, because – and thisis perhaps the most fundamental of the paradoxes we will struggle with – being-against is the fundamental actor in the production of affects, wealth and socialrelations. It is no paradox, however, to say that love is productive. Love is in factby de� nition the power of generation.

3.3: Long Live Unemployment!

European societies are today experiencing a paradoxical situation: as unemploy-ment rates rise, so too grows the population that is directly or indirectly sub-jected not only to market exchanges and the monetary regime but to the rulesof capitalist exploitation. In other words, regular employment decreases but atthe same time the population that works, or really that is productively employed,outside the regular framework grows. In the USA, the unemployment rateremains low (dangerously low from Wall Street’s perspective), but for how long?It seems to us that the paradoxical situation demonstrated in Europe today ismore indicative of the general direction of labour regimes across the world inthe passage to Empire.4 The logic behind this paradox resides in the technologicaltransformations of the last 20 years and the way capital has been able to exert itscontrol over them. Capital’s management of the transformations of labour con-sists not only in the intensi� cation and social expansion of exploitation in general,but above all in its capture and mysti� cation of the new forms of labour powerthat have appeared on the market since the end of the 1960s.

Capital’s strategy consists of � ve primary components. The � rst line of strat-egy involves the automation of industrial production in general. Most import-antly, this line focuses on the informatization of labour inside and outside thefactory, the transfer of service industries outside of the factory and the enormousexpansion of computerized services. With the tendential computerization of theentire social sphere capital seeks to capture all that is productive in society. Doesthis signal the end of work? Certainly not, but rather it marks the end of the disci-plinary organization of the working class and the regulation of its technical and

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political composition through Fordist and Taylorist mechanisms. As the walls ofthe factory collapse, labour power is socialized.

As a result of this � rst line of capitalist strategy, a second line is needed thatoperates a radical transformation of the technical composition of labour power,or at least of one very important sector of labour power. Labour power is forcedto become ever more mobile across space and � exible in its time. As labourpower is socialized, the regimented working day dissolves.

According to a third line of capitalist strategy, within the new informationalstructure of labour, labour power is pushed ever more toward immateriality. Bythis we mean labour power (which is itself material, in brains and bodies) thatproduces immaterial goods, and that contributes to the productive processthrough informational, cultural and/or affective means. We should pause for amoment on the materiality of this transformation that leads toward immateriallabour power. This transformation represents a profound break, in the evolutionof the organization of labour. In the history of capitalist accumulation, techno-logical evolution has consisted in the progressive appropriation of the tools onthe part of the machine such that human labour has been progressively abstracted(taken away from its concrete characteristics). Today, however, this process seemsto have been completed and it is not so much abstract labour but directly ourbrain and our sensibility that are employed in production. The brain and theaffects become the principle tools. Social knowledge, science, affects and sensi-bility become immediately productive forces.

A fourth line of the strategy consists in the attempt to make the space andtime of the production of goods overlap with the space and time of social repro-duction. Production becomes directly the production of life and thus effectivelyoverlaps with the various processes of social reproduction (from the daily regi-ments of care to household tasks, from education to communication, and soforth). The modes of life (and the co-operation among the subjects that theyentail) become directly modes of productivity.

The � fth line involves going beyond the disciplinary methods of the regu-lation of social production that were established by the compromises of theWelfare model, and substituting in their place monetary, communicational andbiopolitical regimes of control.

These lines of capitalist strategy to capture the forces released in the trans-formation of labour power make clear the enormous power of capitalist exploi-tation. At this point, however, we must return to the initial paradox and pointout that in this transformation not only does regular formal work decline andinformal work increase, but also informal work takes on new forms in which theforces of living labour are ever more clearly recognizable. This recognition ofliving labour is what can free us from the nightmare of the new exploitation. Inother words, within the processes of the transformation we are witnessing, oneach of its nodes and against each of the lines of the capitalist initiative arise notonly resistances to exploitation but new powers of creativity and liberation.

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Consider, for example, how the processes of the automation of the factoriesand the computerization of the social sphere have imposed a growing mobilityand � exibility on labour power. It is clear that through this breach can pass notonly the processes of capitalist restructuring and deregulation, but also networksof desire, which are as old as the tradition of worker struggles, aimed at break-ing the � xed temporal and spatial framework of exploitation. Discovering andreappropriating spaces and temporalities of freedom is a tendency that has alwaysbeen part of worker struggles. Through this breach can pass, especially when weare considering the new forms of immaterial labour, the forces of the self-valorization of labour and the self-managing entrepreneurial capacities of thenew labouring subjects.

Some might object, however, that we would thus be taking the liberal capi-talist position that argues ‘long live unemployment!’ because it can raise produc-tivity and, hence, the general rate of pro�t. No, that is not what we are arguing.The self-valorization and self-managing entrepreneurial capacities we are af� rm-ing are not wandering out in the desert of liberal society, but they are places,sites and, above all, forces of solidarity that are animated by collective subjects.A free development of the productivity of living labour in conceivable, but forthe development of this new energy of immaterial labour, there must be not onlythat fundamental biopolitical means which is a guaranteed wage but also adequatemeans of investment. And since there is only one pie that is being divided here,what is accorded to labour power must be taken away from capital. There isnothing more reactionary than pretending to solve the problems of unemploy-ment and redistribute incomes by reviving employment in the old industries.That employment will never come and it is an operation that only serves to keepworkers precariously poised on the edge between employment and unemploy-ment. Incomes must be redistributed in the context of a project for a neworganization of social productivity.

Once we take this initial position on the question we can confront a secondproblem, which derives from the claim that the modes of life increasingly tendto become modes of productivity. New deployments of labour must arise fromthe new modes of life. On one hand, social co-operation (in households and com-munities, in education and communication) is today exploited by capital free ofcharge. Capital appropriates it in a completely parasitical way. On the other hand,however, it is true that the more production becomes immaterial and the moreit is socialized, the more labour power becomes autonomous from capitalistcommand. In the new modes of life, in an ever larger domain, labour becomesdesire – desire that is expressed as affect in intimate relations, desire for know-ledge in education, linguistic and communitarian desire in communication, andso forth. We thus � nd ourselves confronted by another paradox: in order forcapital to valorize itself, it needs to engage ever more labour (affective, co-operative, immaterial labour) that it does not organize. Labour power – becom-ing more social and immaterial, even when it is under the hegemony of capital

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– is no longer in the position of what Marx called variable capital. It has reap-propriated the tools of production (in other words, affects), co-operation, lan-guages, and so forth. Only on this basis can the great collective means neededfor a new organization of labour adequate to the new subjectivities be conceived.

Labour can and must be reconstructed through this transition as a new socialtie, a new mechanism for constructing community. The reform cannot be drivenby any kind of nostalgia, neither for that ‘really existing socialism’ (that no longerexists) nor for the welfare of Keynesianism and the Fordist regime. The funda-mental condition of reform is that capital has ceased to be the orchestrator oflaboring cooperation. Like in Europe, under the ancien régime, the grievances thatare raised today against unemployment are bound to be ineffective. There existsthe possibility, however, that the authors of those pleas, and all of us, becomeconscious of the fact that at the base of every appeal to the State and capital (thetwo branches of one and the same power), there is something much more sub-versive: a plea to the new subjects of labour, an appeal to a constituent desire.

3.5: Fear5

The society of the spectacle and the various media instruments that participatein it are indeed new, but as a form of rule they work by wielding an age-oldweapon. Hobbes recognized long ago that for effective rule ‘the Passion to bereckoned upon, is Fear’ (1968: 2000). For Hobbes, fear is the essential glue thatbinds and insures the social contract, and still today fear is the primary mechan-ism of control that � lls the society of the spectacle. Although the spectacle seemsto function through desire and pleasure (desire for commodities and pleasure ofconsumption), it really works through the communication of fear – or rather, thespectacle creates forms of desire and pleasure that are intimately wedded to fear.In the vernacular of early modern European philosophy, the communication offear was called superstition. And indeed the politics of fear have always been spreadthrough a kind of superstition. What has changed, in effect, are the forms andmechanisms of the superstition that communicate fear.

That fear is today the primary affect of the spectacle, the passion to be reck-oned upon, is easy to see (Massumi, 1993). Fear of course often corresponds tovery real and existing dangers (not the least of which is the poor’s fear of star-vation, the subaltern’s fear of repression, and so forth), but the spectacle uni-versalizes fear throughout society, to rich and poor alike, regardless of sex, race,creed or colour. Simply turn on the TV or walk into a movie theatre. Watch aTV police drama about New York, Hong Kong, Paris or Rio, or even watch theevening news and you might well hesitate to go out on the street for fear of beinghit by a stray bullet or becoming a victim of random attack. After reading orwatching an exposé on the baby market, young parents cannot but think that ifthey turn their heads for a second their babies will be snatched from the grocery

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cart and sold to the highest bidder. Psycho-killers, serial rapists and axe mur-derers seem to be around every corner because they are featured in every secondHollywood � lm released. And indeed not all of the dangers are so tangible. Fromall sides we are assailed by the invisible dangers of illness, disease, plagues andpandemics. It is impossible to account for all the toxins, carcinogens, air-borneviruses and sexually-transmitted diseases. Medical reports and safe-sex cam-paigns constantly tell us: be afraid, be very afraid. To be safe one must be ever-vigilant – but even then dangers abound! It is not as if the spectacle promulgatesfalse dangers that with an enlightened mind we can simply think away. The spec-tacle elevates them all to the plane of reality. In the society of the spectacle, fearis inescapable. What the spectacle says to us, in a perfectly Hobbesian idiom, isthat our world is a dangerous place and if we are to live together in society theonly alternative to constant fear is strict obedience to sovereign power.

Todd Haynes’s beautiful and haunting � lm Safe tells the story of CarolWhite, a wealthy housewife in a Los Angeles suburb who mysteriously developssomething like an allergic reaction to or a general incompatibility with the basicsubstances of contemporary society: foods, fumes, chemicals, pesticides and soforth. Even in her life at the pinnacle of privilege, she is constantly threatenedby invisible dangers from all quarters. Carol’s illness is not merely the result ofan idle imagination; her suffering is real, as are the dangers she faces. She eventu-ally � nds comfort with a support group that diagnoses her as having an ‘environ-mental illness’, as being ‘allergic to the 20th century’. She and her fellowsufferers reach the point of being afraid to breath and afraid to eat – physicallyincapable of co-existing with the material substances of contemporary society.The treatment for Carol’s condition is an ascetic retreat from society into asterile environment of deprivation, carved out of the desert, with no sex andno drugs, only the confessional and moralistic rhetoric typical of twelve-stepprogrammes. The community of sufferers not only creates a toxic-free oasisfrom the pollutants of the industrial world but they also retreat from its socialaspects as well. They stop reading the newspapers and watching the newsbecause they cannot bear the idea that the world is so terribly violent anddangerous. Carol ultimately � nds protection in an individual and hermetically-sealed ‘safe house’, a � nal retreat from society in absolute isolation, an ultimatenegation of the social.

The sterile retreat of Safe is a horrible dead end. Safety from the dangers ofcontemporary society is itself a kind of death – a blank, individual, antisepticdeath. The � lm functions as a kind of negative proof by absurdity. Try to escapethe terror of our society and its spectacle by retreating into isolation and ulti-mately you will � nd only the comfort of a pain-free death. We must, on the con-trary, live together in society, cope with the very real dangers of thecontemporary world, and wrestle with the terror of the spectacle. We really haveno option other than to confront the fear of the society of the spectacle head onand create somehow the bases of a new hope.

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4.1: Prophet

In ancient times the prophet was the one who made the multitude pass from oneera to another and who, thus, in a very real sense constructed a people. Theprophet made a people by reorganizing the conditions of collective existencethrough a labour of the imagination that gave body and will to the multitude. Theprophet had to live completely the violence of the enemy and the suffering of hisor her brothers and sisters. In these conditions the prophet was able to imagineliberation – liberation as victory over the enemy undoubtedly, but moreover asthe unleashing of a new subject, as the constitution of a new people. The actionof the prophet thus de� ned a real passage, a desiring and hallucinatory passage,of resistance and struggle, that was socialized and constructed � nally as ingeniummultitudinis, the innate genius of the multitude. The action of the prophetinvolved passing in two senses. First, passing like the salamander because theprophet formed part of the multitude, puri� ed through the � re of immersion inthe collective experience of the multitude and thereby acquiring the strength forthe prophetic mission. Second and more signi� cantly, the prophet passes in thesense of a comet, a celestial body that travels the distances of interstellar space,establishes itself as a perfect ‘outside’ and thereby attracts all other bodies intoits own gravitational � eld, aligning them to its trajectory.

In modern Europe, there was an extraordinary revival of the prophetic func-tion. Machiavelli was not mistaken when he identi� ed the appearance of Giro-lama Savonarola as the event that made Florence enter into a new era – and alongwith Florence an entire cycle of European history (1976: 31). Since that timemodernity has continually been marked by prophecy, from the Reformation tothe age of Enlightenment revolutions, from the Atlantic exodus to the birth ofsocialism and the great revolutions of the 20th century. It was always the prophetwho composed the musical score that would orchestrate the constitution of thepeople. It was a strange situation: in an era that declared itself queen of ration-ality, its social contents were continually de� ned and reproduced throughcharisma. As the one who passes, the prophet always functioned as a represen-tative of both God and the people, or rather as a divine representation that makesitself the people. The prophet was, therefore, always also a priest, even when theprophet appeared in a completely secular or even atheistic context. The passageof the prophet resulted in a � nal declaration, with the implementation of a newtable of laws and the establishment of a new order.

Can the � gure of the prophet function in postmodern times? Can oneimagine a prophet who would rise up against Empire? No, certainly not. Thepostmodern condition prohibits any ontology of the outside in which the prophetwould pass like a comet calling human nature to follow along with it. Postmodernhumanity is ineluctably tied to the inside and has no celestial message to trans-mit. Anyone who pretends today to identify a prophetic � gure can only do so(and it is indeed done, often with comical results) in deconstructionist, esoteric

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and/or mystical terms. This postmodern prophet cannot but rest in unhappycontradiction with the collective and triumphant � gure of the modern prophets.It is even less possible to resurrect the prophetic function in postmodernity fromthe political point of view. There is no prophet and, moreover, there are no lawsnor any people that can pose themselves against Empire. In Empire the propheticfunction is degraded to the level of advertising and publicity; peoples and socialclasses, even when they � ght for liberation or greater freedom, become merelymarket values; and new laws become useless in a world that knows only pro-cedures and compromise. Although there is no prophet-comet, however, can westill conceive the � gure of the prophet-salamander, the one who is puri� edthrough immersion in the suffering and experiences of the multitude, in the com-munity of brothers and sisters, and thereby gives voice and strength to resistanceand alternative projects? No, this is no longer possible either, because theprophet-salamander also relies on a kind of outside. The life of the prophet andits desert of puri� cation have to anticipate the actions of militants, a life that isunhinged from being. The postmodern prophet would ultimately become a mys-tical � gure and rather than � nding itself in others it would distance itself irrevo-cably from the ‘other’ and from the multitude of others. In postmodernity,moreover, the communications industry has specialized in re� guring the experi-ence of the salamander as the insanity of cults, recoding it as criminal activity.

Does this mean that there will no longer be the possibility of struggle, nomore possibility of � ghting for liberation in postmodernity? No, this possibilitycannot be negated. It exists and is continually reproposed, but we must strip itof the illusion of prophesy. This is not only because the power of the enemy isenormous. Empire can indeed mystify prophesy to the point of making it func-tion for the machine of domination. We need to strip the possibility of liberationfrom the illusion of prophesy for a much more simple and urgent reason: we haveno need for prophesies because we already live in a prophetic reality, or reallywe have no need for prophets because the multitude itself is prophetic. It isenough to immerse ourselves completely in the world to feel it pulse with thepowers of generation, which are strong enough to overthrow any � xed languageand any determined destiny, because our desire is embodied to pronounce andpractice liberation. The desire and the hallucinations of the prophet can thus bereplaced by the desires, needs and deliriums of the multitude, because co-operation, here and now in this prophetic reality that we live, produces theconcept, and with the concept (the common name) it produces the reality of theconcept (the common place), giving it � esh and bones. Whereas before thepeople was the result of prophesy, now our prophetic reality is itself the con-tinuous constitution of the multitude.

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4.2: Imperial America

It can easily appear that the US government is the master of this new Empire.The historical narrative to support this view poses a clear geographical migra-tion of the centre of world power: in the modern era, European powers achievedthe position of supreme rulers of the world and in the passage from modernityto postmodernity, the centre of world power has shifted from Europe to theUSA. As Henry Luce proclaimed in the midst of World War Two, the 20thcentury was to be an ‘American century’, as will be, it seems, the 21st.

The image of US world dominance was heightened with the collapse of theSoviet Union – leaving the USA as the only and undisputed superpower – and�nally consolidated in the victory over Iraq in the Gulf War. That war seems tohave completely redeemed the US military from its humiliating defeat in Vietnamand repaired its image of vulnerability. The Gulf War, at least as it was presentedon CNN, showed the US military as an invincible technological machine thatcould � nd and destroy absolutely and with precision any enemy at will. The imageof the confused and disillusioned GI lost in the jungle and confounded by theomnipresent Viet Cong was successfully replaced by that of the expert pilot whodestroys impersonal targets with smart bombs. The technological power of theUS military now appears as a transcendent force that stands above the world –too complex to understand and too strong to challenge.

Hollywood seems to have understood the unquestioned military superiorityof the USA as meaning that the US government is the centre of the new Empireand that Washington is the new Rome. Two summer blockbuster movies, Inde-pendence Day and Air Force One, present a US military that can defeat all enemiesfrom this world and beyond. US power is imperial in both of these � lms preciselyinsofar as it is deployed not in any limited or national interest, but rather in theinterests of all humanity: the US military protects life itself. What is most dis-tinctive in these two fantasies of imperial power, however, is their representationof the powers of the president. In both � lms the US president – veteran pilot ofthe Gulf War in one and Vietnam in the other – is the paramount warrior. Thepresident personally leads the combat against the enemy and the survival of lifeand order depends ultimately on his seemingly in�nite courage and the powersof his body. The survival of the president is directly linked to the survival ofhumanity itself. Furthermore, the commander-in-chief is not only the ultimatewarrior, he is also the pinnacle of all virtue and goodness (which in contemporaryHollywood idiom is expressed as dedication to family). This combination of thesupreme force and virtue in the body of the president elevates the president pre-cisely to the classical position of Emperor. Not only is the US the centre ofEmpire, then, but the president is its Emperor – that is, the physical embodimentof its force and virtue, the ultimate provider of life and arbiter over death.

This conception of an imperial America, however, despite the powerfulsupport it receives from Hollywood ideology, is not true. The US government is

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not the centre of Empire and the president is not its Emperor. The primary prin-ciple of Empire as we have described it throughout this book is that its power hasno actual and localizable centre. Imperial power is distributed in networks andthrough articulated mechanisms of control. (The US Constitution acts as avehicle for the passage to Empire precisely because it provides a model of dis-tributing power in networks.) This is not to say that the US government and theUS territory are no different than any other: the USA certainly occupies a privi-leged position in the global segmentations and hierarchies of Empire. As thepowers and boundaries of nation states decline, however, differences betweenstates and national territories become increasingly relative. They are now notdifferences of nature (as were, for example, the differences between the terri-tory of the metropole and that of the colony) but differences of degree. Thecentre of Empire, if it still makes sense to speak of that, resides in no place butin the virtuality of its power. The long 20th century, then, is not really an Ameri-can century, but an imperial century.

Notes

1 In the � nal part of the book, Spinoza follows up his seemingly complete dis-cussion of the link between freedom and necessity (and joy!) by elaboratingon a prototypical problem of early modern philosophy: the intellectual love ofGod. Jonathan Bennett’s characterization of Part Five can be taken as emblem-atic of the general philosophical view of this section of the Ethics: ‘After threecenturies of failure to pro� t from it, the time has come to admit that this partof the Ethics has nothing to teach us and is pretty certainly worthless’ (Bennett,1984: 372). The work of Gilles Deleuze and of Antonio Negri on Spinoza(among others) does not, of course, take this view of the � nal chapter of theEthics.

2 On the ontologically constitutive capacities of labour, speci� cally in thecontext of feminist theory, see Weeks (1998).

3 ‘The society of comrades is the revolutionary American dream. . .’ (Deleuze,1997).

4 On unemployment and the transformations of labour, see Rifkin (1995) andAronowitz and Di Fazio (1994).

5 Portions of this insert have already been incorporated by Hardt and Negri intoChapter 3.5 of Empire.

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