Empire (37 page)

that Empire is characterized by a fluidity ofform—an ebb and flow

of formation and deformation, generation and degeneration.

To say that imperial sovereignty is defined by corruption

means, on the one hand, that Empire is impure or hybrid and, on

the other, that imperial rule functions by breaking down. (Here

the Latin etymology is precise:
cum-rumpere,
to break.) Imperial

society is always and everywhere breaking down, but this does not

mean that it is necessarily heading to ruin. Just as the crisis of

modernity in our characterization did not point to any imminent

or necessary collapse, so too the corruption ofEmpire does not

indicate any teleology or any end in sight. In other words, the crisis

ofmodern sovereignty was not temporary or exceptional (as one

would refer to the stock market crash of 1929 as a crisis), but rather

the norm ofmodernity. In a similar way, corruption is not an

aberration ofimperial sovereignty but its very essence and modus

operandi. The imperial economy, for example, functions precisely

through corruption, and it cannot function otherwise. There is

certainly a tradition that views corruption as the tragic flaw of

Empire, the accident without which Empire would have triumphed:

think of Shakespeare and Gibbon as two very different examples.

We see corruption, rather, not as accidental but as necessary. Or,

more accurately, Empire requires that all relations be accidental.

Imperial power is founded on the rupture of every determinate

ontological relationship. Corruption is simply the sign ofthe absence

ofany ontology. In the ontological vacuum, corruption becomes

necessary, objective. Imperial sovereignty thrives on the proliferat-

ing contradictions corruption gives rise to; it is stabilized by its

instabilities, by its impurities and admixture; it is calmed by the

panic and anxieties it continually engenders. Corruption names

the perpetual process ofalteration and metamorphosis, the anti-

foundational foundation, the deontological mode of being.

We have thus arrived at a series ofdistinctions that conceptually

mark the passage from modern to imperial sovereignty: from the

I M P E R I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

203

people to the multitude, from dialectical opposition to the manage-

ment ofhybridities, from the place ofmodern sovereignty to the

non-place ofEmpire, from crisis to corruption.

R EFUSAL

Bartleby would prefer not to. The mystery of Herman Melville’s classic

story is the absoluteness of the refusal. When his boss asks him to perform
his duties, Bartleby calmly repeats over and over, ‘‘I would prefer not to.’’

Melville’s character fits in with a long tradition of the refusal of work. Any
worker with any sense, of course, wants to refuse the authority of the boss,
but Bartleby takes it to the extreme. He does not object to this or that
task, nor does he offer any reason for his refusal—he just passively and
absolutely declines. Bartleby’s behavior is indeed disarming, in part because
he is so calm and serene, but moreover because his refusal is so indefinite
that it becomes absolute. He simply prefers not to.

Given Melville’s great penchant for metaphysics, it is no wonder that

Bartleby solicits ontological interpretations.1 His refusal is so absolute that
Bartleby appears completely blank, a man without qualities or, as Renaissance philosophers would say,
homo tantum,
mere man and nothing more.

Bartleby in his pure passivity and his refusal of any particulars presents us
with a figure of generic being, being as such, being and nothing more. And
in the course of the story he strips down so much—approximating ever

more closely naked humanity, naked life, naked being—that eventually

he withers away, evaporates in the bowels of the infamous Manhattan

prison, the Tombs.

Michael K, the central character in J. M. Coetzee’s wonderful novel

The Life and Times of Michael K,
is also a figure of absolute refusal.

But whereas Bartleby is immobile, almost petrified in his pure passivity,
K is always on his feet, always moving. Michael K is a gardener, a simple
man, so simple that he appears to be not of this world. In a fictional country
divided by civil war, he is continually stopped by the cages, barriers, and
checkpoints erected by authority, but he manages quietly to refuse them, to
keep moving. Michael K does not keep moving just for the sake of perpetual
motion. The barriers do not just block motion, they seem to stop life, and
thus he refuses them absolutely in order to keep life in motion. What he
really wants is to grow pumpkins and tend to their wandering vines. K’s
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P A S S A G E S O F S O V E R E I G N T Y

refusal of authority is as absolute as Bartleby’s, and that very absoluteness
and simplicity situate him, too, on a level of ontological purity. K also
approaches the level of naked universality: ‘‘a human soul above and beneath
classification,’’2 being simply
homo tantum.

These simple men and their absolute refusals cannot but appeal to

our hatred of authority. The refusal of work and authority, or really the
refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics. Long
ago E

´ tienne de La Boe´tie preached just such a politics of refusal: ‘‘Resolve
to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place
hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support

him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose

pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into

pieces.’’3 La Boe´tie recognized the political power of refusal, the power of
subtracting ourselves from the relationship of domination, and through our
exodus subverting the sovereign power that lords over us. Bartleby and

Michael K continue La Boe´tie’s politics of the refusal of voluntary servitude,
carrying it to the absolute.

This refusal certainly is the beginning of a liberatory politics, but it
is only a beginning. The refusal in itself is empty. Bartleby and Michael
K may be beautiful souls, but their being in its absolute purity hangs on
the edge of an abyss. Their lines of flight from authority are completely
solitary, and they continuously tread on the verge of suicide. In political
terms, too, refusal in itself (of work, authority, and voluntary servitude)
leads only to a kind of social suicide. As Spinoza says, if we simply cut
the tyrannical head off the social body, we will be left with the deformed
corpse of society. What we need is to create a new social body, which is a
project that goes well beyond refusal. Our lines of flight, our exodus must
be constituent and create a real alternative. Beyond the simple refusal, or
as part of that refusal, we need also to construct a new mode of life and
above all a new community. This project leads not toward the naked life
of
homo tantum
but toward
homohomo,
humanity squared, enriched
by the collective intelligence and love of the community.

I N T E R M E Z Z O

C O U N T E R - E M P I R E

While this Heavenly City is on pilgrimage on earth, it calls out all

peoples and so collects a society ofaliens, speaking all languages.

Saint Augustine

We want to destroy all the ridiculous monuments ‘‘to those who

have died for the fatherland’’ that stare down at us in every village,

and in their place erect monuments to the deserters. The monu-

ments to the deserters will represent also those who died in the war

because every one ofthem died cursing the war and envying the

happiness ofthe deserter. Resistance is born ofdesertion.

Antifascist partisan, Venice, 1943

We have now arrived at a turning point in our argument.

The trajectory we have traced up until now—from our recognition

ofmodernity as crisis to our analyses ofthe first articulations ofa

new imperial form of sovereignty—has allowed us to understand

the transformations of the constitution of world order. But that

order
would be merely a hollow husk ifwe were not to designate

also a new regime of
production.
Furthermore, we have not yet

been able to give any coherent indication ofwhat type ofpolitical

subjectivities might contest and overthrow the forces of Empire,

because those subjectivities will arrive only on the terrain ofpro-

duction. It is as ifat this point we can see only shadows ofthe

figures that will animate our future. Let us therefore descend

into the hidden abode ofproduction to see the figures at work

there.

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I N T E R M E Z Z O

Even when we manage to touch on the productive, ontological

dimension ofthe problematic and the resistances that arise there,

however, we will still not be in the position—not even at the

end ofthis book—to point to any already existing and concrete

elaboration of a political alternative to Empire. And no such effective

blueprint will ever arise from a theoretical articulation such as ours.

It will arise only in practice. At a certain point in his thinking Marx

needed the Paris Commune in order to make the leap and conceive

communism in concrete terms as an effective alternative to capitalist

society. Some such experiment or series ofexperiments advanced

through the genius ofcollective practice will certainly be necessary

today to take that next concrete step and create a new social body

beyond Empire.

OneBig Union!

Our study set out from the hypothesis that the power of Empire

and the mechanisms ofimperial sovereignty can be understood only

when confronted on the most general scale, in their globality. We

believe that toward the end ofchallenging and resisting Empire

and its world market, it is necessary to pose any alternative at an

equally global level. Any proposition ofa particular community in

isolation, defined in racial, religious, or regional terms, ‘‘delinked’’

from Empire, shielded from its powers by fixed boundaries, is

destined to end up as a kind ofghetto. Empire cannot be resisted

by a project aimed at a limited, local autonomy. We cannot move

back to any previous social form, nor move forward in isolation.

Rather, we must push through Empire to come out the other

side. Deleuze and Guattari argued that rather than resist capital’s

globalization, we have to accelerate the process. ‘‘But which,’’ they

ask, ‘‘is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from

the world market . . ? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction?

To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of

decoding and deterritorialization?’’1 Empire can be effectively con-

tested only on its own level ofgenerality and by pushing the

processes that it offers past their present limitations. We have to

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207

accept that challenge and learn to think globally and act globally.

Globalization must be met with a counter-globalization, Empire

with a counter-Empire.

In this regard we might take inspiration from Saint Augustine’s

vision ofa project to contest the decadent Roman Empire. No

limited community could succeed and provide an alternative to

imperial rule; only a universal, catholic community bringing to-

gether all populations and all languages in a common journey could

accomplish this. The divine city is a universal city ofaliens, coming

together, cooperating, communicating. Our pilgrimage on earth,

however, in contrast to Augustine’s, has no transcendent telos be-

yond; it is and remains absolutely immanent. Its continuous move-

ment, gathering aliens in community, making this world its home,

is both means and end, or rather a means without end.

From this perspective the Industrial Workers ofthe World

(IWW) is the great Augustinian project ofmodern times. In the

first decades ofthe twentieth century the Wobblies, as they were

called, organized powerful strikes and rebellions across the United

States, from Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Paterson, New Jersey,

to Everett, Washington.2 The perpetual movement ofthe Wobblies

was indeed an immanent pilgrimage, creating a new society in the

shell ofthe old, without establishing fixed and stable structures of

rule. (In fact, the primary criticism of the IWW from the official

Left was and continues to be that its strikes, though powerful and

often victorious, never left behind durable union structures.) The

Wobblies had extraordinary success among the vast and mobile

immigrant populations because they spoke all the languages ofthat

hybrid labor force. The two accepted stories of the derivation of

the name ‘‘Wobbly’’ illustrate these two central characteristics of

the movement, its organizational mobility and its ethnic-linguistic

hybridity: first, Wobbly is supposed to refer to the lack of a center,

the flexible and unpredictable pilgrimage ofIWW militancy; and