Empire (5 page)

ofthe imperial ordering supports the exercise ofpolice power, while

at the same time the activity ofglobal police force demonstrates the

real effectiveness of the imperial ordering. The juridical power to

rule over the exception and the capacity to deploy police force

are thus two initial coordinates that define the imperial model

ofauthority.

Universal Values

We might well ask at this point, however, should we still use the

juridical term ‘‘right’’ in this context? How can we call right (and

specifically imperial right) a series oftechniques that, founded on

a state ofpermanent exception and the power ofthe police, reduces

right and law to a question of pure effectiveness? In order to address

these questions, we should first look more closely at the process of

imperial constitution that we are witnessing today. We should

emphasize from the start that its reality is demonstrated not only

by the transformations of international law it brings about, but also

by the changes it effects in the administrative law of individual

societies and nation-states, or really in the administrative law of

cosmopolitical society.27 Through its contemporary transformation

ofsupranational law, the imperial process ofconstitution tends either

directly or indirectly to penetrate and reconfigure the domestic

law ofthe nation-states, and thus supranational law powerf

ully

overdetermines domestic law.

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T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

Perhaps the most significant symptom ofthis transformation

is the development ofthe so-called
right of intervention.
28 This is commonly conceived as the right or duty ofthe dominant subjects

ofthe world order to intervene in the territories ofother subjects

in the interest ofpreventing or resolving humanitarian problems,

guaranteeing accords, and imposing peace. The right ofintervention

figured prominently among the panoply ofinstruments accorded

the United Nations by its Charter for maintaining international

order, but the contemporary reconfiguration ofthis right represents

a qualitative leap. No longer, as under the old international ordering,

do individual sovereign states or the supranational (U.N.) power

intervene only to ensure or impose the application ofvoluntarily

engaged international accords. Now supranational subjects that are

legitimated not by right but by consensus intervene in the name

ofany type ofemergency and superior ethical principles. What

stands behind this intervention is not just a permanent state of

emergency and exception, but a permanent state ofemergency and

exception justified by
the appeal to essential values of justice.
In other words, the right ofthe police is legitimated by universal values.29

Should we assume that since this new right ofintervention

functions primarily toward the goal of resolving urgent human

problems, its legitimacy is therefore founded on universal values?

Should we read this movement as a process that, on the basis of

the fluctuating elements ofthe historical framework, sets in motion

a constitutive machine driven by universal forces of justice and

peace? Are we thus in a situation very close to the traditional

definition ofEmpire, the one promulgated in the ancient Roman-

Christian imaginary?

It would be going too far to respond affirmatively to these

questions at this early stage in our investigation. The definition of

the developing imperial power as a science ofthe police that is

founded on a practice of just war to address continually arising

emergencies is probably correct but still completely insufficient. As

we have seen, the phenomenological determinations ofthe new

global order exist in a profoundly fluctuating situation that could

W O R L D O R D E R

19

also be characterized correctly in terms ofcrisis and war. How can

we reconcile the legitimation ofthis order through prevention and

policing with the fact that crisis and war themselves demonstrate

the very questionable genesis and legitimacy ofthis concept of

justice? As we have already noted, these techniques and others like

them indicate that what we are witnessing is a process ofthe material

constitution ofthe new planetary order, the consolidation ofits

administrative machine, and the production ofnew hierarchies of

command over global space. Who will decide on the definitions

ofjustice and order across the expanse ofthis totality in the course

ofits process ofconstitution? Who will be able to define the concept

ofpeace? Who will be able to unify the process ofsuspending

history and call this suspension just? Around these questions the

problematic ofEmpire is completely open, not closed.

At this point, the problem ofthe new juridical apparatus is

presented to us in its most immediate figure: a global order, a justice,

and a right that are still virtual but nonetheless apply actually to us.

We are forced increasingly to feel that we are participants in this

development, and we are called upon to be responsible for what

it becomes in this framework. Our citizenship, just like our ethical

responsibility, is situated within these new dimensions—our power

and our impotence are measured here. We could say, in Kantian

fashion, that our internal moral disposition, when it is confronted

with and tested in the social order, tends to be determined by the

ethical, political, and juridical categories ofEmpire. Or we could

say that the external morality ofevery human being and citizen is

by now commensurable only in the framework of Empire. This

new framework forces us to confront a series of explosive aporias,

because in this new juridical and institutional world being formed

our ideas and practices ofjustice and our means ofhope are thrown

into question. The means ofthe private and individual apprehension

ofvalues are dissolved: with the appearance ofEmpire, we are

confronted no longer with the local mediations of the universal

but with a concrete universal itself. The domesticity of values, the

shelters behind which they presented their moral substance, the

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T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T

limits that protect against the invading exteriority—all that disap-

pears. We are all forced to confront absolute questions and radical

alternatives. In Empire, ethics, morality, and justice are cast into

new dimensions.

Throughout the course ofour research we have found our-

selves confronted with a classic problematic of political philosophy:

the decline and fall of Empire.30 It may seem paradoxical that we

address this topos at the beginning, at the same time that we treat

the initial construction ofEmpire; but the becoming ofEmpire is

actually realized on the basis ofthe same conditions that characterize

its decadence and decline. Empire is emerging today as the center

that supports the globalization ofproductive networks and casts its

widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within

its world order—and yet at the same time it deploys a powerful

police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves

who threaten its order. The power ofEmpire appears to be subordi-

nated to the fluctuations oflocal power dynamics and to the shifting,

partial juridical orderings that attempt, but never fully succeed, to

lead back to a state ofnormalcy in the name ofthe ‘‘exceptionality’’

ofthe administrative procedures. These characteristics, however,

were precisely those that defined ancient Rome in its decadence

and that tormented so many ofits Enlightenment admirers. We

should not expect that the complexity ofthe processes that construct

the new imperial relationship ofright be resolved. On the contrary,

the processes are and will remain contradictory. The question of

the definition ofjustice and peace will find no real resolution; the

force of the new imperial constitution will not be embodied in a

consensus that is articulated in the multitude. The terms ofthe

juridical proposal ofEmpire are completely indeterminate, even

though they are nonetheless concrete. Empire is born and shows

itselfas crisis. Should we conceive this as an Empire ofdecadence,

then, in the terms Montesquieu and Gibbon described? Or is it more

properly understood in classical terms as an Empire ofcorruption?

Here we should understand corruption first ofall not only in

moral terms but also in juridical and political terms, because accord-

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21

ing to Montesquieu and Gibbon, when the different forms of gov-

ernment are not firmly established in the republic, the cycle of

corruption is ineluctably set in motion and the community is torn

apart.31 Second, we should understand corruption also in metaphysi-

cal terms: where the entity and essence, effectiveness and value, do

not find common satisfaction, there develops not generation but

corruption.32 These are some ofthe fundamental axes ofEmpire

that we will return to later at length.

Allow us, in conclusion, one final analogy that refers to the

birth ofChristianity in Europe and its expansion during the decline

ofthe Roman Empire. In this process an enormous potential of

subjectivity was constructed and consolidated in terms ofthe proph-

ecy ofa world to come, a chiliastic project. This new subjectivity

offered an absolute alternative to the spirit of imperial right—a new

ontological basis. From this perspective, Empire was accepted as

the ‘‘maturity ofthe times’’ and the unity ofthe entire known

civilization, but it was challenged in its totality by a completely

different ethical and ontological axis. In the same way today, given

that the limits and unresolvable problems ofthe new imperial right

are fixed, theory and practice can go beyond them, finding once

again an ontological basis ofantagonism—within Empire, but also

against and beyond Empire, at the same level oftotality.

1.2

B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N

The ‘‘police’’ appears as an administration heading the state, to-

gether with the judiciary, the army, and the exchequer. True. Yet

in fact, it embraces everything else. Turquet says so: ‘‘It branches

out into all ofthe people’s conditions, everything they do or under-

take. Its field comprises the judiciary, finance, and the army.’’ The

police
includes everything.

Michel Foucault

From the juridical perspective we have been able to

glimpse some ofthe elements ofthe ideal genesis ofEmpire, but

from that perspective alone it would be difficult if not impossible

to understand how the imperial machine is actually set in motion.

Juridical concepts and juridical systems always refer to something

other than themselves. Through the evolution and exercise ofright,

they point toward the material condition that defines their purchase

on social reality. Our analysis must now descend to the level of

that materiality and investigate there the material transformation of

the paradigm ofrule. We need to discover the means and forces

ofthe production ofsocial reality along with the subjectivities that

animate it.

Biopower in the Society of Control

In many respects, the work ofMichel Foucault has prepared the

terrain for such an investigation of the material functioning of

imperial rule. First ofall, Foucault’s work allows us to recognize a

historical, epochal passage in social forms from
disciplinary society
to B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N

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the
society of control.
1 Disciplinary society is that society in which social command is constructed through a diffuse network of
dispositifs

or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and pro-

ductive practices. Putting this society to work and ensuring obedi-

ence to its rule and its mechanisms ofinclusion and/or exclusion

are accomplished through disciplinary institutions (the prison, the

factory, the asylum, the hospital, the university, the school, and so

forth) that structure the social terrain and present logics adequate

to the ‘‘reason’’ of discipline. Disciplinary power rules in effect

by structuring the parameters and limits ofthought and practice,

sanctioning and prescribing normal and/or deviant behaviors.

Foucault generally refers to the ancien re´gime and the classical age

ofFrench civilization to illustrate the emergence ofdisciplinarity,

but more generally we could say that the entire first phase of

capitalist accumulation (in Europe and elsewhere) was conducted

under this paradigm ofpower. We should understand the society

ofcontrol, in contrast, as that society (which develops at the far

edge ofmodernity and opens toward the postmodern) in which

mechanisms ofcommand become ever more ‘‘democratic,’’ ever

more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains

and bodies ofthe citizens. The behaviors ofsocial integration and