Empire (39 page)

and material conditions ofimperial reproduction; but positively,

what pulls forward is the wealth of desire and the accumulation of

expressive and productive capacities that the processes ofglobaliza-

tion have determined in the consciousness ofevery individual and

social group—and thus a certain hope. Desertion and exodus are

a powerful form of class struggle within and against imperial post-

modernity. This mobility, however, still constitutes a spontaneous

level ofstruggle, and, as we noted earlier, it most often leads today

to a new rootless condition ofpoverty and misery.

A new nomad horde, a new race ofbarbarians, will arise to

invade or evacuate Empire. Nietzsche was oddly prescient oftheir

destiny in the nineteenth century. ‘‘Problem: where are the
barbarians

ofthe twentieth century? Obviously they will come into view and

consolidate themselves only after tremendous socialist crises.’’8 We

cannot say exactly what Nietzsche foresaw in his lucid delirium,

but indeed what recent event could be a stronger example ofthe

power ofdesertion and exodus, the power ofthe nomad horde,

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than the fall ofthe Berlin Wall and the collapse ofthe entire Soviet

bloc? In the desertion from ‘‘socialist discipline,’’ savage mobility

and mass migration contributed substantially to the collapse ofthe

system. In fact, the desertion of productive cadres disorganized and

struck at the heart ofthe disciplinary system ofthe bureaucratic

Soviet world. The mass exodus ofhighly trained workers from

Eastern Europe played a central role in provoking the collapse of

the Wall.9 Even though it refers to the particularities of the socialist

state system, this example demonstrates that the mobility ofthe labor

force can indeed express an open political conflict and contribute to

the destruction ofthe regime. What we need, however, is more.

We need a force capable of not only organizing the destructive

capacities ofthe multitude, but also constituting through the desires

ofthe multitude an alternative. The counter-Empire must also be

a new global vision, a new way ofliving in the world.

Numerous republican political projects in modernity assumed

mobility as a privileged terrain for struggle and organization: from

the so-called Socians ofthe Renaissance (Tuscan and Lombard

artisans and apostles of the Reform who, banished from their own

country, fomented sedition against the Catholic nations of Europe,

from Italy to Poland) up to the seventeenth-century sects that

organized trans-Atlantic voyages in response to the massacres in

Europe; and from the agitators of the IWW across the United States

in the 1910s up to the European autonomists in the 1970s. In these

modern examples, mobility became an active politics and established

a political position. This mobility ofthe labor force and this political

exodus have a thousand threads that are interwoven—old traditions

and new needs are mixed together, just as the republicanism of

modernity and modern class struggle were woven together. Post-

modern republicanism, ifit is to arise, must face a similar task.

New Barbarians

Those who are against, while escaping from the local and particular

constraints oftheir human condition, must also continually attempt

to construct a new body and a new life. This is a necessarily violent,

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

215

barbaric passage, but as Walter Benjamin says, it is a positive barba-

rism: ‘‘Barbarisms? Precisely. We affirm this in order to introduce

a new, positive notion ofbarbarism. What does the poverty of

experience oblige the barbarian to do? To begin anew, to begin

from the new.’’ The new barbarian ‘‘sees nothing permanent. But

for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encoun-

ter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he

sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere

. . . Because he sees ways everywhere, he always positions himself

at crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring.

What exists he reduces to rubble, not for the sake of the rubble,

but for that of the way leading through it.’’10 The new barbarians

destroy with an affirmative violence and trace new paths of life

through their own material existence.

These barbaric deployments work on human relations in gen-

eral, but we can recognize them today first and foremost in corporeal

relations and configurations ofgender and sexuality.11 Conventional

norms ofcorporeal and sexual relations between and within genders

are increasingly open to challenge and transformation. Bodies them-

selves transform and mutate to create new posthuman bodies.12 The

first condition ofthis corporeal transformation is the recognition

that human nature is in no way separate from nature as a whole,

that there are no fixed and necessary boundaries between the human

and the animal, the human and the machine, the male and the

female, and so forth; it is the recognition that nature itself is an

artificial terrain open to ever new mutations, mixtures, and hybrid-

izations.13 Not only do we consciously subvert the traditional

boundaries, dressing in drag, for example, but we also move in a

creative, indeterminate zone
au milieu,
in between and without

regard for those boundaries. Today’s corporeal mutations constitute

an
anthropological exodus
and represent an extraordinarily important, but still quite ambiguous, element ofthe configuration ofrepublicanism ‘‘against’’ imperial civilization. The anthropological exodus

is important primarily because here is where the positive, construc-

tive face of the mutation begins to appear: an ontological mutation

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in action, the concrete invention ofa first
new place in the non-place.

This creative evolution does not merely occupy any existing place,

but rather invents a new place; it is a desire that creates a new

body; a metamorphosis that breaks all the naturalistic homologies

ofmodernity.

This notion ofanthropological exodus is still very ambiguous,

however, because its methods, hybridization and mutation, are

themselves the very methods employed by imperial sovereignty. 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.14 We certainly do need to change our bodies

and ourselves, and in perhaps a much more radical way than the

cyberpunk authors imagine. In our contemporary world, the now

common aesthetic mutations ofthe body, such as piercings and

tattoos, punk fashion and its various imitations, are all initial indica-

tions ofthis corporeal transformation, but in the end they do not

hold a candle to the kind ofradical mutation needed here. The

will to be against really needs a body that is completely incapable

ofsubmitting to command. It needs a body that is incapable of

adapting to family life, to factory discipline, to the regulations of

a traditional sex life, and so forth. (If you find your body refusing

these ‘‘normal’’ modes of life, don’t despair—realize your gift!)15

In addition to being radically unprepared for normalization, how-

ever, the new body must also be able to create a new life. We must

go much further to define that new place of the non-place, well

beyond the simple experiences ofmixture and hybridization, and

the experiments that are conducted around them. We have to arrive

at constituting a coherent political artifice, an
artificial becoming
in the sense that the humanists spoke ofa
homohomo
produced by art and knowledge, and that Spinoza spoke ofa powerful body produced by

that highest consciousness that is infused with love. The infinite

paths ofthe barbarians must form a new mode oflife.

Such transformations will always remain weak and ambiguous,

however, so long as they are cast only in terms ofform and order.

Hybridity itselfis an empty gesture, and the mere refusal oforder

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217

simply leaves us on the edge ofnothingness—or worse, these ges-

tures risk reinforcing imperial power rather than challenging it. The

new politics is given real substance only when we shift our focus

from the question of form and order to the regimes and practices

ofproduction. On the terrain ofproduction we will be able to

recognize that this mobility and artificiality do not merely represent

the exceptional experiences ofsmall privileged groups but indicate,

rather, the common productive experience ofthe multitude. As

early as the nineteenth century, proletarians were recognized as the

nomads ofthe capitalist world.16 Even when their lives remain

fixed in one geographical location (as is most often the case), their

creativity and productivity define corporeal and ontological migra-

tions. The anthropological metamorphoses ofbodies are established

through the common experience oflabor and the new technologies

that have constitutive effects and ontological implications. Tools

have always functioned as human prostheses, integrated into our

bodies through our laboring practices as a kind ofanthropological

mutation both in individual terms and in terms ofcollective social

life. The contemporary form of exodus and the new barbarian life

demand that tools become poietic prostheses, liberating us from

the conditions ofmodern humanity. To go back to the Marxian

digression we made earlier, when the dialectic between inside and

outside comes to an end, and when the separate place ofuse value

disappears from the imperial terrain, the new forms of labor power

are charged with the task ofproducing anew the human (or really

the posthuman). This task will be accomplished primarily through

the new and increasingly immaterial forms of affective and intellec-

tual labor power, in the community that they constitute, in the

artificiality that they present as a project.

With this passage the deconstructive phase ofcritical thought,

which from Heidegger and Adorno to Derrida provided a powerful

instrument for the exit from modernity, has lost its effectiveness.17

It is now a closed parenthesis and leaves us faced with a new

task: constructing, in the non-place, a new place; constructing

ontologically new determinations ofthe human, ofliving—a pow-

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erful 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 decon-

struction, to these new terrains ofpossibility—but we should re-

member that this is a fable and nothing more. The force that must

instead drive forward theoretical practice to actualize these terrains

ofpotential metamorphosis is still (and ever more intensely) the

common experience ofthe new productive practices and the con-

centration ofproductive labor on the plastic and fluid terrain of

the new communicative, biological, and mechanical technologies.

Being republican today, then, means first ofall struggling

within and constructing against Empire, on its hybrid, modulating

terrains. And here we should add, against all moralisms and all

positions ofresentment and nostalgia, that this new imperial terrain

provides greater possibilities for creation and liberation. The multi-

tude, in its will to be-against and its desire for liberation, must push

through Empire to come out the other side.

PART 3

P A S S A G E S O F P R O D U C T I O N

3.1

T H E L I M I T S O F I M P E R I A L I S M

The world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of it is

being divided up, conquered, and colonised. To think ofthese stars

that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can

never reach. I would annex the planets ifI could; I often think of

that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.

Cecil Rhodes

For a large portion ofthe twentieth century, the critique

ofimperialism has been among the most active and urgent arenas

ofMarxist theory.1 Many ofthese arguments are today certainly

outdated and the situation they refer to is utterly transformed. This

does not mean, however, that we have nothing to learn from them.

These critiques ofimperialism can help us understand the passage

from imperialism to Empire because in certain respects they antici-

pated that passage.

One ofthe central arguments ofthe tradition ofMarxist think-

ing on imperialism is that there is an intrinsic relation between

capitalism and expansion, and that capitalist expansion inevitably

takes the political form ofimperialism. Marx himselfwrote very

little about imperialism, but his analyses ofcapitalist expansion are

central to the entire tradition ofcritique. What Marx explained most

clearly is that capital constantly operates through a reconfiguration of