Quotes from Empire By Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt

- Harvard University Press 2000

"Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves. THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CYBERSPACE IS REALLY A RECOGNITION OF THE NEW HUMAN CONDITION" - (291)


"Today we increasingly think like computers...." (291)

"In the dark world of cyberpunk fiction, for example, the freedom of self-fashioning is often indistinguishable from the powers of an all-encompassing control." (216)

"It is now a closed paranthesis {deconstruction} and leaves us faced with a new task: constructing, in the non-place, a new place; constructing ontologically new determinations of the human, of living - a powerful artificiality of being. Donna Haraway's cyborg fable, which resides at the ambiguous boundary between human, animal, and machine, introduces us today, much more effectively than deconstruction, to these new terrains of possibility - but we should remember that this is a fable and nothing more." (218)

"The process of becoming human and the nature of the human itself were fundamentally transformed in the passage defined by modernization" (285)

Toni Negri, The Crisis of Political Space

"Modern systems of communication are not subordinated to sovereignty: quite the contrary, sovereignty is subordinated to communication..... In this experience we reach an outer limit in the dissolution of the relationship between order and space: henceforth we can only view this relationship within *an other place* - an 'elsewhere' which is original in being un-containable within the articulation of the sovereign act. The space of communication is completely de-territorialised. It is absolutely other.... What we have here is not a residue, but a *metamorphosis*: a metamorphosis of all the elements of political economy and the theory of the State, which derives from the fact that we have entered a phase of *real subsumption* of society within capital.

In other words, communication is the form of the capitalist process of production at the point where capital has conquered and subjected to itself the whole of society, in real terms, globally, by suppressing any margins of alternative: if ever an alternative is to be proposed, this will have to be done through the intermediary of the society of real subsumption, and it will have to be constructed within it, playing up new contradictions. The alternative will be posed within the 'new', in fact within the 'very new'. "

For anthropology of cyberspace see also Negri’s approval of : Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind's emerging World in cyberspace ( NY: Plenum Press, 1997)

More of Negri’s general definitions of Empire.

Many contemporary theorists are reluctant to recognise the globalisation of capitalist production and its world market as a fundamentally new situation and a significant historical shift. The theorists associated with the world-systems perspective, for example, argue that from its inception, capitalism has always functioned as a world economy, and therefore those who clamor about the novelty of its globalisation today have only misunderstood its history. Certainly, it is important to emphasise both capitalism’s continuous foundational relationship to (or at least a tendency toward) the world market and capitalism’s expanding cycles of development. But, without underestimating these real and important lines of continuity, we think it is important to note that what used to be conflict or competition among several imperialist powers has in many important respects been replaced by the idea of a single power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common notion of right that is decidedly postcolonial and postimperialist. …

The transition we are witnessing today from traditional international law, which was defined by contracts and treaties, to the definition and constitution of a new sovereign, supranational world power (and thus to an imperial notion of right), however incomplete, gives us a framework in which to read the totalising social process of Empire. In effect, the juridical transformation functions as a symptom of the modifications of the material biopolitical constitution of our societies.

The concept of Empire is presented as a global concert under the direction of a single conductor, a unitary power that maintains the social peace and produces its ethical truths. In order to achieve these ends, the single power is given the necessary force to conduct, when necessary, ‘just wars’ at the borders against the barbarians and internally against the rebellious. (on the Roman Empire, writing a genealogy of the concept of imperial sovereignty)

The appeal to a permanent state of emergency and exception is justified by the appeal to essential values of justice. The right of the police is legitimated by universal values. With the appearance of Empire we are confronted no longer with the local mediations of the universal but with a concrete universal itself. (19)

Against Habermas: when he described communicative action, he still relied on a standpoint outside of these effects of globalisation, a standpoint of life and truth that could oppose the informational colonisation of being. The imperial machine, however, demonstrates that this external standpoint no longer exists. The machine is self-validating, autopoietic, that is, systemic. It constructs social fabrics that evacuate or render ineffective any contradiction; it creates situations in which, before coercively neutralising difference, seem to absorb it in an insignificant play of self-generating and self-regulating equilibria. … Contrary to the way many postmodernist accounts would have it, however, the imperial machine, far from eliminating master narratives, actually produces and reproduces them (ideological master narratives in particular) in order to validate and celebrate its own power. (34)

Globalisation, insofar as it operates a real deterritorialisation of the previous structures of exploitation and control, is really a condition for the liberation of the multitude. (52)

Each of these struggles (Tienanmen square 89, Intifada, May 92 revolt in LA, French strikes in 95 etc.) was specific and based on immediate regional concerns in such a way that they could in no respect be linked together as a globally expanding chain of revolt. …This is certainly one of the central and most urgent political paradoxes of our time: in our much celebrated age of communication, struggles have become all but incommunicable. (54) Perhaps precisely because these struggles are incommunicable and thus blocked from travelling horizontally in the form of a cycle, they are forced instead to leap vertically and touch immediately on the global level.

New quality of social movements:

1. each struggle though firmly rooted in local conditions, attacks the imperial constitution in its generality.
2. all struggle destroy traditional distinction between economic and political. They are biopolitical struggles, struggles over the form of life.

All these struggles, which pose really new elements, appear from the beginning to be already old and outdated – precisely because they cannot communicate, their languages cannot be translated. One obstacle that blocks communication is the absence of a recognition of a common enemy against which the struggles are directed. Clarifying the nature of the common enemy is thus an essential political task. The form in which the political should be expressed as subjectivity today is not at all clear. A solution to this problem would have to weave closer together the subject and the object of the project, pose them in a relationship of immanence still more profound than that achieved by Machiavelli or Marx and Engels, in other words, pose them in a process of self-production.