1. Empire by Antonio Negri
Absolutely Epic
Empire is a sweeping book with a big-picture vision. Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri argue that while classical imperialism has largely
disappeared, a new empire is emerging in a diffuse blend of technology,
economics, and globalization. The book brings together unlikely
bedfellows: Hardt, associate professor in Duke Universitys literature
program, and Negri, among other things a writer and inmate at Rebibbia
Prison in Rome. Empire aspires to the same scale of grand political
philosophy as Locke or Marx or Fukuyama, but whether Hardt and Negri
accomplish this daunting task is debatable. It is, however, an exciting book
that is especially timely following the emergence of terrorism as a
geopolitical force. Hardt and Negri maintain that empire--traditionally
understood as military or capitalist might--has embarked upon a new stage
of historical development and is now better understood as a complex web
of sociopolitical forces. They argue, with a neo-Marxist bent, that the
multitude will transcend and defeat the new empire on its own terms. The
authors address everything from the works of Deleuze to Jeffersons

2. constitutional democracy to the Chiapas revolution in a far-ranging
analysis of our contemporary situation. Unfortunately, their penchant for
references and academese sometimes renders the prose unwieldy. But if
Hardt and Negris vision of the world materializes, they will undoubtedly be
remembered as prophetic. --Eric de Place
Personal Review: Empire by Antonio Negri
eneral Summary
In Empire political theorists Hardt and Negri describe a new form of
global sovereignty called Empire. Unlike the modernist era which privileged
the nation-state as the primary site of social organization and command,
Empire is distinctly postmodern and ascribes to no central source of
power. In replace of central power, rallied around the nation-state,
sovereignty has evolved into a diffuse network of decentered nodal points.
These nodal points include multinational corporations, nation-states,
NGOs, and supranational institutions, all of which simultaneously vie for
political and capitalistic hegemony. Empire''s evolving political logic, while
frightening to the extent that it attempts to reproduce global hierarchy, is,
according to Hardt and Negri, a response to a crisis in capitalism that
emerged sometime after 1968. While Empire is indicative of a new global
order, then, Hardt and Negri view it as "better than the forms of society and
modes of production that came before it" (43). Whereas previous historical
epochs relied on repressive measures such as the Fordist assembly line to
regulate subjectivity and discipline behavior, Empire''s modes of
subjectification are increasingly decentered and fragmented. This
weakness in empire- a shift corresponding with the transition from Fordism
to post-Fordism- is ultimately what can allow for the multitude, the locus of
all production in late capitalist society, to "enter the terrain of Empire and
confront their homogenizing and heterogenizing flows in all their
complexity" (46). Hardt and Negri''s work, as a result, reads as the
"Communist Manifesto" of the 21st century; it takes Marx and Engel''s
theory of historical materialism and situates it in the radically different
contours of late capitalist society.
Key concepts
Disciplinary societies
Hardt and Negri argue that the modernist era was characterized by a
typology of social reproduction called disciplinary societies. In disciplinary
societies "social command is constructed through a diffuse network of
dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and
productive practices" (p. 23). In disciplinary societies, then, power is
consolidated in particular material localities such as the factory line, the
prison, the school, and the psychiatric ward. This structuralist
epistemology-- which views a transcendent outside as subjectifying an
immanent inside-- corresponds with the model of ideology theorized by
Marx and Engels.

3. In Marxist theory the bourgeois is believed to be coeval with the
interests of capitalism. As a result, it uses this mode of production to
discipline and reproduce the immanent productive forces of the proletariat.
In late capitalism, however, as Hardt and Negri argue, immanence is no
longer limited to the category of the proletariat. In the era Empire, a
multiplicity of subject positions have all become immanent to capitalism, a
consequence that derives from the emergence of immaterial labor and the
global division of labor. This new terrain of immanence, then, requires a
new conceptual framework, and for this Hardt and Negri turn to the
concepts of control societies and biopolitical production.
Control societies
Societies of control are peculiar to postmodernity and coincide with
the transition from capital''s formal subsumption of labor to its real
subsumption of labor. In this stage of capitalist production- a shift brought
about by the multitude- "mechanisms of command become ever more
`democratic,'' ever more immanent to the social field" (23). In contrast to
disciplinary societies, societies of control function immanently. They do not
require any disciplinary practices (such as Fordism and Taylorism) to
reproduce and expropriate productive social relationships. With the
emergence of immaterial labor, life itself has become open to capital''s
command. As a result, capital can extract surplus value without even
intervening politically or ideologically. This decentered form of
govermentality, that characterizes societies of control, is ultimately
empire''s weakness, since its axes of repression are simultaneously its
axes of transgression.
Biopolitical production
Biopower is a concept that originates with Michel Foucault and is
used to describe "a form of power that regulates social life from its interior"
(23). Foucault developed the concept of biopower as an alternative to the
Marxian concept of ideology. Whereas ideology theory is interested in the
way mystification takes place at the level of discourse, biopower is
concerned with the way discourses and bodies are brought into being
simultaneously as a "structure of feeling." The result is that biopower
challenges the dual ontology between materiality and discourse, it
demonstrates that discourses not only reproduce particular types
consciousness (such as the bourgeois ideology) but also produce the
corporeal, somatic, and affective properties of individual subjectivity.
As a mode of subjectification, biopolitical production could only
develop in the modernist era; it could only exist in a time when the life
sciences and research on eugenics were accorded fundamental values.
Nevertheless, it is only in societies of control (or, in other words,
postmodernity) that biopower has become the sole motor of social
reproduction. While modernity used biopower as a tool for regulating the
subjectivity of particular populations, in postmodernity biopower has
subsumed the social bios as a whole. To this end, control societies and

4. biopower (also know as biopolitical production) are one and the same: both
autonomously propel the production and reproduction of global capitalist
society.
Immanence
Immanence corresponds with the ideas of control societies and
biopolitical production insofar as it views social organization as produced
and reproduced prior to any model of human subjectification (e.g., Marx''s
base/superstructure, Freud''s conscious/unconscious, etc.). At the same
time, however, immanence is a transcendent concept; it is the Real (in the
Lacanian sense) ontological state of being that exists prior to any dualistic
human mediation. As a philosophical standpoint immanence reaches its
zenith in the work of Baruch Spinoza who argued in the mid 17th century
that man, nature, and god were one and the same to the extent that all
move evanescently along the same plane of existence. Because of this
belief in the immanent power of humanity, Hardt and Negri argue that
Spinoza was the first genuine philosopher of modernist thought.
Spinoza''s locating of the plane of immanence, nevertheless, was
quickly undermined by a second set of (enlightenment) modernist thinkers
such as Descartes, Hobbes, Hegel, and Marx. In their belief in the power
of man to triumph over nature, all of these thinkers posed "a transcendent
constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against
desire" (74). It is not until Nietzsche, Bergson, and later Deleuze that
Spinoza''s ontology of immanence became revitalized as a philosophical
vantage point. In fact, it is Deleuze (the thinker which Hardt and Negri are
most indebted to) who takes this heretical assemblage of thinkers to their
logical conclusion, by developing a whole vocabulary of philosophical
concepts centered on the Spinozian ideal of immanence. From an
immanentist perspective, then, society always moves forward in a
perpetual process of becoming. Its discourses, institutions, and
technological processes are lines of flight that propel humanity forward. To
this end, an immanent ontology is absolutely materialist (though not
dialectical); it views history as the ultimate arbiter of human subjectivity.
Postmodernization
Hardt and Negri- echoing the thought
For More 5 Star Customer Reviews and Lowest Price:
Empire by Antonio Negri 5 Star Customer Reviews and Lowest Price!