Re: hardt&negri's "empire"

The principal contribution of this dense tome to all theorizations of
"trajectories" is in its discussion of sovereignty, an area where most
of what goes by the name of "world[-]systems analysis" is
characteristically weak.  The main argument - that modern sovereignty,
premised on a fundamental distinction between inside an outside, immanence
and transcendence (i.e. the nation-state, the market, as well as
civilization, Reason, and modernity itself on the one hand, and their
Other, in whatever form, on the other) has been superceded by a new
global, imperial (but not imperialIST) sovereignty, which recognizes no
limitation.  Unlike for parcellized modern sovereignties, the claims of
Empire are universal, even while it is not troubled by the
proliferating local particularisms exemplified by the multiculturalist
rubric, so long as they remain local and so long as empire retains the
power to organize them in hierarchies (typically by "naturalizing"
"social" differences, through the invocation of sociobiology, etc.) At
present, this sovereignty instantiates itself through multiple
institutions, including a hyperinterventionist US state, supported by
agencies of global economic governance (IMF/WB), some human rights
organizations (including many NGOs) and, at a more local level, various
fundamentalisms (including those of the multiculti variety prevalent in
the West).

To me, the most interesting aspect of the book is its engagement with
political theory and the issue of transcendence - a product of Negri's
political reading of Marx.  The practical upshot of this is the ability to
theorize an imperial resolution to the current crisis, something world
systemists have frequently mentioned in passing, but never addressed in
detail.  The imperial trajectory was one of three mentioned by Arrighi in
the _Long 20th Century_ (whether in the text itself or in the class
mentioned by Elson Boles, I presently don't recall) - along with another
hegemonic (East Asian-led) cycle and a disintegration into chaos.  It is,
of course, still too early to call which of these outcomes will indeed
transpire, but the world-systemists' endemic economism has made it
difficult to seriously engage with the first of these alternatives. In
any event, the East Asian trajectory (until recently Arrighi's baby) looks
less likely, in part because the imperial domain has been more firmly
established in the last 10 years (meaning also that the collapse of a
particular institution which makes up imperial sovereignty may not mean
much in the long run for the prospects of Empire).  Part of the problem is
with the whole business of divining the future on the basis of past
economic trends (and this seems to be behind the popularity of the East
Asian trajectory).  The original impetus behind this is entirely justified
- if you want to understand capitalism, you have to study capitalists - as
Arrighi is fond of saying, and only by studying the capitalists' behavior
can we break out of the structuralist straightjacket that sees the modern
world system as an invariable 500-year totality.  However, the price paid
for this breakout in the _Long 20th Century_ is too high - though Arrighi
does integrate territorialism into his story, the transcendent domain, as
well as what Wallerstein calls the "structures of knowledge" - both
present in the Wallerstinian system, are now irrevocably lost, as is any
sense of their impact on future developments.  This, it seems to me, is
the real thrust of Negri and Hardt's critique of Arrighi (and WS theory
generally), not his cyclicalism per se.

Though the sketching of the imperial sovereignty is obviously the main
theme of the book, I must say that in most other respects I found it quite
shallow.  N&H are concerned not only with outlining Empire, but with
showing a way out, and it is here that their main weakness lies.  In
classic Marxist fashion (and I'm not prepared to characterize it as
definitively social-democratic or communist), they insist that that they
way to go is through empire, not around it.  The positive feature of
Empire is precisely its final elimination of the inside/outside
distinction, which means that realm of the transcendent has been
eliminated once and for all.  I suppose I'm probably not alone in
interpreting claims along the lines of "politics is the realm of pure
immanence" (immanent to what, one wonders) as pointing the way of party
infallibility and the gulag.  Because N&H agree with Empire in proclaiming
the death of transcendence, their alternatives do not ultimately look all
that different from it in its divinization of humanity.  In fact, the 
key difference is in the practicability of the two utopias - Empire is
already in the process of ordering the globe, while N&H's calls to
resist it amount to little more than the anarchist rejection of all
hierarchy, and helpful suggestion of how to resist imperial
organization, for instance by piercing our noses.
 -- 
Boris Stremlin
bc70219@binghamton.edu