Empire (29 page)

is an exemplary Enlightenment project ofmodernist politics, and

the critique ofit in these contexts could serve only to aid the

mystificatory and repressive powers ofthe regime under attack.

In our present imperial world, the liberatory potential ofthe

postmodernist and postcolonial discourses that we have described

only resonates with the situation ofan elite population that enjoys

certain rights, a certain level ofwealth, and a certain position in

the global hierarchy. One should not take this recognition, however,

as a complete refutation. It is not really a matter of either/or.

Difference, hybridity, and mobility are not liberatory in themselves,

but neither are truth, purity, and stasis. The real revolutionary

practice refers to the level of
production.
Truth will not make us free, but taking control ofthe production oftruth will. Mobility

and hybridity are not liberatory, but taking control ofthe production

ofmobility and stasis, purities and mixtures is. The real truth com-

missions ofEmpire will be constituent assemblies ofthe multitude,

social factories for the production of truth.

T HE P OOR

In each and every historical period a social subject that is ever-present and
everywhere the same is identified, often negatively but nonetheless urgently,
around a common living form. This form is not that of the powerful and

the rich: they are merely partial and localized figures,
quantitate signatae.

The only non-localizable ‘‘common name’’ of pure difference in all eras is
that of the poor. The poor is destitute, excluded, repressed, exploited—and
yet living! It is the common denominator of life, the foundation of the
multitude. It is strange, but also illuminating, that postmodernist authors
seldom adopt this figure in their theorizing. It is strange because the poor
is in a certain respect an eternal postmodern figure: the figure of a transversal,
omnipresent, different, mobile subject; the testament to the irrepressible
aleatory character of existence.

This common name, the poor, is also the foundation of every possibility
of humanity. As Niccolò Machiavelli pointed out, in the ‘‘return to beginnings’’ that characterizes the revolutionary phase of the religions and ideolo-S Y M P T O M S O F P A S S A G E

157

gies of modernity, the poor is almost always seen to have a prophetic capacity:
not only is the poor
in
the world, but the poor itself is the very possibility
of the world. Only the poor lives radically the actual and present being, in
destitution and suffering, and thus only the poor has the ability to renew
being. The divinity of the multitude of the poor does not point to any

transcendence. On the contrary, here and only here in this world, in the
existence of the poor, is the field of immanence presented, confirmed, consolidated, and opened. The poor is god on earth.

Today there is not even the illusion of a transcendent God. The poor

has dissolved that image and recuperated its power. Long ago modernity

was inaugurated with Rabelais’s laugh, with the realistic supremacy of the
belly of the poor, with a poetics that expresses all that there is in destitute
humanity ‘‘from the belt on down.’’ Later, through the processes of primitive
accumulation, the proletariat emerged as a collective subject that could express
itself in materiality and immanence, a multitude of poor that not only

prophesied but produced, and that thus opened possibilities that were not
virtual but concrete. Finally today, in the biopolitical regimes of production
and in the processes of postmodernization, the poor is a subjugated, exploited
figure, but nonetheless a figure of production. This is where the novelty
lies. Everywhere today, at the basis of the concept and the common name
of the poor, there is a relationship of production. Why are the postmodernists
unable to read this passage? They tell us that a regime of transversal linguistic
relations of production has entered into the unified and abstract universe of
value. But who is the subject that produces ‘‘transversally,’’ who gives a
creative meaning to language—who if not the poor, who are subjugated

and desiring, impoverished and powerful, always more powerful? Here,

within this reign of global production, the poor is distinguished no longer
only by its prophetic capacity but also by its indispensable presence in the
production of a common wealth, always more exploited and always more

closely indexed to the wages of rule. The poor itself is power. There is
World Poverty, but there is above all World Possibility, and only the poor
is capable of this.

Vogelfrei,
‘‘bird free,’’ is the term Marx used to describe the proletariat, which at the beginning of modernity in the processes of primitive

accumulation was freed twice over: in the first place, it was freed from being
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the property of the master (that is, freed from servitude); and in the second
place, it was ‘‘freed’’ from the means of production, separated from the soil,
with nothing to sell but its own labor power. In this sense, the proletariat
was forced to become the pure possibility of wealth. The dominant stream
of the Marxist tradition, however, has always hated the poor, precisely for
their being ‘‘free as birds,’’ for being immune to the discipline of the factory
and the discipline necessary for the construction of socialism. Consider how,
when in the early 1950s Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini set the

poor to fly away on broomsticks at the end of their beautiful film
Miracle in Milan,
they were so violently denounced for utopianism by the spokesmen
of socialist realism.

The
Vogelfrei
is an angel or an intractable demon. And here, after
so many attempts to transform the poor into proletarians and proletarians
into a liberation army (the idea of army weighed heavily on that of liberation),
once again in postmodernity emerges in the blinding light of clear day the
multitude, the common name of the poor. It comes out fully in the open

because in postmodernity the subjugated has absorbed the exploited. In

other words, the poor, every poor person, the multitude of poor people, have
eaten up and digested the multitude of proletarians. By that fact itself the
poor have become productive. Even the prostituted body, the destitute person,
the hunger of the multitude—all forms of the poor have become productive.

And the poor have therefore become ever more important: the life of the
poor invests the planet and envelops it with its desire for creativity and
freedom. The poor is the condition of every production.

The story goes that at the root of the postmodernist sensibility and

the construction of the concept of postmodernism are those French socialist
philosophers who in their youth celebrated factory discipline and the shining
horizons of real socialism, but who became repentant after the crisis of 1968

and gave up, proclaiming the futility of the pretense of communism to

reappropriate social wealth. Today these same philosophers cynically deconstruct, banalize, and laugh at every social struggle that contests the universal
triumph of exchange value. The media and the culture of the media tell

us that those philosophers are the ones who recognized this new era of the
world, but that is not true. The discovery of postmodernity consisted in the
reproposition of the poor at the center of the political and productive terrain.

S Y M P T O M S O F P A S S A G E

159

What was really prophetic was the poor, bird-free laugh of Charlie Chaplin
when, free from any utopian illusions and above all from any
discipline
of liberation, he interpreted the ‘‘modern times’’ of poverty, but at the same
time linked the name of the poor to that of life, a liberated life and a
liberated productivity.

2.5

N E T W O R K P O W E R :

U . S . S O V E R E I G N T Y

A N D T H E N E W E M P I R E

I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated

as ours for extensive empire and self government.

Thomas Jefferson

Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always

to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrange-

ment without loss ofessential form.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

In order to articulate the nature ofimperial sovereignty,

we must first take a step back in time and consider the political

forms that prepared its terrain and constitute its prehistory. The

American Revolution represents a moment ofgreat innovation

and rupture in the genealogy ofmodern sovereignty. The U.S.

constitutional project, emerging from the struggles for indepen-

dence and formed through a rich history of alternative possibilities,

bloomed like a rare flower in the tradition ofmodern sovereignty.

Tracing the original developments ofthe notion ofsovereignty in

the United States will allow us to recognize its significant differences

from the modern sovereignty we have described thus far and discern

the bases on which a new imperial sovereignty has been formed.

N E T W O R K P O W E R : U . S . S O V E R E I G N T Y

161

The American Revolution and the

Model of Two Romes

The American Revolution and the ‘‘new political science’’ pro-

claimed by the authors ofthe
Federalist
broke from the tradition of modern sovereignty, ‘‘returning to origins’’ and at the same time

developing new languages and new social forms that mediate be-

tween the one and the multiple. Against the tired transcendentalism

ofmodern sovereignty, presented either in Hobbesian or in Rous-

seauian form, the American constituents thought that only the

republic can give order to democracy, or really that the order of

the multitude must be born not from a transfer of the title of power

and right, but from an arrangement internal to the multitude, from

a democratic interaction ofpowers linked together in networks.

The new sovereignty can arise, in other words, only from the

constitutional formation of limits and equilibria, checks and bal-

ances, which both constitutes a central power and maintains power

in the hands ofthe multitude. There is no longer any necessity or

any room here for the transcendence of power. ‘‘The science of

politics,’’ the authors ofthe
Federalist
write,

like most other sciences, has received great improvement. The

efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which

were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the

ancients. The regular distribution ofpower into distinct depart-

ments; the introduction oflegislative balances and checks; the

institution ofcourts composed ofjudges, holding their offices

during good behaviour; the representation ofthe people in

the legislature, by deputies oftheir own election; these are

either wholly new discoveries, or have made their principal

progress towards perfection in modern times. They are means,

and powerful means, by which the excellencies of republican

government may be retained, and its imperfections lessened

or avoided.1

What takes shape here is an extraordinarily secular and immanentist

idea, despite the profound religiousness that runs throughout the

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texts ofthe Founding Fathers. It is an idea that rediscovers the

revolutionary humanism ofthe Renaissance and perfects it as a

political and constitutional science. Power can be constituted by a

whole series ofpowers that regulate themselves and arrange them-

selves in networks. Sovereignty can be exercised within a vast

horizon ofactivities that subdivide it without negating its unity

and that subordinate it continually to the creative movement of

the multitude.

Contemporary historians, such as J. G. A. Pocock, who link

the development ofthe U.S. Constitution and its notion ofpolitical

sovereignty to the Machiavellian tradition, go a long way toward

understanding this deviation from the modern concept of sover-

eignty.2 They link the U.S. Constitution not to baroque and count-

erreformist Machiavellianism, which constructs an apologia of state

reason and all the injustices that derive from it, but to the tradition

ofrepublican Machiavellianism that, after having inspired the pro-

tagonists ofthe English Revolution, was reconstructed in the Atlan-

tic exodus among European democrats who were defeated but not

vanquished.3 This republican tradition does have a solid foundation

in Machiavelli’s own texts. First ofall, there is the Machiavellian

concept ofpower as a
constituent power
—that is, as a product ofan

internal and immanent social dynamic. For Machiavelli, power is

always republican; it is always the product ofthe life ofthe multitude

and constitutes its fabric of expression. The free city of Renaissance