Empire (64 page)

secular Pentecost, the bodies are mixed and the nomads speak a

common tongue.

In this context, ontology is not an abstract science. It involves

the conceptual recognition ofthe production and reproduction of

being and thus the recognition that political reality is constituted

by the movement ofdesire and the practical realization oflabor as

value. The spatial dimension ofontology today is demonstrated

through the multitude’s concrete processes ofthe globalization, or

really the making common, ofthe desire for human community.

One important example ofthe functioning ofthis spatial di-

mension is demonstrated by the processes that brought an end to

the Third World, along with all the glory and disgrace ofits past

struggles, the power ofdesires that ran throughout its processes of

liberation, and the poverty ofresults that crowned its success. The

real heroes ofthe liberation ofthe Third World today may really

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have been the emigrants and the flows ofpopulation that have

destroyed old and new boundaries. Indeed, the postcolonial hero

is the one who continually transgresses territorial and racial bound-

aries, who destroys particularisms and points toward a common

civilization. Imperial command, by contrast, isolates populations in

poverty and allows them to act only in the straitjackets ofsubordi-

nated postcolonial nations. The exodus from localism, the transgres-

sion ofcustoms and boundaries, and the desertion from sovereignty

were the operative forces in the liberation of the Third World.

Here more than ever we can recognize clearly the difference Marx

defined between
emancipation
and
liberation.
17 Emancipation is the entry ofnew nations and peoples into the imperial society ofcontrol,

with its new hierarchies and segmentations; liberation, in contrast,

means the destruction ofboundaries and patterns offorced migra-

tion, the reappropriation ofspace, and the power ofthe multitude

to determine the global circulation and mixture ofindividuals and

populations. The Third World, which was constructed by the colo-

nialism and imperialism ofnation-states and trapped in the cold

war, is destroyed when the old rules ofthe political discipline of

the modern state (and its attendant mechanisms ofgeographical and

ethnic regulation ofpopulations) are smashed. It is destroyed when

throughout the ontological terrain ofglobalization the most

wretched ofthe earth becomes the most powerful being, because its

new nomad singularity is the most creative force and the omnilateral

movement ofits desire is itselfthe coming liberation.

The power to circulate is a primary determination ofthe

virtuality ofthe multitude, and circulating is the first ethical act of

a counterimperial ontology. This ontological aspect ofbiopolitical

circulation and mixture is highlighted even more when it is con-

trasted with other meanings attributed to postmodern circulation,

such as market exchanges or the velocity ofcommunication. Those

aspects ofspeed and circulation belong, rather, to the violence of

imperial command.18 Exchanges and communication dominated by

capital are integrated into its logic, and only a radical act ofresistance

can recapture the productive sense ofthe new mobility and hybridity

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ofsubjects and realize their liberation. This rupture, and only this

rupture, brings us to the ontological terrain ofthe multitude and

to the terrain on which circulation and hybridization are biopolitical.

Biopolitical circulation focuses on and celebrates the substantial

determinations ofthe activities ofproduction, self-valorization, and

freedom. Circulation is a global exodus, or really nomadism; and

it is a corporeal exodus, or really miscegenation.

General Intellect and Biopower

We insisted earlier on the importance and limitations ofMarx’s

notion of‘‘general intellect’’ (Section 1.2). At a certain point in

capitalist development, which Marx only glimpsed as the future,

the powers oflabor are infused by the powers ofscience, communi-

cation, and language. General intellect is a collective, social intelli-

gence created by accumulated knowledges, techniques, and know-

how. The value oflabor is thus realized by a new universal and

concrete labor force through the appropriation and free usage of

the new productive forces. What Marx saw as the future is our era.

This radical transformation of labor power and the incorporation

ofscience, communication, and language into productive f

orce

have redefined the entire phenomenology oflabor and the entire

world horizon ofproduction.

The danger ofthe discourse ofgeneral intellect is that it risks

remaining entirely on the plane ofthought, as ifthe new powers

oflabor were only intellectual and not also corporeal (Section 3.4).

As we saw earlier, new forces and new positions of affective labor

characterize labor power as much as intellectual labor does. Bio-

power names these productive capacities oflife that are equally

intellectual and corporeal. The powers ofproduction are in fact

today entirely biopolitical; in other words, they run throughout

and constitute directly not only production but also the entire realm

ofreproduction. Biopower becomes an agent ofproduction when

the entire context ofreproduction is subsumed under capitalist rule,

that is, when reproduction and the vital relationships that constitute

it themselves become directly productive. Biopower is another

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name for the real subsumption of society under capital, and both

are synonymous with the globalized productive order. Production

fills the surfaces of Empire; it is a machine that is full of life, an

intelligent life that by expressing itself in production and reproduc-

tion as well as in circulation (of labor, affects, and languages) stamps

society with a new collective meaning and recognizes virtue and

civilization in cooperation.

The powers of science, knowledge, affect, and communication

are the principal powers that constitute our anthropological virtual-

ity and are deployed on the surfaces of Empire. This deployment

extends across the general linguistic territories that characterize the

intersections between production and life. Labor becomes increas-

ingly immaterial and realizes its value through a singular and contin-

uous process ofinnovation in production; it is increasingly capable

ofconsuming or using the services ofsocial reproduction in an

ever more refined and interactive way. Intelligence and affect (or

really the brain coextensive with the body), just when they become

the primary productive powers, make production and life coincide

across the terrain on which they operate, because life is nothing

other than the production and reproduction ofthe set ofbodies

and brains.

The relationship between production and life has thus been

altered such that it is now completely inverted with respect to how

the discipline ofpolitical economy understands it. Life is no longer

produced in the cycles ofreproduction that are subordinated to the

working day; on the contrary, life is what infuses and dominates

all production. In fact, the value of labor and production is deter-

mined deep in the viscera oflife. Industry produces no surplus

except what is generated by social activity—and this is why, buried

in the great whale oflife, value is beyond measure. There would

be no surplus ifproduction were not animated throughout by social

intelligence, by the general intellect and at the same time by the

affective expressions that define social relations and rule over the

articulations ofsocial being. The excess ofvalue is determined

today in the affects, in the bodies crisscrossed by knowledge, in

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the intelligence ofthe mind, and in the sheer power to act. The

production ofcommodities tends to be accomplished entirely

through language, where by language we mean machines ofintelli-

gence that are continuously renovated by the affects and subjec-

tive passions.19

It should be clear at this point what constitutes
social cooperation

here on the surfaces of imperial society: the synergies of life, or

really the productive manifestations of
naked life.
Giorgio Agamben has used the term ‘‘naked life’’ to refer to the negative limit of

humanity and to expose behind the political abysses that modern

totalitarianism has constructed the (more or less heroic) conditions

ofhuman passivity.20 We would say, on the contrary, that through

their monstrosities ofreducing human beings to a minimal naked

life, fascism and Nazism tried in vain to destroy the enormous

power that naked life could become and to expunge the form in

which the new powers ofproductive cooperation ofthe multitude

are accumulated. One might say in line with this idea that the

reactionary deliriums offascism and Nazism were unleashed when

capital discovered that social cooperation was no longer the result

ofthe investment ofcapital but rather an autonomous power, the

a priori ofevery act ofproduction. When human power appears

immediately as an autonomous cooperating collective force, capital-

ist prehistory comes to an end. In other words, capitalist prehistory

comes to an end when social and subjective cooperation is no

longer a product but a presupposition, when naked life is raised up

to the dignity ofproductive power, or really when it appears as

the wealth ofvirtuality.

The scientific, affective, and linguistic forces of the multitude

aggressively transform the conditions of social production. The field

on which productive forces are reappropriated by the multitude is a

field ofradical metamorphoses—the scene ofa demiurgic operation.

This consists above all in a complete revision ofthe production of

cooperative subjectivity; it consists in an act, that is, ofmerging

and hybridizing with the machines that the multitude has reappro-

priated and reinvented; it consists, therefore, in an exodus that is

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not only spatial but also mechanical in the sense that the subject

is transformed into (and finds the cooperation that constitutes it

multiplied in) the machine. This is a new form of exodus, an exodus

toward (or with) the machine—a machinic exodus.21 The history

ofthe modern worker and ofthe subject ofmodern sovereignty

already contains a long catalogue ofmachinic metamorphoses, but

the hybridization ofhumans and machines is no longer defined by

the linear path it followed throughout the modern period. We have

reached the moment when the relationship ofpower that had

dominated the hybridizations and machinic metamorphoses can

now be overturned. Marx recognized that the conflict between

workers and machines was a false conflict: ‘‘It took both time

and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish between

machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer

their attacks from the material instruments of production to the

form of society which utilizes these instruments.’’22 Now the new

virtualities, the naked life of the present, have the capacity to take

control ofthe processes ofmachinic metamorphosis. In Empire the

political struggle over the definition ofmachinic virtuality, or really

over the different alternatives of the passage between the virtual

and the real, is a central terrain ofstruggle. This new terrain of

production and life opens for labor a future of metamorphoses that

subjective cooperation can and must control ethically, politically,

and productively.

Res Gestae/Machinae

In recent years there has been much talk ofthe end ofhistory,

and there have also been made many justified objections to the

reactionary celebrations ofan end ofhistory that would see the

present state ofrule as eternal. It is certainly true, nonetheless, that

in modernity the power ofcapital and its institutions ofsovereignty

had a solid hold on history and exerted their rule over the historical

process. The virtual powers ofthe multitude in postmodernity signal

the end ofthat rule and those institutions.
That
history has ended.

Capitalist rule is revealed as a transitory period. And yet, ifthe

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transcendent teleology that capitalist modernity constructed is com-

ing to an end, how can the multitude define instead a materialist

telos?23

We will be able to respond to this question only after conduct-

ing a phenomenological and historical analysis ofthe relationship

between virtuality and possibility, that is, after responding to the

question if, how, and when the virtuality of the multitude passes

through possibility and becomes reality. The ontology ofthe possible