Empire (67 page)

by crisis. Empire is the desert and crisis is at this point indistinguish-

able from the tendency of history. Whereas in the ancient world

the imperial crisis was conceived as the product ofa natural cyclical

history, and whereas in the modern world crisis was defined by a

series ofaporias oftime and space, now figures ofcrisis and practices

ofEmpire have become indistinguishable. The twentieth-century

theorists ofcrisis teach us, however, that in this deterritorialized

and untimely space where the new Empire is constructed and in

this desert ofmeaning, the testimony ofthe crisis can pass toward

the realization ofa singular and collective subject, toward the powers

ofthe multitude. The multitude has internalized the lack ofplace

and fixed time; it is mobile and flexible, and it conceives the future

only as a totality ofpossibilities that branch out in every direction.

The coming imperial universe, blind to meaning, is filled by the

multifarious totality ofthe production ofsubjectivity. The decline

is no longer a future destiny but the present reality of Empire.

America, America

The flight ofEuropean intellectuals to the United States was an

attempt to rediscover a lost place. Was not American democracy

in fact founded on the democracy of exodus, on affirmative and

nondialectical values, and on pluralism and freedom? Did not these

values, along with the notion ofnew frontiers, perpetually re-create

the expansion ofits democratic basis, beyond every abstract obstacle

ofthe nation, ethnicity, and religion? This music was played at times

in a high form in the project of the ‘‘Pax Americana’’ proclaimed by

the liberal leadership, and at times in a low form, represented by

the American dream ofsocial mobility and equal opportunity for

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381

wealth and freedom for every honest person—in short, ‘‘the Ameri-

can way oflife.’’ The New Deal’s project to surmount the world

crisis of the 1930s, which was so different from and so much more

liberal than the European political and cultural projects to respond

to the crisis, supported this conception ofthe American ideal. When

Hannah Arendt claimed the American Revolution to be superior

to the French because the American was an unlimited search for

political freedom and the French a limited struggle over scarcity

and inequality, she not only celebrated an ideal offreedom that

Europeans no longer knew but also reterritorialized it in the United

States.15 In a certain sense, then, it seemed as ifthe continuity that

had existed between U.S. history and the history ofEurope was

broken and that the United States had embarked on a different

course, but really the United States represented for these Europeans

the resurrection ofan idea offreedom that Europe had lost.

From the standpoint ofa Europe in crisis, the United States,

Jefferson’s ‘‘Empire of liberty,’’ represented the renewal of the impe-

rial idea. The great nineteenth-century American writers had sung

the epic dimensions ofthe freedom ofthe new continent. In Whit-

man naturalism became affirmative and in Melville realism became

desiring. An American place was territorialized in the name ofa

constitution offreedom and at the same time continually deterritori-

alized through the opening off

rontiers and exodus. The great

American philosophers, from Emerson to Whitehead and Pierce,

opened up Hegelianism (or really the apologia ofimperialist Europe)

to the spiritual currents ofa process that was new and immense,

determinate and unlimited.16

The Europeans in crisis were enchanted by these siren songs

ofa new Empire. European Americanism and anti-Americanism

in the twentieth century are both manifestations of the difficult

relationship between Europeans in crisis and the U.S. imperial

project. The American utopia was received in many different ways,

but it functioned everywhere in twentieth-century Europe as a

central reference point. The continuous preoccupation was manifest

both in the spleen ofthe crisis and in the spirit ofthe avant-gardes,

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in other words, through the self-destruction of modernity and the

indeterminate but uncontainable will to innovation that drove the

last wave ofgreat European cultural movements, from expressionism

and futurism to cubism and abstractionism.

The military history ofthe double rescue ofEurope by the

U.S. armies in the two World Wars was paralleled by a rescue in

political and cultural terms. American hegemony over Europe,

which was founded on financial, economic, and military structures,

was made to seem natural through a series ofcultural and ideological

operations. Consider, for example, how in the years surrounding

the end ofWorld War II the locus ofartistic production and the

idea of modern art shifted from Paris to New York. Serge Guilbaut

recounts the fascinating story of how, when the Paris art scene had

been thrown into disarray by war and Nazi occupation, and in the

midst ofan ideological campaign to promote the leading role of

the United States in the postwar world, the abstract expressionism

ofNew York artists such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell

was established as the natural continuation and heir ofEuropean

and specifically Parisian modernism. New York stole the idea of

modern art:

American art was thus described as the logical culmination of

a long-standing and inexorable tendency toward abstraction.

Once American culture was raised to the status ofan interna-

tional model, the significance ofwhat was specifically Ameri-

can had to change: what had been characteristically American

now became representative of‘‘Western culture’’ as a whole.

In this way American art was transformed from regional to

international art and then to universal art . . . In this respect,

postwar American culture was placed on the same footing

as American economic and military strength: it was made

responsible for the survival of democratic liberties in the

‘ free’’ world.17

This passage in the history ofartistic production and, more impor-

tant, art criticism is simply one aspect ofthe multifaceted ideological

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383

operation that cast the U.S. global hegemony as the natural and

ineluctable consequence ofthe crisis ofEurope.

Paradoxically, even the ferocious European nationalisms,

which had led to such violent conflicts over the first halfofthe

century, were eventually displaced by a competition over who

could better express a strong Americanism. Lenin’s Soviet Union

in fact may have heard the siren song of Americanism most clearly.

The challenge was to replicate the results ofthe capitalism that had

achieved its pinnacle in the United States. The Soviets argued

against the means the United States employed and claimed instead

that socialism could attain the same results more efficiently through

hard labor and the sacrifice offreedom. This terrible ambiguity also

runs throughout Gramsci’s writings on Americanism and Fordism,

one of the fundamental texts for understanding the American prob-

lem from the European point of view.18 Gramsci saw the United

States, with its combination ofnew Taylorist forms ofthe organiza-

tion oflabor and its powerful capitalist will to dominate, as the

inevitable reference point for the future: it was the only path for

development. For Gramsci, it was then a matter ofunderstanding

whether that revolution would be active (like that ofSoviet Russia)

or passive (as in Fascist Italy). The consonance between American-

ism and state socialism should be obvious, with their parallel paths

ofdevelopment on the two sides ofthe Atlantic throughout the

cold war, which led finally to dangerous competitions over space

exploration and nuclear weapons. These parallel paths simply high-

light the fact that a certain Americanism had penetrated into the

heart ofeven its strongest adversary. The twentieth-century devel-

opments ofRussia were to a certain extent a microcosm for those

ofEurope.

The refusal of European consciousness to recognize its decline

often took the form of projecting its crisis onto the American utopia.

That projection continued for a long time, as long as lasted the

necessity and urgency to rediscover a site offreedom that could

continue the teleological vision ofwhich Hegelian historicism is

perhaps the highest expression. The paradoxes ofthis projection

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multiplied, to the point where European consciousness, faced with

its undeniable and irreversible decline, reacted by going to the other

extreme: the primary site ofcompetition, which had affirmed and

repeated the formal power of the U.S. utopia, now represented its

complete overturning. Solzhenitsyn’s Russia became the absolute

negative ofthe most caricatural and apologetic images ofthe U.S.

utopia in the guise ofArnold Toynbee. It should come as no surprise

that the ideologies ofthe end ofhistory, which are as evolutionary

as they are postmodern, should appear to complete this ideological

mess. The American Empire will bring an end to History.

We know, however, that this idea ofAmerican Empire as the

redemption ofutopia is completely illusory. First ofall, the coming

Empire is not American and the United States is not its center.

The fundamental principle of Empire as we have described it

throughout this book is that its power has no actual and localizable

terrain or center. Imperial power is distributed in networks, through

mobile and articulated mechanisms ofcontrol. This is not to say

that the U.S. government and the U.S. territory are no different

from any other: the United States certainly occupies a privileged

position in the global segmentations and hierarchies ofEmpire.

As the powers and boundaries ofnation-states decline, however,

differences between national territories become increasingly rela-

tive. They are now not differences of nature (as were, for example,

the differences between the territory of the metropole and that of

the colony) but differences of degree.

Furthermore, the United States cannot rectify or redeem the

crisis and decline ofEmpire. The United States is not the place

where the European or even the modern subject can flee to resolve

its uneasiness and unhappiness; there was no such place. The means

to get beyond the crisis is the ontological displacement ofthe subject.

The most important change therefore takes place inside humanity,

since with the end ofmodernity also ends the hope offinding

something that can identify the self outside the community, outside

cooperation, and outside the critical and contradictory relationships

that each person finds in a non-place, that is, in the world and the

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385

multitude. This is where the idea ofEmpire reappears, not as a

territory, not in the determinate dimensions ofits time and space,

and not from the standpoint of a people and its history, but rather

simply as the fabric of an ontological human dimension that tends

to become universal.

Crisis

Postmodernization and the passage to Empire involve a real conver-

gence ofthe realms that used to be designated as base and superstruc-

ture. Empire takes form when language and communication, or

really when immaterial labor and cooperation, become the domi-

nant productive force (see Section 3.4). The superstructure is put

to work, and the universe we live in is a universe ofproductive

linguistic networks. The lines ofproduction and those ofrepresenta-

tion cross and mix in the same linguistic and productive realm. In

this context the distinctions that define the central categories of

political economy tend to blur. Production becomes indistinguish-

able from reproduction; productive forces merge with relations of

production; constant capital tends to be constituted and represented

within variable capital, in the brains, bodies, and cooperation of

productive subjects. Social subjects are at the same time producers

and products ofthis unitary machine. In this new historical forma-

tion it is thus no longer possible to identify a sign, a subject, a

value, or a practice that is ‘‘outside.’’

The formation of this totality, however, does not eliminate

exploitation. It rather redefines it, primarily in relation to communi-

cation and cooperation. Exploitation is the expropriation ofcooper-

ation and the nullification ofthe meanings oflinguistic production.

Consequently, resistances to command continually emerge within

Empire. Antagonisms to exploitation are articulated across the global

networks ofproduction and determine crises on each and every

node. Crisis is coextensive with the postmodern totality ofcapitalist

production; it is proper to imperial control. In this respect, the