hydrarchist writes:
Ruptures Within Empire, The Power of Exodus
An Interview with Toni Negri by Giuseppe Cocco and Maurizio Lazzarato
Translated from the French journal Multitudes (Issue
No. 7) by Thomas Seay and Hydrarchist
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Multitudes: In the early 90s, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we were together in the streets of Paris, demonstrating against the bombing of Baghdad. International intervention in the Gulf region under the aegis of the United States seemed to open a period of expansion in imperial management of international relations. In relation to that period, do the events in New York constitute a rupture, or is it part of a continuum? Should we consider the events in New York as bringing to a close a period opened by the fall of the Berlin Wall? Or, instead, should we consider that that period had already been drawn to a close by the unilateral positions taken by the United States in regards to the Palestinian question, the non-proliferation treaty on bacteriological weapons, on Kyoto, then at Durban?
Negri: In the early 90s there were really very few of us demonstrating. Today, we are many more, at least here in Italy. That is in itself a fact to take into account. But it is equally true of the United States, I believe. In addition to this important point, the New York events do indeed constitute a rupture. It is a rupture in imperial management, and one that takes place within the process of building the imperial network that collective capital has been putting into place. The construction of this imperial network started in the early 90s, with the end of the Cold War. It should be considered a real rupture because it comes from outside, or rather, outside of this process, which is not to say that it comes from the exterior of imperial constitution. By this I mean that there has been a process of imperial constitution, whereby capitalist sovereignty has been expanded out across the entire fabric of international relations; this has created a large-scale shift in sovereignty whereby international relations have been overshadowed by imperial sovereignty. And it was precisely in this moment that a suspension, a rupture occurred: the attack against the United States. Thus the rupture came from outside of the process, but at the same time it comes from within Empire. It involves a suspension of the process, a setback, a block; it is something that has been imposed. Before this turn of events there was undoubtedly an American attempt to unilaterally take control of the process. But now they are confronted by some very serious difficulties. For the sake of clarity, we'd best make use of an abstraction. In my opinion, three crises are in progress (I say "three" in order to simplify, but in fact there are multiple crises). These three crises concern the characterization of imperial sovereignty.
