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.Iftrue to their rejection of the dialectic, given this internal dynamism, Empirecould either prevail over or be defeated by the forces of opposition from withinor, far more likely from a genealogical perspective, many combinations thereof.But those various possibilities and ambiguities are then dispelled not to reject adialectical outcome but, rather, to foretell which outcome will happen, namelytheir millennial telos.As Hardt and Negri explain in regard to the third passagetoward their totalizing telos:  Here consciousness and will, language andmachine are called on to sustain the collective making of history&.Thereforethe power of the dialectic, which imagines the collective formed throughmediation rather than through constitution, has been definitively dissolved.Themaking of history is in this sense the construction of the life of the multitude(405).While they assert that the multitude is or will be self-constituting, thatstance is undercut throughout via conceptualizations that rely on a crudedialectical opposition that looks more like this: Empire (thesis) clashes with thecounter-Empire of the multitude (antithesis) to produce a willed, creative telos(synthesis).Empire s millennial tendencies toward homogeneity and totalization arefostered through Hardt s and Negri s insistence on a  single logic of rule (xii).Once again, they begin by explicitly stating what they later counter, admittingthat:  Globalization, of course, is not one thing, and the multiple processes thatwe recognize as globalization are not unified or univocal (xv).They then renegeon this crucial insight throughout the rest of the book by treating both Empireand the multitude in terms of a single logic that is made to accommodatediversity and inconsistency within each formation.The rationale for this is that,with Empire:  there is no more outside (186).Information technologies, globaleconomic flows, and cyborgian life forms, they argue, have so transformed thenew world order as to eradicate this distinction of modern thought.While it istrue that former distinctions such as nature and culture and the public and privateare undergoing legal and cultural redefinition and that we increasingly liveamidst spectacle, their claims for total transformation are both hyperbolic andoverextended.23Recurrently, Hardt and Negri confuse conceptualization with proof thatEmpire really does or will soon exist exactly as they describe it.What thisabstract, faith-based claim amounts to is conceptualizing an umbrella category solarge that it covers all opposing forces which might otherwise be seen as246 EMPIRE S NEW CLOTHESoutside Empire s structures.In regard to the multitude, this tendency is evidentwhen they state that the  multitude is not formed simply by throwing togetherand mixing nations and peoples indifferently; it is the singular power of a newcity (395; emphasis in original).In order to stave off millennial tendencies, it isworth asking, with genealogical skepticism, why the multitude cannot be ahodgepodge, why it must be a singular power, why struggles cannot come fromforces outside the global flows (including such things as earthquakes, floods, anddroughts as well as local groups), why there can t be forces of resistance other thanthe multitude.Sidestepping consideration of such questions, Empire s critique of thepossibility of local groups providing resistance is a telling one.Stating accuratelyenough that local groups risk reinforcing  walls of nation, ethnicity, people, andthe like (362), they too quickly dismiss such risks as  regressive and evenfascistic when they oppose circulations and mixture (362).What they willtolerate is a local challenge that links up with the  concrete universal of themultitude.But this is to reinstate a transcendental mode, resorting to propheticclaims to know in advance which resistances work to break down oppressiveforces [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]