Date: Sat, 04 Aug 2001 13:14:05 -0100
Subject: What is Empire about?


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--Boundary_(ID_V6mQ4JymqhC85OJZuJMOiA)

Eric, Steve/ All

The short answer is: 496 pages.

A lot of you probably pick books, as I often do, by roaming the stacks, opening the back of the book, searching for conclusions, for names of authors you trust among the 150 plus references that seem mandatory for scholarship.  Also searching for sections, headings, text, of interest.

Since Derrida did not meet these requirements, I never read him.  But a lot of his contemporaries did meet them.

I never had the pleasure of seeing Derrida on TV, as I did see Hardt, who is a very engaging personality and appears to be an independent thinker.  He got his first degree in Engineering, at present is teaching literature at Duke, and says he will get a degree in Paris when he completes his thesis.

Scanning the online version, of Empire, I found the first few hundred pages to be of considerable historical interest, but loaded with (to me ) unfamiliar abstractions i.e. the use of familiar words in unfamiliar ways,  such as "empire", "subjectivity", "multitude",  "measure", and the occasional reification of terms like "power", and "imperial capital" as if they were natural entities/phenomena that cause human problems.

Remembering the Lyotard of "Le Differend", who stressed the importance and difficulty of communicating with words, and the indispensable requirement that 
addressor and addressee share a significant commonality of meaning of the  words they use, I searched for clarification in the "Empire" text.  For some words there was such clarification, "imminance", for example.  For others, there was not.  

So, going to the end of the book, I selected, copied and posted a few paragraphs that seemed most significant.  Now let me add the lead-in lines of other paragraphs which are easily found with Acrobat's fieldglass/find button.  

NOTE:  Search for first words, NOT page number.
            Scroll to the first page on the list below, then enter first words
                and you reach them in an instant.

This will help answer the question:  What is Empire about? and we can discuss 
our various opinions.

regards,
Hugh 
  
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~            

396 - centered on the production of subjectivity


397 - Only from the consciousness of the uniqueness of my life arises
        religion- science art

398 - The complete deterritorialization of the coming Empire
      - The multitude has internalized the lack of place and fixed time

      - The coming imperial universe, blind to meaning, is filled by the
        multifarious totality of  the production of subjectivity.  The decline is no longer future destiny but the  present reality of Empire.

400 - the indeterminate but uncontainable will to innovation that drove the
        last wave of great  European cultural movements, from expressionism to       d
        cubism and abstractionism

402 - The fundamental principle of Empire as we have described it throughout
        this book is that its power has no actual and localizable  Imperial power is
        distributed in networks, through mobile and articulated mechanisms of
        control.

403 - the universe we live in is a universe of productive linguistic
        networks.  The lines of production and those of representation cros and mix
        in the same linguistic and productive realm.

406 - In reality we are masters of the world because our desire and labor
        regenerate it continuously.

416 - Mass migrations have become necessary for production.
      -  What we need to grasp is how the multitude is organized and
         redefined as a positive political power.

417 - Imperial capital does indeed attack the movements of the multitude
        with a tireless determination:  it patrols the seas and the borders; within
        each country it divides and segregates; and in the world of labor 
        it reinforces the cleavages and borderlines of race,  gender, language,
        culture, and so forth. 

        Even then, however, it must be careful not to restrict the productivity of the 
        multitude too much because Empire too depends on this power 

418  - What specific and concrete practices will animate this
         political project?  We cannot say at this point.   What we can see nonetheless  is a first element of a political demand:  "global citizenship". 

419 - Empire too depends on this power.

      - In modernity, reality was not conceivable except as measure, and meaure in  turn was not  conceivable except as a (real or formal) a priori that corraled
        being within a transcendent order 

421 - a social wage and a guaranteed income for all.

422 - Knowledge has to become linguistic action and philosophy has to become a 
        real "reappropriation of knowledge"  In other  words knowledge and  communication have to constitute life through struggle.

 
424 - the right to reappropriate.

425 - the earthly city must demonstrate its power as an apparatus of the
        mythology of the multitude. being-knowing-having power.

428 - a society in which the basis of power is defined by the expression of
        the needs of all.




--Boundary_(ID_V6mQ4JymqhC85OJZuJMOiA)

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