Empire by Antonio Negri, Professor Michael Hardt Page A

successful attempts
    to recognize the potential ofbiopolitical production. Precisely by
    bringing together coherently the different defining characteristics
    ofthe biopolitical context that we have described up to this point,
    and leading them back to the ontology ofproduction, we will be
    able to identify the new figure of the collective biopolitical body,
    which may nonetheless remain as contradictory as it is paradoxical.
    This body becomes structure not by negating the originary produc-
    tive force that animates it but by recognizing it; it becomes language
    (both scientific language and social language) because it is a multi-
    tude ofsingular and determinate bodies that seek relation. It is thus
    both production and reproduction, structure and superstructure,
    because it is life in the fullest sense and politics in the proper sense.
    Our analysis has to descend into the jungle ofproductive and
    conflictual determinations that the collective biopolitical body offers
    us.18 The context ofour analysis thus has to be the very unfolding
    oflife itself, the process ofthe constitution ofthe world, ofhistory.
    The analysis must be proposed not through ideal forms but within
    the dense complex ofexperience.
    B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N
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    Corporations and Communication
    In asking ourselves how the political and sovereign elements ofthe
    imperial machine come to be constituted, we find that there is no
    need to limit our analysis to or even focus it on the established
    supranational regulatory institutions. The U.N. organizations, along
    with the great multi- and transnational finance and trade agencies
    (the IMF, the World Bank, the GATT, and so forth), all become
    relevant in the perspective ofthe supranational juridical constitution
    only when they are considered within the dynamic ofthe biopoliti-
    cal production ofworld order. The function they had in the old
    international order, we should emphasize, is not what now gives
    legitimacy to these organizations. What legitimates them now is
    rather their newly possible function in the symbology of the imperial
    order. Outside of the new framework, these institutions are inef-
    fectual. At best, the old institutional framework contributes to
    the formation and education of the administrative personnel of the
    imperial machine, the ‘‘dressage’’ ofa new imperial eĺite.
    The huge transnational corporations construct the fundamental
    connective fabric of the biopolitical world in certain important
    respects. Capital has indeed always been organized with a view
    toward the entire global sphere, but only in the second halfofthe
    twentieth century did multinational and transnational industrial and
    financial corporations really begin to structure global territories
    biopolitically. Some claim that these corporations have merely come
    to occupy the place that was held by the various national colonialist
    and imperialist systems in earlier phases ofcapitalist development,
    from nineteenth-century European imperialism to the Fordist phase
    ofdevelopment in the twentieth century.19 This is in part true, but
    that place itselfhas been substantially transformed by the new reality
    ofcapitalism. The activities ofcorporations are no longer defined
    by the imposition ofabstract command and the organization of
    simple theft and unequal exchange. Rather, they directly structure
    and articulate territories and populations. They tend to make nation-
    states merely instruments to record the flows ofthe commodities,
    monies, and populations that they set in motion. The transnational
    corporations directly distribute labor power over various markets,
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    T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T
    functionally allocate resources, and organize hierarchically the vari-
    ous sectors ofworld production. The complex apparatus that selects
    investments and directs financial and monetary maneuvers deter-
    mines the new geography ofthe world market, or