Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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, Michael Hardt
DiscO'UTSe, 20.3, Fall1998, pp. 139-152. Copyright by 1998 Wayne State University Press,
Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.
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,m()ill. . Discourse 20.3
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'~~l #ext, or like a sieve whose pattern changes from one point to
the''tiext. "2
. . ::'What Deleuze gives us, in effect, is a simple image of this
'passage, certainly a beautiful and poetic image, but one that is not
artic~latedenough to allow us to grasp this new form of society. The
task ~f articulating this image remains a task for us to accomplish,
,land 1 think the best way to do that is to link it in relation to a
iiseries of other passages that have been proposed as characterizing
contemporary society. I Will try to elaborate the nature of this
passage, then,by posingits relation to the passage from modern to
posnnodern society expressed in the work ofauthors such as Fredric
Jame~on, the end of history described by Francis Fukuyama, and
the ,changing form that racism takes in our societies according. to
Etidnne Balibar and others. Above all, though, I want to situate the
RasJage Deleuze speaks of in terms of ~o passages that Antonio
,l'tJegri and I have been trying to elaborate in the last few years:
't~~e; first is what we call the Withering of civil society, which like
'.t; r~f'.'.g. assage towa:d the society.of ~on.tro~ refers to the decline. of the
~.e ,~atoryfunctionsofthe social mstitutions; and the second IS what
:'I#;;all the passage fr~m imperi~ism, which was perfected p~m~ly
r ,! ~e ~uropean ,nation-States m the quest for global dommation,
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: <l :,., : -from Los Angeles and Granada to Mogadishu and Sarajevo.
, ,W fl, 't, the separation of tasks between the external and internal
'~r.of power (between the army and the police, the CIA and the
" :fBI)is increasingly vague and indeterminate.
:' In our terms the end of history that Fukuyama refers to is the
.:I ~nd th~ crisis at the center of ~odernity,~e co~:rent and defin-
of
mg c~nfhct that was the foundatIon and raison d etre for modern
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sovereignty. History has ended precisely and only to the extent that
it is conceived in Hegelian terms-as the movement ofa dialectic
, of contradictions, a play of absolute negations and subsumption.
The binaries that defined modern conflict have become blurred.
The Other that might delimit a sovereignSe1fhas become fractured
and indistinct, and there is no longer an outside that can bound the
place ofsovereign ty. At one point in the ColdWar, in an exaggerated
version of the crisis of modernity, every enemy imaginable (from
.women's garden clubs and Hollywood films to national liberation' .
movements) could be identified as communist, that is, part of the 1
unified enemy. The outside is what gave the crisis of the modern
and imperialist world its coherence. Today it is increasingly difficult
for the ideologues ofthe United States to name the enemy, or rather
there seem to be minor and elusive enemies everywhere. 6 The end
of the crisis of modernity has given rise to a proliferation of minor
and indefinite crises in the iinperial society of control, or as we
prefer, to an omni-erisis.
It is useful to remember here that the capitalist market is
one machine that has always run counter to any division between
inside and outside. The capitalist market is thwarted by exclusions
and it thrives by including always increasing numbers within its
sphere. Profit can only be generated through contact, engagement,
interchange, and commerce. The realization of the world market
would constitute the point of arrival of this tendency. In its ideal
form there is no outside to the world market: the entire globe is its
domain.'LWe--might-llse--the- fO-F-m0f--the--woFld---maFket--as-a--mode~'
for understanding the form of.... imperial..
sovetc:;ignty in its entirety.
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Imperial Racism .
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,i: The end of the outside, which characterizes the passage from
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I's~iplinary society to the society of control, certainly shows one of
i 11"~'~cesin the shifting configurations of racism and alterity in our
ir
,I ,':i I~i : ties . W~ sho~d note first of al~ that it has ?ecome increasingly
I!lf:lfult to Identify the general hnes of raCIsm. In fact, we are
, Fo~'tinually told by ~oliticians, the ,media, and eve? ~istorians that
raF~sm has progressIvely receded III modern socIetIes-from the
'. end of slavery to decolonization struggles and civil rights move-
, ments. Certain specific traditional practices of racism have un-
dou~tedlY declined and one might be tempted to view the end
of t e Apartheid laws in South Mrica as the symbolic close of an
.enti .e era of racial segregation. From our perspective, however,
it is clear on the contrary that racism has not receded, but ac-
tually progressed in the contemporary world, both in extent and
iIite~sity. It appears to have declined only because its form and
strategies have changed. If we take manichean divisions between
I inside an~ o~tsi~e and exclusionary pr~ctices (in So~th Afric~, in
;th colomal CIty, III the Southeastern Umted States, or III PalestIne)
as e paradigm of modern racisms, we must now ask what is the
fcontrol. .
"I II Many analysts describe this passage as a shift in the dominant
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i ~~as Seen as grounding the modern practices of racial exclusion.
': ccordingto Deleuze and Guattari, though, "European racism ...
'I Has never- operated by exclusion, or by the designation of some-
, oIieas Other.... Racism operates by the determination of degrees
of devi'ance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors
tq integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and
I ~Ck'fard waves.... From the viewpoint of racism, there is no ex-
- 'It~ri~f' there are no people on the outside."l1 De1euze and Guattari
,e I ~nge us, in effect, to conceive racist practice not in terms of
'ei ,lu'sion but as a strategy of differential inclusion. No identity is
, i' ated as Other, no one is excluded from the domain, there is
r; 0: tside. Just as postInodern racist theory cannot pose as a point
, ,:, parture any' essential differences among human races, post-
,t: n r~cist practice cannot.begin by an exclusion of the ra~ial
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'I "pline, when the boundaries of the institutions have been breached,
:'corrupted, so that there is no longer a distinction between inside
i,i~md outside. The Ideological State Apparatusses should also be
:111 ~ecog~iied as ope.r~~ng in the society of co~trol,.perhaps with more
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egrees aeros,,s the world. The apologia of colonial administration
ways involved its establishment of social and political institutions
'n the colonies. Today's noncolonial forms of domination equally
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ization in underdeveloped or subordinated countries is concerned
centrally with the establishment of a stable set of institutions that'
constitute the backbone of a new civil society. The disciplinary
regimes necessary to establish the global Fordist system of pro-
duction, for example, required that a whole array of social and
political institutions be in place. We can even point to examples
of this exportation in direct and individual terms (which are only
indicative of a more general and diffuse process) in which pri-
maty institutions in Europe and the United States adopt and foster
(j fledgling institutions: official unions such as the AFL form and
!~ enco~ag~ f~rei!?n Offspring, First World ec~n?~ists help create
I ,financIal mstltutlons and teach fiscal responslblhty, and even par-
i lliaments and the U.S. Congress teach forms and procedures of rule.
;1 Well, whereas in the process of modernization the most powerful
Notes
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