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Powers of Sovereignty: State, People, Wealth, Life Powers of sovereignty: State, people, wealth, life Aihwa Ong Abstract: Hardt and Negri’s trilogy describes an American Empire as shaping a world split between global capital and disenfranchised multitude, leading to a final confrontation between the Empire of capital and the counter-Empire of workers everywhere. However, their interpretation is limited by their philosoph- ical abstraction and revolutionary vision, which fails to recognize the implica- tions of actually existing processes of sovereignty and capital at this global juncture. The situation found in Asia challenges their analysis. In contemporary China, experimental assemblages of sovereign powers, capital, techne, and ethics have not weakened, but, in fact, have strengthened political sovereignty, nation- alist sentiments, and collectivist ethos, presenting a different picture of biopoli- tics from that of Hardt and Negri’s global theory. The authoritarian outcomes in China are political solutions forged in circumstances that mingle the global, the historical, and the situated. This article argues that Asian aspirations are rear- ranging capitalism and political sovereignty as Hardt and Negri understand them. Keywords: assemblage, biopolitics, China, Empire, global capitalism, Multitude, sovereignty Shifting sovereign powers was a book that made all of us proud to be both academic and relevant. With philosophical rigor “When someone writes the history of our time and passionate urgency, Michael Hardt and An- 50 or 100 years from now, it is unlikely to be tonio Negri reinstated the centrality of capital- about the Great Recession of 2008 … or about ism in serious work on the global contempo- the fiscal problems that America confronted in rary. Empire, followed by Multitude (Hardt and the second half of the 21st century. It will be Negri 2004) and Commonwealth (Hardt and about how the world adjusted to the movement Negri 2009), lays out an ambitious program of of the theatre of history toward China.” world revolution, pinning hopes of their in- —Lawrence Summers1 evitable revolution on an emerging revolution- ary subject located in a global multitude disen- Bursting upon the world at the end of the twen- franchised by global capital. The global sweep tieth century, Empire (Hardt and Negri 2000) of Hardt and Negri’s claims, however, are per- Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 64 (2012): 24–35 doi:10.3167/fcl.2012.640103 Powers of sovereignty: State, people, wealth, life | 25 haps more reflective of their philosophical am- gular logic, but as a historically contingent con- bition to reclaim the world than of an analytical cept that points to configurations shaped by the goal to renew structural Marxism. interaction of global and situated components. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, they “Global assemblages” of capital, politics, and see an American Empire as unchallenged in the ethics define a space of inquiry, pointing to world, shaping a world split between global cap- ways in which “the human” is at stake (Collier ital and disenfranchised multitude. This progres- and Ong 2005). Rather than flying at a high sive simplification of the capital-labor contradic- level of abstraction, anthropologists have always tion, they argue, will lead to a final confrontation preferred a low-flying approach to emerging sit- between the Empire of capital and the counter- uations crystallized in the interconnections of Empire of workers everywhere. Furthermore, capital and politics, technology and ethics. In- the philosophers project a convergence of pro- deed, by hovering close to the surface of observ- letarian consciousness and Christian fervor in a able human practices, we discover not the struc- global solidarity that will foment as ademo- tural uniformity of capitalism’s deprivation but, cratic alternative to Empire. Caught up in their rather, highly varied economic, social, and cul- epochal revolutionary vision, however, Hardt tural outcomes. For instance, in Asia, some and Negri seem to miss the giant of the Chinese countries participate in global markets by ex- economy looming on the horizon. porting increasingly large ratios of their labor Even as Empire rolled off the press to great force to richer countries. But where the state is academic acclaim, China had been bankrolling strong, strategic exceptions are made both in fa- US capitalism for over a decade. By 2011, sover- vor of capital and of social well-being. Attempts eign wealth funds mainly from Asia and the are made to combine neoliberal logic and bio- Middle East hold half of the outstanding federal political interventions in order to align goals of debt of the US government. The People’s Repub- wealth production on the one hand with secur- lic of China (PRC), a backward behemoth just ing varied visions of the good life on the other. 30 years ago, is now the vital lifeline that keeps the US economy afloat. This awkward partner- ship between the United States and the Chinese Sovereignty and biopower Communist Party has been dubbed “Chimerica” by the historian Niall Ferguson. A rapid reassem- Modern political reason concerns itself, by def- bling of capitalist forces has taken place, recen- inition, with intervening upon human life and tering in East Asia. There is no more vivid chal- modes of living. In Hardt and Negri’s formula- lenge to claims about a US-led Empire or global tion, however, “[m]odern European sovereignty order. China is the emerging heavyweight, shift- is capitalist sovereignty, a form of command ing the political and economic tectonic plates of that overdetermines the relationship between our times. individuality and universality as a function of In recent years, shake-ups in global events the development of capital” (Hardt and Negri and in the social sciences have required a shift 2000: 87). This questionable synthesis of sover- away from models of stabilized world arrange- eignty and an abstracted universal capitalism, ments to the analysis of heterogeneous situa- they claim, was historically extended to the rest tions contingently shaped by global forces. of the world through European colonialism. Instead of projecting a framework of fixed trans - With the end of colonialism, “the declining national relationships, we problematize univer- powers of the nation,” and the rise of American sal categories by studying the dynamic inter- capitalism, there is a passage to a form of “im- relationships that form a diversity of globalized perial sovereignty” that Hardt and Negri call environments. We invoke “the global” not as a “Empire” (ibid.: 137). Here, sovereignty is reter- metaphorical or achieved instantiation of a sin- ritorialized from the waning state onto the 26 | Aihwa Ong machinations of a global capitalism that sub- cuits. Indeed, special zoning techniques have verts or circumvents classical categories of sov- been widely implemented in East Asian coun- ereignty and their dependence on the system of tries, in order to strategically position specific nation-states. This projection echoes other spaces to different economic and political ends. claims that market-centered deregulation has Especially in the PRC, the technique of zoning contributed to “the declining sovereignty of areas of political exception is frequently wielded states over their economies” (Sassen 1998: to create special industrial zones and to enforce xxvii–xxviii). Such “denationalizing” effects of a regime of graduated rule across a vast terri- globalization are synchronized by global bank- tory (Ong 2006: 102–111; Ong and Zhang ers, executives, and capitalists at meetings such 2008). Rather than a uniform application of as the World Economic Forum in Davos, sovereign power, neoliberal calculations dictate Switzerland. As I have argued elsewhere, claims policies that make the most of differentiations about the impending end of the nation-state in the productive capacities of population and could not be more off the mark, even when ar- space within the national terrain. The neolib- ticulated in the days of the Asian financial crisis eral as a technology of governing for optimal of the late 1990s. Instead of assuming a decline outcomes challenges the conventional view of of sovereign power in an economic storm, it capitalism steamrolling over political sover- would have been useful to observe how crises eignty, or of neoliberalism as a set of irreducible compel states to become flexible in their re- elements that can characterize entire nations sponses by manipulating capitalist circuits (Harvey 2005). The novel Asian milieus consti- (Ong 2006: 97–120). It is especially a mistake to tuted in the articulation of neoliberal logic, au- fuse political sovereignty with capitalist might, thoritarian politics, and capital reject the view as these are separate technologies of power that that every encounter is an instantiation of capi- interact in complex ways. We tend to find state- tal’s imperial sovereignty overcoming political guided development in postcolonial countries sovereign rule. where state sovereignty was not merely imag- Besides ignoring actually existing states, ined into being (Anderson 1983), but largely Hardt and Negri claim, also in a philosophical embraced as the necessary political institution vein, that Empire has engendered conditions for charged with defending national well-being in a a unified totalizing biopower, expressed as a set competitive global environment. of rules over life on earth.2 They recast Fou- The irony of abstract claims about capital cault’s concept of governmentality
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