ABSTRACT
Since its publication only three years ago, Empire has spawned a remarkable amount of commentary and debate, including a number of responses and elaborations from the authors.1 Indeed, one is tempted to suggest that Empire has been so successful in encapsulating current conditions of social and intellectual production that it has failed to escape them, and that it too has become just another “commodity undergoing metamorphosis in our globalized, networked, academic market.”2 But, whether because there is no outside to Empire or because, as Spivak has suggested, “the mainstream has never run clean, perhaps never can,”3 there is no way to write about Empire without becoming somehow implicated in its reproduction and amplification. We can, however, seek to engage in a “constructive, rather than disabling complicity”4 with our sources, which here include not only Hardt’s and Negri’s Empire but also that more decidedly mainstream publication, the World Bank’s annual World Development Report.
