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Through flows, swirls, transnational exchanges, mapping territory, placing boundaries and borders, circulation of images, logos, icons, trade routes, multi-directional, efficient, speed of light communications networks, vortexes and black holes time and space are condensed and flattened. The globe is a massive network of spatial markings and trade routes. Money and capital regulate the flow of commodities and bodies. As Louis-Ferdinand Celine accurately remarks, "There is no escaping American business." (Hardt & Negri: 270). The concept of Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire's rule has no limits….Empire posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality that rules over the entire "civilized" world. No territorial boundaries limit its reign" (Hardt & Negri: Preface, xiv). Arjun Appadurai captures the new quality of these structures with the "analogy of landscapes, finanscapes, technoscapes, ethnoscapes and so forth. The suffix "-scape" allows us on the one hand to point to the fluidity and irregularity of these various fields and on the other to indicate formal commonalties among such diverse domains as finance, culture, commodities and demography" (Hardt & Negri, 151).

In the transnational hyper-real world of flows, networks, high-speed Internet DSL lines and multi-national corporate conglomerates, globalization is inescapable. In the McWorld of Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Gap, Microsoft and McDonalds, our very existence is intricately tied to the global market. Everything we feel, touch, smell, eat and see is part of this invisible network of globalization and part of the decentralized governance of Empire. The roots of globalization emerge out of the very first voyage of Christopher Columbus to the Americas in 1492. Through colonial trade routes the passage into global markets emerged. As ships, trains, cable networks, satellites and airplanes carve trade and communication paths into the earth's surface and atmosphere, the global network of exchange and commodification becomes mapped and codified.

Hardt and Negri argue that "Empire is materializing before our very eyes…We have witnessed an irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges. What has emerged is a new global order, a new logic and structure of rule, in short, a new form of sovereignty that governs the world….This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire….It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow… Many locate the ultimate authority that rules over the processes of globalization and the new world order in the United States. Proponents praise the United States as the world leader and sole superpower, and detractors denounce it as an imperialist oppressor… (Hardt & Negri: Preface xiii). The Empire does not fortify its boundaries to push others away, but rather pulls them within pacific order, like a powerful vortex…The Empire is a kind of smooth space across which subjectivities glide without substantial resistance or conflict." (Hardt & Negri: 198).

REFERENCES:

Hardt, Michael & Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001.