Follow up from my draft on Agamben and Marx, in rougher shape cuz my books are all at home and I am not.
Thus far I have drawn on Agamben in the attempt to establish something like a syllogism, as follows:
The proletariat is a figure of bare life.
Bare life is (bio)political, as are the processes which produce bare life.
Therefore, the proletariat is biopolitical, as are the processes which produce the proletariat.
I would now like to qualify this by introducing a distinction drawn by Jacques Ranciere.
Ranciere distinguishes between politics and what he calls the police, the “order of distribution of bodies as a community.” This understanding could be fruitfully compared with the sense of distribution which Marx declares in the Grundrisse to be prior and internal to production, the distribution of social positions and bodies into those positions. For Ranciere, politics is a process or instance of subjectification which operates against some police order. In this sense, then, what Agamben terms biopolitics would be, in Ranciere’s terms, a form of policing, a sort of “biopolice,” so to speak. The point of the preceding discussion remains, that the economic distribution of bodies and the ‘political’ distribution of bodies are not different in kind but are both modes or ensembles of policing. Conceding that what I have been discussing is the police and not politics would imply that different instantiations of opposition to economic and other forms of domination are also not different in kind from each other – though each is singular – but rather all are “mode[s] of subjectification” which disrupt police orders. (Disagreement 99.) [Hardt and Negri’s recent work on multitude and singularity can be read as at least in part an attempt to produce a theoretical understanding of a (bio)politics corresponding to – or, operating against – the (bio)police order in the present. My suspicion is that their insistence on the prefix ‘bio’ aspect limits the efficacy of their thought of this politics, but I’m not entirely sure. NOTE TO SELF: LOOK UP THE DONZELOT BOOK.]
Bare life is a police concept, albeit one critical of the police order. Much of marxism is also a history of developing different police concepts, and, in the case of the so-called Soviet Union (“lies,” as Castoriadis put it), not critical but rather innovative thereof. The political is not derivable from the police-ial. The attempt to make this derivation is what Ranciere terms [LOOK UP THE TERMS, I ALWAY MIX THEM UP, ARCHI-,META-ETC]. This attempt is common throughout much of marxism, as in the insistence on the inevitability of communism and the need for “pre-capitalist” forms to pass through the crucible of capitalism. [The later Althusser’s “aleatory materialism” is an important resource for thinking alternatives to this derivation within marxism. The work of Ranciere and of Alain Badiou can be thought of as an extension of this work, attempting to think politics and thought as a power to produce clinamen, a swerve, which is not derived from the police count of the present. EXPAND A BIT, MAKE PART OF THE DISCUSSION.] Within the Italian tradition of operaismo this derivation takes the form of attempting to determine the political composition of the working class based upon the technical composition of the class. [CITE AND QUOTE MORE ON THIS W/ IN OPERAISMO. Hardt and Negri repeat this mistake in their pegging of multitude to immaterial labor.]
For Paolo Virno, the sale of labor power is a biopolitical relationship [though Virno is wrong to see biopolitics as exclusively an effect of labor power’s commodity status – if anything, the production of labor power as a commodity required biopolitical methods such that biopolitics pre-dates commodified labor power]. [QUOTE.] Drawing on Ranciere, I would rephrase this to say that the sale of labor power is bound up with a certain police order. In the last section I argued that the proletariat is a figure of that particular biopolitical condition which Giorgio Agamben terms bare life, which I also hold to be a police rather than political condition. In any case, the proletarian condition of being “vogelfrei,” free as a bird, exemplifies the proletarian condition as abre life. The proletariat is animalized, thus outside the posited human community, and is stripped – “freed” – of all possession such that it only has its labor power to sell in order to live.
The proletariat’s being free as a bird as I have discussed it thus far is a condition of subjection, the proletariat as object, as a concept of the police count of the present. There is a second sense of vogelfrei, however. This sense is the power of flight implied by the bird metaphor. The birdlike freedom of the proletariat implies also a power to fly, a power to undertake what Virno, Negri, and others have termed the practice of exodus (and which Negri earlier termed self-valorization). This is a power of subjectification, a political power in Ranciere’s sense of politics. [CITE RANCIERE AND BADIOU ON POLITICS AND SUBJECTIFICATION.]
Agamben’s work on ontology offers room to make this point within Agamben’s own project. [QUOTE, CITE, POTENTIALITY-ACTUALITY-IMPOTENTIALITY, READ THE ARISTOTLE.] This operates on two levels.
The proletariat sells its labor power. Labor power is the power to work. The capitalist purchases labor power as a commodity and seeks to make use of it – to set the laborer to work – in order to produce surplus value [QUOTE, CITE MARX]. According to Agamben’s work on potentiality, the proletarian potential to produce surplus value is also impotential: the potential to not produce surplus value [and to produce in other ways, again what Negri terms self-valorization]. This places Agamben’s work in relation to that of Mario Tronti. [QUOTE, CITE TRONTI, REFUSAL OF WORK.] Capitalist production is a conflict between police orders and potential instances of politics which seek to escape from or limit surplus value production, a conflict over (im)potentiality and actuality. [CITE VIRNO ON LABOR POWER AND POTENTIALITY, SEE BRETT’S ARTICLE.]
In addition to whether or not labor power purchased as a commodity produces, there is a question as to whether or not labor power is a commodity, or to what degree this occurs. Primitive accumulation produces the (lethal) conditions wherein the sale of labor power as a commodity is a necessary condition for survival of most people. This condition is not entirely complete, though. Commodity relations do not colonize and determine the entirety of the social field. That would mean saturation by the police order such that politics is impossible [CITE, QUOTE RANCIERE ON THE ATTEMPT TO ELIMINATE POLITICS AND THE ROLE OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IN DOING SO.] Often marxism has been a figure of political philosophy in this sense, the theoretical evacuation of politics as even possible. Drawing on Agamben’s work on potentiality, it is possible to say that the enclosures which create the capitalist order seek to create the conditions for labor power to be a potential commodity. Just as commodified labor power is also the power to not work despite having been purchased, labor power’s potential to be a commodity also implies the potential to not be a commodity. The proletariat is sometimes actually proletariat and bare life. But the proletariat is only always bare life at the level of potentiality. This potentiality also implies the potential to not be bare life and in this sense to not be proletariat. The proletarian power of flight – exodus, self-valorization, refusal to work – is the power of subjectification, of politics, which is the clinamen within the capitalist order: its source of dynamism. [CITE, QUOTE THE AUTONOMIST HYPOTHESIS, CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT FOLLOWS THE PROLETARIAT NOT THE REVERSE.] The police order has been forced to change repeatedly by politics. We saw this earlier in the discussion of Servius Tullius and the break down of the patrician and plebian order of the gens which thus necessitated the introduction of a new order, from which the order based on property arose.
This discussion also implies that in an important sense bare life is never bare life. There never exists life which is simply life, life which has as its only trait its being not-dead. Bare life is an implied category in the (police) thought and practices of sovereignty and political economy, but this is a reduction of life, a subtraction of qualities from life. [QUOTE, CITE, BADIOU ON COUNT AS ONE.] Even when lethal operations occur – states of exception, primitive accumulation – the life which is killed is not actually sans all qualities. The life which is killed is a multiple composed of lives which are themselves multiples, containing all sorts of determinations – names, histories, memories, etc. Simply terming this “bare life” in a way which takes it to be actually sans all qualities concedes the operation of the police order at the level of theory. This lethal operation is never fully successful, though it does win victories for sovereigns and capitalists and wreak tremendous damage. Thinking that this operation is fully successful, that life is actually bare life, is to give up in advance or to retroactively posit a type of necessity behind contingent historical events which could have occurred differently. That is, it is to think from the perspective of sovereignty and capital which flattens singularities, rather than to think from a located perspective within the multiples of lives which are formatted by sovereigns and capitalists. In terms of late Althusser’s metaphorical use of ancient atomism, this is to think from the perspective of atoms falling in parallel, rather than to think from the perspective of the deviation from parallelism, the clinamen which is the condition for constitutive encounter as well as dissolution.
Similarly, the working class is never labor “sans phrase” [CITE MARX], and labor (power) is never abstract despite the behavior of the capitalist class. Labor is treated so but this does not tell us anything about the being of labor power or workers. In his transition from purchase and sale to production Marx makes use of a metaphor [QUOTE EXACTLY], we leave the noisy sphere of the market and enter the sphere of the factory, where the sign reads “quiet, men working.” The very injunction to silence indicates a power to speech. Otherwise there would be no need for the capitalist to demand silence and to enforce – to police – this requirement. Marx was not always clear about this himself, sometimes treating the proletariat as simply an object. [THIS CONFUSION OF POLITICS AND POLICE ON MARX’S PART IS ADDRESSED, THOUGH NOT IN SO MANY WORDS, IN RANCIERE’S EXCELLENT BOOK THE PHILOSOPHER AND HIS POOR.] It is the multiplicity of the proletariat as not being simply labor power and a commodity, as not being simply life which reproduces itself, which makes possible the reduction at the level of theory – and the political, or rather, police practices which this theory is bound up with – of the proletariat to this ‘bare’ status. It is the same with bare life. Only life’s being precisely not bare makes it possible to theoretically abstract all content from life in order to render it bare at the level of thought.
[NOTES – BRIEF DISCUSSION OF HEGEL AND SCHELLING’S CRITIQUE THEREOF – HEGEL:BEING::AGAMBEN:BARE LIFE. DRAW ON THE PAPER BY ALBERTO, THE PAPER BY ? ON BADIOU AND NEGRI, AND THE PAPER BY? ON ALEATORY MATERIALISM AND OPERAISMO. QUOTE RANCIERE, EARLY ALTHUSSER AS A THINKER OF ORDER, IN REID’S INTRO TO NIGHTS OF LABOR. ALSO PERHAPS HOLLOWAY, ON CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY VS MARXIST ECONOMICS?]
crashcourse666 
A few questions on this:
1. Why isn’t the proletariat in the sense used above yet another of the caesuras that enables the production of bare life (as Agamben talks out in Remnants)?
2. To anticipate the most obvious answer to the above, which is that this caesura is not biological, isn’t there a sense in which you are explicitly biologizing the proletariat here as a social body? Especially as one defined by its capacity to labor, which is a biological determination/capacity, and a naturalization of labor as the boundary condition of the proletariat (it’s not your naturalization, but you do repeat it…)
And 3. It does seem to me that if we take Agamben seriously, some operations in the production of bare life actually are fully successful. I’m not sure I understand how acknowledging this limits one’s agency in the face of it. Can you unpack this a bit?
hi Ken,
Thanks for this. I’ve not read Remnants yet so I’m not sure how to respond to the first. In case this is part of what you’re saying, I do not mean to say “bare life=proletariat”. Rather, I mean to say “proletariat=mode of bare life” such that bare life is a broader category and proletariat is one more specific category. Other could and probably do exist, I can’t really comment on that. Part of what I argued in the earlier piece, the first half to this, is that the proletariat is as apt a figure for bare life as is homo sacer. This isn’t a claim to that figure being exclusive of others. If that doesn’t answer the question then I’m going to have to ask you to explain more of the argument to me before I can respond, as it’ll probly be a while before I get a chance to read Remnants.
On the second, the proletariat is defined by its capacity to labor (though in Roman law it was defined instead by its capacity for biological reproduction). I don’t think this is my biologizing, though. If there is such a move, it’s going on elsewhere are you point out. That’s the ‘police’ version of the concept, as a count. I think Marx isn’t always clear on this and himself sometimes sounds like he’s using that version of it. The political concept, though, is that which disrupts the count, which would work against the police version. It does still take the police version, the existing count, as a point of reference because that is what it’s declared against. I don’t think that has to mean it also retains a naturalizing move.
On the third, I don’t know what you mean. Can you give an example of a fully successful operation in the production of bare life? Do you mean to say that people do get brutalized and killed? If so, then yes of course.
Strictly speaking, though, those people still in an important sense are not bare life. They’re very particular – “clothed” – life, or rather, lives, who get brutalized and killed. That the sovereign treats them as bare life does not mean that that’s what they are. (The same holds for a more classically marxian idiom, exchanging “bare life” for “abstract labor” and “sovereign” for “capitalist”.) The point here is one of perspective. To analyze and criticize the political (or rather, police) thought and operations which treat people as bare life is important. But the being “bare” are not determinations of those whom these operations act upon, but determinations of how they are acted upon, what they are treated as. Those who are acted upon are infinite multiples (as is everything), which are only ‘bare’ from some perspective rather than from all perspectives, and are definitely not bare from those perspective which can be said to be their own perspectives.
happy holidays,
Nate
Ken,
I forgot to mention, Agamben criticizes Marx someplace, I think in Means Without End, for an overly biological thinking, I believe in reference to species being. Do you remember the reference I’m talking about? I’ll look it up when I get home in a few days. I’m quite open to that line of thought, and I think it’s an important point in reading the rest of Agamben, I think it works against reading bare life as an ontological condition (taking ‘ontologization’ and ‘naturalization’ as similar moves). This is part of what I like in Agamben, for my interest he’s useful for criticizing marxian thought for the moments where it’s overly resonant with Schmittian stuff.
cheers,
Nate
Thanks for the replies. At least in Remnants, Agamben is specifically talking out the Musselman as bare life, and argues that the camps (which elsewhere – Homo Sacer – he argues are the new nomos, the new norms that structure the political today) have as their greatest tragedy the production of this bare life, rather than say the subtraction of attributes from some non-bare life that exists as ontologically prior to the stripping of those attributes.
His argument on caesuras is not dissimilar to his arguments in Homo Sacer, but functionally he wants to argue that the biological lines with which the Jew is separated from the Aryan give way to the ones that separate Jew from Muslim in the camp, then those that give way to the separation between camp prisoner and Musselman, and it is at the level of the Musselman that such caesuras cease to have any meaning, since the Musselman is produced as the absence of those caesuras. I asked about the possibility of the proletariat as another one of the caesuras, because in Agamben at least, the alternative to bare life is what he calls the form of life, which is a way of thinking life that does not find it co-incident with itself, i.e. with vitality/survival. Form of life isn’t so clear to me as to what it is, even if I understand what it isn’t, though I read a rumor that his next book will be called Form of Life and will attempt to finish off this theme, but I don’t recall where I read that. Anyway, there’s some risk I think that the institution of caesuras makes possible their removal and the bareness of the biopolitical order, though I’m really just typing out loud here.
As for the biologization, yeah, I think Marx does naturalize labor as part of the human condition, which is why he fetishizes (I don’t know how else to describe it) the concept of use-value in vol 1 of Capital, and why he also pins the hopes and dreams of communists everywhere on the reclamation of their own labor-power. Obviously he’s been called to task for this – Baudrillard’s Mirror of Production is the one that comes to mind, though Bauman has a book that celebrates laziness somewhere, though its title escapes me at the moment) – but I was asking if the move you want to make – to think the proletariat as a mode of bare life (something Badiou-like about this formulation, where the proletariat belongs to the set of bare life…) is to necessarily clothe bare life and somewhat vitiate the concept. Possibly. Which is why I was curious about how much you want to tie the argument your making about potentiality to labor power… Does that make more sense?
hi Ken,
That’s clearer yeah, thanks. I’m not clear on the form-of-life stuff either. I think there’s more resonances with (or perhaps direct influence from) Badiou here. Form-of-life and the whatever singularity are as close as Agamben gets to talking about subjectivity.
The universality (the whatever-ness or generic-ness) here is what makes me think of Badiou. I’d eventually like to write an essay trying to recover the concept of gattungswesen in Marx based on this, as not species being (a biological concept, a count as one and probably a police concept) but as generic being (that’s how the term’s translated into romance languages). Agamben remarks on this someplace, as does Jason Read. The generic links up with the stuff on indifference I was rambling about in that other post, and is I think quite different from “bare” or “mere”.
I’m quite open to that critique of at least a certain Marx. The important part of Marx is the critique of political economy, the moments where he does philosophy of history and much of his philosophical anthropology are mad problematic and sometimes color the first in unfortunate ways. I also think there’s a lot that could be done with a nonfetishized (because non-naturalized) version of the concept of use value. Part of that, though, I think, means not conceiving of use value as distinct from exchange value but rather exchange value as one subset of possible use values, as I’ve argued elsewhere on here.
I’m not sure I understand the question about labor power and potentiality. What I’m trying to do with the potentiality stuff here is similar to what I’m trying to do with bare life – I want to talk about one instantiation thereof. I don’t want to say “bare life is only the proletariat” nor do I want to say “potentiality is only labor power” as neither makes sense – especially the latter. The potentiality stuff is intended as an argument on several fronts. First, potentiality to labor must also be impotentiality to labor (or, potentiality to not labor). Thus commodification does not exhaust conflict but rather initiates new sites of it – labor power purchased as a commodity must still be used by the capitalist – the worker must be set to work if surplus value is to be produced. This isn’t news, but I like making the point using Agamben. Second, and linked to this, the potential for (form-of-)life to be commodified labor power is also the impotential to be commodified. Primitive accumulation/enclosure is a permanent process while capitalism exists but (or, precisely because) it is never permanently completed (equating for now “commodification” with “enclosure”). Third is an analogous point re: bare life. The potential for life to be killed via the lethal operations where bare life is produced is also the impotential to be killed. All of which is to say, the outcomes are not foregone conclusions but rather are antagonistic and aleatory. This last argument is independent of the arguments about the proletariat and could perhaps stand to be worked out on its own, but the essential point of this argument is precisely that bare life is not, in an important sense. Put another way, bare life is a sort of top down concept, it’s from the king’s/cop’s eye view. View from some of the positions of those who are (taken as) bare life, bare life is not bare. The sovereign’s decision which produces lethal results is precisely an indifference to many determinations – treating as if bare – but it does not, even in the acts of killing, render life actually bare. You may disagree here, but I hope I’ve made the point clearer. I take your point that this may vitiate the concept of bare life, but I think if handled right this can serve as a gloss or nuance rather than a complete rejection of the concept.
cheers,
Nate