Just now I thought of a resonance between this fun bit of interbloggal conversation that’s started up and some things Paolo Virno has written (which means a point of contact or resonance between stuff I used to be super into and stuff I’m trying to get more into, the latter being more historical).
In an interview Virno remarked
“he biopolitical is only an effect derived from the concept of labor-power. When there is a commodity that is called labor-power it is already implicitly government over life. Agamben says, on the other hand, that labor-power is only one of the aspects of the biopolitical; I say the contrary: over all because labor power is a paradoxical commodity, because it is not a real commodity like a book or a bottle of water, but rather is simply the potential to produce. As soon as this potential is transformed into a commodity, then, it is necessary to govern the living body that maintains this potential, that contains this potential. Toni (Negri) and Michael (Hardt), on the other hand, use biopolitics in a historically determined sense, basing it on Foucault, but Foucault spoke in few pages of the biopolitical – in relation to the birth of liberalism – that Foucault is not a sufficient base for founding a discourse over the biopolitical and my apprehension, my fear, is that the biopolitical can be transformed into a word that hides, covers problems instead of being an instrument for confronting them. A fetish word, an “open doors” word, a word with an exclamation point, a word that carries the risk of blocking critical thought instead of helping it. Then, my fear is of fetish words in politics because it seems like the cries of a child that is afraid of the dark…, the child that says “mama, mama!”, “biopolitics, biopolitics!”. I don’t negate that there can be a serious content in the term, however I see that the use of the term biopolitics sometimes is a consolatory use, like the cry of a child, when what serves us are, in all cases, instruments of work and not propaganda words.”
In his book Il ricordo del presente Virno remarks that
“Each time that it seeks to procure labour power, capital runs into a living body. This last, in itself, does not count for anything from an economic perspective, but is the ineliminable tabernacle of what certainly does matter: “labour as subjectivity”. The living body, without any dowry other than pure vitality, becomes the substrate for productive capacity (…) The non-mythological origin of the dispositif of knowledges and powers that Michel Foucault defined with the term biopolitics without a doubt finds its mode of being in labour power. Here, the practical importance assumed by potentiality as potentiality in the capitalist relations of production; its inseparability from immediate corporeal existence”, is the exclusive foundation of the biopolitical point of view. (…) life as such [is] taken charge of and governed (…) because it forms the substratum time of a faculty, labour power, which possess the autonomous consistency of a use value. The productivity of labour in act is not in play here, but rather the exchangeability of the potential for labour. By being bought and sold, this potentiality carries the receptacle from which it is inseparable, that is, the living body; more, it shows itself as an accomplished object of knowledge and government (of innumerable and differentiated strategies of power).”
Virno continues, “In giving the wage, the capitalist seeks to buy labour power, or “labour as subjectivity”, not the living body (…) the life of the worker has no price (…) Potentiality and life are consubstantial, but not identical: as such it is the appreciation of the first is effected together with the devaluation of the second.”
For Virno this – biopolitics – is exclusively a matter of capitalism. In the final lines quoted above Virno implicitly (I suspect knowingly) deals with a category that Agamben uses a lot, though Virno doesn’t mention it, the category of bare life (life with no qualities at all but its mere fact of being alive, not being dead, a category which for Agamben is closely linked to the power to kill and to actual killing or acts of violence which may kill; Virno basically says here that this category is inseperable from capitalism). It strikes me that Virno is wrong in an important way in these passages, in that he claims that all of this is an effect of capitalism, that biopolitics is a subcategory of capital. That seems false and unreasonable.
That said, Virno none the less makes a point that is very important to me, which is that capitalism is always-already biopolitical in at least one definition of the term. This is basically what I tried to argue in the thing I wrote on Hardt and Negri which was part of my parting with post-operaismo in its periodizing impulses (this topic was a key preoccupation of mine when I started this blog and this blog is one of the main places where I worked out what I thought on all that). Hardt and Negri make a claim to an era of biopolitical production, a claim which is not sensible if taken strictly – that there is biopolitical era of capitalism as opposed to a non-biopolitical one (again depending on the meaning of the term “biopolitical,” Hardt and Negri’s doesn’t work for their purposes). I tried to argue in two different ways in the paper I linked to and in this that capitalism involve biopolitics (or a biopolitics) from its inception, and in the second I further argued – or just cited Agamben claiming – argued that biopolitics pre-dates capitalism.
That is, capitalism is a mode of biopolitics (or a set of different modes of biopolitics, the history of which is worth investigating), as opposed to Virno’s claim that biopolitics came about via capitalism. (Again depending on the meaning of the terms.) Put differently, “biopolitical” is a larger or more general determination than “capitalist” (the latter taken as an adjective). As Marx wrote in the Grundrisse, “Some determinations belong to all epochs, others only to a few. [Some] determinations will be shared by the most modern epoch and the most ancient.” “Biopolitics” is one such determination, at least as Agamben defines it – which he recognizes- and as Negri defines it – which he seems to not recognized. (The rest of the Marx quote is in comment 58 here.) Part of the arguments about slavery and about housework that I want to make – or rather, to parrot – is a similar one to the point about the generality of the determination “biopolitical,” that is, that “capitalist” is a more general determination than has been often recognized.
Two notes to self, two more Marx quotes I’d forgotten to return to. The first I didn’t plan to return to but it’s relevant or at least resonant with the discussion at WP’s about the body as property. Marx quotes Wilhelm Schulz, “To develop in greater spiritual freedom, a people [ein Volk] must break their bondage to their bodily needs — they must cease to be the slaves of the body.” (Quoted in this post on the Paris Manuscripts. And this one, from this post: “Since actual labour is the appropriation of nature for the satisfaction of human needs, the activity through which the metabolism between man and nature is mediated, to denude labour capacity of the means of labour, the objective conditions for the appropriation of nature through labour, is to denude it, also, of the means of life, for as we saw earlier, the use value of commodities can quite generally be characterised as the means of life. Labour capacity denuded of the means of labour and the means of life is therefore absolute poverty as such, and the worker, as the mere personification of the labour capacity, has his needs in actuality, whereas the activity of satisfying them is only possessed by him as a non-objective capacity (a possibility) confined within his own subjectivity. As such, conceptually speaking, he is a pauper, he is the personification and repository of this capacity which exists for itself, in isolation from its objectivity.” The latter is about capital as a mode of production of bare life, producing the proletariat (a mode of bare life, insofar as it is object).
crashcourse666 
This reminds me, I’ve been meaning to make myself a biopolitics reading list. More to the point, a “Foucault on biopolitics” reading list, as distinct from Agamben and Negri’s respective uses of the term (which is more like the use I … well, use … in this post, as that’s the work I’m more familiar with that uses the term), which I believe differ from Foucault in some important ways.
According to this – http://foucaultblog.wordpress.com/2007/12/14/birth-of-biopolitics-announced/ – the Foucault lectures called The Birth of Biopolitics will be out in April. That means if I get my list together and start reading, I could conceivably be well set to read that one when it comes out.
There’s a summary of that lecture series in the Ethics collection. There’s a few pages in History of Sexuality 1 and in Society Must Be Defended (don’t remember which apges though, curses).
Some other resources – remarks by the good people at G-O, including links to other material, http://www.generation-online.org/c/cbiopolitics.htm
This, on Ewald among other things
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j007/Articles/editorial.htm
and this (not just) for page refs –
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j007/Articles/thacker.htm
And this –
http://foucaultblog.wordpress.com/2007/03/13/bio-politics-biopower/
See also library search for keyword “biopower”, also keyword “biopower”, and google book search “foucault beyond foucault” and see http://eventmechanics.net.au/?s=biopolitics
http://www.michel-foucault.com/
http://www.foucault-studies.com/
Hey Nate,
I actually think that Foucault’s conception of biopolitics differs from Agamben’s and Negri’s in a couple of ways (as you gesture to), although I don’t know that literature, really. One thing to notice is that it gets kind of ‘added on’ to disciplinary power. Disciplinary power doesn’t go away – it tends to stick around as the generally-forgotten-but-actually-kinda-key concept of ‘anatamopolitics’. And it does this at a very particular moment because the concept of ‘the race’ or ‘the population’ became in some sense meaningful, quantifiable. In this respect, it’s very much bound up with the concept of the norm; actually, at some point Foucault points to medicine as demonstrating that the norm offers the site of best convergence between anatamopolitics (the disciplining of the individual body) and biopolitics (the shaping of the population).
Whilst I don’t know my history well enough to tell Agamben he’s wrong ;-), I do think that there’s something different about this sense of biopolitics, one which tends to problematise Agamben’s ‘it’s been around forever’ kinda line. Yes, it’s a power over life, and in some sense that may well have been around ‘forever;’ but it’s power over life in a very specific sense: it is the life of the *race* which is at stake. In other words, what counts as ‘life’ in the phrase ‘power over life’ I think changes over time; so Foucault’s perspective refers to a very particular phenomenon. This is particularly the case coz he binds biopolitics to the norm, race and racism, and to ideas of degeneracy (which I think is totally fascinating for the dovetailing of race, disability and productivity!) as the sites of fragmentation of the population into superracial and subracial… I don’t know about about it, but NP tells me that Marx does some pretty hefty work on the relationship between the norm and capitalism; I wonder, again, about how they work together, and in turn the implications for a Foucauldian conception of biopolitics. It looks like a return to Ian Hacking is required… [sigh] Post-thesis, as I’m promising myself for everything these days!….
I also was kinda struck by Virno’s complaint from the interview: what, precisely, does he think that an analysis premised on biopolitics would conceal? The second quote seems to indicate what an analysis of biopower (with its two poles) might actually let you get at… (just if you have thoughts, it’s a wondering, not a key question :-))
hey there WP,
It sounds to me like Virno is talking about the Agamben/Negri sense of the term rather than Foucault, and I’m not clear what he thinks is the big risk or whatever.
My opinion is that Agamben’s use of the term “biopolitics” is probably mostly vacuous – all top-down power is power over life in some sense of “life” because we only have power relations with living things – but I like aspects of that as well for what it helps track onto or direct attention toward for the purposes of theory and other research. Negri’s claims involving biopolitics are I think self-contradictory/incoherent, as I think his definition of the term is quite close to Agamben’s but he attaches it to historical periodizations that don’t make sense.
I don’t feel conversant in Foucault so I can’t say much re: him. A friend of mine who is very up on Foucault and dislikes Negri and Agamben tells me there’s a big difference between their uses and Foucault’s uses of the term (Agamben’s better at noting that than Negri is).
I got Security, Territory, Whatstis – the new lecture course – out of the library, I read the course summary at the end. I’m hoping to use that to kick off reading more Foucault on biopolitics. I want to know that stuff better, in part in order to get a proper handle on the scope of the concept, where it does and doesn’t (make sense to) apply.
take care,
Nate
ps- what do you recommend re: Hacking on Foucault (or anyone else decent on Foucualt for that matter)?
Hi all. Is there clear line dividing biopower from biopolitics. I often use both and feel that i am running the risk of appearing to be an idiot.
I am willing to speculate that Virno’s opposition to biopower and his desire to see it as subordinate to capital’s attempt to exploit labour-power is essentially a political question. Whilst the line’s between the two are fudged by Negri perhaps we can say that they lead in two opposite directions. Whilst both want to talk about the interrelationship of oppressed in the practices of oppression ( to put it clumsily) biopower sees us as made by the process of power , whilst true to operismo labour power would see capital as our product. It is no accident that your friends who use biopower a lot as a concept seem to end up paranoid and your post-autonomia mates wildly optimistic. Perhaps both are errors – and to balance the contradiction we need to use both and make both errors at the same time
rebel love
Dave
hi Dave,
I’m no help on the terms there, maybe WP can help. I think that makes sense re: Virno. That’s some of my own feeling. I like the Foucault I’ve read, particularly mid- to late period stuff (the bits of the earlier stuff I’ve read left me cold more, I’m not real into like epistemology and language stuff in the french style), but it always feels adjacent to the stuff I’m most concerned with – the economy, particularly the workplace, how those things get redefined and how the definitions play a role in the actual economy, etc. I think that may be some of Virno’s thing, trying to say “look we still need to talk about labor power.” I’m not sure but my sense is that the reception of Foucault is also bound up with attempts to get around or attack marxism. While certainly much marxism deserves to be attacked and prompts me to want to evade too, there’s a bit of a baby-and-bathwater thing going on sometimes, or at least I think there used to be. Maybe something similar is also what Virno’s irritated about?
cheers,
Nate
ps- I keep forgetting to email you back re: Zizek. Let’s say we set some tentative dates. I’ll post stuff here. If you want you can do the same, or we can find some other option (you could start a blog!)
I don’t actually recall Agamben eternizing biopolitics, as he does himself seem to have some kind of system of periodization (an epochal one, like Heidegger). But his definition of biopolitics is wildly different from Foucault, who could never support the turn to ontological movements that Agamben wants. Biopol. is, in Foucault, just the moment when populations are treated as wholes, and managed by states without recourse to individualizing processes. As such, it seems that the whole “biopolitics is forever” thing is fairly empty if you want to go with with Foucault’s def.–in History of Sex. and “Society Must Be Defended.” I haven’t read the more recently released lectures, though.
In any case, I think that, for the period Foucault is referring to, the late 19th, early 20th cents., that biopolitics *is* a function of capital. Just because there was biopolitics before capitalism doesn’t invalidate that claim. There was trade, empires, wars before capitalism, but that doesn’t mean that, in the 20th-cent., capital isn’t largely the sufficient reason for such things. Biopolitics in fascism and in the welfare state, in the ideologies of racism, is clearly a function of the need to maintain and police the difference between classes–it’s a supplement to exploitation. Of course, Foucault uses this to critique socialism’s and Marxism’s notion of class as well. . .
Apologies if the above sounded high-toned. Thinking a bit more, I should clarify. It’s definitely true that–as I look over Homo Sacer- biopolitics precedes capitalism in his account, and is a part of the classical state. But in Agamben it’s only with the liberal state (and its complement in capitalism, although his account is entirely legalistic) that the condition of homo sacer gets generalized to become the ground of citizenship. I think one could read Agamben–critically–as a narrative about the production and reproduction of the working class. That is, the way in which giving the vote to the working class was a form of that inclusion-exclusion that Agamben associates with the homo sacer, and which exceptional in Rome but became general in the last two centuries.
Or so it seems to me now.
Start a blog? Shit Nate i am trying to finish my thesis – i have already spent most of my day making mixed CD’s for my house mate, dance around the info store in my basement and thinking about going on a bike ride – i don’t need new distractions!
rebel love
Dave
so yes lets use your blog….what kind of time frame you thinking?
hi Jasper,
No need to apologize. I know I wrote a reply comment back to you but apparently the internet ate it. That’s annoying cuz it was, like, a REALLY insightful comment on my part. 😉 Seriously though I’ll reply later when I’m not annoyed at the internet. I like the stuff you suggest.
Dave,
Priorities man, priorities! What will a thesis get you? A headache and nothing more. A blog, however, is a ticket to unadulterated goodness.
Re: time frame, it’s all good w/ me either way. What works for you?
cheers,
Nate
Hi all,
Jasper, sorry, that “biopolitics has been around forever” thing was just me being flip. I don’t actually mean that Agamben thinks biopolitics has been around forever; my point is more that Foucault’s conception of biopolitics *is* deeply historicised, in a way that seems to be undermined by Agamben’s going back to classical times and understanding *that* as biopolitical, though that is not to say that Agamben’s conception of biopolitics isn’t useful, just that it’s quite different, as you say. I actually *do* totally agree that capital and (Foucault’s conception of) biopower go together. I think, without knowing much/any Marxism (it’s starting to make me feel like I shouldn’t really have these conversations, given that I keep saying that; I really don’t want to play the trollish thing of making everyone else responsible for my ignorance!! Let me know if I’m doing that, won’t you all?) that Foucault’s point is that more is going on than is being paid attention to: broader senses of ‘productivity’ (for example, of truth, of norms, of individual subjects) are being engendered… which are, I would suggest, bound up very much with capital, but in ways which some Marxists seem (caveated with ignorance again!) to not want to think about…
My take, Dave, on the whole biopolitics/biopower thing is to say that what Foucault *really* intends (that’s said with a self-critical wink, btw) is that biopower is made up of the dual poles of biopolitics and anatamopolitics. That said, he tends to use the term ‘the biopolitical’ to refer to what I’ve set aside as ‘biopower’ above. This may have something to do with translation: it’s hard to skip from ‘biopower’ to some kind of adjective: ‘biopowerful’ is certainly inaccurate (and kinda makes me wince). But I try to keep biopower as the name for the two poles functioning together; lots of people don’t, and use the biopolitical as a term for biopower; but the difference is, I think, that my focus on the subject means I want to examine anatamopolitics as a particular kind of function, where a lot of people just seem to want to chuck it to the wayside (which I personally think misses the visceral, phenomenological investments contemporary subjects have in being, say, human (in a particular sense), individual (again in a very particular sense) and free (again, liberal humanistic style freedom). I hope that makes sense. To sum it up: there’s a lot of people out there who use biopower and biopolitics interchangeably, but I try to avoid it because that tends to lose the space for the discussion of discipline of subjects… which I personally think is an important thing to hang onto, especially because it can help us think about the tolerance of workers to their own exploitation, for example.
And Dave, in response to the paranoia of Foucauldians… 🙂 yeah, it’s completely true. Interestingly, though, it seems to do something kinda unfair to Foucault… though it *is* kinda his own fault. For me this seems to turn on the question of what he actually means when he says ‘power.’ Obviously, as he says, he means something quite different from the usual, repressive hypothesis. But I think that while folks will go along with his redefinition for a while, they then tend to then kinda ‘import’ notions of oppression into it. This means that it’s just that power is *tricky* in its repressiveness; hence the paranoia. I don’t entirely disagree, but such a position tends to reiterate the idea of a liberatory ‘outside’ to power, which, if we could just reach it, would be pure of all of power’s machinations (a perspective the paranoids, of course, would disavow, but seems to still structurally shape their understanding). That is, of course, what is primarily under attack in Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis. He doesn’t help himself in this regard, of course, because at one point Foucault problematically, and contradicting his own position as I understand it, suggests that there are kinda bodily flows that we can ‘liberate’ from power’s grasp (a point which feminist theorists have thoroughly critiqued.) My response to this, though, is that I think we need to take the critique of power as repressive very seriously, because it reconfigures it in such a way that power is productive, and not just in a negative way: it demonstrates that power enables us to *be*, to *think*, to *interact* as we do, as well as shutting down possibilities. (But this critique, I think, came out of a heavily Marxist context, and does tend to be understood as requiring baby and bathwater to be thrown out, as you say, Nate, but I don’t think it has to!)
(Structurally, this seems to bear a remarkable resemblance to Nietzsche’s issue with the ‘two-worlds’ scenario. It also seems to come up a lot for undergrads studying postmodernism, usually winding up in a kind of strange nihilism: ‘oh my god, meaning is in flux; that means that things can mean anything… so nothing means anything oh my god, nothing exists but in my own head, and maybe not even that etc etc. I must go slice my wrists up.’ 😉 (Flip again, sorry…) The point is that this can only be a source of anxiety if one is clinging to an idea that there *is* an ‘outside’ that ‘meaning’ (representation) corresponds to, which is precisely what is under critique. Anyway, that’s a long-winded way of saying that Foucauldian paranoia, whilst Foucault himself seemed to suffer from it, occurs in the slippage around the term power, which really does need to be taken seriously…)
The Hacking stuff, Nate, is really about norms, statistics and chance, but it’s also about the engendering particular kinds of subjects, which I suspect will, again, have to do with capital… but I need to spend a bit more time thinking about that, and reading up. It’s more that Hacking has deployed Foucault’s conception of biopower in relation to… well, other things, so it might offer a useful way into thinking about it explicitly in relation to labour. I’ll let you know if I remember something specific. Though I think ‘The Taming of Chance’ might offer some way into thinking about the relation between the creation of substitutable subjects in systems of production, and statistical norms… but I’d have to have a closer look.
Also, I know this is long, but just a final thing: I picked up Rabinow and Dreyfus’ book “Michael Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics” today (‘picked up’ as in looked at, not as in purchased). It seems to spend a lot of time talking about biopower and biopolitics, and winds up with Foucault’s response (the book’s old, and he was still alive :-)). Rabinow is pretty big in using ideas of biopolitics to talk about new productions around developing biotech, so he knows his stuff (even if I tend to disagree with him on some stuff) and Dreyfus… well… I know the name a lot, so he must be famous 😉 And of course, the lectures which are on their way should be good… if not exactly the kind of thing I *don’t* want coming out in the direct aftermath of the thesis!
Thanks for this engagement, all, it’s interesting…! 🙂 Sorry to be so long-winded.
Hi Kids
Negri positions biopolitics as something that is of both Empire and Multitude – can we speak of a biopower of the Multitude? That sounds like a nonsense to me. Or is it when we exist in the society of control/ real subsumption, when subjectivity not only enables work but is directly put to work that we are then saturated in a relationship of biopower; thus all politics must become biopolitical?
rebel love
Dave
After thinking above the above at work ( a call centre) I realised that i had made an error. Negri argues that both the work and the struggle of the multitude ( both as flesh – that is as ruled by capital; and as body – its co-operative capacities realised autonomously around the common) are biopolitical. That is, in our work we work producing embodied relationships as we do in our struggles – since struggle (exodus) is for Negri the realisation of activity that we carry out for capital under our own control.
Big Hugs
dave
hi Dave,
I think we’ve argued a bit about this by email, haven’t we? I’m not as taken with the control society/real subsumption of society narrative as you are. I will say, the final line of your last comment really crystallizes things for me – the realization of activity for ourselves that we currently do for capital. That is I think part of the disconnect for me w/ all that stuff these days.
cheers,
Nate
please ignore typos…
Hi Nate, i can’t remember arguing about it….when was that? But yeah Negri has no real understanding of alienation – and this weakens his critique of capitalism. Though I think it is hard to articulate both our power against capital and the depth of our alienation. Virno also lacks a critique of alienation but his casting of our condition as “ambiguous” means he misses some of Negri’s pitfalls.
cheers
Dave
hi Dave,
I may be confused, I’ve argued about real subsumption with so many friends and comrades… 🙂
In a nutshell, in your earlier comment you spoke of “when subjectivity not only enables work but is directly put to work.” Like your line in comment 12, I think you capture a Negri/post-operaismo point really well here. To me the claim doesn’t hold in some way which can be used to specify the present from the past. That’s not to say nothing’s changed, just that I don’t think “subjectivity put to work now vs before when it wasn’t” is the right distinction to undertand what has and hasn’t changed. Likewise w/ Negri’s occasional claim that reproduction is productive nowadays. It’s the “nowadays” that bugs me. I wrote about this early on in the life of this blog somewhat, if you’re interested. http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2005/10/23/is-up-with-the-insistence-on-the-new/
There was a good article in the Commoner related to this stuff a while back too I think, by Massimiliano Tomba, about periodization in post-operaismo. Right I raelly need to get to bed. More soon, and I’ll try to get to the Zizek soon, I keep forgetting that.
xo,
Nate