Dear Richard,
sorry for taking long to reply and coming out with a short one in the
end. I was puzzled by the moderating email and had to reflect on the
difference between forums and mailing lists for a while. I haven't
solved the puzzle yet I decided to answer you here anyway, at the risk
of disturbing 698 mailboxes with an unreal discussion.
First of all, thanks a lot for what you say about G-O, and for using the
resources.
The quote from Empire links two separate passages so I'll take them
separately.
"What Foucault fails to grasp finally are the real dynamics of
> production in biopolitical society…
Negri and Hardt agree with Foucault's idea that wherever there are
productive relations, there are also communicative relations and power
relations. In fact I think Empire went a long way to unravel these
dynamics. I am aware of Hardt's dismissal of Foucault's work as too
'trapped in structuralist ontology', and disagree with his
interpretation. But I appreciate Negri's take on Foucault (see passage
pasted below).
The second quote is from their chapter on 'corporations and
communications' - the basic idea that financial and industrial powers
shape subjectivities- the production of the producer. The bee analogy I
presume refers more to Deleuze&Guattari than Marx - the hive as a smart
machine, not the bee as inferior to the architect. I find it silly:
who's the queen bee anyway.
And finally, so long as life is a struggle, resistance is creation.
But what's your answer to your question?
Arianna
Negri on Foucault
(apologies for lack of reference - it comes from an old file which I
must have translated some years ago maybe from some archive somewhere in
Rome)
"Michel Foucault is undoubtedly the one who has made the most
substantial progress in defining a concept of power that, in its
relationship to the subject, allows for constructive dimensions and
great openings. In Foucault, humanity appears as a set of resistances
that release (outside any finalism that is not an expression of life
itself and its reproduction) an absolute power of liberation. Life is
liberated in humanity and opposes anything that encloses it and
imprisons it. What we need to stress here is that the relationship
between subject and procedure is free. In other words, after
demonstrating how power can subjugate humanity to the point of making it
function as a cog of a totalitarian machine (we could accept this
specific use of the term totalitarianism), Foucault shows instead how
the constitutive process running through life, biopolitics and biopower,
is an absolute (and not totalitarian) movement. This movement is
absolute because it is absolutely free from determinations that are not
internal to the action of liberation, to the vital assemblage (agencement).
From this standpoint, which allows us to ground the question of the
constituent subject, Foucault makes us go even further. Indeed, he shows
us that the subject is first of all strength, power, production.
Certainly, the subject can be reduced to a pure phantom, a residue of
the totality of the system of repression. Yet how productive it still
is, even in this reductive horizon and imprisoned within these
mechanisms! It is productive because on this limit the subject goes back
onto itself and rediscovers there the vital principle. Second, besides
being strength, the subject is also action, a time of action and
freedom, an assemblage - an open one because no teleology conditions or
prefigures it. Foucault critically performs a process that assumes the
disarticulation of the real and then, constructively, reopens a process
that treats this disarticulation as a positive condition. What was a
necessary path paves the way to a process of freedom. This is
essentially the same process we find in Spinoza. Third, Foucault
develops the paradigm of subjectivity as the place of the recomposition
of resistance and of public space. Here we are confronted with a figure
of the subject that formally and methodologically has characteristics
adequate to absolute procedure. In effect this subject is strength,
time, and constitution: it is the strength of producing constitutive
trajectories; it is time that is in no way predetermined; and it is thus
a singular constitution. When this critique has destroyed the prisons of
constituted power; it identifies itself as ontological strength,
constituent power capable of producing absolute events. The politics is
here production, production par excellence, collective and
non-teleological. Innovation constitutes the political; constitution
cannot but be constant innovation. What Arendt tried to articulate in
terms of the inessentiality of liberal politics as the alternative to an
Heideggerian void of being Foucault constructs in the fullness of being,
as an apparatus of positive freedom. The social, negated by Arendt as
the suffocation of the political, reveals itself as the space of
biopolitics - of that human radical nature of the political that
constituent power reveals in its absoluteness."
Richard Bailey wrote:
Hi Arianna,
Thanks for the links, I have visited G-O many times, it is a wonderful
resource. My thoughts on Negri and Foucault are necessarily tentative..
But I refer specifically to the following passage in Empire:
"What Foucault fails to grasp finally are the real dynamics of
production in biopolitical society… In the biopolitical sphere, life is
made to work for production and production is made to work for life. It
is a great hive in which the queen bee continuously oversees production
and reproduction. The deeper the analysis goes, the more it finds at
increasing levels of intensity the interlinking assemblages of
interactive relationships."
I read this as reconfiguring Focuault's work on biopower in the light of
work on the social factory and real subsumption that has come out of
operaismo. I would be interested to read your interpretation of this
passage.
I have another question that I keep coming back to as well. Your wrote
"the main issue with operaismo and foucault is that resistance comes
first". I agree with this assessment but wonder what then is the basis
of resistance?
Richard