Subject: Re: AUT: RE: biopolitics, was party form/leninism
Date: Sat, 02 Aug 2003 13:40:53 -0400


Hi Angela and everyone-

That's helpful, thanks. I don't full grasp the idea of 'reproductive labor' 
though in my limited encoutner I quite like the idea, the same goes with 
'social capital' (my reading time is very limited and almost always found on 
the fly). Anyway, this is interesting and will help me puzzle through this 
stuff.

I'm still not clear on what the difference is between 'biopower' and 
'biopolitics', I need to reread the section in Empire on biopolitical 
production. My grasp of Foucault is slim, but as I understand it Negri's 
perspective is not (or not solely?) that of the management from above of 
life, but (also?) 'from below'.
Below is a quote on the relationship between Foucault and Negri from Michael 
Hardt's dissertation that some folks might find helpful. I did. It's a 
little long, my apologies. I don't fully understand all the terms (and find 
some of them cumbersome) but I think the point is relatively clear that 
Negri (in Hardt's view anyway) operates a kind of inversion of Foucault.

As to representational politics, I'll have to dig up some quotes (or maybe 
I'm just mis-remembering) but I was under the impression that for Negri for 
some reason representational politics are particularly ineffective or are 
specifically undermined given present conditions of biopolitical production. 
I can see the first, that representational politics don't get us what we 
want but I don't see why this is unique to 'biopolitics'. As to the second, 
there have been and are big union organizing drives here in the US around 
care work - nursing, home healthcare, care work in institutions for the 
mentally ill or developmentally disabled, etc (this may be more of my mixing 
the to me half-understood concepts of 'biopolitics' and reproduction but) to 
my knowledge these campaigns haven't been much less successful than other 
unionization campaigns

best wishes,
Nate



"In most of Foucault's work, the dispositifs of power seem to be presented 
as natura naturans (the
constitutive agent) and social subjects are restricted to the role of natura 
naturata (constituted and determined agents).  This is where Negri seeks to 
exercise the inversion of Foucauldian ontology,
bringing the subject to the position of natura naturans.  In other words, 
Negri sees the Foucauldian process of the positive constitution of being as 
an opportunity for subjective intervention.  Through our
collective practice and labor, through our power we can construct a branch 
of the complex network of our being.  ...
Through the organization of our collective practice, of our collective 
labor, we are constructing
a small but very real segment of our being.  Through social practice we can 
intervene in the constitution of our nature and thus struggle to determine 
the horizons of our thoughts and actions, of our desires
and pleasures.  ...
Like Foucault's, Negri's ontology is political in that it has a positive 
foundation in the material and historical field of force that is constituted 
by the exercise of power.  Negri, however, tries to
find the means whereby social subjects intervene in this process of 
ontological constitution through the organization of their practices. 
Political organization, in Negri's framework, becomes the real organization 
of being."
from dissertation section http://www.duke.edu/~hardt/Dissertation/CONST2.htm
entire dissertation http://www.duke.edu/~hardt/Dissertation.html





Angela:

Crudely, for Foucault, the term specifies the moment when
"living human beings" are constituted as a population by
governmental practices around sanitation, health care,
demographics (including racial classifications and national
typologies for example), and so on.  In that sense, it's not
exactly commensurate with the concept of the labour of
reproduction, but is related -- though more in the sense of
discerning an historical point where the management of
populations and specifically *the politicisation of life* by
governments emerges as a 'problem', locus of conflict,
statements, assertions, a range of techniques for its
management, etc.  Maybe think about the emergence of social
capital, and the parallel/indistinguishable emergence of a
terrain of social policy, rather than 'labour of reprodn'.

For Agamben, the interest in biopolitics is more
specifically about the emergence of the sovereignty of the
nation-state, a citizenship constituted by birth, and the
assertion of rights granted by birth (birthright).
Agamben's big idea is that certain people are excluded from
the terrain of rights by being included (categorised) within
the terrain of biopolitics as non-citizens.  Without that
formulation, Agamben would be just another left-liberal
calling for the expansion of rights, inclusion, etc.  With
that formulation, which is to say, staying close to
Foucault, he rather insists that the denial of rights -- the
concentration camp, the state of being an 'unlawful
non-citizen' -- is inherent to the construction of
sovereignty.

As for representational politics, I guess the link would
have much to do with the connection between demographics and
the nation-state; but I don't see that a critique of
representational politics is entirely dependant upon the
adoption of a crit of biopolitics, even if it is related.
I'm not sure what prior posts were getting at tho.

Angela

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