From: "Nate Holdren" <nateholdren-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: AUT: Virno
Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2003 01:36:27 -0500


hey all, I thought this might be of interest. It's a small piece of an 
interview with Paolo Virno. The spanish version is at

http://www.nodo50.org/ts/editorial/dossierlecturasvirno.rtf%202.pdf

The translation is by me, as are any errors.

best,
Nate


Agamben is a thinker of great value but also, in my opinion, a thinker with 
no political vocation. Then, when Agamben speaks of the biopolitcal he has 
the tendency to transform it into an ontological category with value already 
since the archaic Roman right. And, in this, in my opinon, he is very 
wrong-headed. The problem is, I believe, that the biopolitical is only and 
effect derived from the concept of labor-power. When there is a commodity 
that is called labor-power it is already implicitly the 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 it is transformed into a commodity the potential, then, it is 
necessary to govern the living body that mantains 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 - but 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 the exclamation point, a word that carried 
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 has fear 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 taht the use of the term biopolitics some 
times is a consolatory use, like the cry of a child, when what serves us 
are, in all cases, instruments of work and not progaganda words.
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/spoons/archive_msg.pl?file=aut-op-
sy.archive/aut-op-sy.0312&msgnum=49&start=5635&end=5710

discussion
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/spoons/archive1.pl?list=aut-op-
sy.archive/aut-op-sy.0312


here is an interesting one ' bare life ' ala agamben and the war, the authors 
has turned out to be mistaken in terms on american solidier casualities in 
the 'occupation.' 

- 
*The Conflict of Everyday Life – Terms of War in the C21* 

G e n e r a l - I n t e l l i g e n c e - G r o u p [www.g-i-g.org] 

Jamie King & Matthew Hyland, May 2003 

*1. The military conditioning of bare life* 

_Military intelligence isn't what it used to be / but so what, human 
intelligence isn't what it used to be either_ - John Cale, Sabotage 

In their recent 'Essay Addressed to the U.S. Anti-war Movement', the Midnight 
Notes collective argue that one of the strategic weaknesses of the Bush 
Administration's foreign policy is in 'its assumption that U.S. soldiers will 
not be casualties in the coming wars of neoliberalism.'[1] It seems unlikely, 
however, that the Administration, schooled in its Iraq campaign by Israeli 
armed forces well used to the process of attrition involved in permanently 
occupying foreign territory, assumes any such thing. There have been thousands 
of deaths of Israeli occupationists, and hundreds of deaths of American 
occupationists in Iraq so far. It also seems unlikely that the Administration 
deludes itself this figure won't be far higher by the time its job is done. 

The problem for the U.S. Administration lies not in coming to terms with the 
fact of attrition in everwar, but in the need to conceal these deaths from its 
electorate, or more precisely to devalorise them. This cannot be achieved 
solely by manipulating statistics and suppressing information from the 
battlefield. Those established techniques are supplemented by the outsourcing 
of nearly all attrition on the American and allied side to local militias and 
privately contracted mercenaries. Life or death within these groups is exactly 
as immaterial in 'homeland' politics as that of the 'unlawful combatants' held 
in the US Naval facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, 'Camp X-Ray'. Bodies of 
these three kinds -- those of provisional prisoners, 'allied' militias and 
Private Military Contractors (PMCs) -- can be designated, following Giorgio 
Agamben, as 'bare' or 'sacred' life[2]. Like the Homo Sacer ('sacred man') in 
Roman law, this life is excluded from the field of the political (i.e. from 
citizenship): liable to be killed at any time, but, being drained of value in 
this way, unable to be sacrificed. Conceded no subjective reality, 'sacred' 
life survives as 'bare' organic material, to be disposed of at what 
administrative power decides is its convenience. 

The definition applies in an obvious way to the Camp X-Ray detainees. The 
living law of Infinite Justice deems them 'unlawful combatants', unprotected by 
a Geneva Convention in which no such category exists. Accordingly, under last 
year's US Patriot Act or this year's Patriot II, their trials are exempt from 
media scrutiny and from the 'safeguards' of judicial independence. The Patriot 
Acts allow for evidence to be withheld from the accused and his or her lawyers, 
and for the death sentence to be imposed by a simple majority of the military 
officers making up the tribunal. Shackled in individual 6-by-8-foot concrete 
and chain-link fencing cages, just able to stand upright, shaved, completely 
exposed to the elements, the prisoners are held in a state of physical 
suspension perfectly corresponding to their political and juridical status. As 
bare life, outside the scope of international conventions, they subsist in a 
state of absolute exception. Poised between orders, survival wholly contingent 
on their captors' sovereign decision, their position is formally identical with 
that of the internees in Nazi concentration camps. 

So much for devalorising the deaths of those who die fighting for the 'other 
side'[3]. The beginnings of an approach to the more difficult problem of 
disposing of deaths on 'our' side can be seen in the meshed strategies of Shock 
& Awe and Rapid Dominance, associated with Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks' 
plan for the 2003 Iraq campaign. This 'Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) not 
only schedules destruction on a scale more 'disheartening' than that of 
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it proposes means to achieve it while keeping the 
number of 'official' American casualities to a statistically negligible 
minimum, as required by the ornamentalisation of Western life that makes the 
death of any American citizen, soldier or no, an 'unthinkable' and 'tragic' 
loss. Fighter pilots are rarely shot down on carpet bombing missions, and 
Special Forces deployed to 'take out' key targets do so in a media-controlled 
environment so that the public only gets to hear about the casualties it's 
cleared to. Meanwhile the relatively tiny quantity of necessary 'traditional' 
losses are treated with inflated pomp and circumstance, becoming sacrificial 
poster-children for ornmamental life. When the RMA is done, the U.S. Infantry 
will only fight on the ground as a symbolic act. Just enough ordinary soldiers 
will die to allow properly tragic public honouring ceremonies to take place; 
the rest will be kept in waiting with the vacuum-packed bouquets for the 
victory drive-by. This political strategy is entirely dependent on the 
purchasing of local militias to do the real dirty work and the hiring of PMCs 
to mop up the rest of the labour deemed incompatible with the prevailing 
spectacular hallucination of war. 

Wade and Ullman, authors of Shock & Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, 
see 'tommorow's soldier' as 'more of an entrepreneur', 'wired to the 
max', 'mobile', 'technologically empowered', 'a free agent, not a blunt 
instrument'[4]. They don't mention the most salient quality of PMC workers: 
they are little more than 'economic' factors of the free market; their use is 
predicated on the tacit understanding that the mercenary is expendable in the 
process of occupation. Another form of bare life, PMC actors may acceptably 
fall to their own amphetamine-addled 'friendly' fire, or be disinherited in the 
case that an 'operation' goes wrong and someone other than another 'unlawful' 
combatant is dispatched. The ideal is for bare life to take bare life: a zero-
sum game in which nothing is sacrificed. 

That the post-Clausewitzian mercenaries run by companies like Dyncorp, winner 
of the contract to keep the post-conquest 'peace' in Iraq, are given such a fat 
pay packet and long leash is no error or oversight. The role of sacred man they 
assume is set to become absolutely central to the machinery of everwar. 
Fighting outside of the Geneva Convention or any other juridical order, PMCs 
are the true inheritors of the military's latest Revolution. The U.S. 
Administration has already perceived that Dyncorp 'soldiers' are simply not 
subjects on the same level as a U.S. Infantryman. The tendency to present such 
forces as technologically 'cutting-edge' fighting machines will redouble, 
precisely because machines are disposable in the maintenance-through policing 
of Enduring crisis. 

Clearly, then, Midnight Notes' proposal to base war-resistance on a forecast of 
casualties is mistaken. As a strategy for galvanising resistance, drawing 
attention to Allied loss of life will offer diminishing returns. Traditional 
losses are the legacy of an order under revision; further invigorating the 
already frantic public concern about home losses will only accelerate the 
Administration's efforts to negate them. The Revolution in Military Affairs, 
that is to say, would effectively be aided by such an oppositional strategy. 

*2. Bare Life Meets Bare Labour* 

_A farce of 'anthropology' played out and replayed in history: provisional 
victors re-member the narrowly vanquished as 'undead', Qlippoth, manifestations 
without subject. Retrospectively reduced to brute corporeality, to bare, 
objective, 'sacred' life._ - De Selby, Blaggard Shell 

The same PMCs are also used to produce order in such 'soft' war zones as 
Colombia and Argentina. Once more, in these places, they meet their mirror. 
Here the transformation of the working class into bare life has been ongoing 
for some time, showing the concrete sense of Marx's axiom that 'labour is 
absolute poverty as object, on one side, and is, on the other side, the general 
possibility of wealth as subject and as activity.'[5]The subsumption of living 
under objectified labour (or 'fixed capital') is advanced to an unprecented 
degree, leaving labour as a 'conscious organ...scattered among the individual 
living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system'[6], its individual 
and collective subjectivities shattered by several simultaneous assaults. 

First, regional trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade 
Agreement (NAFTA) and the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) are part 
of a process that displaces workers from their traditional economies. In a 
process of 'creative destruction', an influx of cheap foreign produce 
demolishes local economies and extirpates entire communities from their 
enviroments, transforming them into itinerant 'inputs' for investment. 
Throughout Latin America the working class has undergone such displacements as 
the FTAA has allowed massively subsidised U.S. corn to destroy local 
agricultural economies. As Conrad Herold points out in a recent essay for Mute 
magazine, last year the Bush Administration bestowed on national corporate 
agriculture its largest ever subsidies, worth 40 billion dollars. As a result, 
U.S. corn can be sold in South America for far less than the cost of production 
and shipping.[7] 
... cont'd http://www.kein.org/keinwiki/ConflictEverday

" Franco Berardi "Bifo" (Italy)

  Philosopher and political activist since the days of autonomia and Radio 
Alice. Co-founder of Rekombinant, a web environment of informal communication 
that does not add up to identity. Author of numerous books, including 
Cyberpunk, The Panther and the Rhizome, Politics of Mutation, Philosophy and 
Politics in the Twilight of Modernity, and The Factory of Unhappiness. 
  
Contact: 
lop1912-AT-iperbole.bologna.it 

URL:
Rekombinant : www.rekombinant.it   "

" COGNITARIAT AND SEMIOKAPITAL

Franco Berardi "Bifo" interviewed by Matt Fuller & snafu-AT-kyuzz.org

... An epidemic of panic is spreading throughout the circuits of the social 
brain. An epidemic of depression is following the outbreak of panic. The 
current crisis of the new economy has to be seen as consequence of this nervous 
breakdown. Once upon a time Marx spoke about overproduction, meaning the excess 
of available goods that could not be absorbed by the social market. Nowadays it 
is the social brain that is assaulted by an overwhelming supply of attention-
demanding goods. This is why the social factory has become the factory of 
unhappiness: the assembly line of net-production is directly exploiting the 
emotional energy of the virtual class. We are now beginning to become aware of 
it, so we are able to recognize ourselves as cognitarians. Flesh, body, desire, 
in permanent electrocution. ... "

-- 
sig/
* - / \ | ^ ^^^^ 
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