File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2004/postanarchism.0410, message 16


Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 13:26:10 -0000 (GMT)
Subject: [postanarchism] Negri Seminar: A Contribution on Foucault
From: "stevphen shukaitis" <stevphen-AT-mutualaid.org>


A contribution on Foucault
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpnegri14.htm

Toni Negri

samedi 9 octobre 2004.


Seminar: Transformations of work and crisis of the political economy
(provisional title).

Douze séminaires d’octobre à juin 2004/5: 1 par mois. 2 pour les mois
d’octobre, mars et mai. Lieu: Université de Paris 1 Panthéon -Sorbonne 5,
Place du Panthéon 75005, Paris Salle 216, 2ème étage de 19h30 à 21h30.
Coordination et animation du séminaire assurée par: A. Negri, A. Querrien,
B. Holmes, C. Vercellone, M. Lazzarato, P.Elicio, P.Dieuaide, R. Moneta.


Question 1: Are Foucault's analyses of actualité useful to understand the
movement of societies? In which fields does it seem to you it that they
should be renewed, readjusted, continued?


Answer 1: Foucault's work is a strange machine, it actually makes it
impossible to think of history as other than present history. Probably, a
great deal of what Foucault wrote (as Deleuze rightly underlined) should
be rewritten today. What is astonishing - and concerning -, is that he
never ceases to seek, he makes approximations, he deconstructs, he
formulates hypotheses, he imagines, he makes analogies and tells fables,
he launches concepts, withdraws them or modifies them… His is a thought of
a formidable inventiveness. But this is not its essence: I believe that
his method is fundamental, because it enables him to study and describe at
the same time the movement from the past to the present and that from the
present to the future. It is a method of transition where the present
represents the center. Foucault is there, between the two, neither in the
past where he does archaeology, nor in the future whose image he sometimes
sketches - ““comme à la limite de la mer un visage sur le sable”” -. It is
starting from the present that it is possible to distinguish other times.
Foucault has often been reproached for the scientific legitimacy of his
periodizations: we I can understand the historians, but at the same time,
I would want to say that this is not a real problem: Foucault is where the
questioning lies, which always originates in his own time.
Historical analysis, with Foucault, thus becomes an action, knowledge of
the past becomes a genealogy, the future perspective becomes a dispositif.
For those who come from the militant Marxism of the 1960s (but not from
the dogmatic and caricatural traditions of the Second and Third
International), Foucault's point of view is obviously perceived as
absolutely legitimate: it corresponds to the perception of the event, of
the struggles and of the joy of taking risks outside of all necessity and
pre-established teleology. In Foucault's thought, Marxism is completely
dismantled at the level of analysis of power relations and historical
teleology, of the refusal of historicism or of a certain positivism; but
at the same time, Marxism is also reinvented and remodelled on the
perspective of the movements and struggles, i.e. actually on the reality
of the subjects of these movements and struggles: because to know is to
produce subjectivity.

But before going any further, I would like to go back for a moment. It is
common to distinguish three 'Foucaults': up to the end of the Sixties, the
study of the emergence of the discourse of the human sciences, i.e. that
which he defines an archaeology of knowledge and of its economy in the
last three centuries, and a great reading of Western modernity through the
concept of épistème; then, in the Seventies, the researches on the
relationship between knowledges and powers, on the emergence of
disciplines, control and biopowers, the norm and biopolitics, which is
both a general analytic of power and an attempt to trace the history of
the development of the concept of sovereignty from its emergence in
political theory until our days; and finally, in the Eighties, the
analysis of the processes of subjectivation under the double perspective
of the aesthetic relation to the oneself and of the political relation to
others - but undoubtedly they are parts of one investigation: that on the
crossing of the aesthetics of the self and of the political concern
(care), which is what is also renowned as ethics.

Actually, I do not know if we can distinguish three Foucault’s, nor even
two, since before the publication of Dits et Ecrits and the Courses at the
Collège of France, the whole of the last Foucault was often not
considered. It seems to me indeed that the three themes Foucault focussed
on are perfectly continuous and coherent - coherent in so fare as they
form a unitary and continuous theoretical production.

What changes is probably the specificity of the historical conditions and
the political needs with which Foucault is confronted and which absolutely
determine the fields of his interests. On this assumption, - and I tell
you in my own words, in the hope that they could have been Foucault's
words too - to assume the Foucauldian perspective also entails putting a
style of thought, identified as the genealogy of the present and always
open in so far as it deals with the production of subjectivity, in touch
with a given historical situation. And this given historical situation is
a historical reality of power relations. Foucault often repeats this, when
he talks about his passion for archives, and about the fact that the
emotion of reading them stems from what they tell us about fragments of
existence: existence, whether past or present, delivered by yellowed
papers or lived from day to day, is always an encounter with power - it is
nothing but that, but that in itself is enormous.

When Foucault starts to work on the shift between the end of the XVIIIth
and the beginning of the XIXth century, i.e. in Surveiller et Punir, he is
confronted with a specific dimension of power relations, dispositifs and
strategies related to it, in other words he is actually confronted with a
kind of power relations that are completely articulated on the development
of capitalism. The latter entails a total investment of life insofar as
the constitution of a labor force, on the one hand, and the requirements
for profitability of production of the other, require it. Power has become
biopower. However it is true that even though Foucault uses thereafter the
model of biopowers in his attempt to outline a critical ontology of the
present, you will seek in vain analyses devoted to the development of
capitalism and to the determination of the passage from the Welfarestate
to its crisis, from the Fordist to the Post-Fordist organization of
labour, from the Keynesian principles to those of neo-liberal
macro-economic theory. But it is also true that in his simple definition
of the shift from the regime of discipline to that of control at the
beginning of the XIXth century, we can already understand that the
post-modern does not represent a withdrawal of the State domination on
social labour, but it is rather an improvement of its control over life.

Foucault develops this intuition everywhere, as if the analysis of the
passage to the post-industrial era constituted the central element of his
thought, even though he never speaks about it directly. Outside of the
material determination of this present and of the transition that it
embodied, we cannot conceive the project of a genealogy of the present,
which entirely structures his relation to the past at the beginning of the
Seventies, nor can we think of his idea of production of subjectivity
which permits, from within power, to modify and weaken its functioning as
much as to create new subjectivities. Foucault has; I believe, the
extraordinary intuition of defining the shift from modern politics to
post-modern biopolitics.

For Foucault, the concept of politics - and that of action in a
biopolitical context - radically differs both from the conclusions of Max
Weber and his epigones of the nineteenth century, and from modern
conceptions of power (Kelsen, Schmitt, etc.). Foucault had probably been
sensitive to their theses - but my impression is that in 1968 the
framework changes radically, and Foucault cannot help taking it into
account. For those like us, who keep using Foucault in spite of him and
beyond him - and his gift to us was of an extraordinary generosity because
Foucault had a generous thought, which is rather rare-, there is nothing
to renew or correct in his theorizations: it is sufficient to prolong his
intuitions on the production of subjectivity and on its implications.

For instance, when Foucault, Guattari and Deleuze support the struggles on
the prison question in the Seventies, they build a new relationship
between knowledge and power: this relation does not only relate to the
situation in the prisons but also to the whole of the situations where it
is possible to follow the same model to develop spaces of freedom, small
strategies of torsion of power from within power, the recovery of one's
own and of collective subjectivity, the invention of new forms of
community of life and struggle - in short: what we call subversion.
Foucault is not only great for accomplishing a remarkable analytic of
power, for his methodological enlightening ideas, or for the new way in
which he crossed philosophy and history with the concern for the present.
He left us intuitions that we continue to find valid; in particular, he
redefined the space of political and social struggles and the figure of
the revolutionary subjects in relation to “classical” Marxism: the
revolution, for Foucault, is not - or in any case not only - a prospect of
liberation, it is a practice of freedom. It is the production of oneself
with others in struggles, it is innovation, the invention of languages and
networks, it is to produce and to reappropriate the value of living
labour. It is to booby-trap capitalism from within (C’est piéger le
capitalisme de l’intérieur?- tr.).

continued at http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpnegri14.htm

   

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