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:
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