Thought-Factory.net Philosophical Conversations Public Opinion philosophy.com Junk for code
hegel
"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
RECENT ENTRIES
SEARCH
ARCHIVES
Library
Links - weblogs
Links - Political Rationalities
Links - Resources: Philosophy
Public Discussion
Resources
Cafe Philosophy
Philosophy Centres
Links - Resources: Other
Links - Web Connections
Other
www.thought-factory.net
'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Empire: biopolitical production « Previous | |Next »
May 28, 2004

In Empire Hardt and Negri understand their task to be one of building on:

"...these partially successful attempts to recognize the potential of biopolitical production. Precisely by bringing together coherently the different defining characteristics of the biopolitical context that we have described up to this point, and leading them back to the ontology of production, we will be able to identify the new figure of the collective biopolitical body, which may nonetheless remain as contradictory as it is paradoxical."

It is a mouthful, isn't it. You can see why there is a concern about the process of "assemblage", or the technique of ripping conceptual ideas away from their historical contexts.

I guess the "potential of biopolitical production points to the way that the new form of global sovereignty, which knows mobile boundaries, undercuts, the concept of the people as representation and as unity within the nation state. We have to rethink the way that we conceptualize "the people" as a population within a nation state.

This re-conceptualization takes us beyond economics with its inter-capitalistic competition that results in overcapacity and overproduction, unemployment and de-industrialization combined with the global market's inability to self-govern then we have something along the lines of a perpetual crisis in the global economy. If we accept that account (eg., Robert Brenner’s “The Economics of Global Turbulence” in New Left Review, 1998), then we need to consider the inherent social implications of the free capital flows of the global capitalist system operating in an essentially unplanned, uncoordinated and ruthlessly competitive manner.

This takes us beyond the economic focused approaches to global governance based around capital flows and the Anglo-Saxon versus Asian capitalism of a Robert Wade.

The social implications---massive dislocation, unemployment, poverty and suburban wastelands---within nation states need to be politically managed. So the biopolitical context becomes important, if not crucial. It refers to the management or governance of our subjectivity. That is what neo-liberalism, as a mode of governance, has been doing. This mode of governance has being shaping us so that we leave the world of citizenship and social democracy behind, and enter the turbulent world of the global market as consumers and producers.

What is being developed here in Empire is a theoretical framework relevant to the current period of global neo-liberalism and international capitalism.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:56 PM | | Comments (0)
Comments