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'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: modernity and biopolitics « Previous | |Next »
May 25, 2004

Hardt and Negri end the section of biopower in the society of control on a flourish. They say:


"From this point of view, the biopolitical context of the new paradigm is completely central to our analysis. This is what presents power with an alternative, not only between obedience and disobedience, or between formal political participation and refusal, but also along the entire range of life and death, wealth and poverty, production and social reproduction, and so forth. Given the great difficulties the new notion of right has in representing this dimension of the power of Empire, and given its inability to touch biopower concretely in all its material aspects, imperial right can at best only partially represent the underlying design of the new constitution of world order, and cannot really grasp the motor that sets it in motion. Our analysis must focus its attention rather on the productive dimension of biopower."

So right ineeds to be supplemented with biopower if we are to grasp the motion of the world order. Hence Foucault's category has been appropriated. If I am reading this text right--as a categorical analysis--- then the next move would be to highlight the limitations of the old categories.

And this is what we find in the next section on the production of life. They say that even though Foucault had powerfully grasped the biopolitical horizon of society and defined it as a field of immanence he never:


"... succeeded in pulling his thought away from that structuralist epistemology that guided his research from the beginning. By structuralist epistemology here we mean the reinvention of a functionalist analysis in the realm of the human sciences, a method that effectively sacrifices the dynamic of the system, the creative temporality of its movements, and the ontological substance of cultural and social reproduction....In fact, if at this point we were to ask Foucault who or what drives the system, or rather, who is the "bios," his response would be ineffable, or nothing at all. What Foucault fails to grasp finally are the real dynamics of production in biopolitical society."

What Foucault's work disclosed though is how the biopolitical context was progressively put at the service of capitalist accumulation in the development of modern liberal capitalist society. He shifts the focus awaay marxist acounts that placed an emphasis on the control of society over individuals through consciousness or ideologyby highlighting the importance of the body. In liberal capitalist society it is biopolitics that is most important.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:59 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)
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