Wednesday, April 27, 2005
(2:11 PM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
power, Power, wonder working Biopower pt. 2
[Three things by way of preface:1. Is there a reason we've been alphabetized out of our sister site status over at à Gauche?
2. I'm sticking with 'old' even though the rocking chair and big beard was not convincing enough for you Jared. You'll just have to think 'old testament' every time you see 'old'. The argument for surfer ('that's the way I remember you best') was not convincing. I mean, do you really want to be known as '
3. This morning, long after I'd finished writing the post below, I discovered what must be the conceptual heart of the Hardto-Negrian misreading of Foucault on biopower. I'll only say a few words since it would take a long, long time to elaborate, and since this post is generally conceived to be an engagement with what I find helpful in Negri. In an interview with Thomas Dunn, Hardt suggests that while Foucault's "notion of biopower is concieved only from above" he and Negri are "attempt[ing] to formulate instead a notion of biopower from below, that is, a power by which the multitude itself rules over life." Apparently, the entire first issue ("Biopolitique et Biopouvoir") of the journal Multitudes is dedicated to perpetuating this error. Simply put, the enormity and consequences of this mistake almost cannot be overstated. Given the crytpic nature of Foucault's take on biopower in History of Sexuality v. 1, misunderstanding is in fact understandable. However, the nature of this misunderstanding is distressing to say the least. When does Foucault ever concieve of anything only from above? The whole point of HS v.1 is to 'cut off the head of the king' in power analyses. And once one has access to Society Must Be Defended, the embarassment of this erroneous reading become ever more pronounced. For Foucault, the very genesis of biopower is from below. The locomotive of biopower is almost totally from below. In fact, the whole project of biopower is directed toward the protection of the 'from below'. ... must stop now!]
... So now, in more mundane fashion than pt. 1 I think, to Discard's Negri post and then back to Schiavo briefly.
While I launched a criticism of h/n on biopower in pt. 1, I would like to start with a fundamental agreement I have with Negri. Discard points to the driving engine of Negri's thought as the distinction between constitutive power and constituted Power (note case diff. between power/Power). The latter is always parasitic on the former and must continually seek to capture the former which is both politically and ontologically prior. My understanding of power (particularly biopower), law, etc. can easily accomodate such an insight. In fact, I very much like it and think it helps to illuminate what the project I've been advocating is all about. To be frank, I believe it has offered a way to think philosophically around the logic of suicide that I (following Miller and Deleuze) have suggested as the endpoint of Foucault's understanding of biopower.
To unpack: The otherwise extraordinarily helpful secondary source that Amish Lovelock pointed us to in the comments to pt. 1, asserts that h/n's conception of biopower is total where Foucault's leaves some room for an outside. Nonsense. Foucault's understanding of biopower is so thoroughgoing that the only way to escape is death: "Now it is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power established its dominion; death is power's limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most 'private.'" (HS v.1 p.138 emphasis added). The totalizing hegemony of biopower (Foucault's less sanguine conception of it, that is) might be cracked open, however, if the power/Power distinction is put to work in a certain way. As I see it (and I'll continue reading Negri and h/n more thoroughly this summer to be sure), the dominant metaphors in Negrian power analysis have to do with excess, overflow, etc. So, to use the example of a mighty river, we might say that Negri's suggestion is that the banks of Power simply cannot always contain the flow of power. There must be at least periodic seasons of flooding where power overwhelms to directive influence of Power. Fair enough. But what if we move in a slightly different manner? What if the great task before us is to redirect Power's feeder streams such that the mighty river should be reduced to a harmless creek or be dried up altogether (having, as it does, no ultimate source of its own)?.
That is how I think we might concieve of torah as a universal law from below (and the same could also be asserted, perforce, for other non-statist forms of law). Since I've said more than enough on this score to date, let me rather speak in terms of alternate currencies.
To push this in terms of alternate currency may be helpful also since it more readily allows us to use the Marxist-Negrian language of labor-power. What I would like to advocate here is a concerted effort to substantially reduce the flow of nation-state or Empire's capital by way of labor-power's refusal to be bought solely in terms of, say, the American dollar. Initially, we might say that this includes worker demands for non-commodifiable benefits rather than pay raises. An immediate example is Eagleton's suggestion in his oh-so-short book on Marx that reduced work weeks (rather than? or in addition to? higher wages) would allow for a greater flowering of human creativity. To substantially reduce or actually dry up the flow of economic Power, however, we would have to go further and begin to trade our labor-power for goods and services more directly. In effect, we would have to make us of the potential of our labor power to recreate an outside to the banks of Power.
I've mentioned before that this area of North Carolina has an alternative currency known as the Plenty. Participating businesses agree to honor Plenty's as well as dollars; the stated goal is to keep business as local as possible. I think eventually the hope would have to be to move almost entirely to Plenty's or other forms of currency, to produce most goods and services locally, and to learn to trade for other goods and services with a rapidly decreasing dependence on the dominant American financial system. Of course, this is all quite preliminary. Unfortunately, I won't be staying in Durham long enough to try this out with respect to the Plenty, and it will probably be some time before we're settled into Toronto enough to figure out if they have anything going in terms of alternate currencies.
To return, then, ever so briefly to the Schiavo case that launched this discussion: during the course of public spectacle, both sides expressed enormous dissatisfaction with various manueverings within the realm of the Law. I have suggested that supporters of both sides were suffering the logic of biopower (rather than solely the right wing, per Santner's piece). What I have been arguing is that the Power of the Law can potentially be escaped wherever the power of law is exercised without recourse to systems of violence. In the Schiavo case that would have meant refusing to reify U.S. Courts by simply resolving the dispute without their "help" (to connect this forward as Dave suggested I might do, that might have involved an appeal to canon law - both sides claim Catholic faith. As discussed here at the weblog, both sides had something of a legitimate case to make. More on the problems and prospects of canon law during Ratzinger Week). As it stood, the actual legal issues had very little (in fact nothing) to do with the rightness or wrongness of Terri's death. Instead the issue was who controlled 'the right of death and power over life.' No surprisingly, the sacred canopy around the Malthusian Couple withstood even the most Powerful attempts to pierce it. Of course, that logic gave Terri's husband ultimate Power to speak for her, to determine the fate of her body even to the point of cremation. (Can anyone really imagine that things would have come out similarly if he had been the one in the coma and she had wanted to fend of extended family and friends?)
So, there you have it. Less sex, hopefully more substance.
