Angela and I have been emailing about stuff, and she's uneasy about my willingness to too quickly assimilate labor power and bare life. Fair enough. My friend Mark writes in a paper: "it is Foucault’s thesis that biopower needs sovereign power, which is to say, the resort to violence in certain situations. People can never be regulated into complete passivity, at least not with the current technology, so there must be prisons and tear gas and fighter-bombers." I've written to him to ask for a page reference or quote in Foucault to support this. I think it's very interesting. Part of why I'm interested in the bare life/labor power thing is around the question of biopower/biopolitics -- I hear echoes of bad readings of Lukacs and the Frankfurt School in some senses of biopower/biopolitics: managed life, recuperation of everything, no room to breathe or to (think) resist(ance). One maneuver in response to this is to foreground the blood and fire required to create the capital relation in the first place, in the processes of originary primitive accumulation, and to emphasize the continuity of this process over time -- at micro level and macro-levels (ie, processes of management and hidden acts of brutality, and big visible crackdowns). Angela objected to the implication in some writers that all of us are subject to being bare life, and not virtually but actually. As I took the point, she says that while turning from reading Marx as a critique of private ownership (the Marxism of state socialism) to the critique of the value form, of labor power, is an advance, there's still a homogeneization at work there. Clearly not all of us are in camps, being tortured, starving, etc and not all of us face the same level of real threat of being made bare life by the sovereign's decision. Maybe part of the response, then, is to look at bare life and the 'silent compulsion of the market', bare life and primitive accumulation: there would be multiple levels of bare life, perhaps? Levels in terms of scale: camps, police stations in the US (the experience of Abner Louima [sp?] and Amadou Dialo -- perhaps an analogy with Debord: diffuse camps vs concentrated camps? a structure of integrated camps?). This touches on another question I have reading Agamben. The sovereign decides on the exception, whether or not to except. But why? Why does the sovereign decide? It strikes me that one source of the sovereign's need to decide is social emergency. (For instance, the state of siege declared in Argentina, December 2001, a social crisis, a fiscal crisis, leading to state of exception and political crisis.) Does this emergency have to be seen solely as eruption or can there be quiet emergencies? (Falling rates of profit perhaps, breakdowns of work discipline, family/sexuality structures?) Or are the big conflagrations the earthquakes - the visible manifestations - derived from subterrenean processes with long histories? Back to reading Marx again, maybe? Thinking about the entirety of the processes of accumulation of capital, (re)producing value/the capital relation globally - globally in terms of geography, in terms of time, and in terms of functionality for capital (labor of 'production', distribution, consumption, reproduction, etc) - focusing here not as a totality (ie, not trying to think from a transcendent position) but as a set of connected points, where something can go wrong at each point. Bare life, then, as perhaps a moment of the global process? Not that we are all bare life all the time, but that making some people bare life some of the time attempts to quash specific types of subversion, and to prevent their spread or their being supported by other points (nodes, in Alquati's terms [or is it Dyer-Witheford?, sloppy very sloppy]). Ends up sound banal, maybe - police repression of some to keep the whole machine running, an injury to one is etc..., but maybe it is banal, theoretically - but still a pressing political issue... books books books...

In an important essay called “The Tribe of Moles” Sergio Bologna noted that in the aftermath of the cycle of struggles of 1968-69 there was a resurgence of state-centered political and theoretical perspectives, wherein the central problems were smashing, seizing, or ameliorating the state as an apparatus intervening in social life. These problems recur in our era; as the Colectivo Situaciones write in reference to the contemporary global anticapitalist movement, a movement centered around its character as anti-capitalism risks defining itself by what it is against and thus “forgetting that the decisive terrain of struggle is the affirmation of an alternative sociability”. Put another way, “if traditional forms of thinking about change through struggle are founded on the desire to change the world, a new sequence of popular struggles seem to tell us that our task not to change the world but rather to produce it anew.”* To some it may seem strange to turn from these political questions of state and strategy to the theoretical work of Giorgio Agamben. Indeed, Paolo Virno claims that Agamben is “a thinker with no political vocation”**. Antonio Negri accuses Agamben of mysticism, and Slavoj Zizek argues that Agamben is Dialectic of Enlightenment thinker, dead-ending in the same abysmal ‘hotel’ as Adorno. Is Agamben an apolitical thinker? Is his work merely a diagnosis of what is wrong - or worse, a lamentation? Or is there a positive content and project to be excavated from his work? I will argue there is. Given the centrality of language and life to the present arrangements of sovereignty and production - variably analyzed as affective, biopolitical, immaterial, imperial, and virtuosic - Agamben’s reflections on bare life, form of life, and on language clearly track onto important political vectors in regard to the forms of power confronting us today. A reading of Agamben’s writings on singularity, ‘whatever’, and community. together with the Marxian notions of counterpower, General Intellect and Gattungswesen, highlights the positive project to be found in Agamben’s work. Gattungsewsen - normally rendered in English as ‘species being’ but translated into Romance languages as ‘generic essence’, a striking and important difference - offers an important bridge between Agamben’s occasionally rarefied lyrical writing and work whose political nature is more immediately obvious, or at least less contested. Agamben’s work helps us uncover a powerful apparatus for thinking antagonism, the antagonism at the heart of power and production, in its destructive modes - disrupting and undermining sovereignty and power - and in its constructive modes - creating, elaborating, and expanding alternative sociabilities predicated on different foundations than those of capital and sovereign power. Understanding these processes is crucial for moving beyond anti-state and anti-capitalist politics and undertaking the development of a genuinely non-state and non-capitalist form of life. *Colectivo Situaciones, Contrapoder: una introduccion, p31-33, my translation ** Interview with Paolo Virno published in Archipiélago number 54, my translation

In Brett Neilson's paper "Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Capitalism" (online at www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/neilson.pdf )he writes "Marx defines labour-power as “the aggregate of all those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being.” And in this sense, labour-power is the common name of all potentials—the key that joins the ontological question of potential/act to an analysis of the capitalist relations of production. By conducting his philosophical investigations between these poles,Virno pushes beyond Agambenʼs Aristotelian view of potential as ʻpreferring not toʼ—a disposition that, as Negri point outs, sounds like nothing so much as a declination to act politically." Brett's paper is great. A few things though - it's important to note that "the aggregate of all those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being" can be made into labor power, this aggregate is not necessarily labor power. Rather, this aggregate is potentially labor power, is subject to being made into labor power. Similarly, Stevphen Shukaitis recently posted on aut-op-sy (2/27/05) "laclau/moufee would tend to seeradical democracy in a institutionalized form as not losing the characteristics that negri identifies within the concept of constituent power - while negri's move to conceptualize such as then being constituted power implies a sort of constant & necessary cycle between constituent and constituted power" I haven't read Insurgencies yet, so I'm not totally clear on this constituent power stuff, but it strikes me that there are two ways to read this: on the on hand, if movements and struggles, the multitude or whatever we call, is identified as 'constituent power',there's the question 'constitutive of what?' Negri says somewhere, I have to chase up the reference, that the multitude always expresses a juridical aspiration. This seems to say that constituent power will constitute, a positive sense of the term. Another reading would be to say that constituent power is that which constitutes, now, but is not necessarily bound to constitute. That is, constituent power is something to subtract from constituted power (the operation that the Colectivo Situaciones call "de-stitution"). To make a parallel with value production, one can read labor power similarly in two ways: labor power, (as the aggregate of human potentialities), will produce value, a conception that makes it hard to think about refusal of work, about escaping the capital relation. On other hand, one could that labor power is that which produces value, now, but the goal is to subtract from value production (an exodus?), to stop producing value. For instance, Tronti (among others) identifies the working class as the animating force behind the historical changes and innovations in capitalist production and that as long as capital exists it exists only as animated by labor. This is important, but it's also important that the working class, at least potentially, can stop being the animating force of capital, by stopping being variable capital, ie, by escaping (ending) the capital relation. Actually, to my mind, the term labor power is synonymous with life-put-to-work, life that produces value. But labor power is not synonymous with people, with movements and struggles. The goal or aspiration is to stop being labor power. Perhaps in parallel fashion the goal is to stop being constituent power? That seems different from Negri. Agamben,Homo Sacer p43 "The problem of the difference between constituting power and sovereign power is, certainly essential. Yet the fact that constituting power neither derives from the constituted order nor limits itself to instituting it - being, rather, free praxis - still says nothing as to constituting power's alterity with respect to sovereign power." Agamben then turns to ontology, in passages I have trouble following, and ends up with the problem of "thinking ontology and politics beyond every figure of relation" (p47). Perhaps this is part of the question of how to think (and practice) rupture? Brett cites Negri that Agamben's refusal may be just the refusal to act politically, and Virno says that Agamben has no political vocation. The question to respond with might be, what does one mean by politics (and by vocation)? Does 'politics' mean representation, decision on exception, the act of constitution? If so, then I think the Agambenian response is precisely to say "yes, let's quit acting politically" and in related to work, to call for the 'absence of opera' ("Movement"), which I take to be a return to the refusal of work. Must read further...

I'm going to use this space partly just to toss up things from other sources, email discussions and whatnot, to try and keep from losing things. This is from a conversation with a friend about various Italian political philosophers, and the idea of the specific intellectual. My friend wrote to me about the idea of "understanding how these people can be "specific" intellectuals as intellectuals--they can work with the powers they have, to recompose, at least on the level of theory, a political discourse, in a partisan fashion". This is important. One of the areas where I'm pointing toward now in my (vague, half-formed) questions about this stuff/these writers, is precisely here, on the connection between various recompositions. The questions for me then are: *What is the relationship between recomposition at the the level of theory and recomposition of other discources (vocabularies, key terms, narratives, etc that enter into the formation of subversive/antagonistic/multitudinous subjectivities both individual and collective, -- we've seen the beginnings of an analysis of this in material on immaterial labor - subjectivity for capital/as resource or productive force - but less so as something against capital)? *What is the relationship between recomposition at the level of theory (and other discourses) and others forms of recomposition? In some ways this is a recasting of the old 'theory and practice' question. Of course, taking these various writers seriously, it's not a matter of theory vs practice, or of intellect vs action. Rather it's a question of the links between the practice/action of theorizing and other forms of practice/action, and (perhaps not the same question after all) the role of intellect in various actions/practices. This question breaks down into the following areas of inquiry, among others: - What are the the links between practices of theoretical knowledge production (questions of multitude, sovereignty, singularity -- philosophy as the crafting of tools to take a Deleuzian [and Rortian!] metaphor) and other forms of knowledge prodcution that I personally tend to call for and valorize, without actually investigating much or actually conducting (workers inquiry, class composition analysis), as well as practices of immaterial labor/knowledge production that fall under the category of "other discourses" that I used above (narratives, etc, I'm thinking here largely of Wu Ming/Luther Blissett)? - What are the links between practices of knowledge production (theoretical or otherwise) and other practices that are part of recomposition in the operaist sense of "political (re)composition of the class" (you know, strikes, sabotage, refusal of work in various forms, all the various things that fall under the very broad headings of 'struggle' and 'resistance')? - Are there 'intellectual' aspects to certain practices that are not practices of knowledge production (acting as a street medic at a demo, leftist lawyers and their various activities, affective components to workplace and other organizing, designing leaflets and websites, setting up email lists etc) in addition to activities -- teaching/training -- that are not knowledge production in the sense of producing a work like a book or an idea, though they are knowledge production in another sense (teaching computer skills at hacklabs, training street medics and legal observers for demos, training people organizing skills, facilitating discussions in workshops etc)? How do we understand these intellectual aspects, and the link between these practices/skills and the various other components here discussed (production of theory, narrative, etc and the other aspects of struggle and antagonism here mentioned)? (This is sort of a question about the various types of specific intellectual, and of a possible continuum -- rather than absolute break -- between universal and specific intellectuals.) - And finally how does all of this relate to the present arrangement of production (and is [how does] the act of producing such an understanding of this relation an act that matters for other acts [again the theory/practice question]?) Each of these questions seem to me that, well, in each case as much as they are questions they are also nexuses of flow (ugh, sorry!), points of interchange -- theory/practice, discourse/action (to use vulgar old fashioned terms). That is, I don't think there are definitive answers ("This is the relationship between theory and practice, knowledge and action") nor do I think that one side of the relation is determining and the other determined Rather, the questions point out areas for further inquiry into relationships that are multiple, heterogeneous, they mutually determine, and take many forms. (I do think though that perhaps at some points in history theory may well determine practice, or the converse, but that this is a condition with a history, part of a set of power relations.) Of course, implicit is also a question of "what could these relationships be" and perhaps "what should they be", for political purposes, linked to struggles, to political recomposition. I think for me it's important at the level of theory to be clear that everything flows in every direction and innovation can occur at all points - theory doesn't follow from practice nor the reverse, nor should they. This doesn't rule out the need/utility (in my opinion, at least) to have these line up, though. "Line up" is poor wording, rather I mean for it all to hang together, for there to be a unity and resonance across these various relationships. One thing I keep coming back to in my thinking about this resonance or whatever its called (unity of theory and practice is what it was called in the bad old days, "praxis"?) is the issue of organization: the role of organization(s) as contexts for mapping out these questions/relations, and the possibility for the "being-in-line" or "being resonant" outside of some organization context (and I don't mean a party, or a union necessarily, but rather simply some - formal or informal - context of collective composition/construction/constitution, across/among the various relationships here named (theory/practice etc.) Argh. This is terribly obtuse and obscure, but it's what's been rattling around in my head , fermenting a good long while (so if it stinks that's why!). Good to get it out into words. I'm not sure what, if anything, I mean for you to reply to. I would like to hear what you think about the issue of how recomposition of/in theory relates to other aspects of recomposition, in the various thinkers under discussion. (And this could be both an extrapolation from texts of what Negri, Virno, Agamben say/imply an intellectual should be, and a question of what type of intellectual each of them seems to be, to embody, to practice.)