Empire by Antonio Negri, Professor Michael Hardt Read Free Book Online

ani-
    mate our common and daily practices, but in contrast to discipline,
    this control extends well outside the structured sites ofsocial institu-
    tions through flexible and fluctuating networks.
    Second, Foucault’s work allows us to recognize the biopolitical
    nature ofthe new paradigm ofpower.2 Biopower is a form of power
    that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, 24
    T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T
    absorbing it, and rearticulating it. Power can achieve an effective
    command over the entire life of the population only when it be-
    comes an integral, vital function that every individual embraces and
    reactivates ofhis or her own accord. As Foucault says, ‘‘Life has
    now become . . . an object ofpower.’’3 The highest function of
    this power is to invest life through and through, and its primary
    task is to administer life. Biopower thus refers to a situation in
    which what is directly at stake in power is the production and
    reproduction of life itself.
    These two lines ofFoucault’s work dovetail with each other
    in the sense that only the society ofcontrol is able to adopt the
    biopolitical context as its exclusive terrain ofreference. In the passage from disciplinary society to the society of control, a new paradigm
    ofpower is realized which is defined by the technologies that
    recognize society as the realm ofbiopower. In disciplinary society
    the effects of biopolitical technologies were still partial in the sense
    that disciplining developed according to relatively closed, geometri-
    cal, and quantitative logics. Disciplinarity fixed individuals within
    institutions but did not succeed in consuming them completely in
    the rhythm ofproductive practices and productive socialization; it
    did not reach the point ofpermeating entirely the consciousnesses
    and bodies ofindividuals, the point oftreating and organizing them
    in the totality oftheir activities. In disciplinary society, then, the
    relationship between power and the individual remained a static one:
    the disciplinary invasion ofpower corresponded to the resistance of
    the individual. By contrast, when power becomes entirely biopoliti-
    cal, the whole social body is comprised by power’s machine and
    developed in its virtuality. This relationship is open, qualitative,
    and affective. Society, subsumed within a power that reaches down
    to the ganglia ofthe social structure and its processes ofdevelopment,
    reacts like a single body. Power is thus expressed as a control that
    extends throughout the depths ofthe consciousnesses and bodies
    ofthe population—and at the same time across the entirety of
    social relations.4
    In this passage from disciplinary society to the society of con-
    trol, then, one could say that the increasingly intense relationship
    B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N
    25
    ofmutual implication ofall social forces that capitalism has pursued
    throughout its development has now been fully realized. Marx
    recognized something similar in what he called the passage from
    the formal subsumption to the real subsumption of labor under
    capital,5 and later the Frankfurt School philosophers analyzed a
    closely related passage ofthe subsumption ofculture (and social
    relations) under the totalitarian figure ofthe state, or really within
    the perverse dialectic ofEnlightenment.6 The passage we are refer-
    ring to, however, is fundamentally different in that instead of focus-
    ing on the unidimensionality ofthe process described by Marx and
    reformulated and extended by the Frankfurt School, the Foucaul-
    dian passage deals fundamentally with the paradox of plurality and
    multiplicity—and Deleuze and Guattari develop this perspective
    even more clearly.7 The analysis ofthe real subsumption, when this
    is understood as investing not only the economic or only the cultural
    dimension ofsociety but rather the social bios itself, and when it is attentive to the