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

order, and cannot really grasp the motor that sets it in
    motion. Our analysis must focus its attention rather on the productive
    dimension ofbiopower.11
    TheProduction of Life
    The question ofproduction in relation to biopower and the society
    ofcontrol, however, reveals a real weakness ofthe work ofthe
    authors from whom we have borrowed these notions. We should
    clarify, then, the ‘‘vital’’ or biopolitical dimensions of Foucault’s
    work in relation to the dynamics ofproduction. Foucault argued
    in several works in the mid-1970s that one cannot understand the
    passage from the ‘‘sovereign’’ state of the ancien re´gime to the
    modern ‘‘disciplinary’’ state without taking into account how the
    biopolitical context was progressively put at the service ofcapitalist
    accumulation: ‘‘The control ofsociety over individuals is not con-
    ducted only through consciousness or ideology, but also in the
    body and with the body. For capitalist society biopolitics is what
    is most important, the biological, the somatic, the corporeal.’’12
    One ofthe central objectives ofhis research strategy in this
    period was to go beyond the versions ofhistorical materialism,
    including several variants ofMarxist theory, that considered the
    problem ofpower and social reproduction on a superstructural level
    separate from the real, base level of production. Foucault thus
    attempted to bring the problem ofsocial reproduction and all the
    elements ofthe so-called superstructure back to within the material,
    fundamental structure and define this terrain not only in economic
    terms but also in cultural, corporeal, and subjective ones. We can
    thus understand how Foucault’s conception ofthe social whole was
    perfected and realized when in a subsequent phase of his work he
    uncovered the emerging outlines ofthe society ofcontrol as a figure
    ofpower active throughout the entire biopolitics ofsociety. It
    does not seem, however, that Foucault—even when he powerfully
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    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
    grasped the biopolitical horizon ofsociety and defined it as a field
    ofimmanence—ever succeeded in pulling his thought away from
    that structuralist epistemology that guided his research from the
    beginning. By structuralist epistemology here we mean the reinven-
    tion ofa functionalist analysis in the realm ofthe human sciences,
    a method that effectively sacrifices the dynamic of the system, the
    creative temporality ofits movements, and the ontological substance
    ofcultural and social reproduction.13 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.14
    By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari present us with a properly
    poststructuralist understanding ofbiopower that renews materialist
    thought and grounds itselfsolidly in the question ofthe production
    ofsocial being. Their work demystifies structuralism and all the
    philosophical, sociological, and political conceptions that make the
    fixity of the epistemological frame an ineluctable point of reference.
    They focus our attention clearly on the ontological substance of
    social production. Machines produce. The constant functioning of
    social machines in their various apparatuses and assemblages pro-
    duces the world along with the subjects and objects that constitute
    it. Deleuze and Guattari, however, seem to be able to conceive
    positively only the tendencies toward continuous movement and
    absolute flows, and thus in their thought, too, the creative elements
    and the radical ontology ofthe production ofthe social remain
    insubstantial and impotent. Deleuze and Guattari discover the pro-
    ductivity ofsocial reproduction (creative production, production
    of values, social relations, affects, becomings), but