Biopolitics and Vitalism
a paper presented at Workshop 16, ‘Mapping Biopolitics’, of the
European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Joint Sessions of Workshops,
Granada,
14-19 April 2005
Bronislaw Szerszynski
Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy
Lancaster University
Lancaster University
LA1 4YG
United Kingdom
[email protected]
In this paper I explore the productivity of bringing together two currents of thought –
biopolitics and vitalism. By ‘biopolitics’ I mean that current of social and political
theory which tries to understand modern forms of power and social ordering as
involving the shaping and optimising of the very biological life of society and
individuals. And by ‘vitalism’ I am referring to biophilosophical conceptions of the
animacy of living things and processes which refuse to see this animacy as reducible
to processes of mechanical, ‘efficient’ causation. While both traditions of thought take
‘life’ as their object, there has been insufficient exploration of their capacity to be
mutually illuminating. In this paper I focus on ways in which neo-vitalist thought
might assist in the addressing of certain deficits of the social and political theory of
biopolitics.
In Part I of the paper I give a brief summary of the biopolitical ideas of three
influential thinkers: Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. I suggest
that, despite its undoubted significance, this body of work is limited in various ways
by conceptualisations of ‘life’, of the bios that is the subject of biopolitics, which
underplays the creative potency of the life process, confines it to the immaterial realm
of ideas, and/or fails to give an adequate account of the dynamism of biopolitics – the
changing mode of insertion of the life process into the social body. In Part II I seek a
remedy to such shortcomings in the revival of vitalist thought in the twentieth century,
focusing on the work of Henri Bergson, who conceived of life as inherently
durational, as a creative, divergent temporal process, and the further development of
Bergson’s ideas in the work of Gilles Deleuze. In Part III I explore the implications of
bringing together these two currents of thought, initially through a consideration of
Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri’s Empire, which draws explicitly on Deleuze’s
ideas, and conclude with some speculative suggestions for the further development of
this line of inquiry.
Biopolitics and Vitalism
Bronislaw Szerszynski
I – BIOPOLITICS
Hannah Arendt and ‘the human condition’
Perhaps the first clear formulation of modern politics as consisting of the
administration of the life process was Hannah Arendt’s neo-Aristotelian account of
The Human Condition (1958). For Arendt, the ceaseless vitality of nature is an
inescapable part of the human condition, in that as humans we are also animals. In the
preface to the book, Arendt decries as a form of ‘earth alienation’ any technological
attempt to transcend our material, organic nature, and thus to deny our belonging to
life and dependency on the processes of nature. For Arendt, when we meet our
biological needs through labour we do so as animals; labour is life performing itself.
Labour allows us ‘to experience the sheer bliss of being alive which we share with all
living creatures ... toiling and resting, labouring and consuming’ (1958: 106).1
But at the same time that labour is a ‘blessing’, it also represents a kind of
imprisonment. As the requirements of necessity are never finally fulfilled, humans are
compelled to labour unceasingly. The ‘redemption’ of this imprisonment can only
come from outside labour, from more specifically human forms of activity – from
work (the fabrication of enduring objects), and action (meaningful speech and
gesture). For Arendt, moral freedom requires us not simply to survive, to meet our
animal needs through labour, but to fabricate an artefactual human world which can
serve as an enduring backdrop for meaningful action, for word and deed.
Unlike human beings, other animals are immortal – not because individual
animals never die, but because they are part of the never-ending flow of life; as a
species their immortality lies in the sheer repetition of procreation. It is only in the
enduring context of the artefactual world that human beings can retain their own
continuing identity – and only against this stable background that human beings can
be seen as mortal, as having a recognizable life story (bios) from birth to death (1958:
97). But this very mortality can itself provide the conditions for a this-worldly
immortality in the collective memory of a society, achieved through word and deed.
One function of the artefactual world for Arendt is thus to keep life out – to
create an enduring human space from which the cyclic and endless meeting of
necessity is kept at bay. However, for Arendt, the rise of labour as the organising
feature of modern societies was the breaching of the boundaries of this human world,
unleashing into it the endless performativity of life. The factory system and the
division of labour transformed communities into ‘societies of labourers and
jobholders ... centred around the one activity necessary to sustain life’ This elevation
of labour threatens the world’s permanence because, whereas work serves the world,
building it up and preserving it over time, labour serves only life itself (1958: 46-7).2
For Arendt the modern human world should thus be understood as exhibiting a
hypertrophy of life’s potency, an ‘unnatural rise of the natural’ (1958: 47); the very
imbalance toward growth and productivity, unchecked by cyclical decay, that is
exhibited by capitalism manifests its character as an unnatural extension of the life
process, one which compromises the integrity and purpose of the artefactual world,
with a number of deleterious implications. Politics is transformed from a realm of
freedom, a polis in which excellence and self-revelation can occur, into one of
necessity, simply ‘the public organisation of the life process’, whereby society is
conceived as an oikos, a giant household to be managed (1958: 46). Society organised
in this way ‘expects from each of its members a certain kind of behaviour, imposing
innumerable and various rules, all which tend to “normalize” its members, to make
them behave, to excluded spontaneous action or outstanding achievement’ (1958: 40).
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And people exhibits a growing ‘world-alienation’, abandoning the togetherness of a
shared public world, retreating instead into the subjectivism of consumption or
therapy.
Michel Foucault and ‘biopower’
Some two decades after the publication of The Human Condition, Michel Foucault
developed his own, Nietzschean account of modernity in terms of the administration
of the life process, without explicit reference to Arendt’s work. In Discipline and
Punish (1977) and The History of Sexuality vol. 1 (1979) he traced the connections
between new forms of state disciplinary power that developed during the eighteenth
century with the emergence of a more ‘biological’ understanding of the human. Up to
the eighteenth century, the key form that power took was ‘sovereignty’; the sovereign
had power to decide life and death – whether indirectly by asking subjects to put their
lives at risk by defending the state, or directly by putting to death those who
transgressed his laws or rose up against him. Sovereignty was ‘a right of seizure: of
things, time, bodies and ultimately life itself’ (1979: 136).
From the eighteenth century onwards, by contrast, sovereignty was replaced
by biopolitics as the key organising principle of society, and power became the right
to administer life – not to impede or destroy the forces in society in the name of
supernatural splendour, but to bend and optimize them, to make them grow in
particular directions.3 Power thus came to be conceived in terms not of transcendence
and difference, but of the maintenance of society’s own immanent coherence. Even
the resistance to state power became conceived in the very terms that that power was
taking, in terms of life: of the right to life, health and happiness (1979: 154). This
represents a shift away from the understanding of this world as pointing towards the
next one – as both symbolizing transcendent truths, and preparing the faithful for
eternal life. Instead, there is a focus on the endless reproduction of life-processes
within this world. the biological becomes seen as a self-sufficient mode of existence;
what modern power administers is no longer ‘legal subjects’ but ‘living beings’
(1979: 142-3).
Foucault argues that it is at this time that life is first conceived as an object to
be administered, and that this new power over life took two forms. The first, anatomopolitics, focused on the administration of the individual human body, regarded as a
machine to be measured, disciplined and optimized. The second, bio-politics, emerged
later, and focused on populations, the management of life.4 Both of these, Foucault
notes, were vital for the emergence and growth of capitalism, so that bodies and
populations could be effectively inserted into productive and economic processes.
Law, too became less focused less an less on displays of ‘murderous splendour’ for
those who transgress sovereign power, and simply part of an array of technical
apparatuses regulating and measuring life, trying to bring it to the norm. For Foucault,
this was ‘the entry of life into history’; rather than the biological exerting pressure on
society from outside in the form of epidemics and famines, it was increasingly an
object of control within society. Life was at once placed outside history, by being
conceived in biological, natural terms, and inside it, in that it was subjected to politics
(1979: 139-43).
Giorgio Agamben and ‘bare life’
In his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), Giorgio Agamben
explicitly sets out to extend and correct Foucault’s account of biopolitics. First he
argues that sovereignty and biopolitics, rather being contrasting regimes of power,
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have always been closely linked in Western thought and culture – that ‘the inclusion
of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original – if concealed – nucleus of
sovereign power’ (1998: 6). Thus the rise of modern biopolitics is neither the
intrusion of biology into politics, nor the constitution of a radically new object for
politics – life – but simply the working out of a logic latent within Western ideas of
sovereignty. Second, he claims that the totalitarian state and the concentration camp
have to be attended to as the ‘exemplary spaces of modern biopolitics’ (1998: 4). But
is also worth remarking that, in an explicit link to Arendt, Agamben also returns to an
Aristotelian framing of the question of biopolitics as one concerning the relationship
between bios and zoē – between conditioned and ‘bare’ life; between substantive
understandings of the good life and mere biological life; between accounts of how we
should live and the simple statement that we live. Nevertheless, he does not share
Arendt’s nostalgia for the classical world, instead seeking a more radical overcoming
of the whole Western problematic of the relation between bios and zoē.
Agamben provocatively draws attention to the homology between the
sovereign, who is ‘above’ the law in his ability to inaugurate and suspend it, and
homo sacer, the outlaw, who is ‘below’ the law in his lack of protection by it.
Agamben suggests that such states of exception, in which a case is excluded from the
application of the law, are not simple applications of sovereignty, or simple
suspensions of the law, but ‘the creation and definition of the very space in which the
juridico-political order can have validity’. Building on the thought of Jean-Luc
Nancy, he thus suggests that the primary political relation is the ‘ban’, conceived as a
positive relation, in which an individual is not simply set outside the law but
‘abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and
law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable’. Thus ‘[t]he matchless potentiality
of the nomos, its originary “force of law,” is that it holds life in its ban by abandoning
it’ (1998: 19, 28, 29). Something is turned into bare life by being placed in a zone of
indistinction between zoë and bios, at once excluded from the law and constituted by
it; and the central feature of this bare life is not that it lives but that it can be killed.
Agamben thus departs from Foucault in granting a much longer history to
biopolitics, and in connecting biopolitics (the politics of life) firmly to thanatopolitics
(the politics of death). For Agamben the only thing that is new is that, in modern
society, what was once the exception is now the norm. We are all abandoned by the
law, are reduced to bare life, are homo sacer, are reduced to our biological existence,
can be killed, and are made subject to the biopolitical logic of the ban. The
biopolitical body of the West is simply the ‘last incarnation of homo sacer’ (1998:
187), and its nomos is revealed not in the disciplinary institutions of modern capitalist
society but in the death camps. The bare life is at once pure zoë, and caught by the law
in the ban, subject to a continuous threat of death, and so intensely political (1998:
183-4). The suggestion here is that, for example, the merging of politics with
medicine (particularly in biotechnology) in the care of populations and individuals
contains a sinister logic.
But Agamben also disagrees with Arendt, suggesting that her appeals to the
classical categories of oikos and polis are rendered redundant by the contemporary
indistinction between the private and the public, the biological and the political. For
Agamben, the only way out is to think a wholly different politics, one pointing
forward to ‘the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted
in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoē’ (1998: 188). In The Open (2004) he
explicates this conception further, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s conception of the
‘saved night’ (Die gerettete Nacht). This is a life freed of any dimension of mystery,
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attained not through any solving of its mystery but simply by a severing of any
relationship with it. To elucidate this idea Agamben draws on the writings of the
second century Gnostic Basilides, who takes up St. Paul’s idea of the groaning of
creation, its awareness of its need for redemption (Rom 8: 22). In his account of the
final liberation of spirit from matter, Basilides suggests that the matter abandoned by
spirit will at once be perfectly blessed, no longer missing or desiring redemption, so
that ‘every creature may retain in its natural condition and none desire anything
contrary to its nature’. Life in this condition will no longer be human, since it will
have abandoned any attempt of rational mastery of its existence; but neither will it be
animal, since it will not exhibit what Heidegger called ‘poverty in world’ (Heidegger
1995: 269-70), the animal’s captivation by its own instinctual relationship with its
milieu. Its savedness will consist not in being brought into logos, into language and
reason, but in its very unsavability, its severing from any relationship with logos or
spirit. This is a messianic vision of a nature given back to itself, existing outside of
history and Being (Agamben 2004: 81-92).
II – VITALISM
The writers discussed above have all been extremely productive and influential in
recent attempts to grasp the essential character of modern society, not least in order
better to understand the possibility and limits of critical thought in a liberal capitalist
society that seems all but unstoppable. However, I want to argue that there are
problems with their conceptualization of ‘life’, of the bios that is the subject of
biopolitics, problems which might be addressed by drawing on other traditions of
modern thought. For example, Arendt can be criticised for overstating the cyclical and
hence futile nature of labouring and other life processes, interpreting their repetition
as a form of stasis, rather than as a creative, productive power, and for uncritically
retaining Aristotle’s hylomorphic view of artefacts and other objects in her
understanding of the fabrication process as the active imposition of a pre-existing
form onto passive matter (Simondon 1958). Foucault, for his part, could be accused of
remaining too ‘structuralist’ in his analysis of biopower, and thus tending to a quasifunctionalism that can only with difficulty account for social change (Hardt and Negri
2000: 28). And finally Agamben might be charged with having a too anthropological
notion of biopower, one which confines it, and the processes through which it might
be transformed, to the immaterial realm of ideas (Hardt and Negri 2000: 421 n.11).
In Part III of the paper I will pursue the idea that the analysis of contemporary
society in terms of biopolitics might best be advanced through incorporating a more
thoroughgoing material analysis of the life process and its organisation in society, and
that this can best be carried out through a rapprochement with the contemporary neovitalist tradition. In this section I will therefore give a brief introduction to the neovitalist revival in twentieth century thinking. Vitalist thought has been a presence in
the West in one form or another since classical times and before, and has gone
through a number of stages. Georges Canguilhem suggests that the history of the
conceptualisation of life can be divided into four main stages: life as animation, as
mechanism, as organisation and as information (Canguilhem 1994: 74-88). I will
supplement this history with a further subsection on life as duration, discussing the
twentieth century philosophy of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, who provide a
radical reconceptualisation of life in terms of a monist temporal ontology of creative
becoming.
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Life as animation
Pre-modern thought was vitalist in the sense that what we would term as non-organic
processes like motion and causation were explained in terms of organismic
development; the pre-modern world was vital, full of life. Aristotle, for example,
understood living things in terms of their possession of a soul or anima. But he also
explained what we would call non-organic processes, such as the motion of stones and
planets, in terms of organic concepts; his was a teleological world, in which things
developed. Through the Christian period the world had the same vitality – metals
were seen as gestating in the earth, and metalwork was understood as a continuation
of these biological processes, conceived by analogy with baking or winemaking
(Channell 1991: 49).
Life as mechanism
The rise in the seventeenth century of modern, Newtonian science (with its debt to
voluntarist theology) had all but put paid to the world’s animacy – matter was inert,
moved lawfully by God. Thus mechanical philosophers like Descartes sought to
explain animal life using mechanical principles. But the problem still remained of
explaining the different behaviour of living and dead organisms, and the development
of embryos. A radically different, ‘Enlightenment’, vitalism thus emerged as a
supplement to Newtonian materialism, seeking a vital substance or force which would
explain the difference between animate and inanimate matter. However, by the middle
of the eighteenth century vitalists had more or less abandoned the search for a vital
substance, instead seeking an immaterial vital force. Writers such as de Maupertuis
and de Buffon argues for a force similar to gravity to explain vital activity including
embryo formation; and in the nineteenth century it became common to associate this
vital principle with electricity (Channell 1991: 55-7).
Life as organisation
Enlightenment vitalism, whether a vitalism of substance or of energy, never overcame
the problems of how to incorporate the phenomenon of life in a mechanical world,
and particularly the problem of how to give an adequate account of embryo
development (Canguilhem 1994: 84: 296). But during the eighteenth century an
alternative way of conceptualising vitality developed as the concept of the organism,
a self-organising form of organisation, was further refined (e.g. Kant 1978). During
the early nineteenth century, and particularly with the development of cell theory, the
living organism became conceived not as a mechanism but a society. Indeed, during
the nineteenth century the ideas of organism and of society developed so closely
together that it becomes difficult to say which is metaphor for the other (Canguilhem
1994: 84). For example, Claude Bernard (1813-78) built a ‘social’ theory of cells and
organs not as simple parts instruments of the organism as a whole, but as individuals.
The use of an economic and political model meant that nineteenth century biologists
such as Bernard could grasp that the relation of parts to whole in an organism is one
of integration; the parts were themselves individuals, their survival the ultimate end
(Canguilhem 1994: 298-300).
More broadly, the nineteenth century saw a sea change in thought in which
large swathes of the sciences departed from the methods of reductionistic analysis that
had characterized their operations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather
than areas of knowledges being organized in terms of relations of observable
similarities and differences between empirical entities, many of them thus started to
be reorganized according to the idea of hidden relational unities lying underneath a
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Bronislaw Szerszynski
surface of differences (Foucault 1970: 251). In Cuvier’s biology, for example, beneath
the surface of the differences between species and species, and between organisms
and their environment, lie the great unities of life function – respiration, digestion,
sensation and so on – not reducible to constituent material elements or visible to the
senses, but nevertheless in many ways more ontologically fundamental. This was ethe
emergence of biology in the modern sense; up to end of eighteenth century all there
was were static, spatial categorisations of living beings – natural history.5 As Foucault
puts it, ‘life itself did not exist’. As sociology developed as a science, it too adopted
this new spatial metaphor, of life functions, vital activities and energetic flows of
labour, capital and resources.
Life as information
With the informationalisation of life in molecular biology, the vitalist tradition enters
a new phase, in which life is made material, and matter is made vital. In 1944
Schrödinger proposed a physics of life, that at the same time laid the foundations for
what might be call the reductionism of molecular biology, and also elevated matter to
a vital force, one which locally speaking can break the second law of thermodynamics
and increase order: ‘What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it
less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in
freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive’. But
Schrödinger also made life informational – the foundation of life is a code-script,
written in the chromosomes: ‘The chromosome structures are at the same time
instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow. They are law-code
and executive power – or, to use another simile, they are architect’s plan and builder’s
craft -in one’ (Schrödinger 1944).
In 1954, with Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA, Schrödinger’s proposal
seemed to be fulfilled. In the ordering of bases along the DNA molecule, and the
processes by which this molecule controls the synthesising of proteins, molecular
biology seemed to offer a new language for life, one which ‘dropped the vocabulary
and concepts of classical mechanics, physics and chemistry … in favor of the
vocabulary of linguistics and communications theory. Messages, information,
programs, codes, instructions, decodings: these are the new concepts of the life
sciences’ (Canguilhem 1994: 316).
Life as duration
But at the turn of the twentieth century Henri Bergson was articulating an alternative
understanding of vitality as duration. In Creative Evolution Bergson argued that time
had not been adequately conceptualised in the sciences, which typically treat the past
and the future as simply calculable functions of the present, and thus conceptualising
time spatially and not as essentially temporal at all. In the understanding of evolution,
Bergson rejected both the mechanism of neo-Darwinism, and the finalism of neoLamarckism, which he saw as which explaining the present by reference to the
compulsion of the past and the future respectively, and thus denying the essentially
creative nature of duration (Ansell Pearson 1999: 41-2)
Bergson was influenced by August Weismann (1834-1914), whose conception
of the germ plasm, passed down through heredity, laid the grounds for the future
development of a mechanistic understanding of evolution. For Weismann, the germ
line is the real, immortal, subject of life, and individual organisms merely its vehicle.
Bergson took this idea of the temporal continuity of life and made it more
philosophically complex. For Bergson, ‘what is transmitted is not simply the physico-
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Bronislaw Szerszynski
chemical elements of the germ plasm but also the vital energies and capacities of an
embryogenesis and morphogenesis that allow for perpetual invention in evolution’
(Ansell Pearson 1999: 40). He conceived of evolution as driven by a tension between
two tendencies – between the entropic tendency of matter to descend into stasis, and
the creative tendency of life to produce divergent directions amongst which its “vital
impetus” gets divided. ‘In reality, life is a movement, materiality is the inverse
movement, and each of these two movements is simple, the matter which forms a
world being an undivided flux, and undivided also the life that runs through it, cutting
out in it living beings all along its track’ (Bergson 1921: 263). But Bergson is not
saying that life simply a negentropic force, and that the enclosure of life in matter, in
organisms, limits its vitality. For Bergson evolution is creative exactly because of the
endless conflict between the stabilization of life in the organism and its breaking out
into new directions. The organism prevents dissipation of life energy and makes life
as invention and duration possible. As Ansell Pearson puts it, ‘[l]ife enters into the
“habits of inert matter” and from this learns how, little by little, to draw from it
animate forms and vital properties’ (Ansell Pearson 1999: 43-5).
In a series of works from the 1960s onwards Gilles Deleuze progressively
combines Bergson’s understanding of creative evolution with a radically monistic
ontology (Deleuze 1988; Deleuze and Guattari 1988; Deleuze 1994). Following
Spinoza, he insists that the world consists of a singular infinite substance, with all
bodies simply its finite modes. Yet this singular substance itself contains difference
and multiplicity. Bergson had opposed mechanism by showing that the essential
motor of difference is internal to identity, deriving from ‘the internal explosive force
of “life”; variation and change thus had to be seen not as merely accidental but as
essential to the ongoing process of creative evolution itself (Ansell Pearson 1999 :
66). Deleuze develops this idea into the basis of a vital monism, in which the creative
powers of life as duration – as constantly diverging creative invention – are internal to
the structure of Being itself. But Deleuze progressively departs from Bergson’s
narrative understanding of life as a developing, creative narrative, driven by the
tension between an anti-entropic vital principle and the dissipative tendencies of
matter. Instead, he comes to conceive of the world as a ‘movement of nomadic
singularities and fields of intensities’, a plane of immanence, a saturnine power that
devours at one end what it created at other (Ansell Pearson 1999: 76). Bergson’s
creative tension between life and matter is replaced by a more hostile conflict between
anorganic and organic life – between Being’s creative and transgressive powers, and
its capture or ‘stratification’ in organisms and institutions. To articulate this neovitalism, Deleuze and Guattari develop a new vocabulary, with terms often arranged
in contrasts between the free flow of life’s creativity, and its articulation in
equilibrated structures – for example the ‘molecular’ and the ‘molar’, ‘intensities’ and
‘strata’, the ‘rhizomatic’ and the ‘arborescent’. As Deleuze and his co-author Félix
Guattari put it, ‘[t]he truly intense and powerful life remains anorganic’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1988: 503).
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III – VITALIST BIOPOLITICS
In Part I of the paper I gave a brief survey of some of the key thinkers who have
developed ideas of biopolitics – of modern society as in some way being organised
around the management of its biological life. In Part II I described the historical
transformation of conceptions of life, concluding with a discussion of the neo-vitalism
of Bergson and Deleuze. In this final part I want to try to see how the two might be
brought together – to explore how our understanding of biopolitics might be altered
by incorporating a neo-vitalist understanding of the ‘life’ that is the subject of
biopolitics.
Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri and ‘biopolitical production’
One obvious place to start such an exploration is Hardt and Negri’s Empire, which
explicitly draws on Deleuze’s work. Hardt and Negri endorse Foucault’s conception
of biopower, as ‘a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following
it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 23-4).
However, they also develop further the argument made by Deleuze, in his ‘Postscript
on the Societies of Control’ (Deleuze 1995), that Foucault’s specific account of
biopolitics is one that only applied to a particular period of modernity, one that has
been superseded since the late twentieth century.
Developing ideas that started to appear in Foucault’s later works, Deleuze
suggested that ‘disciplinary’ power was characteristic of the mercantile and organised
capitalisms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was canalised through
spaces of enclosure such as prisons, hospitals, factories, schools and the family, each
with their own set of normalising rules. By contrast, he described a new form of
biopolitics as emerging in the late twentieth century after a period of crisis in all the
environments of enclosure, and with the emergence of post-fordist forms of
production.
Hardt and Negri describe this new ‘society of control’ as one
‘in which mechanisms of Command become ever more “democratic,” ever more immanent to
the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens. The behaviors of
social integration and exclusion proper to rule are thus increasingly interiorized within the
subjects themselves. … The society of control might thus be characterized by an
intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that
internally animate our common and daily practices, but in contrast to discipline, this control
extends well outside the structured sites of social institutions through flexible and fluctuating
networks’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 23).
In a sense this is a more perfect biopolitics than that described by Foucault.
‘Disciplinarity fixed individuals within institutions but did not succeed in consuming them
completely in the rhythm of productive practices and productive socialization; it did not reach
the point of permeating entirely the consciousnesses and bodies of individuals, the point of
treating and organizing them in the totality of their activities. … By contrast, when power
becomes entirely biopolitical, the whole social body is comprised by power’s machine …
Society, subsumed within a power that reaches down to the ganglia of the social structure and
its processes of development, reacts like a single body. Power is thus expressed as a control
that extends throughout the depths of the consciousnesses and bodies of the population-and at
the same time across the entirety of social relations’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 24).
However, for Hardt and Negri this taking up of the whole of life itself into the process
of capitalist ordering does not result in a totalitarian completion of capitalism, since
the very subsumption of the social bios ‘disrupts the linear and totalitarian figure of
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capitalist development.’ In the ‘classical’ biopolitics of Foucault, resistance had been
coordinated outside the spaces of enclosure, in civil society; in the new society of
control, by contrast such resistances have been taken up into the state, exploding the
state into a diverse set of networks (Hardt and Negri 2000: 25). We can see here how
the Bergsonian conception of a difference that is internal to identity has clear
biopolitical implications. The final capture of life’s vitality by capital in post-fordist
modes of production and regulation results in the breaking up of the organised,
character of the state. The centred state of fordist capitalism represents a
manifestation of the ‘stratification’ of the life process, its sedimentation into
organism-like, equilibrium systems, on the ‘alloplastic’ or social level. As Ansell
Pearson argues, Deleuze does not attack the organism itself but ‘the organism
construed as a given hierarchized and transcendent organization ... abstracted from its
molecular and rhizomatic conditions of possibility’ (1999: 154). The ‘molecular and
rhizomatic conditions of possibility’ of the state, for Hardt and Negri, are to be found
in the unruly creative powers of the ‘multitude’; the absorption of these powers into
the state/economy complex disrupts the latter’s organismic unity, creating a new
emancipatory opportunity for the rhizomatic vitality of the multitude.
Here Hardt and Negri are drawing on the work of Italian Marxists such as
Paolo Virno (2003), who see the growing importance of intellectual, immaterial, and
communicative labour in the knowledge economy as having a radical political
significance. Virno contrasts the disciplined and individualised ‘people’ of Hobbes’
political theory with the more unruly and plural ‘multitude’ of Spinoza:
‘For Spinoza, the multitudo indicates a plurality which persists as such in the public scene, in
collective action, in the handling of communal affairs, without converging into a One, without
evaporating within a centripetal form of motion. Multitude is the form of social and political
existence for the many, seen as being many: a permanent form, not an episodic or interstitial
form. For Spinoza, the multitudo is the architrave of civil liberties (Spinoza, Tractatus
Politicus)’ (Virno 2003: 21).
He then suggests that the shift towards immaterial labour in the post-fordist
economies of the developed world (here he seems to be particularly thinking of the
service industries) means that common, rather than specialised, forms of speech –
what Marx called ‘the general intellect’ – are coming to the fore in human existence,
and that the Hobbesian ‘people’, always defined in relation to the state, is being
displaced by the Spinozist ‘multitude’ as the primary form of political subjectivity.
Thus post-fordism, itself partially a response to the trade union and social movement
demands of the 1960s and 1970s, ‘has given life to a sort of paradoxical “communism
of capital”’, realising in a different register the demands of that ‘failed’ revolution
(Virno 2003: 111).
Hardt and Negri go even further than Virno in seeing the multitude as the
creative driver behind capital accumulation in post-fordist society, as was the manual
worker in earlier forms of capitalism. More significantly, they also go further in
according emancipatory powers and a political programme to the multitude that has
been brought into being by post-fordism:
‘The mode of production of the multitude reappropriates wealth from capital and also
constructs a new wealth, articulated with the powers of science and social knowledge through
cooperation. Cooperation annuls the title of property. In modernity, private property was often
legitimated by labor, but this equation, if it ever really made sense, today tends to be
completely destroyed. Private property of the means of production today, in the era of the
hegemony of cooperative and immaterial labor, is only a putrid and tyrannical obsolescence.
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Biopolitics and Vitalism
Bronislaw Szerszynski
The tools of production tend to be recomposed in collective subjectivity and in the collective
intelligence and affect of the workers; entrepreneurship tends to be organized by the
cooperation of subjects in general intellect. The organization of the multitude as political
subject, as posse, thus begins to appear on the world scene. The multitude is biopolitical selforganization’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 410-11).
Biopolitics as the regulation of ‘potentiality’
The work of Hardt and Negri makes a highly significant contribution to the
development of a vitalist biopolitics. Their incorporation of a Deleuzian
understanding of life as an inventive potentiality in Being itself, one which is
canalised into and through stable organismic forms but can never be reduced to them,
provides a welcome recognition of the sheer materiality of the life process, and the
radical creativity inherent in its processes of repetition. As such they offer potential
solutions to some of the problems identified in the work of the key writers on
biopolitics discussed in Part I. They also take the idea from Foucault and Deleuze that
a new form of the biopolitical ordering of society was emerging in the late twentieth
century, and develop a powerful synthetic account of its nature and potentialities.
However, it might be said that Hardt and Negri’s sense of the pressing need to
develop a framework for thinking about radical politics in the twenty first century
means that more general questions about biopolitics remain underdeveloped. And one
of these questions is how a more general account of biopolitics as the management of
life’s potential might be developed. In Virno’s discussion of biopolitics he discusses
the passage in the Grundrisse where Marx observes that ‘the use value which the
worker has to offer to the capitalist, which he has to offer to others in general, is not
materialized in a product, does not exist apart from him at all, thus exists not really,
but only in potentiality, as his capacity’ (Marx 1973). Virno suggests that ‘where
something which exists only as possibility is sold, this something is not separable
from the living person of the seller. The living body of the worker is the substratum of
that labor-power which, in itself, has no independent existence. “Life,” pure and
simple bios, acquires a specific importance in as much as it is the tabernacle of
dynamis, of mere potential’. The living body thus becomes an object to be governed
‘because it is the substratum of what really matters: labor-power as the aggregate of
the most diverse human faculties (the potential for speaking, for thinking, for
remembering, for acting, etc.) (Virno 2003: 82, 83).
What is interesting here is the way that Virno seems to link questions of
political economy – of the source of surplus value in capitalist accumulation – to life’s
vital powers. Bergson’s understanding of life as duration emphasises that vitality is an
essentially temporal phenomenon, irreducible to the spatiality of the present; the
differentiation of the elan vital over time is the unpredictable expression of the
difference that is internal to Being. Life thus is always potentiality, always temporal,
always oriented to an open future. This conceptualisation of vital potentiality in
Bergson is echoed in Arendt’s work in her notion of ‘natality’ – the capacity for
creating the radically new that she, following Augustine, sees as confined to the
human being (see Brunkhorst 2000). So, first, more work needs to be done on
specifying the distinctiveness of the forms that vital potentiality takes in the human
being as opposed to other living things (for ways of thinking about this, see Ansell
Pearson 1999: 51-6; Agamben 2004). Second, we need to develop a more systematic
vitalist theory of political economy – the way that this potentiality can be captured
and converted into mobile and storable reifications of social power – into capital.
Virno and Hardt and Negri have assisted by giving us a better understanding of how
in post-fordist economies it is the communicative, not physical potential of human
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Biopolitics and Vitalism
Bronislaw Szerszynski
beings that is the main source of value. But we also need a vitalist political economy,
for example, of the high technology sector, which understands better the capture of
value from the vital, evolutionary character of human technical powers. And third, we
need a vital political economy of the state’s biopolitical role, a theorisation of the way
that a species can develop technologies that take hold of its own vital powers,
artificial organs that are turned back on their progenitor to shape and change their
natural being.
NOTES
Here she departs from Karl Marx, for whom it is the capacity to labour that sets humans apart from
other animals.
2
For Arendt the liberation of labour into the human world reached its theoretical acme in Marx, who
merged work with labour, in service of life, and for whom ‘all things would be understood, not in their
worldly, objective quality, but as results of living labour power and functions of the life process’
(Arendt 1958: 89).
3
Wars, for example, are no longer the defence of ‘the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the
biological existence of a population’. And the death penalty is less to do with the enormity of the
crime, of attacking the sovereign’s will, than the incorrigibility of the criminal – their biological
endangerment of others (Foucault 1979: 137-8).
4
The term ‘biopolitics’ is often used to cover both of these sets of practices.
5
Here history is being used in its original sense as a ‘telling’, rather than in the specific sense of
‘history’ that emerges in the nineteenth century.
1
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Biopolitics and Vitalism
Bronislaw Szerszynski
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