R: [Generation_online] power/resistance: thoughts in progress

[M]

I wasn't thinking of that specific passage, though thanks for pointing it
out to me. I was actually thinking more of things I'd come across in The
History of Sexuality Vol. 1 - although I can't remember the details.

I think one has to be careful when looking at Negri's usage of Foucauldian
terms, however, principally because I get the feeling that he actually gives
notions such as biopower and biopolitics a much more subjective and radical
valence. My understanding of Foucault is that these terms describe more the
way Power (potestas) has altered its form so as to become more immanent and
pervasive - especially visible in its strategies of subject
formation/structuration; while for Negri they rather indicate the
increasingly collective and productive (constitutive) operations of
subjectivity, and only secondarily as the new space of control.

In the case of Negri I don't think that we can suggest, in the same way as
we might with Foucault, that there's a kind of a universalising of
resistance, for the simple fact that that collective subject is
ontologically fundamental (potentia), while it is sovereignty or the
state-form that needs explaining... This is a gesture that I think can
probably be traced back to Deleuze and Guattari (if not Spinoza).... It is
Power the emerges and is constituted - one could go perhaps as far as to
suggest that it is power that resists, while the (collective) subject is the
dynamic core...

-----Messaggio originale-----
Da: generation_online-admin@kein.org
[mailto:generation_online-admin@kein.org]Per conto di Arianna
Inviato: mercoledì 20 febbraio 2002 19.30
A: generation_online@kein.org
Oggetto: [Generation_online] power/resistance: thoughts in progress

From: "M" <swerve@onetel.net.uk>
To: <generation_online@kein.org>
Subject: R: [Generation_online] re: Yves's comments on section 3.1
Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2002 11:50:12 -0000
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Clearly I think that what needs to be
thought through - as with all positions that are heavily Althusser and/or
Foucault influenced, when the subject is to some extent constructed through
disciplinary regimes, or regimes of control, or interpellation, where does
the subject of resistance come from... Foucault is always rather mysterious
about the pre-existing resistance that is always somehow always already
there...


hi, sorry this isn't relevant to alienation as such, is this the passage you
are thinking of when you say mysterious?

'Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only in so far as they are
free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a
field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions
and diverse comportments may be realized. Where the determining factors
saturate the whole there is no relationship of power, slavery is not a power
relationship.... since without the possibility of recalcitrance, power would
be equivalent to a physical determination [...] If it is true that at the
heart of power relations and as a permanent condition of their existence
there is an insubordination and a certain essential obstinacy on the part of
the principles of freedom, then there is no relationship of power without
the means of escape or possible flight. Every power relationship implies, at
least in potentia, a strategy of struggle, in which the two forces are not
superimposed, do not lose their specific nature, or do not finally become
confused. !
Each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of
possible reversal. The agonism between power relations and the
intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all
social existence.' (The subject and power)

This is in the context of an essay that analyses the role of the state and
anti-authority struggles (as transversal and immediate struggles against the
government of individuation).

I think the question of the subject of resistance is very important but
where Foucault is brought into it I find it misleading. I agree that there
is no such thing in Foucault but it sort of makes sense. The notion of a
subject of resistance is more suited to the contractualist (juridical) and
the repressive (institutional) hypotheses, and the discourses of sovereignty
and right (also of liberation from alienation, in Marcusean terms), through
which this subject must pass in order to become intelligible and
identifiable. Foucault historicizes, questions and explicitly rejects both
of these models.
Whether this is at the price of a clear-cut definition of subversion is
difficult to answer, also because he doesn't give a 'clear-cut' definition
of power either. I agree that at points there is a symmetrical tension in
the notion of power-resistance, which takes overly Nietzschean tones and
ends up almost essentialising struggle as constitutive of power relations.
Do you think Negri does this too?
Foucault says that in order to take seriously the assertion that struggle is
at the center of every power relation (the politics war paradigm), we should
get rid of the old logic of contradiction and the 'sterilizing constraints
of the dialectics'. Whether he comes up with some kind of substitute is
another question. But this is complex and maybe the notion of
governmentality and biopower are more useful, because they point to how our
possible field of action is structured by others and more importantly, what
precisely is at stake in the struggle itself. This is almost off topic but I
see Negri's politics of subversion as informed by an idea of
'reappropriation', obviously not of a 'lost liberty of human essence' but of
the conditions of production, of that collective field of action where self
government is possible, and this sometimes makes his adoption of Foucault's
idea of power quite problematic to me.

Arianna



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