The vulgar arrogance of raison d’état lives a continuous cycle of births and reappearances. Both before and after Marx. Before Marx, in the return to Hobbes; and after Marx, in the disenchanted memory of Stalin. But Hobbes and Stalin, in the physics of power that they assumed, registered a necessity, a raison of supreme conservation, the highest value of peace and, then, that of the nation, of the motherland [patria]. Leviathan and Ivan the Terrible. ‘Politics above the economy’, the ‘autonomy of the political above interests of class’, the ‘dependence of economy on politics’, all of this can only refer to those values: peace and the nation, über alles – at least if, in Neumann’s usage, one opts for Leviathan and not Behemoth. Hobbes and Stalin act within a mechanicist horizon whose key they have to possess in order to impose the value that interests them, to lock the system in value. Even a physical horizon that is singularly open, such as that described by Hobbesian mechanicism and by its pulsations, by its potentialities, must thereby postulate a transcendentality of power [potere]. Power is a transcendental: the criterion of obligation is transcendental – so it is read by its interpreters – and irreducible to the mechanics of instincts. So here we discover power and define it as a moment that possesses an extraordinary intensity of alterity: an other that stands above to the extent that it is necessary to existence. Idealism is the ongoing existence of raison d’état, it is the motor that continually reproduces it. Idealism is the doctrine of value, of domination over passions, of their solution in transcendentalism. The truth of idealism is thus not different from that of the values it expresses and imposes: peace and patria, peace or patria.
People talk about politique d’abord, the ‘autonomy of the political’. Well: what is the value that is being pursued? None other, they say, than the law of working-class dictatorship over development. Glory be! As if this were a mere trifle! But it requires at least one presupposition: that the workers want dictatorship and development, that they accept to subordinate the potentiality of their force to the transcendental of development, in the same way in which elsewhere it is subordinated to peace or to patria. The ‘autonomy of the political’ is a theory of the transition, a theory – assuredly ‘Leninist’ in a Third Internationalist sense – that affirms the contents of capitalist development in the revolutionary process under the form of the leap: a hyper-Leninism conceived in a zone of very high, sublime theoretical and historical rarefaction. Its concrete determination is thus a conception of development that must demonstrate a push towards this leap, to the qualitative change. And what if this is not given? No matter: the function of the political is reaffirmed; that’s all that is required for the ‘new type’ of organic intellectual – the mystification of value is reintroduced, redefined, and assumed within the system. The political has to be separated from the economic because only this separation permits the restoration of value.
This kind of ‘Lysenkoism’ in political theory is no less characteristic than its counterpart in the theory of science. It is a system – inevitably it has to be systematic – of generic utilities – inevitably they have to be generic: the economy and not the class struggle – which postulate a sublimation (peace, nation, development) within the state. The banality of scientific ‘Lysenkoism’ is tempered, in politics, by a tradition that asserts, as a matter of principle, that politics should be disengaged from truth: truth is only that which concerns the totality of the value proposed, to which the truth of singular movements [movenze] has to sacrifice itself. Peace, nation, development: this is the final truth. Its relationship with reality is as an apology of the concrete, a dryness of intellect, a curial attitude (Machiavellianism. not Machiavelli, Hobbesianism and not even Hobbes… Togliatti and not – but why not? – Stalin). Lysenko is the autonomy of truth. The system of ‘Lysenkoism’ is a process that produces the leap beyond truth, the sacrifice to value, to conservation, to peace–nation–development. It is a system of homologies pushed to one single coherence: that of value, of its surreptitious domination, of falsity. It is a prostration before power, which transforms the problem of power into servilism and projects a technical solution for it: lawcourt techniques.
There are some who say, then: let us not accept these homologies and the necessity of the leap to the totality that consecrates and sublimates the process! Here – and this is the pure and simple opposite of the theories of the autonomy of the political – the transparency of the leap is negated so radically that power comes to be reinstated to its misplaced ideal self-sufficiency, to its fetishistic determination, to its originary non-truth, without having to take recourse to any dialectical function, to any formality. This interpretation of power poses it as an object to be destroyed. What needs to be destroyed is the ‘Lysenkoism’ – a model of input–conversion–output. Lysenkoism assumes a series of givens and produces absolute non-truth through a mechanism of conversion that operates on a system of mystified homologies. Power represents itself in ‘Lysenkoism’: in the point of view of power, and also in that of science, what counts is the totality – it absolutely precedes the real; sublimation controls truth. So this is the point reached by the denunciation – moralistic, if you like, but also solid and documented: the solidity of the facts and the stubbornness of reality against idealism of the political. But can we really bring the critique of power to a negation that verges on indifference? Is indifference adequate to the critique of idealism? Or does it not itself becomes an expression, a variant, a trick? When the nouveaux philosophes push the critique of power towards the crudeness of indifference, do they win or lose the battle on the terrain of truth?
I have this fact before me: ‘Gulag idealism’. The manipulation of reality that derives from it follows the laws of the mystificatory dialectic of totality. The passages of this dialectic are all dominated, supported and directed by the indifference of value. Homologies can only exist inasmuch as the context on which they operate is that of indifference. But if I deny, resist and denounce this fact and its indifference, I am not – by that very fact – within indifference; on the contrary, there is difference, real determinacy and determination in practice. ‘Human beings are not characterised by a certain relationship to truth; but they contain, as rightly belonging to them, a truth that is simultaneously offered and hidden from view’ (Foucault, 2009, p. 529). I deny that power because I want (not that power, but) the power, the Hobbesian vital pulsation, that is a power of existing, producing and reproducing. If I deny every possible homology between my potentiality to exist and that power, I cannot deny it in indifference, indeed I have to affirm the universality of the problem of power. Critique cannot destroy the object – and this holds all the more as the problem is universal, all the more as the determinate reality of each subject is implicated in it. The approach of the nouveaux philosophes is valid to the extent that it confronts and poses the universality of the problem of potentiality [potenza] at the level of its present historical and sociological dimensions: social labour determines its antagonism in relation to the state; it does not confront a boss but the collective reality of the state, the ideational power of the collective boss – in all its monstrosity and its necessity.
On the other hand, it is true, it did happen that, in the face of a socialised labour [lavoro sociale], the homologies of the concrete and immediate labour process (those defined by the experience of the factory worker) have faded away in analogies, have been wiped away in a qualitative leap: the antagonism is no longer that of the immediate labour process but the antagonism that begins to take shape on the terrain of the socialisation of labour. If this is given, all the categories of antagonism need to be reformulated. The idea of the ‘indifference of power’ fails to reformulate anything except the terrain on which the problem is to be raised. But this reformulation in terms of indifference is in turn a mystification: a power that is identical and omnipresent, in the face of which we have, not a determined, but an undetermined potentiality, raises claims that are undefined and undefinable. Yet this criticism, both in what it says and in what it lacks, determines the problem, defines the need to deepen the research and to establish its articulations. However, neither the idealistic delight of renewed Stalinism nor the indifference of the totality of power – redefined or critiqued – satisfies us; and ‘Lysenkoism’ in political theory or the denial of the problem of power cannot remove the ideal reality of the mystification of power. However, breaking the horizon and going to the roots of the process that constitutes it, shattering it, opening an articulation of analysis that can follow the molecular articulation of the variables that are present – this is the priority task of the moment. Undoubtedly the nouveaux philosophes who have come to address this problem are important. But more important still is to live it from within, in its most brutal concreteness. I believe that this is possible.
Therefore analysis reacquires validity if it traverses the fabric of the being, of the historical being, of power, but in traversing it it destroys its figure, its articulation, its dimension – not the thickness, the weightiness, the actual skeleton. These, in fact, have to be rebuilt. What needs to be constructed here is an ontological analysis, a Daseinsanalyse: to the extent that you grasp the being, you destroy the false geometry of its image – you turn analysis into a weapon of excavation and demolition; science deconstructs power inasmuch as it reveals its constitutive dynamic and consequently unmasks its image. Power then reveals its necessity, starting from the dissipated and dispersed fabric of its constitutive threads. You can traverse these threads and follow them: you will never find in them grounded truths, homologies and analogies, or an unbroken continuity of significations or concretisations that are impermeable to action – no, what you find here is labour, what you find here is a young power that is constructing itself each time. This really is the opposite of that romantic discovery that prompted Schelling – the young Schelling – to cry out in front of the discovery of that historical hardening of human reality, of the world, of its products: ‘Here is nature!’ But here there is labour instead, there is human operativity. It is there as long as we reconquer the immediateness of its discourse against the stratification of images and the reality of mystification. Faced with the objectivity of historical being, of its stratifications, of its institutions, we have a courage of truth that brings us ourselves entirely into play: history is a complexity of tangents that resolve into a resultant, of strategies that tend towards the result. The point of view is the constitutive element of the historical project, but it is also the constitutive element of the archaeology of knowledge. The relationship between sense [Sinn] and reference [Bedeutung] is reversed: it is the reference that now explains the sense, not the reference – the brutal consolidation into the given – that subsumes the sense. The scientific deconstruction of the known world brings us to the origins of knowledge and of the world, and also to the definition of the conditions of self-valorisation.
In Foucault a specific ontological tradition of French thought becomes an operational horizon, scientifically effective, without yielding to the blandishments of the philosophy of action. Thought is accepted as an overall action; it is not to be confused with action but cohabits with it. It is a unitary world, this world that presides over the formation of analytical instruments: it had been defined as the fabric of the imaginary (Foucault, 1954). The Daseinsanalyse of the imaginary interposes itself between anthropology and ontology and seeks to be such as to overcome both the hermeneutics of symbols and the mere horizon of decyphering: existential structures that are fundamental and not alienated have to be grasped in this first approach. Further along, a philological work of continuous, ever closer scrutiny of the text permits us to positivise this scientific impulse: from Rousseau to Spitzer, from Kant to Weizsäcker. Let us look at the work that Foucault did on the latter two authors: you might consider this a gross diversion but it is not, even though the texts taken into consideration (Kant, 1964; von Weizsäcker, 1958) are not particularly significant and are even ambiguous. Nevertheless, it is not a diversion but rather a process of homing in onto a profound unity within which, and starting from which – from its anthropological, biological and medical materiality – analysis can reconstitute itself in the face of totality. Build the synthesis where it is and do not seek it in what lies outside the immediacy of the real. Analyse, make distinctions within reality, to see it constituting itself not according to metaphysical schemata but according to concrete strategies, plans, projects and investments.
And struggles? When thought frees itself from Kant’s ‘schematism of reason’ or from Husserl’s ‘functional intentionality’, one finds oneself within a concrete horizon that has to be reconstructed as such: the horizon of strategy, of the complex of strategies, is the interchange between the will to know and concrete givenness, between rupture and limit of rupture. Every strategy is struggle, every synthesis is limit. Here there is more dialectics than in dialectics, there is more astuteness than in reason, there is more concreteness than in the idea. Power is finally related back to the network of acts that constitutes it. Certainly those acts come to be covered by the ambiguity that Power represents for itself. But this does not remove the fact that always, at every moment, the totality is split, a heteronomy of ends can become a reality, and the picture loses all unidimensionality. Because what changes is the point of view; what modifies and gives the research so much freshness is that being within reality, recurring within that act of existence and of separation that belongs to us and to all the subjects that move in history. Struggles are the containing space of needs and of points of view, of projections and wills [volontà], of desires and expectations. Synthesis is delegated to nobody and to nothing. Science liberates itself from its master to offer itself to action, to concrete determination and to determination in practice.
The fact that a simple, formal approach of this kind is sufficiently powerful to preserve us from Power and to avoid falling for the blandishments of ‘Lysenkoism’ or of ‘indifference’, to afford us an active conception of the historical project, and also of its science, is astonishing. Perhaps for the first time a historiographical methodology and its philosophical foundation put themselves in a position to transform the reality they are attacking. Transforming reality means avoiding the ‘transformation problem’: from comprehensive categories to other categories, according to the rhythm of structural analogies. Instead we get laws of dishomogeneity, of fracture, of separation, which strike the eye immediately. The problem of transformation – of value into price, of the real into the symbol, of the universal into the particular – seeks to structure reality definitively: the stamp of the process is its non-truth, das Ganze ist unwahr [the whole thing is untrue]. Transforming reality means rather destructuring it continuously, so that the process – which is as liminal as you wish, but real nonetheless – of self-valorisation, of the emergence of needs, of the tendency of desires, can take place. ‘Put again into question our will to truth; restore to speech its character of event; finally remove the sovereignty of the signifier’ (Foucault, 1981, p. 66).
Reversal, discontinuity, specificity, exteriority: the relationship that presides over the desire to learn no longer finds easy – or indeed difficult – dialectical solutions. What runs through this methodology is violence, it is always a determination of the conditions of possibility of existence and discourse, taken together. ‘Where there is work of art [oeuvre], there is no madness’ (Foucault, 1988, pp. 288–9). And yet Homo psychologicus [the psychological human] is a descendant of homo mente captus [the insane human].
For Sade as for Goya, unreason continues to watch by night; but in this vigil it joins with fresh powers. The non-being it once was now becomes the power to annihilate. Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence, and of recovering tragic experience beyond the promises of dialectic. (Foucault, 1988, p. 285)
This is the violence that destroys Power; this is the violence of self-valorisation that deconstructs Power; this insisting on physical potentiality in Hobbesian terms unmasks the metaphysics of Power. ‘Now, the study of this micro-physics presupposes that the power exercised on the body is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 26). So
this power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who ‘do not have it’; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them […] This means that these relations go right down into the depths of society, that they are not localized in the relations between the state and its citizens or on the frontier between classes and that they do not merely reproduce, at the level of individuals, bodies, gestures and behaviour, the general form of the law or government; that, although there is continuity (they are indeed articulated on this form through a whole series of complex mechanisms), there is neither analogy nor homology, but a specificity of mechanism and modality. Lastly, they are not univocal; they define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion of the power relations. The overthrow of these ‘micro-powers’ does not, then, obey the law of all or nothing; it is not acquired once and for all by a new control of the apparatuses nor by a new functioning or a destruction of the institutions; on the other hand, none of its localized episodes may be inscribed in history except by the effects that it induces on the entire network in which it is caught up. (Foucault, 1979, pp. 26–7)
But is it true that this world of Foucault’s tends to flatness? And that it tends – beyond single emergences – to project the richness of the dialectics of strategies onto a horizon that is only formally structured, to repeat it in the conception of a totality that is ‘without a subject’? If this were true, political theory would yet again have killed its object. The mystified subject could have the upper hand over a methodology that is empty.
Foucault does not help us much in solving this problem. The progress of his discourse is provocative: his history of madness knows no mad people. On the terrain of ideology he then tends equally to render justice to indifference and to the interchangeability of discourses: Bentham and Rousseau, Foucault stresses in his Introduction to the edition of Panopticon, are complementary. Later on, when the problem is formulated expressly (for example, in a 1977 interview in Révoltes Logiques, 4), Foucault admits to the emergence of a subjective tremor in the history of systems, but this absence is liminal (and thus universal, an attribute of the species); it is dialectical (but better, one should say, residual, because produced by the mechanism of power); and then, finally, it is resistant… And thus in some sense powerful? Is the subject of strategies therefore real, is it not simply the point of intersection of the networks of existence? Foucault does not go beyond the hypothesis of a possible positive determination; he does not overcome but rather deepens the ambiguity, the elusiveness of his own approach. Baudrillard (1977) insists: this is not about ambiguity but about a new, sublime mystification. In Foucault the discourse mediates. Foucault himself had put us on our guard against this: ‘the theme of universal mediation is […] yet another manner of eliding the reality of the discourse’ (Foucault, 1986, p. 159).
But now the author is prey to the danger that he denounces.
The nemesis of reality is powerless over discourse because the word [parola] is formally negated, substantially assumed to an exclusive horizon. This ontology of discourse is heavy, mediative, unresolvable. Baudrillard accuses Foucault of having deprived discourse of a subject and of having reduced it on the terrain of circulation. Here the problem of transformation does not exist, not because it is negated in the face of the productive force of transforming – as historical knowledge – but because the real (in its discontinuity and interruption) is not grasped as it is, but is already mediated by the simulated transparency of the discourse.
We have arrived at the heart of Foucault’s ambiguity. His discourse is revolutionary from a formal point of view: reality is recognised to the extent that it is transformed by the complex of strategies that invest it. But, from a substantive point of view, the contents of the operation of transformation are mediated with respect to levels of reality that are stale and conservative. Pessimism of content, implacable optimism of transformational tendencies: but this definition of the new nature of circulation does not succeed in becoming a discovery of the productive nature of circulation. Reproduction is subsumed to circulation, not circulation to reproduction. And yet all the conditions for the former to happen were given. The productive force of knowing (and of the subjects of the strategies) was formally given. Now, instead, the whole does not reveal this productive force; it destructures but does not self-valorise; it carries out an operation that is destruens [destroying], but it does not organise the pars construens [building part]. Rather it negates the tension of the will to knowledge in the flatness of objective knowing. The world is a great mechanism of circulation in which everything goes around in respect of everything. Regularities, the series that are determined, are wertfrei [value-free] – not only in the sacrosanct circle of logic, but above all in relation to reality. Production of power, production of knowing through the means of knowing: going beyond structuralism repeats the stalest of its characteristics. Political Lysenkoism and the political theory of indifference take revenge (on the terrain of contents) for the defeat suffered at the level of methodology, of the apparatus of research. When analysis limits itself on the terrain of circulation, it does not succeed in expressing the potential that the process of foundation, the insistence on the force of transformation, the thickness of strategies had grasped. The materials are solid but the tower is fragile: the confusion of languages, their indifference become possible. The destruction of the structural homology constructs – or at any rate residuates – a structure of non-meaning – the interruption permits the reconstruction of every identity.
Why this internal aporia of Foucault’s thought? Why is it that the productive axis that, starting from the methodological foundation and passing through the vitality of strategies, could have invested in a creative manner the circulation of knowledge and of the real limits itself to itself instead, and leaves us a horizon that is destructured and only passively defined? On what can the ideologies of power rebuild their will for power? Why is it that the richness of a project that, grounding itself in specificity and passing through discontinuity and the logic of the concrete, of separation, overflows the complex totality of the real and becomes a wretched thing, stripped of its productive thrust – which nonetheless seeks to present itself as universality (and this is crucial, because this is the question we are all asking ourselves, for better or worse)?
* * *
It is said that in France politics fulfils the function exercised in Germany by metaphysics and in Britain by political economy. So let us have a bit of fun with these comparisons! Actually, in examining whether the Foucauldian impasse does or does not correspond to some of the terminology of philosophical thought in the era of late capitalism, I have little interest in focusing on German metaphysics. Such an approach would risk multiplying the ambiguities, if it is true that Nietzsche holds a pre-eminent position in Foucault’s meditations – as is the case for other representatives of French contemporary thought. But which Nietzsche? The fascist manikin who promulgates the absoluteness of Wille zur Macht [will to power]? Of course not; rather that irresoluteness of power and potentiality [potenza] that constitutes itself and cancels itself out, like tragedy, being individually, metaphysically unresolved around the historical diffusion of the emergences of being. But assuming this genealogy of Foucault’s thought, or only one of its distinguishing philological resonances, does not explain anything: you end up repeating the problem raised by the Foucauldian impasse. Is the weight of the senselessness [insensenzatezza] of circulation, the emptying out of its productive meaning, somewhat Heideggerian? Such never ending paths lead me nowhere. So, once again, the impasse remains unresolved; it is simply jumped over by Heidegger, just as it is posed in extreme and paralysing terms in Nietzschean thought too. So this is not what interests me: the Foucauldian problem is that of transformation, and it remains an open problem.
So we have to look elsewhere to find meanings and experiences suited to the identification of this problem – in a place where the problem of transformation exists as reality, as a question in play.
Rather than looking at German metaphysics, perhaps we could take a look at English political economy. They say that one day Pietro Sraffa met Wittgenstein. The experience of the Tractatus had come to an end, and that terrain could no longer be pursued. What Wittgenstein was pursuing in the Tractatus, the final frontier of positivism, of empiricism, was, again, a problem of transformation.
Now every possibility of transformation is in crisis, the solutions do not satisfy him; a huge weight of experience and suffering negates them. Sraffa expresses himself with a characteristic comical gesture, a hand gesture, a sign of contempt – the Neapolitan version of ‘up yours’. He ironically asks Wittgenstein for a symbolic translation. For Wittgenstein, they say (and I am not very interested in the truth of this anecdote, provided it works), the suggestion prompted the discovery of a new field of investigation: the production of signs by means of signs beyond the sphere of the pure circulation of signs, beyond the static unity of a universe of semiotic movement. A production of signs by means of signs… a production of commodities by means of commodities? When we consider what this story recounts, is it not the victory of a new political economy that includes production in circulation, is not the irrational proposed by Sraffa the winning element?
The production of commodities by means of commodities? That economic horizon that centuries of critical thinking had sought, up to this point, to ground systematically in a theory of value dissolves. All the relations, all the homologies, all the categories are subjected to retesting, and not one of them stands up. The reality of the market has changed so radically and significantly that every function that is not linear, not immediately grasped through a linear perspective, is removed. But not only the market (and the possibility of building there, no matter how, analogous networks) is removed; also removed is any determination of processes outside the terms of regularity, outside serial and statistical analysis. And, above all, the categories of production have to be critiqued as well: Where do we find now the link between labour and value? Where is it still possible to consider constant capital as a result of the development of living labour, when all the internal relations of constant capital are disrupted and, according to the law of the non-return of technologies [la legge del non ritorno alle techniche],* we cannot infer regular relations in any single case? So let us no longer talk of the law of value: the only image we can have of it is conclusive, resultant, Humeian. It is the effect of rejoining different images placed one on top of the other on a large screen. Its only existence is serial, but these series record only linear functions – and cannot do otherwise; they register no series that is linked to, or based on, the materiality of a real process of transformation. And so this economic world is reduced to a panoptic universe in which we must move according to sequences that are determined by structural relations and by changing dynamics, different from one moment to the next. Those serial regularities are themselves effects and conclusions.
It seems clear to me that here you find yourself before an analytical position that, with absolute consistency, presents a radical critique of the transformation problem. And the ‘panoptic’ character of this model also seems clear to me. But this does not mean that, in the work of Sraffa and his colleagues, the picture is painted only in formal terms. That science and critique can penetrate the level of production and of reproduction only by reducing it to that of circulation does not mean that one should doubt that production and reproduction still exist. Far from it: the panoptic level of circulation is constantly stimulated by the productive emergences, by the figures that preside over production and reproduction; circulation runs because it is continuously driven by small electrical stimuli. Of course, we only grasp the tip, the emergence of these stimuli, we only see them – and we can only see the fact that they organise themselves – as linear functions. Profit is a linear function of the wage; preconstituted relations do not exist, they are in the process of constituting themselves. The dynamism of the system is internal to the level of circulation. This does not mean denying the weightiness of the ontological problem of political economy. It only means avoiding that this weightiness becomes unbearable, that ontology becomes a hole into which we plunge impotently. This will mean that the dynamism impressed on circulation comes from another source, from another place; however, I register it as an effect, refusing to problematise the genesis beyond the limit of its experimentation. As the Sraffian theoretician of political economy will continue to explain, I shall seek my genealogies at this level of circulation, and in any event they will be strong genealogies if it is true that all categories, all conflictual content that is inserted in them, I now resolve at the level of circulation – following these tendential lines, the crossing points, the intersections and series, the results and the resultants …
The production of commodities by means of commodities. Political economy is a strange science: it lives a direct complementarity with economic policy, which is a practice. The analysis of strategies turns into a practice of strategies. That solution of the problem of transformation, which is denied at the genealogical level, is obligatory at the political level. But the terrain of this practice has thus far been emptied out – at the analytic level – of all necessity. And not just of this: it has also been emptied out of any subjectivity. The schema is sans sujet [without a subject] – but that is not a possibility for practice. The schema has, additionally, stopped time (and can play on the transformation between diachrony and synchrony, and vice-versa) as an important lever of the analysis: this is not an option for economic intervention. Sraffa has invented a theoretical schema that may permit various algebras of planners à la Leontiev; but then, when these algebras are applied in space and time, a number of difficulties arise. Production of commodities by means of commodities, hegemony of circulation: fine, but what is meant by this ‘by means of’? The instrument finds difficulty in matching itself to the analysis. The analysis has dissolved in front of me the spatial and temporal concreteness of the field of intervention; it has demystified for me every possible totality. So to what can the instrument now be matched, what totality will it have to create for itself? None, replies the economist. From the temporal point of view my units of intervention will become ever smaller: and as regards any long-term trends, I shall only be able to conceive of them as ensembles of many independent entities, as resultants of a chain of short-term situations. From the spatial point of view, my units of intervention will become increasingly more diverse and pluralistic: any theory that assumes a priori constant levels of long-term usage of any productive potentiality is of no use to me; I have to break with them all; I have no coefficients through which to deal with the big relationships of the cycle – on the other hand, the rigidity of the functions and magnitudes that I address can be at least as important as their fluidity, considered so far. This said, science has to be in command once again and economic policy is obliged to arrive at a conclusion, at a final determination. And in a situation where there is no norm of production and dynamic stimulus is given only as an external pulsion to a system that is loose and dispersed – well, here again the subjectivity denied to the ontological nexus comes to be surreptitiously reinserted as command, in, on, and of circulation. All ambiguity is dissolved. The destruction of every homology can only be resolved by the relation of force. The production of commodities by means of commodities becomes the production of commodites by means of command, the production of command by means of commodities, the production of command by means of command.
The paradox of the panoptic story of contemporary political economy lies in being its prey; that is, in the fact of moving surreptitiously from the destruction of the problem of the ontological foundation to the determination of an authoritarian validation, in the fact of developing a differential genealogical analysis and of concluding in a one-dimensional practice – which, however, inasmuch as it arises from these critical assumptions, is determined and can only be determined in terms of will, of specification of indifference. But this specification is in turn indifferent. The conclusion is prey to the indifference of the content. All production is in the end dominated by circulation. In this manner a highly mystified function comes to be affirmed, and a theoretical picture that, with Sraffa, had grasped the new dimension of economic becoming and had defined the horizon upon which the ensemble of forces was determining an entirely innovative relation (and series of relations)… that theoretical picture gets blurry and becomes both the basis and the result of an operation of transformation and manipulation of reality. Once again there is Lysenkoism, all the more seriously and tragically powerful as the field of economic reality was fruitfully dug at the start. Once again a political behaviour emerges that will determine the obfuscated and indifferent conclusion of the theoretical analysis. Once again the paths lead nowhere, except to a recognition of that and to the accompanying conclusion of an act of force, of a continuous rape of and against reality.
No, in Foucault production is not dominated by circulation. The analysis of circulation as a privileged terrain offered today by social capital, the analysis of the institutional circularity within which the existence of classes is given today – these do not negate but heighten the aspect of production. It is not production that is subsumed to circulation, but vice versa; the latter is invested by the former, according to an interplay of strategy and tactics, of structures and functions, of games and terms of reference that offer us both the freshness of the power [potere] of production and the new quality of circulation. Certainly, in Foucault this tendency often (indeed too often) becomes flattened. The analysis seems to get lost between the formalism of a traditional philosophy of action (without object) and the concrete quality of a traditional structuralism (without subject). We have grasped this impasse of Foucault; but in Foucault, unlike in my experience of other contemporary thought, I feel, beyond the impasse, a potentiality that is so powerful, an ontological thrust that is so alive, and a constitutive earnestness that is so strong that I find it difficult, if not impossible, to reduce his thinking to the level of a painful impasse.
Rather it is in the other direction that we need to proceed – namely to recognise the centrality of the terrain and methodological initiative proposed by Foucault. Is this new form of critique a new model of ‘a priori synthesis’, of action and structure, of will and matter? Once again, no. It is rather an ontology that is renewed here; it roots itself in the complexity of the given historical reality and subsumes all the determinations of historical being – just as capital itself has come to be determined, at this outer limit of its social development. Critique, in addressing this area, extends over all aspects of the existent; it grasps the complexity of its articulations, their intersection, and the mobility of all factors; in the perspective of the social totality of the capital – and thus of power. Because, when the complexity of capitalist development has reached these magnitudes, the critique of political economy becomes the critique of capitalist society, therefore the critique of society, of institutions, and of the state, and therefore a critique of politics. The game played by the power of social capital has to be revealed: to analyse it is also to denounce it – this ontology of historical being is simultaneously a genealogy and a critical potentiality [potenza] of destruction. At this point Foucault’s shortfalls do not matter, nor am I concerned about the weight of the impasse that his way of proceeding continually reveals, like an original stain that has not yet washed away. What interests me is rather the radicalness of the point of view and the truth of the definition of the terrain of analysis. It is this social potentiality [potenza] of capital that the viewpoint of inquiry, in its very foundation, reveals to me in its mystification, in the network of strategies to which it is constrained – in the potentiality of its impotence.
But this is not enough. And it seems that it was also not enough for Foucault. In his Préface to Bruce Jackson’s Leurs prisons: Autobiographies de prisonniers et d’ex-détenus américains (Foucault, 1972b) he proposes a reading of the world as a world of the circulation of command, exclusion and violence; he offers a critical consideration of capital as a prison, but at the same time he is struck, astonished and excited by the formidable reality of rebellion, of independence, of communication and of self-valorisation inside the prisons. The idea and the reality of the power, of the law, of the order that traverses prisons and brings together, in the accounts of prisoners, the most terrible experiences, here begins to falter. The events, in their seriality and regularity, open onto new conditions of possibility. There is no dialectical link in all this: dialectics, in its false rigour, imprisons the imagining of possibilities. No static overturning. Instead, by contrast, a horizon that is open. To the extent that it is realised, the analytical logic of separation opens into a strategy of separation. The separation, the overturning become real only in strategy. A world of self-valorisation opposes itself to the world of valorisation of capital. Here possibility becomes potentiality [potenza]. But by introducing this Spinozan concept of possibility–potenza, are we possibly extending too far our interpretative take on Foucault?
Perhaps so. However, in Foucault the suspicion of indeterminacy is always alert. On the other hand his analysis ‘seeks’ – so to speak – not only critical outcomes but also probably a kind of stability in the effectuality newly arrived at. Yet that methodological ‘mobility’ that we like so much and that corresponds so well to the quality of intellectual labour determined by social capital, which is intrinsic to the modalities and the purposes of the revolutionary process today, poses a problem: will it or will it not be capable of standing on its own? Is it not necessarily led to embody the hard determination of the historical process, of potenza against Power, of the proletariat against capital? Here a problematic picture opens, to which only a real movement is able to provide an answer. But, even if Foucault achieved no more than to pose this set of questions, the real movement should be grateful to him.
From the point of view of a critique that marches with the movement, it is thus necessary to repropose the totality of these problems: from the critique of political economy to the critique of politics, from the critique of capital to the critique of power, as I have said. Here the method constructs itself in strategy and articulates itself to functions and contents. It cannot be otherwise, if every category has to be verified from the point of view of its genesis, if every institution has to be disassembled and revealed in the totality of its mechanisms, if every freedom – and above all that of critique – is to be incorporated into the potentiality [potenza] that the historical process and every possibility of separation produce. But here, above all, nothing is flattened. This single and exclusive field of analysis that is circulation, its necessary and inescapably political quality, remain nevertheless a field of production. Production that is labour, human activity geared to ends of reproduction and of happiness, of expression and of potentiality [potenza]. Production is requalified within the horizon of circulation, but production itself remains, as a hegemony of the historical being of the human against and above every other form of existence. All the categories of the critique of political economy need to be laid out anew, constructed, and strategically connotated. Their dimension is that of circulation and politics; their foundation is production – the human power [potenza] of transforming the world.
When Marx comes to his definition of the ‘society of capital’ – that is, to the intuition that the development of the capital overcomes by its own necessity all limits of possible historical prediction and by that fact imposes the modification of its own categories of operation according to a schema and according to dimensions that are ‘social’ – at that very moment he calls for the implementation of a neue Darstellung, of a new and adequate exposition. The neue Darstellung – in Marx’s writing – is obviously not only a new exposition of contents; it must also be a new identification of subjects, and then a new refounding of method. Today we are in the middle of (and possibly beyond) that threshold phase glimpsed by Marx and absolutely required by his critical method of proceeding. Today we are thus witnessing a first fertile upheaval of the scientific horizon of revolutionaries – and for this we must also be grateful in part to Foucault. This upheaval of categories and this resolute innovative method thus become fundamental tasks. Tasks to be taken on directly, by insisting on the structural complexity of capitalist Zivilisation [civilisation]; on the radicality of the project for destruction; on the sectarian partiality of the scientific strategy that we are putting in place; and on the offensive character of the tactical consequences that derive from it. What is certain is that a lot of progress has already been made in this direction. The intensity of the Foucauldian approach and the fertility of his method are among the things that have been done, and at the same time they are tasks to be undertaken.
As always, however, the reasons for a choice or a task and the foundations of a method are certainly not sustained solely on the identification of a historical turning point. Ontology is more dense than histoire [history]. The method, as we have said, is required by the specificity of the exposure of the contents. But here, at this stage, we have to say more: the method requires, determines the specificity of the contents. The method seeks to be rooted in the ‘ontologicality’ of the grip on historical existence that is characteristic of this existence and reveals to us the world of this radicality. Try to read with the simplicity of the dialectical method and its strange alternatives some of the great problems of the (critique of) political economy and of politics: at best you end up with a handful of flies in your hand! Truth rather reveals its complexity today through the thousand paths that lead into the critical process of revolution. To follow them and to articulate – in the face of, and against, Power – the infinitely complex interconnections of autonomies and independences, of autonomy and autonomies, of possibilities and potentialities [potenze] – and to explain this process as both the source and the overturning of the enemy’s domination: this is the method we need if we are to make this task possible for us; we need its ontological fullness. An adoption of this method and of its functional, multifaceted and diverse activity, of the complexity of the semantic function that it determines, the method of the critique of political economy and of politics proves itself today on this task, and that is thanks also to Foucault.