In the last 1978 issue of AutAut, the journal that first took Foucault on board in Italy, I published an essay (already written in the previous year) entitled ‘On the Method of Political Critique’ (Negri, 1978).* In that essay I discussed what, until that time (the last Foucault writing that I covered in the article was Surveiller et punir), had been the impact of Foucault’s work on the thinking of the revolutionary left in Italy, in which I was then an activist. This was the period when I had resumed my work on Marx, and in particular on the Grundrisse; between 1977 and 1978 I had been giving my course on ‘Marx beyond Marx’ at the École Normale Supérieure at rue d’Ulm (Negri, 1991 [1979]).
I offer this information to the reader to point up a coincidence: my reading of Foucault was happening at the very moment in which I was presenting a university course that summed up a long ‘revisionist’ experience of readings of Marx. However, the reader should note that my ‘revisionism’ in those years developed within an attitude of adherence to the basic concepts of the critique of political economy and also as part of revolutionary militant activity, and not – as was often the case during that period – in a rejection of Marx.
Why did I start to get interested in Foucault? Because in those years the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the trade unions, with which the movements were locked in polemic, were planning an alliance on the societal and parliamentary terrain with the forces of the right – the famous ‘historic compromise’ – advancing the notion that it was now possible for the proletariat to achieve sovereign power, that the forces of the left could not be picky when they engaged in this operation of difficult but necessary compromises, and that the political was autonomous and indifferent to values: only strength counted. For the PCI, the cult of sovereignty and the exercise of raison d’état – as we were soon to find out – slept under the same blanket. The problem was how to demystify this idea – a bizarre one for communists – that power and sovereignty were autonomous places and indifferent instruments. A real and proper ‘transcendental’! And the idea that struggle could only take place, and that the political transition could only be built, by taking into account these transcendentals. We replied: on the contrary, the materiality of power and of the political constitution is clearly defined and well characterised from the point of view of liberal politics, and this condition is very far from indifferent. Consequently, when I deny, resist, and denounce that supposed indifference of power, I do so with good reason. In other words I adopt a point of view that is critical and determined. I deny indifference because I am difference, a difference that is itself determined, real, politically defined, and unable to show itself in a different way. We could say, with Foucault, that ‘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).
This, however, was not enough to transform the rejection of a political disaster in the making – the disaster of the policies of the left – into the making of a new horizon of struggle. What was needed was to reorganise analysis and rebuild organisation. We had to give that moment of consciousness a capacity for expansion and the solid construction of a new theoretical foundation. This is why it was useful to think with Foucault.
From the beginning it was clear that Foucault was working within an ‘ontological’ tradition of French thought that did not succumb to the lure of the philosophy of life and action. Moving up, in my reading, from Foucault’s (1954) essay on Biswanger, through his essays on Kant’s (1964) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and on Weizsäcker (1958), to the History of Madness (Foucault, 2009) and the Birth of the Clinic (Foucault, 1976 [1963]), in the above-mentioned article I highlighted on the one hand the potency of the relationship that was proposed between anthropology and ontology and, on the other, the fact that in this work the construction of the historical object was extremely realistic: the object was no longer sought in the range of things outside the immediacy of experience. In this Foucault there emerged, as Althusser noted, ‘absolutely unexpected temporalities’ and ‘new logics’ (see in this regard Vilar, 1973). Freeing himself from the Kantian ‘schematism of reason’ and from the Husserlian ‘functional intentionality’, Foucault constructed within a horizon that was concrete – within a horizon of struggles and strategies.
Now:
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. (Chapter 12, p. 142)
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What happens around this decision? There happens something that is as elementary as it is difficult – you have to push this experience from history to life, from the description of the historia rerum gestarum [history of events] to res gestae [events]: regain the totality in order to deny it (das Ganz ist unwahr) [the whole is untrue], but deny it because the totality, Power, could not encompass life, the point of view of the singularity, the dispositif that desire organises.
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I had immersed myself in German historicism, Historismus: in fact this was precisely the topic of my doctoral research (Negri, 1959). I had focused especially on Dilthey – on that very singular Kulturpolitik [cultural politics and cultural policy] that constituted the terrain of his analysis. Burckhardt and Nietzsche were in there, much more than it seemed. ‘Epochs’ in which knowledge was organised unitarily, but that were always being broken – ‘epochs’ in a discontinuity. Might this process not also be called an ‘archaeology’, a sequence of epistēmai? And yet the ‘epoch’ of the analyses of Historismus, as also the epistēmē [knowledge, understanding] of Foucault, sometimes seemed more solid than the decision of constitution (which, however, traversed them) and than the ability to recuperate it. So, in that eventual blockage of the process, Kultur changed into Zivilisation among historicists; and, in parallel, life, the living epistēmē, and biopolitics were, in Foucault, absorbed into biopower.
Epistēmē: how difficult it was to understand it in a non-structuralist manner, in an epoch traversed by the flourishing of (until then undefeated) cultures and methods of structuralism in the humanities! That is how Les Mots et les choses was in fact interpreted (Foucault, 1966; but see also IMEC, 2009). The same fate was to loom over Surveiller et punir. Here it was the idea of the ‘panopticon’ that rigidified knowledge and movement. Production seemed to be dominated by a kind of unproductive circulation. The ‘panopticon’ invested production in order to subsume it, and Foucault’s analysis seemed thus ‘to get lost between the formalism of a traditional philosophy of action (without object) and the concrete quality’ of the philosophy of the structure, ‘a traditional structuralism (without subject)’ (Chapter 12, p. 150). Between historia rerum gestarum and res gestae a circuit without an escape route was sometimes established. In many ways, therefore, the openings I described above seemed to be blocked.
Yet it is in Surveiller et punir, just where the blockage seems at its strongest, that the discussion reopens. The terms used by Foucault to give a name to this new economy of power (panoptique, ‘all-seeing’), which is now based on the exploitation of life and on putting to work the physical strength of individuals, on the management of their bodies and the control of their needs, in short on the normalisation of what people do, are actually twofold: biopowers and biopolitics. Thus far we have used these terms indiscriminately, as if they were equivalent. In fact they are not.
So now we have this problem: as long as one maintains a lack of distinction between biopower and biopolitics, it seems no longer possible to have a resistance to the capturing of life and to its standardised management; there is no longer the option of an exteriority, and you can no longer even imagine a counterpower, unless you reproduce – inversely – that from which you want to be liberated. This is where ‘liberal’ readings of Foucault began to appear on the scene: that is, starting from the Foucauldian analyses of regulatory management of a living being [un vivente] organised into populations – from which derives the political image of an ‘actuarial’ (insurance-like) political management of life, of a classification of individuals within macrosystems that are regulatory, desubjectivating and homogeneous.
Otherwise, on the contrary, the biopowers are dissociated from biopolitics, and the latter becomes the affirmation of a potentiality [potenza] of life against the power over life. Or rather there is, located within life itself – in the production of affects and languages, in social cooperation, in bodies and in desires, in the invention of new ways of life – a place of creation of a new subjectivity that would also prove to be a moment of destruction of all subjection. In this regard, it could be objected that the opposition between Power and potentiality [potenza] owes more to Spinoza than to Foucault. It is certainly the case that my own thinking owes much to this derivation. In those years I was in fact beginning the work on Spinoza that would lead to my writing of L’anomalia selvaggia (Negri, 1991 [1982]). Yet I believe that Foucault can very much be located within this division between Power and potentiality. For instance, at the end of Surveiller et punir, when he wrote: ‘In this central and centralised humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of “incarceration”, objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 308) – in short, when Foucault proposed that ‘roar of battle’ as the sound of a work in progress, he negated any possibility of reducing it to the noise of the panopticon – and thus that potentiality [potenza] could be flattened on power.
As regards the simple reduction of my analyses to the simple metaphor of the panopticon, I think that here one can reply at two levels. One can say: compare what they attribute to me with what I have actually written; here it is easy to show that the analyses of power that I have conducted are not in any sense reducible to this figure, not even in the book where they went looking for it: Discipline and Punish. In fact, while I show that the panopticon was a utopia, a kind of pure form developed in the late eighteenth century to provide the most convenient formula of a constant exercise of power that is immediate and total, and while I showed the birth, the formulation of this utopia, its raison d’être, it is also the case that I immediately showed that it was precisely a utopia that had never functioned in the manner in which it was described and that the whole history of the prison – its reality – consisted precisely in the fact of having bypassed this model. (Foucault, 1994a, vol. 3, text 238, p. 628)
Thus in Surveiller et punir this was already entirely clear. It was also entirely clear to me in provincial Italy, and in fact in my article of 1978 I quoted this long section from Foucault:
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. […] Therefore 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 localised 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 localised 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)
It was during this period that it was possible for a text such as my Dominio e sabotaggio (Negri, 1979), where the ‘agonistic’ and ‘antagonistic’ concept of power was strongly stressed, to emerge simultaneously with my research on Foucault but also within the hard-fought struggles that were taking place in Italy. And above all it was during that period, and on these theoretical bases, that the antagonism of the class struggles could begin to be interpreted through that social microconflictuality that socialisation (both that of capital and that of labour power) now entailed: and this in fact explains the emergence of the concept of the ‘socialised worker’ [operaio sociale].
So one has to go beyond the promises of dialectics; in other words one has to read power not as a property but as a strategy.
At that point, in that 1978 article, I made a long digression on what seemed to me to be the state of the critique of political economy in its more active schools: the Ricardian ones, which were already going beyond Keynesianism. And it was on Sraffa (1960) that I settled – on the potentialities that, in The Production of Commodities through Commodities, he showed were determining new value in order to produce innovation from within the movement of goods, thus updating the reading of the movement of goods and the transformation problem chez Marx. In recalling the theoretical importance of this Sraffian reading of Ricardian circulation, I remembered the anecdote of the encounter-confrontation with Wittgenstein, after the experience of the latter’s Tractatus had reached its conclusion. Piero Sraffa suggested to his Cambridge colleague that the problem, at the level of logic and in the critique of political economy, was the same: How was it possible to identify a point of transformation (of innovative production) for the economist in the circulation of goods, and for the philosopher in linguistic circulation? Now, whereas for Wittgenstein
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? (Chapter 12, p. 147)
And might we not take this anecdote as a parallel to the task that Foucault had already for some time explicitly been setting himself: ‘to question our will to truth; to restore to discourse its character as an event; to abolish the sovereignty of the signifier’? (Foucault, 1981, n.p.).
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But is all this enough? Is it possible to have truth without praxis, without resistance? This is how I answered that question in 1978:
But this is not enough. And it seem 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. (Chapter 12, p. 151).
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In 1983 I returned to France after a long period of imprisonment in Italy. At around the time of Foucault’s death I resumed contact with Deleuze. I discussed with him at length about Foucault, going beyond the reticence about Foucault that was common among Deleuze’s closest friends and collaborators. So I was breathing from close up the air of that masterpiece (not of the history of philosophy – have you ever seen anyone further away from that horrid discipline than Foucault and Deleuze? – but of literature and of spiritual sharing) that was Deleuze’s (1986) book on Foucault. It represented the definitive overcoming of that impasse between a ‘subjectivity without object’ and a ‘structure without a subject’ of which we have already described the topography in Foucault (and which should be read as a result of French philosophy’s ‘loss of identity’ from the 1950s onwards) – that overcoming that is not an Aufhebung [sublation] and has nothing of the dialectical (‘the idea of universal mediation is yet another way […] of eliding the reality of discourse’, Foucault, 1981, n.p.) but is a definitive going beyond the tradition of French spiritualism, which on the matter of the subject-individual presses hard on the truth, paralyses action in love, and in psychology nullifies the positivity of existence. Indeed, well before narrating the history of the encounter between epistēmē and its innovation, Deleuze had offered its dispositif to Foucault. This was the reason why now he could speak of him so pertinently. As for us, in order to get the whole of the picture of this formidable going beyond of the French philosophical tradition – completed from within itself – and in order to become aware of that ‘realisation’ that was hegemonic on the (not only European) terrain of philosophy that Foucault and Deleuze made possible for it, we still had to wait for the publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France. We had, however, understood that, if the twentieth century had become Deleuzian, the twenty-first would be Foucauldian.
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Yet how many efforts have been made to get rid of the definitive conversion of Foucault’s discourse – beyond biopower, through the biopolitical – to the production of subjectivity! I remember, in the early 1990s, at one of my seminars at the Collège International de Philosophie, a sharp exchange between François Ewald and Pierre Macherey. They clashed on the question of individualism, on the different determinations of freedom, and on the meaning of Foucauldian ethics; but both missed the fact that in Foucault the opposite of individualism was singularity, that ethics experienced a search for a freedom that was not only of the spirit but also of bodies, and that its ontology was productive. And so they missed the point that sovereignty, within which biopower was rooted in each of its forms (both liberal and socialist), was not the only fabric on which ontology could be constructed and measured. On the contrary: sovereignty was taken up by Foucault and then analysed and deconstructed, within biopolitics, in the relationship between various different productions of subjectivity.
When one defines the exercise of power as a mode of action upon the actions of others, when one characterises these actions as the government of humans by other humans – in the broadest sense of the term – one includes an important element: freedom. Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are ‘free’. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several kinds of conduct, several ways of reacting and modes of behavior are available. Where the determining factors are exhaustive, there is no relationship of power: slavery is not a power relationship when a man is in chains, only when he has some possible mobility, even a chance of escape. (In this case it is a question of a physical relationship of constraint.) Consequently there is not a face-to-face confrontation of power and freedom as mutually exclusive facts. […] The power relationship and freedom’s refusal to submit cannot therefore be separated. The crucial problem of power is not that of voluntary servitude (how could we seek to be slaves?). At the very heart of the power relationship, and consequently provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. (Foucault, 2000, pp. 341–2)
This text is from 1980. Everything that Foucault develops subsequently will be entirely within this perspective. There will be an uninterrupted deepening of the materialist character of the analysis of the historical determinations, of the content of epistēmē in the transition between ‘archaeology’ and ‘genealogy’, and also of the potentiality [potenza] of the ‘production of subjectivity’, from resistance to rebellion and to expression, and to the critique of political democracy.
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Another page from my AutAut article of 1978:
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. (Chapter 12, pp. 152–4).