hydrarchist writes:

"The Italian Foucault: Subjectivity, Valorization, Autonomia"

Mark Coté

What powers must we confront, and what is our capacity for resistance, today when we can no longer be content to say that the old struggles are no longer worth anything? And do we not perhaps above all bear witness to and even participate in the ‘production of a new subjectivity’?
— Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, p. 115

I want to seek a productive space between cultural studies and political economy by remembering autonomia, a theoretical and political tendency of the Italian radical left, developed ‘from below’ in the 1960s. Autonomia emphasised the self-organizing capacity of labour and everyday practices, in decentralized, nonhierarchical structures. It also strongly rejected not only the Soviet model, and the Stalinist party with its centralized leadership, but by and large representational politics. By the 1970s, autonomia had become a heterogeneous grouping of students, labour, women, and the marginalized. In some strands of autonomia—it has always been a diffused and contested movement —there was an increasingly strong influence of French poststructuralist thought, especially by Foucaultian microphysics of power and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the inherent productivity of desire and subjectivity. These influences are manifested perhaps most clearly in the autonomist concept of the ‘social factory’ which sees power and productivity as dispersed, emanating as much in subjectivities, everyday life, and cultural practices as in traditionally-defined ‘factory labour.’
My longer-term interest is in the complex relationship between subjectivity, autonomy, and capitalist reproduction. For now, I want to take a figure well known in cultural studies—Michel Foucault—and remake him, in order to introduce what myself and others have taken to calling the ‘communication school’ of autonomist thought. To do so, I am following the Foucauldian impulse of ‘fabrication.’ That is, I want to construct all the necessary travelling documents in order to take Foucault on a spatial and temporal journey to a particular Italy—to make up the ‘Italian Foucault.’ In constructing the ‘fiction’ of the ‘Italian Foucault’ I am not willfully misconstruing an historical and theoretical narrative; rather, I am seeking lines of affinity in order to stimulate the imaginary in terms of what might be done—in terms of scholarly pursuits between cultural studies and marxist political economy; and in terms of our practices in everyday life. Thus, this paper will give Foucault the credentials of a particular kind of ‘marxist’, and take him through some foundational automonist texts before setting him down in the Bologna, first circa 1977, and then today.

As I am doing this, I’d like you to consider a quote by Maurizio Lazzarato, a contemporary autonomist communication theorist best known for developing the conceptual working persona of post-Fordist production: immaterial labour. While I’d ask you to hold it in abeyance for now, it highlights some of the valuable insight the Italian Foucault might facilitate:

The process by which the ‘social’ (and what is even more social, that is, language, communication, and so forth) becomes ‘economic’ has not yet been sufficiently studied. In effect, on the one hand, we are sufficiently familiar with an analysis of the production of subjectivity defined as the constitutive ‘process’ specific to a ‘relation to the self’ with respect to the forms of production particular to knowledge and power (as in a certain vein of poststructuralist French philosophy), but this analysis never intersects sufficiently with the forms of capitalist valorization.

My gambit, now, is that the Italian Foucault can act as an intersection between the production of subjectivity and capitalist valorization.

Foucault the marxist?

There are long-standing antipathies between certain Foucauldians and certain Marxists. Their battles are not of interest here. My fabrication is not about giving back to Foucault his membership card in the French Communist Party which he tore up in 1952, just a few years after joining under the influence of his professor Louis Althusser. The Italian Foucault remains hostile to any party Marxism with a Stalinist streak, or to one that presents itself as a ‘science’, a methodological guarantor Foucault spent his life critiquing. Indeed, the Italian Foucault is a bastard, in the Derridean sense; a critical inheritor of what Derrida calls ‘the multiple spectres of Marx’. Rather than establishing some pure filiation, my impulse is toward a dynamic theoretical rekombination that allows us to break through the endless array of walls we face in the everyday practices of overcoming the immiserating and degrading reality of global capital.

Thus the case can be made that the Italian Foucault, rather than refusing or negating a Marxist critique, radicalizes it through expansion and intensification—thereby following a trajectory similar to some of his autonomist counterparts without necessarily knowing it. Consider the series of lectures he delivered at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in May 1973, where he doubts ‘traditional Marxist analysis’ which assumes labour as our ‘concrete essence’ which is transformed by capitalist relations into surplus value.

This is not because he denies a process of capitalist valorization (or surplus value). Instead, he suggest we reconsider the manner in which that process takes place. From the beginning—as Foucault famously repeated throughout his later years—the focus of his analysis was subjectivity and its construction amidst a productive matrix of power/knowledge relations. What is overlooked is what he sees as flowing through that matrix: "The fact is, capitalism penetrates much more deeply into our existence." (86) Hence capital’s need for a new set of techniques of power, of political practices, that transformed peoples’ corporal and temporal existences into things more adequate for the production of surplus value. "A web of microscopic, capillary political power had to be established at the level of man’s very existence, attaching men to the production apparatus, while making them into agents of production, into workers." In short, Foucault presents a radical dispersal of power relations that takes us beyond a strictly class-based analysis but not outside capitalist valorization: "There is no hyperprofit without an infrapower…[which refers not to] a state apparatus, or to the class in power, but to a whole set of little powers, of little institutions situated at the lowest level." (86-7) Necessarily, then, this "entails challenging and attacking infrapower" and hence the radical expansion of the critique of capital.

So what is really at stake here is a reconceptualization of power. While this is where some Orthodox Marxist might become apoplectic—‘you mean a transformation of historical materialism into a theory of power and subjectivity!?’—this is where the Italian Foucault begins to gain his stride. In ‘Les mailles du pouvoir’ , a lecture delivered again in Brazil, in 1976, a rather Foucauldian Marx is presented:

Finally, what we can find in Capital, Volume II is, in the first place, that there doesn’t exist one power, but several powers. Powers, signifying forms of domination, forms of subjection, which function locally, for example, in the workshop, in the army,[etc]…In sum, these are local forms, regions of power, that have their own form of functioning, their procedures and techniques. All these forms of power are heterogeneous.

While some may consider this a bastardized Marx, others, like leading ‘communication school’ autonomist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, see this reconsideration of power as vital for a keener analysis of our historical moment—one in which production has been diffused throughout society on a subjective level. In an interview I conducted with Bifo, he stated,

The connection between Foucault and autonomia is the concept of microphysics of power, the abandonment of the strongly political framework of the social movement, and the understanding of the revolutionary meaning of sexuality and daily life in the social history. The effect of Foucault's conception of subject (the subject does not exist a priori, but only as an effect) had a strong impact on marxist thought, and also on our social practices, especially after '77.

So with travel documents—fabricated or not—in order, lets take Foucault to Italy.

Mario Tronti and Sergio Bologna: Italian Foucaults?


While I have been stressing the ‘fabricated’ nature of the Italian Foucault, I am by no means the first to suggest productive linkages between Foucault and Marx. Nearly 20 years ago, conference participant Mark Poster wrote Foucault, Marxism, History, which situated Foucault in the tradition of ‘Western Marxism’. Of course, Hardt and Negri turn to Foucault for a substantial conceptual marker on their road to Empire with ‘biopolitical production’; more recently Jason Read has rigorously extended our understanding of the ontological production of biopower. A formal discussion of biopower—a shift in power from disciplining bodies to making populations productive—is beyond our ken here, because, as Bifo notes, biopower was still largely "out of sight" in 1977. Indeed, it was not until 1978 that The History of Sexuality was published in Italian, were one could read Foucault’s statement: "This bio-power was without question an indispensible element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes." (141)

Yet this paper is not a mere philological exercise; it is a matter of making the Italian Foucault as efficacious as possible. Hence we can turn to Gilles Deleuze, the capo di capi of Foucault’s compagni outside of the familiar penninsular boot. Indeed, it is absolutely necessary that someone write another paper not on the ‘Italian Deleuze’ but on the ‘deleuzo-guattaristi autonomists’—because without the full representation of this trio, the real impact of French poststructuralism on the Italian radical left cannot be understood. Regardless, in his wonderful small book Foucault, Deleuze sketched out lines of affinity with Mario Tronti, a progenitor of operaismo, the foundation of autonomist thought. What distinguishes operaismo (which translates poorly as ‘workerism’) is an inversion of the orthodox marxist perspective of relations between labour and capital. Tronti’s conceptual breakthrough is in seeing the dynamic of this relation in labour’s ability to resist capital, not the capital’s ability to dominate labour. Hence, with both Tronti and Foucault, as Deleuze writes, "the final word on power is that resistance comes first." (89) Its important to note that Tronti developed his notion that worker’s resistance exists prior to strategies of capital in 1961, well in advance of Foucault’s work on power.

In the same essay, which would later be published in Operai e Capitale (Workers and Capital), Tronti presented his ‘social factory’ thesis in which general social relations become moments of production: "the whole of society becomes an articulation of power; in other words, the whole of society exists as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination over the whole of society." Time prevents a detailed comparison here, but with little difficulty one could see in Tronti’s concept a liminal zone between Foucault’s disciplinary institutions (i.e. the factory) and social production diffused throughout the biopolis. Still, Tronti was no Foucauldian: he remained steadfast in his insistence on a ‘factory’ perspective on the social factory and prevaricated in his commitment to new forms of praxis, moving in and out and back into the Italian Communist Party, albeit in its radical wing.

Let us now fast-forward to 1977, and Sergio Bologna’s ‘Tribe of Moles’, an article that remains basic reading for anyone who wants to understand the radical social ferment in Italy during that decade. We would do well to remember that in Italy, it is said May ’68 lasted a whole decade; that is, after the ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1969, there continued the social liberation of Italian students and youth combined with decidely militant political practices. Students, women, industrial labour, precarious workers, and the unemployed underwent cycles of composition, decomposition, and recombinations, throughout the 70s, engaging in battles of varying intensities with institutional sites of power, be it capital, the state, the police, the university, or the party. At the same time, Italy’s first economic miracle, which began out of the rubble of WWII—during which Italy’s GDP grew at nearly double the rate of France or Britain—began to fade. Concomitantly, Italy was undergoing the painful shift to decentralized post-Fordist production, something that met with fierce and often violent resistance from the country’s highly organized labour force. This was the ground in which Bologna saw his tribe of moles burrowing through, emerging in struggle in the small factory, in the university, at the massive FIAT Mirafiori plant, and throughout the streets. For Bologna, this is what was most important: the ‘cycles of struggle’ were no longer solely undertaken by the mass worker in the factory: "here we find instead a set of recompositional mechanisms that start, precisely, from a base of dishomogeneity." (51) Here we see the sites of resistance that spring up wherever power relations seek to dominate throughout the social field—a notion central to Foucault.

Bologna saw this too, calling it "a system of struggle that is itself also infinitely decentralised." (55) Looking back, we can see his important conceptual gestures slouching toward biopower, what Deleuze would dub control society. Recasting Foucault’s diagrams of power, Deleuze famously stated that while in disciplinary society, ‘you were always starting over again’ (you’re not at home, in school, etc. anymore); in the control society ‘you never finish anything’ as disciplinary institutions are diffused on a subjective level throughout society. With Bologna’s analysis, steeped in engaged political practice, we might again rewrite Foucault, this time in Italian: non finisci mai di lottare (you never finish struggling). But remember that the Italian Foucault remains a fabrication. In a 1996 interview, Bologna looked back on that period, and noted that while Foucault may have been in the air, he personally was not steeped in his work: "Certainly the ‘77 Movement and several intellectuals linked to Autonomia had read Foucault especially, and with great passion. They identified more with Foucault, sometimes, than with Marx or Lenin, and this is obviously very important. So a discussion was opened." Bologna’s great insight did not, however, take him down a Foucauldian path. By the end of the ‘70s, his focus returned to ‘workers´ centrality’, through the analysis of the large factories, and with transportation workers. But the Italian Foucault found many other compagni, this time in the city of Bologna.

Bologna ’77


1977 can be seen as a watershed for autonomia in Italy. The year before, the Communist Party came within a hair’s breadth of winning the national election and promptly entered into a coalition government with the hated Christian Democrats. For most of the radical left, this was the final proof that the ‘official left’ and the Party were nothing more than the key linchpin that, in the last instance, sapped revolutionary energy and ensured the continued reproduction of capitalism. And when in parliament, the Communists abstained, thus ensuring the passage of a law that allowed the police to shoot protesters whenever they felt public order was ‘threatened’, what the Italians call the ‘Years of Lead’ had begun.

The antipathy among autonomists for the PCI cannot be understated. When the shooting began, and there were some 150 militants killed in these years, the official newspaper of Communist Party—L’Unita—made clear what side it was on. In March 1977, the University of Bologna—Europe’s oldest university—exploded in conflict and an unarmed 25 year old autonomist was shot dead in the back. The following day, L’Unita’s headline read ‘It is necessary for democratic forces to unite against the spiral of violence and provocation…’ The democratic force, of course, was the official Party and the State; the spiral of violence was from the students and autonomists.
So it is curious that the real Foucault, not the Italian Foucault, about a year later gave perhaps the most extensive interviews of his life with that very same newspaper, L’Unita. Published much later in English as Remarks on Marx, the interviewer, a Party journalist, betrayed the same misgivings he felt for Foucault as the Party did for the autonomist movement. For example, the interviewer confuses Foucault’s refusal of representational party politics with politics tout court; likewise he equates the pursuit of ‘autonomous zones’ with the ‘absence of a plan’ for political change. This is to say that it doesn’t all come together neatly for either the real or Italian Foucault in Bologna ’77. As Bifo pointed out, French intellectuals always thought the Italian Communist Party was different from their own Stalinist party, because in Italy, "it was a mass-party, and its conversion to Democracy was founded in the experience of the anti-fascist struggle [against the Nazis]…But after the Spring of ’77 and the bloody repression led by the PCI, the same intellectuals who had praised the novelty of the Italian way, protested against the resurfacing Stalinism."

So the real Foucault and the Italian Foucault come together in the streets of Bologna, struggling, often in uncertainty. Italy too, continued in a struggle of violence, led by the State, led by the Red Brigade, with the ultimate effect being the destruction of autonomia, at least in that form. Bifo was frank in his appraisal: "The enormous richness that the Movement of ’77 expresses could not succeed in finding a formal program and positive organization. This is because of capitalist repression, but also because of the inability of the revolutionary movement to adjust with rapidity its interpretive categories and its practices to the reality of a mature, post-socialist proletariat." (156) There were gleanings of new interpretive categories and practices, though; thus, the real and Italian Foucault did have their moments in ’77. The year before, Foucault wrote the ‘Preface’ to a reissue of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, where he called for the end to "the sad militants, the terrorists of theory, those who would preserve the pure order of politics…Bureaucrats of the revolution and civil servants of the Truth."

Bologna’s illegal underground Radio Alice, emerged at about that time, seemingly taking the real/Italian Foucault at his word. One of their communiques read "Foucault teaches something. Communication is subversive: power knows this." As not-sad militants, the Radio Alice collective later wrote "The practice of happiness is subversive when it becomes collective." Felix Guattari was so moved by Radio Alice that he visited, then loudly agitated for the station, writing "The Italians of Radio Alice have a beautiful saying: when they are asked what has to be built, they answer that the forces capable of destroying this society surely are capable of building something else, yet that will happen on the way." Along the way, Bifo and several other members of Radio Alice were thrown in jail. Along the way, the police burst through the station’s doors, smashed the equipment, and destroyed the transmitter. Along the way, 25 years later, to be exact, Radio Alice’s bastard offspring reappeared a few blocks away as Telestrade, a micro-television station. They embody the Italian Foucault’s invocation of the local and the microstruggle.

Telestrade—meaning street tv—are microbroadcasters that operate on almost no budget; they only reach a radius of a few blocks; they are run only by people in the neighbourhood in which they broadcast; there are already some 21 Telestrade microbroadcasters in Italy; they are joined in a circulation of struggle through a network of websites; they are now connected through ‘tactical television’ to other Italian microbroadcasters like ‘no-war tv’, ‘urban tv’, and ‘global tv’. They are an emerging network of ‘infrapower.’

So it may seem like I’ve taken you on a ruse. Like with the Movement of ’77, we are no closer to understanding sufficiently how the production of subjectivity intersects with the forms of capitalist valorization. However, my bet is that much remains to be learned from the Italian Foucault. And I think it is clear that he is resting well, at least in the interstices of communication in Bologna, but is getting restless to move somewhere else, along the way…

Mark Coté