Angela and I have been emailing about stuff, and she's uneasy about my willingness to too quickly assimilate labor power and bare life. Fair enough. My friend Mark writes in a paper:

"it is Foucault’s thesis that biopower needs sovereign power, which is to say, the resort to violence in certain situations. People can never be regulated into complete passivity, at least not with the current technology, so there must be prisons and tear gas and fighter-bombers." I've written to him to ask for a page reference or quote in Foucault to support this. I think it's very interesting. Part of why I'm interested in the bare life/labor power thing is around the question of biopower/biopolitics -- I hear echoes of bad readings of Lukacs and the Frankfurt School in some senses of biopower/biopolitics: managed life, recuperation of everything, no room to breathe or to (think) resist(ance).

One maneuver in response to this is to foreground the blood and fire required to create the capital relation in the first place, in the processes of originary primitive accumulation, and to emphasize the continuity of this process over time -- at micro level and macro-levels (ie, processes of management and hidden acts of brutality, and big visible crackdowns). Angela objected to the implication in some writers that all of us are subject to being bare life, and not virtually but actually. As I took the point, she says that while turning from reading Marx as a critique of private ownership (the Marxism of state socialism) to the critique of the value form, of labor power, is an advance, there's still a homogeneization at work there. Clearly not all of us are in camps, being tortured, starving, etc and not all of us face the same level of real threat of being made bare life by the sovereign's decision. Maybe part of the response, then, is to look at bare life and the 'silent compulsion of the market', bare life and primitive accumulation: there would be multiple levels of bare life, perhaps? Levels in terms of scale: camps, police stations in the US (the experience of Abner Louima [sp?] and Amadou Dialo -- perhaps an analogy with Debord: diffuse camps vs concentrated camps? a structure of integrated camps?). This touches on another question I have reading Agamben. The sovereign decides on the exception, whether or not to except. But why? Why does the sovereign decide? It strikes me that one source of the sovereign's need to decide is social emergency. (For instance, the state of siege declared in Argentina, December 2001, a social crisis, a fiscal crisis, leading to state of exception and political crisis.) Does this emergency have to be seen solely as eruption or can there be quiet emergencies? (Falling rates of profit perhaps, breakdowns of work discipline, family/sexuality structures?) Or are the big conflagrations the earthquakes - the visible manifestations - derived from subterrenean processes with long histories? Back to reading Marx again, maybe? Thinking about the entirety of the processes of accumulation of capital, (re)producing value/the capital relation globally - globally in terms of geography, in terms of time, and in terms of functionality for capital (labor of 'production', distribution, consumption, reproduction, etc) - focusing here not as a totality (ie, not trying to think from a transcendent position) but as a set of connected points, where something can go wrong at each point. Bare life, then, as perhaps a moment of the global process? Not that we are all bare life all the time, but that making some people bare life some of the time attempts to quash specific types of subversion, and to prevent their spread or their being supported by other points (nodes, in Alquati's terms [or is it Dyer-Witheford?, sloppy very sloppy]). Ends up sound banal, maybe - police repression of some to keep the whole machine running, an injury to one is etc..., but maybe it is banal, theoretically - but still a pressing political issue...

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