I don't know how to link directly to journal entries, but Angela's journal entry on Saturday April 02, 05 is interesting.

She references a journal called Culture Machine that has an issue on biopolitics. I haven't read it yet, but it looks good.

Looking back over one of my earlier entries I can't believe I wrote something about reading Marx in the context of the entirety of capital accumulation. Dear god, what have I become?! :) I think you're right about the equation of bare life and labor power, labor power and biopolitics. Not really sure what to do with these concepts, but I'm convinced they're important and that they're linked. The next step of trying work out that linked-ness is a little daunting.

One of the things that concerns me with the biopolitics stuff, one of the underlying things behind my urge/tendency to want to say labor power and biopolitics is the same thing is this: I worry about a certain periodizing impulse. For instance, see this recent post to aut-op-sy.

The post is trying to argue for some sort of anarchist point, which I'm sympathetic to. But it relies on a viewpoint that now, under real subsumption, anarchism makes sense. I see the same move in Hardt and Negri's work, which is to say: NOW labor power/production is biopolitical. And because of this becoming biopolitical, now multitude makes sense (and also, now reproductive labor is labor, now "women's work" is work, etc).

This comes up I think in the electronic interview we did with Michael Hardt. In the interview, Hardt was asked:

"Do you intend the concept of 'always-already multitude' to be a critique of the idea that only the one can rule, that the many can not rule itself (that is, the social and political body has always been multiple, the many has always been able to rule itself, and now we understand this) or a diagnosis of historical exhaustion of the rule of the one (that is, the rule of the one was the only possibility before, earlier attempts to produce multitude were pre-mature, only now is the era of the one's rule passing)?"

and he replied

"I would tend to agree with your latter formulation, that the exhaustion of the rule of the one and the formation of the multitude are only possible today for the first time. The "always-already" is meant to refer to the virtual existence of multitude. But I wonder if there really have been earlier attempts to produce multitude or rather if only today in retrospect we can read our history in those terms. Maybe it's something like that line of Marx in the Introduction to the Grundrisse about the anatomy of the human preceding the anatomy of the ape."

It seems to me that there's an effort here to point toward a certain way of 'doing politics' and of thinking (the whole issue of what that way is, what multitude means in other less theoretical idioms, is a really important one but one for another day), which I like and appreciate. But the gesture seems to me to be one of "now is the time when this becomes possible", a periodization based on claims about biopolitics. That's the part I don't like. It erases a lot from history and sides with some pretty ugly and bloodstained characters - like the claim "Lenin would be pro-networks if he were here today" which implies "I would have supported Lenin's plans if I was around back in the day" (sorry, I just can't stop being sectarian about this).

Angela writes in a comment, in reference to the equation of bare life and labor power, "it's your old-style party rhetorics, with a new dash of lyrical indignation borrowed from Agamben, which represents 'the working class' as a homogenous entity. Only state socialists are interested in that kind of representation." I think she's right. It seems to me then that the move I'm objecting to is one that claims to be anti-state and anti-representation, but operates what Angela is pointing toward: a homogenization, that operates by a periodization (once there was an era of the One, now is the era of the Many, once production wasn't biopolitical, now production is biopolitical).

My gut response to this is say, "no, production was always biopolitical", to push against the periodization. I can see, though, that there's still a flattening move here in what I'm saying. Basically what I'm saying boils down to "what y'all say is new is not so new." Not that nothing has changed, just that everything is not new, at least in any non-trivial sense, and I think the aura of novelty produced actually works against trying to get at the specificity of our moment and its potentialities (and it also works against historical readings of the specificites of earlier moments). I'm not sure how to express this clearly, or to oppose the periodizing/flattening without making another flattening move of my own. Gotta think more about this.

For me I think it much of this comes back to questions of possibilities of communism. Communism is always specific, and how can we think specific communisms without erasing any other specifities (ie, thinking communisms today in a way that erases past communisms and possibilities of communism.) I don't know, but if anyone figures it out, please tell me.