If I were more conversant in Deleuze and Kierkegaard, I would try and argue that I am not being redundant, but rather enacting repetition as philosophical category. No can do, though. Instead I'm just going to hammer away repetively at this biopolitics thing and recognize that it is repetitive (though I do have a hope that it will work out good-repetitive, a la the Ramones, and not bad repetitive a la waged work).

I mispoke when I said H/N think biopolitical/immaterial labor is new:

"The argument, let me repeat, is not that immaterial labor did not exist before but rather that it has recently been accorded the dominant position in the economy and that such dominance has a series of important effects." (In Hardt, Common Property)

That's almost weirder, though, because it means that the idea is that the hegemony of immaterial labor creates all this new human potential. Now, it could be that the hegemony of immaterial labor -- the hegemony of the sector/type of labor that bears the multitude-capacity -- means that now there is a chance that multitude can exist without getting killed off (an argument about contingent historical circumstances of power, conflict, and survivability). That kind of makes sense to me, but when I've tried to ask Hardt this he didn't like that idea (or else I wasn't able to pose the question clearly). The alternative, to say that there is some sort of new possibility for humanity opened up -- a sharing of the multitude-capacity, analogous to the party sharing it's revolutionary consciousness -- seems to me predicated on an idea of the working class as not itself a set/site of antagonisms and conflicts. That is, it seems to me to imply that there's this new capacity which needs to be handed out -- a problem of distribution -- rather than seeing a set of conflicting organizational and political etc goals in competition. (Reminds me of this Ranciere quote that I found,it's in the translator's intro to Night of Labor: "It is always in the heart of the worker aristocracy that a hegemonic fraction forms, presenting itself as THE proletariat and affirming the proletarian capacity to organize anohter social order, starting with the skills and values formed in its work and its struggle." [Ranciere, "Les maillon de la chaine (proletaires et dictatures)",Les Revoltes Logiques #2, Spring-Summer 1976, 5.] I took it to mean 'when someone expresses an essence of labor they are probably speaking on behalf of a labor aristocracy and universalizing one quality of the aristocracy in order to hide conflicts and power plays'.)

On a related note, Brad Evans sent me a Foucault quote he found -- 'a question session On the geneology of ethics' reads as follows "q - isnt it logical, given these concerns, that you should be writing a geneology of bio-power? MF - I have no time for that now but, it could be done. in fact I have to do it!"'

See also the text on the genealogies of biopolitics conference...