Biopolitics and Vitalism
|
|
- Mark Mosley
- 6 years ago
- Views:
Transcription
1 a paper presented at Workshop 16, Mapping Biopolitics, of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Joint Sessions of Workshops, Granada, April 2005 Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy Lancaster University Lancaster University LA1 4YG United Kingdom In this paper I explore the productivity of bringing together two currents of thought biopolitics and vitalism. By biopolitics I mean that current of social and political theory which tries to understand modern forms of power and social ordering as involving the shaping and optimising of the very biological life of society and individuals. And by vitalism I am referring to biophilosophical conceptions of the animacy of living things and processes which refuse to see this animacy as reducible to processes of mechanical, efficient causation. While both traditions of thought take life as their object, there has been insufficient exploration of their capacity to be mutually illuminating. In this paper I focus on ways in which neo-vitalist thought might assist in the addressing of certain deficits of the social and political theory of biopolitics. In Part I of the paper I give a brief summary of the biopolitical ideas of three influential thinkers: Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. I suggest that, despite its undoubted significance, this body of work is limited in various ways by conceptualisations of life, of the bios that is the subject of biopolitics, which underplays the creative potency of the life process, confines it to the immaterial realm of ideas, and/or fails to give an adequate account of the dynamism of biopolitics the changing mode of insertion of the life process into the social body. In Part II I seek a remedy to such shortcomings in the revival of vitalist thought in the twentieth century, focusing on the work of Henri Bergson, who conceived of life as inherently durational, as a creative, divergent temporal process, and the further development of Bergson s ideas in the work of Gilles Deleuze. In Part III I explore the implications of bringing together these two currents of thought, initially through a consideration of Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri s Empire, which draws explicitly on Deleuze s ideas, and conclude with some speculative suggestions for the further development of this line of inquiry.
2 I BIOPOLITICS Hannah Arendt and the human condition Perhaps the first clear formulation of modern politics as consisting of the administration of the life process was Hannah Arendt s neo-aristotelian account of The Human Condition (1958). For Arendt, the ceaseless vitality of nature is an inescapable part of the human condition, in that as humans we are also animals. In the preface to the book, Arendt decries as a form of earth alienation any technological attempt to transcend our material, organic nature, and thus to deny our belonging to life and dependency on the processes of nature. For Arendt, when we meet our biological needs through labour we do so as animals; labour is life performing itself. Labour allows us to experience the sheer bliss of being alive which we share with all living creatures... toiling and resting, labouring and consuming (1958: 106). 1 But at the same time that labour is a blessing, it also represents a kind of imprisonment. As the requirements of necessity are never finally fulfilled, humans are compelled to labour unceasingly. The redemption of this imprisonment can only come from outside labour, from more specifically human forms of activity from work (the fabrication of enduring objects), and action (meaningful speech and gesture). For Arendt, moral freedom requires us not simply to survive, to meet our animal needs through labour, but to fabricate an artefactual human world which can serve as an enduring backdrop for meaningful action, for word and deed. Unlike human beings, other animals are immortal not because individual animals never die, but because they are part of the never-ending flow of life; as a species their immortality lies in the sheer repetition of procreation. It is only in the enduring context of the artefactual world that human beings can retain their own continuing identity and only against this stable background that human beings can be seen as mortal, as having a recognizable life story (bios) from birth to death (1958: 97). But this very mortality can itself provide the conditions for a this-worldly immortality in the collective memory of a society, achieved through word and deed. One function of the artefactual world for Arendt is thus to keep life out to create an enduring human space from which the cyclic and endless meeting of necessity is kept at bay. However, for Arendt, the rise of labour as the organising feature of modern societies was the breaching of the boundaries of this human world, unleashing into it the endless performativity of life. The factory system and the division of labour transformed communities into societies of labourers and jobholders... centred around the one activity necessary to sustain life This elevation of labour threatens the world s permanence because, whereas work serves the world, building it up and preserving it over time, labour serves only life itself (1958: 46-7). 2 For Arendt the modern human world should thus be understood as exhibiting a hypertrophy of life s potency, an unnatural rise of the natural (1958: 47); the very imbalance toward growth and productivity, unchecked by cyclical decay, that is exhibited by capitalism manifests its character as an unnatural extension of the life process, one which compromises the integrity and purpose of the artefactual world, with a number of deleterious implications. Politics is transformed from a realm of freedom, a polis in which excellence and self-revelation can occur, into one of necessity, simply the public organisation of the life process, whereby society is conceived as an oikos, a giant household to be managed (1958: 46). Society organised in this way expects from each of its members a certain kind of behaviour, imposing innumerable and various rules, all which tend to normalize its members, to make them behave, to excluded spontaneous action or outstanding achievement (1958: 40). 2
3 And people exhibits a growing world-alienation, abandoning the togetherness of a shared public world, retreating instead into the subjectivism of consumption or therapy. Michel Foucault and biopower Some two decades after the publication of The Human Condition, Michel Foucault developed his own, Nietzschean account of modernity in terms of the administration of the life process, without explicit reference to Arendt s work. In Discipline and Punish (1977) and The History of Sexuality vol. 1 (1979) he traced the connections between new forms of state disciplinary power that developed during the eighteenth century with the emergence of a more biological understanding of the human. Up to the eighteenth century, the key form that power took was sovereignty ; the sovereign had power to decide life and death whether indirectly by asking subjects to put their lives at risk by defending the state, or directly by putting to death those who transgressed his laws or rose up against him. Sovereignty was a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies and ultimately life itself (1979: 136). From the eighteenth century onwards, by contrast, sovereignty was replaced by biopolitics as the key organising principle of society, and power became the right to administer life not to impede or destroy the forces in society in the name of supernatural splendour, but to bend and optimize them, to make them grow in particular directions. 3 Power thus came to be conceived in terms not of transcendence and difference, but of the maintenance of society s own immanent coherence. Even the resistance to state power became conceived in the very terms that that power was taking, in terms of life: of the right to life, health and happiness (1979: 154). This represents a shift away from the understanding of this world as pointing towards the next one as both symbolizing transcendent truths, and preparing the faithful for eternal life. Instead, there is a focus on the endless reproduction of life-processes within this world. the biological becomes seen as a self-sufficient mode of existence; what modern power administers is no longer legal subjects but living beings (1979: 142-3). Foucault argues that it is at this time that life is first conceived as an object to be administered, and that this new power over life took two forms. The first, anatomopolitics, focused on the administration of the individual human body, regarded as a machine to be measured, disciplined and optimized. The second, bio-politics, emerged later, and focused on populations, the management of life. 4 Both of these, Foucault notes, were vital for the emergence and growth of capitalism, so that bodies and populations could be effectively inserted into productive and economic processes. Law, too became less focused less an less on displays of murderous splendour for those who transgress sovereign power, and simply part of an array of technical apparatuses regulating and measuring life, trying to bring it to the norm. For Foucault, this was the entry of life into history ; rather than the biological exerting pressure on society from outside in the form of epidemics and famines, it was increasingly an object of control within society. Life was at once placed outside history, by being conceived in biological, natural terms, and inside it, in that it was subjected to politics (1979: ). Giorgio Agamben and bare life In his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), Giorgio Agamben explicitly sets out to extend and correct Foucault s account of biopolitics. First he argues that sovereignty and biopolitics, rather being contrasting regimes of power, 3
4 have always been closely linked in Western thought and culture that the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original if concealed nucleus of sovereign power (1998: 6). Thus the rise of modern biopolitics is neither the intrusion of biology into politics, nor the constitution of a radically new object for politics life but simply the working out of a logic latent within Western ideas of sovereignty. Second, he claims that the totalitarian state and the concentration camp have to be attended to as the exemplary spaces of modern biopolitics (1998: 4). But is also worth remarking that, in an explicit link to Arendt, Agamben also returns to an Aristotelian framing of the question of biopolitics as one concerning the relationship between bios and zoē between conditioned and bare life; between substantive understandings of the good life and mere biological life; between accounts of how we should live and the simple statement that we live. Nevertheless, he does not share Arendt s nostalgia for the classical world, instead seeking a more radical overcoming of the whole Western problematic of the relation between bios and zoē. Agamben provocatively draws attention to the homology between the sovereign, who is above the law in his ability to inaugurate and suspend it, and homo sacer, the outlaw, who is below the law in his lack of protection by it. Agamben suggests that such states of exception, in which a case is excluded from the application of the law, are not simple applications of sovereignty, or simple suspensions of the law, but the creation and definition of the very space in which the juridico-political order can have validity. Building on the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, he thus suggests that the primary political relation is the ban, conceived as a positive relation, in which an individual is not simply set outside the law but abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. Thus [t]he matchless potentiality of the nomos, its originary force of law, is that it holds life in its ban by abandoning it (1998: 19, 28, 29). Something is turned into bare life by being placed in a zone of indistinction between zoë and bios, at once excluded from the law and constituted by it; and the central feature of this bare life is not that it lives but that it can be killed. Agamben thus departs from Foucault in granting a much longer history to biopolitics, and in connecting biopolitics (the politics of life) firmly to thanatopolitics (the politics of death). For Agamben the only thing that is new is that, in modern society, what was once the exception is now the norm. We are all abandoned by the law, are reduced to bare life, are homo sacer, are reduced to our biological existence, can be killed, and are made subject to the biopolitical logic of the ban. The biopolitical body of the West is simply the last incarnation of homo sacer (1998: 187), and its nomos is revealed not in the disciplinary institutions of modern capitalist society but in the death camps. The bare life is at once pure zoë, and caught by the law in the ban, subject to a continuous threat of death, and so intensely political (1998: 183-4). The suggestion here is that, for example, the merging of politics with medicine (particularly in biotechnology) in the care of populations and individuals contains a sinister logic. But Agamben also disagrees with Arendt, suggesting that her appeals to the classical categories of oikos and polis are rendered redundant by the contemporary indistinction between the private and the public, the biological and the political. For Agamben, the only way out is to think a wholly different politics, one pointing forward to the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoē (1998: 188). In The Open (2004) he explicates this conception further, drawing on Walter Benjamin s conception of the saved night (Die gerettete Nacht). This is a life freed of any dimension of mystery, 4
5 attained not through any solving of its mystery but simply by a severing of any relationship with it. To elucidate this idea Agamben draws on the writings of the second century Gnostic Basilides, who takes up St. Paul s idea of the groaning of creation, its awareness of its need for redemption (Rom 8: 22). In his account of the final liberation of spirit from matter, Basilides suggests that the matter abandoned by spirit will at once be perfectly blessed, no longer missing or desiring redemption, so that every creature may retain in its natural condition and none desire anything contrary to its nature. Life in this condition will no longer be human, since it will have abandoned any attempt of rational mastery of its existence; but neither will it be animal, since it will not exhibit what Heidegger called poverty in world (Heidegger 1995: ), the animal s captivation by its own instinctual relationship with its milieu. Its savedness will consist not in being brought into logos, into language and reason, but in its very unsavability, its severing from any relationship with logos or spirit. This is a messianic vision of a nature given back to itself, existing outside of history and Being (Agamben 2004: 81-92). II VITALISM The writers discussed above have all been extremely productive and influential in recent attempts to grasp the essential character of modern society, not least in order better to understand the possibility and limits of critical thought in a liberal capitalist society that seems all but unstoppable. However, I want to argue that there are problems with their conceptualization of life, of the bios that is the subject of biopolitics, problems which might be addressed by drawing on other traditions of modern thought. For example, Arendt can be criticised for overstating the cyclical and hence futile nature of labouring and other life processes, interpreting their repetition as a form of stasis, rather than as a creative, productive power, and for uncritically retaining Aristotle s hylomorphic view of artefacts and other objects in her understanding of the fabrication process as the active imposition of a pre-existing form onto passive matter (Simondon 1958). Foucault, for his part, could be accused of remaining too structuralist in his analysis of biopower, and thus tending to a quasifunctionalism that can only with difficulty account for social change (Hardt and Negri 2000: 28). And finally Agamben might be charged with having a too anthropological notion of biopower, one which confines it, and the processes through which it might be transformed, to the immaterial realm of ideas (Hardt and Negri 2000: 421 n.11). In Part III of the paper I will pursue the idea that the analysis of contemporary society in terms of biopolitics might best be advanced through incorporating a more thoroughgoing material analysis of the life process and its organisation in society, and that this can best be carried out through a rapprochement with the contemporary neovitalist tradition. In this section I will therefore give a brief introduction to the neovitalist revival in twentieth century thinking. Vitalist thought has been a presence in the West in one form or another since classical times and before, and has gone through a number of stages. Georges Canguilhem suggests that the history of the conceptualisation of life can be divided into four main stages: life as animation, as mechanism, as organisation and as information (Canguilhem 1994: 74-88). I will supplement this history with a further subsection on life as duration, discussing the twentieth century philosophy of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, who provide a radical reconceptualisation of life in terms of a monist temporal ontology of creative becoming. 5
6 Life as animation Pre-modern thought was vitalist in the sense that what we would term as non-organic processes like motion and causation were explained in terms of organismic development; the pre-modern world was vital, full of life. Aristotle, for example, understood living things in terms of their possession of a soul or anima. But he also explained what we would call non-organic processes, such as the motion of stones and planets, in terms of organic concepts; his was a teleological world, in which things developed. Through the Christian period the world had the same vitality metals were seen as gestating in the earth, and metalwork was understood as a continuation of these biological processes, conceived by analogy with baking or winemaking (Channell 1991: 49). Life as mechanism The rise in the seventeenth century of modern, Newtonian science (with its debt to voluntarist theology) had all but put paid to the world s animacy matter was inert, moved lawfully by God. Thus mechanical philosophers like Descartes sought to explain animal life using mechanical principles. But the problem still remained of explaining the different behaviour of living and dead organisms, and the development of embryos. A radically different, Enlightenment, vitalism thus emerged as a supplement to Newtonian materialism, seeking a vital substance or force which would explain the difference between animate and inanimate matter. However, by the middle of the eighteenth century vitalists had more or less abandoned the search for a vital substance, instead seeking an immaterial vital force. Writers such as de Maupertuis and de Buffon argues for a force similar to gravity to explain vital activity including embryo formation; and in the nineteenth century it became common to associate this vital principle with electricity (Channell 1991: 55-7). Life as organisation Enlightenment vitalism, whether a vitalism of substance or of energy, never overcame the problems of how to incorporate the phenomenon of life in a mechanical world, and particularly the problem of how to give an adequate account of embryo development (Canguilhem 1994: 84: 296). But during the eighteenth century an alternative way of conceptualising vitality developed as the concept of the organism, a self-organising form of organisation, was further refined (e.g. Kant 1978). During the early nineteenth century, and particularly with the development of cell theory, the living organism became conceived not as a mechanism but a society. Indeed, during the nineteenth century the ideas of organism and of society developed so closely together that it becomes difficult to say which is metaphor for the other (Canguilhem 1994: 84). For example, Claude Bernard ( ) built a social theory of cells and organs not as simple parts instruments of the organism as a whole, but as individuals. The use of an economic and political model meant that nineteenth century biologists such as Bernard could grasp that the relation of parts to whole in an organism is one of integration; the parts were themselves individuals, their survival the ultimate end (Canguilhem 1994: ). More broadly, the nineteenth century saw a sea change in thought in which large swathes of the sciences departed from the methods of reductionistic analysis that had characterized their operations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather than areas of knowledges being organized in terms of relations of observable similarities and differences between empirical entities, many of them thus started to be reorganized according to the idea of hidden relational unities lying underneath a 6
7 surface of differences (Foucault 1970: 251). In Cuvier s biology, for example, beneath the surface of the differences between species and species, and between organisms and their environment, lie the great unities of life function respiration, digestion, sensation and so on not reducible to constituent material elements or visible to the senses, but nevertheless in many ways more ontologically fundamental. This was ethe emergence of biology in the modern sense; up to end of eighteenth century all there was were static, spatial categorisations of living beings natural history. 5 As Foucault puts it, life itself did not exist. As sociology developed as a science, it too adopted this new spatial metaphor, of life functions, vital activities and energetic flows of labour, capital and resources. Life as information With the informationalisation of life in molecular biology, the vitalist tradition enters a new phase, in which life is made material, and matter is made vital. In 1944 Schrödinger proposed a physics of life, that at the same time laid the foundations for what might be call the reductionism of molecular biology, and also elevated matter to a vital force, one which locally speaking can break the second law of thermodynamics and increase order: What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive. But Schrödinger also made life informational the foundation of life is a code-script, written in the chromosomes: The chromosome structures are at the same time instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow. They are law-code and executive power or, to use another simile, they are architect s plan and builder s craft -in one (Schrödinger 1944). In 1954, with Watson and Crick s discovery of DNA, Schrödinger s proposal seemed to be fulfilled. In the ordering of bases along the DNA molecule, and the processes by which this molecule controls the synthesising of proteins, molecular biology seemed to offer a new language for life, one which dropped the vocabulary and concepts of classical mechanics, physics and chemistry in favor of the vocabulary of linguistics and communications theory. Messages, information, programs, codes, instructions, decodings: these are the new concepts of the life sciences (Canguilhem 1994: 316). Life as duration But at the turn of the twentieth century Henri Bergson was articulating an alternative understanding of vitality as duration. In Creative Evolution Bergson argued that time had not been adequately conceptualised in the sciences, which typically treat the past and the future as simply calculable functions of the present, and thus conceptualising time spatially and not as essentially temporal at all. In the understanding of evolution, Bergson rejected both the mechanism of neo-darwinism, and the finalism of neo- Lamarckism, which he saw as which explaining the present by reference to the compulsion of the past and the future respectively, and thus denying the essentially creative nature of duration (Ansell Pearson 1999: 41-2) Bergson was influenced by August Weismann ( ), whose conception of the germ plasm, passed down through heredity, laid the grounds for the future development of a mechanistic understanding of evolution. For Weismann, the germ line is the real, immortal, subject of life, and individual organisms merely its vehicle. Bergson took this idea of the temporal continuity of life and made it more philosophically complex. For Bergson, what is transmitted is not simply the physico- 7
8 chemical elements of the germ plasm but also the vital energies and capacities of an embryogenesis and morphogenesis that allow for perpetual invention in evolution (Ansell Pearson 1999: 40). He conceived of evolution as driven by a tension between two tendencies between the entropic tendency of matter to descend into stasis, and the creative tendency of life to produce divergent directions amongst which its vital impetus gets divided. In reality, life is a movement, materiality is the inverse movement, and each of these two movements is simple, the matter which forms a world being an undivided flux, and undivided also the life that runs through it, cutting out in it living beings all along its track (Bergson 1921: 263). But Bergson is not saying that life simply a negentropic force, and that the enclosure of life in matter, in organisms, limits its vitality. For Bergson evolution is creative exactly because of the endless conflict between the stabilization of life in the organism and its breaking out into new directions. The organism prevents dissipation of life energy and makes life as invention and duration possible. As Ansell Pearson puts it, [l]ife enters into the habits of inert matter and from this learns how, little by little, to draw from it animate forms and vital properties (Ansell Pearson 1999: 43-5). In a series of works from the 1960s onwards Gilles Deleuze progressively combines Bergson s understanding of creative evolution with a radically monistic ontology (Deleuze 1988; Deleuze and Guattari 1988; Deleuze 1994). Following Spinoza, he insists that the world consists of a singular infinite substance, with all bodies simply its finite modes. Yet this singular substance itself contains difference and multiplicity. Bergson had opposed mechanism by showing that the essential motor of difference is internal to identity, deriving from the internal explosive force of life ; variation and change thus had to be seen not as merely accidental but as essential to the ongoing process of creative evolution itself (Ansell Pearson 1999 : 66). Deleuze develops this idea into the basis of a vital monism, in which the creative powers of life as duration as constantly diverging creative invention are internal to the structure of Being itself. But Deleuze progressively departs from Bergson s narrative understanding of life as a developing, creative narrative, driven by the tension between an anti-entropic vital principle and the dissipative tendencies of matter. Instead, he comes to conceive of the world as a movement of nomadic singularities and fields of intensities, a plane of immanence, a saturnine power that devours at one end what it created at other (Ansell Pearson 1999: 76). Bergson s creative tension between life and matter is replaced by a more hostile conflict between anorganic and organic life between Being s creative and transgressive powers, and its capture or stratification in organisms and institutions. To articulate this neovitalism, Deleuze and Guattari develop a new vocabulary, with terms often arranged in contrasts between the free flow of life s creativity, and its articulation in equilibrated structures for example the molecular and the molar, intensities and strata, the rhizomatic and the arborescent. As Deleuze and his co-author Félix Guattari put it, [t]he truly intense and powerful life remains anorganic (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 503). 8
9 III VITALIST BIOPOLITICS In Part I of the paper I gave a brief survey of some of the key thinkers who have developed ideas of biopolitics of modern society as in some way being organised around the management of its biological life. In Part II I described the historical transformation of conceptions of life, concluding with a discussion of the neo-vitalism of Bergson and Deleuze. In this final part I want to try to see how the two might be brought together to explore how our understanding of biopolitics might be altered by incorporating a neo-vitalist understanding of the life that is the subject of biopolitics. Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri and biopolitical production One obvious place to start such an exploration is Hardt and Negri s Empire, which explicitly draws on Deleuze s work. Hardt and Negri endorse Foucault s conception of biopower, as a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it (Hardt and Negri 2000: 23-4). However, they also develop further the argument made by Deleuze, in his Postscript on the Societies of Control (Deleuze 1995), that Foucault s specific account of biopolitics is one that only applied to a particular period of modernity, one that has been superseded since the late twentieth century. Developing ideas that started to appear in Foucault s later works, Deleuze suggested that disciplinary power was characteristic of the mercantile and organised capitalisms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was canalised through spaces of enclosure such as prisons, hospitals, factories, schools and the family, each with their own set of normalising rules. By contrast, he described a new form of biopolitics as emerging in the late twentieth century after a period of crisis in all the environments of enclosure, and with the emergence of post-fordist forms of production. Hardt and Negri describe this new society of control as one in which mechanisms of Command become ever more democratic, ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens. The behaviors of social integration and exclusion proper to rule are thus increasingly interiorized within the subjects themselves. The society of control might thus be characterized by an intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices, but in contrast to discipline, this control extends well outside the structured sites of social institutions through flexible and fluctuating networks (Hardt and Negri 2000: 23). In a sense this is a more perfect biopolitics than that described by Foucault. Disciplinarity fixed individuals within institutions but did not succeed in consuming them completely in the rhythm of productive practices and productive socialization; it did not reach the point of permeating entirely the consciousnesses and bodies of individuals, the point of treating and organizing them in the totality of their activities. By contrast, when power becomes entirely biopolitical, the whole social body is comprised by power s machine Society, subsumed within a power that reaches down to the ganglia of the social structure and its processes of development, reacts like a single body. Power is thus expressed as a control that extends throughout the depths of the consciousnesses and bodies of the population-and at the same time across the entirety of social relations (Hardt and Negri 2000: 24). However, for Hardt and Negri this taking up of the whole of life itself into the process of capitalist ordering does not result in a totalitarian completion of capitalism, since the very subsumption of the social bios disrupts the linear and totalitarian figure of 9
10 capitalist development. In the classical biopolitics of Foucault, resistance had been coordinated outside the spaces of enclosure, in civil society; in the new society of control, by contrast such resistances have been taken up into the state, exploding the state into a diverse set of networks (Hardt and Negri 2000: 25). We can see here how the Bergsonian conception of a difference that is internal to identity has clear biopolitical implications. The final capture of life s vitality by capital in post-fordist modes of production and regulation results in the breaking up of the organised, character of the state. The centred state of fordist capitalism represents a manifestation of the stratification of the life process, its sedimentation into organism-like, equilibrium systems, on the alloplastic or social level. As Ansell Pearson argues, Deleuze does not attack the organism itself but the organism construed as a given hierarchized and transcendent organization... abstracted from its molecular and rhizomatic conditions of possibility (1999: 154). The molecular and rhizomatic conditions of possibility of the state, for Hardt and Negri, are to be found in the unruly creative powers of the multitude ; the absorption of these powers into the state/economy complex disrupts the latter s organismic unity, creating a new emancipatory opportunity for the rhizomatic vitality of the multitude. Here Hardt and Negri are drawing on the work of Italian Marxists such as Paolo Virno (2003), who see the growing importance of intellectual, immaterial, and communicative labour in the knowledge economy as having a radical political significance. Virno contrasts the disciplined and individualised people of Hobbes political theory with the more unruly and plural multitude of Spinoza: For Spinoza, the multitudo indicates a plurality which persists as such in the public scene, in collective action, in the handling of communal affairs, without converging into a One, without evaporating within a centripetal form of motion. Multitude is the form of social and political existence for the many, seen as being many: a permanent form, not an episodic or interstitial form. For Spinoza, the multitudo is the architrave of civil liberties (Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus) (Virno 2003: 21). He then suggests that the shift towards immaterial labour in the post-fordist economies of the developed world (here he seems to be particularly thinking of the service industries) means that common, rather than specialised, forms of speech what Marx called the general intellect are coming to the fore in human existence, and that the Hobbesian people, always defined in relation to the state, is being displaced by the Spinozist multitude as the primary form of political subjectivity. Thus post-fordism, itself partially a response to the trade union and social movement demands of the 1960s and 1970s, has given life to a sort of paradoxical communism of capital, realising in a different register the demands of that failed revolution (Virno 2003: 111). Hardt and Negri go even further than Virno in seeing the multitude as the creative driver behind capital accumulation in post-fordist society, as was the manual worker in earlier forms of capitalism. More significantly, they also go further in according emancipatory powers and a political programme to the multitude that has been brought into being by post-fordism: The mode of production of the multitude reappropriates wealth from capital and also constructs a new wealth, articulated with the powers of science and social knowledge through cooperation. Cooperation annuls the title of property. In modernity, private property was often legitimated by labor, but this equation, if it ever really made sense, today tends to be completely destroyed. Private property of the means of production today, in the era of the hegemony of cooperative and immaterial labor, is only a putrid and tyrannical obsolescence. 10
11 The tools of production tend to be recomposed in collective subjectivity and in the collective intelligence and affect of the workers; entrepreneurship tends to be organized by the cooperation of subjects in general intellect. The organization of the multitude as political subject, as posse, thus begins to appear on the world scene. The multitude is biopolitical selforganization (Hardt and Negri 2000: ). Biopolitics as the regulation of potentiality The work of Hardt and Negri makes a highly significant contribution to the development of a vitalist biopolitics. Their incorporation of a Deleuzian understanding of life as an inventive potentiality in Being itself, one which is canalised into and through stable organismic forms but can never be reduced to them, provides a welcome recognition of the sheer materiality of the life process, and the radical creativity inherent in its processes of repetition. As such they offer potential solutions to some of the problems identified in the work of the key writers on biopolitics discussed in Part I. They also take the idea from Foucault and Deleuze that a new form of the biopolitical ordering of society was emerging in the late twentieth century, and develop a powerful synthetic account of its nature and potentialities. However, it might be said that Hardt and Negri s sense of the pressing need to develop a framework for thinking about radical politics in the twenty first century means that more general questions about biopolitics remain underdeveloped. And one of these questions is how a more general account of biopolitics as the management of life s potential might be developed. In Virno s discussion of biopolitics he discusses the passage in the Grundrisse where Marx observes that the use value which the worker has to offer to the capitalist, which he has to offer to others in general, is not materialized in a product, does not exist apart from him at all, thus exists not really, but only in potentiality, as his capacity (Marx 1973). Virno suggests that where something which exists only as possibility is sold, this something is not separable from the living person of the seller. The living body of the worker is the substratum of that labor-power which, in itself, has no independent existence. Life, pure and simple bios, acquires a specific importance in as much as it is the tabernacle of dynamis, of mere potential. The living body thus becomes an object to be governed because it is the substratum of what really matters: labor-power as the aggregate of the most diverse human faculties (the potential for speaking, for thinking, for remembering, for acting, etc.) (Virno 2003: 82, 83). What is interesting here is the way that Virno seems to link questions of political economy of the source of surplus value in capitalist accumulation to life s vital powers. Bergson s understanding of life as duration emphasises that vitality is an essentially temporal phenomenon, irreducible to the spatiality of the present; the differentiation of the elan vital over time is the unpredictable expression of the difference that is internal to Being. Life thus is always potentiality, always temporal, always oriented to an open future. This conceptualisation of vital potentiality in Bergson is echoed in Arendt s work in her notion of natality the capacity for creating the radically new that she, following Augustine, sees as confined to the human being (see Brunkhorst 2000). So, first, more work needs to be done on specifying the distinctiveness of the forms that vital potentiality takes in the human being as opposed to other living things (for ways of thinking about this, see Ansell Pearson 1999: 51-6; Agamben 2004). Second, we need to develop a more systematic vitalist theory of political economy the way that this potentiality can be captured and converted into mobile and storable reifications of social power into capital. Virno and Hardt and Negri have assisted by giving us a better understanding of how in post-fordist economies it is the communicative, not physical potential of human 11
12 beings that is the main source of value. But we also need a vitalist political economy, for example, of the high technology sector, which understands better the capture of value from the vital, evolutionary character of human technical powers. And third, we need a vital political economy of the state s biopolitical role, a theorisation of the way that a species can develop technologies that take hold of its own vital powers, artificial organs that are turned back on their progenitor to shape and change their natural being. NOTES 1 Here she departs from Karl Marx, for whom it is the capacity to labour that sets humans apart from other animals. 2 For Arendt the liberation of labour into the human world reached its theoretical acme in Marx, who merged work with labour, in service of life, and for whom all things would be understood, not in their worldly, objective quality, but as results of living labour power and functions of the life process (Arendt 1958: 89). 3 Wars, for example, are no longer the defence of the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. And the death penalty is less to do with the enormity of the crime, of attacking the sovereign s will, than the incorrigibility of the criminal their biological endangerment of others (Foucault 1979: 137-8). 4 The term biopolitics is often used to cover both of these sets of practices. 5 Here history is being used in its original sense as a telling, rather than in the specific sense of history that emerges in the nineteenth century. REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio (2004) The Open: Man and Animal, tr. Kevin Attell, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ansell Pearson, Keith (1999) Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze, London: Routledge. Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bergson, Henri (1921) Creative Evolution, tr. Arthur Mitchell, London: Macmillan. Brunkhorst, Hauke (2000) Equality and Elitism in Arendt, in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp Canguilhem, Georges (1994) A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem, tr. Arthur Goldhammer, New York: Zone Books. Channell, David F. (1991) The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and Organic Life, New York: Oxford University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1988) Bergsonism, New York: Zone. Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton, London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1995) Postscript on the Societies of Control, October, (59), pp Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi, London: Athlone Press. Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Tavistock. Foucault, Michel (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel (1979) The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction, tr. Robert Hurley, London: Allen Lane. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, Martin (1995) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, tr. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kant, Immanuel (1978) The Critique of Judgement, tr. James Creed Meredith, Oxford: Clarendon. Marx, Karl (1973) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy: Rough Draft, tr. Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin. 12
13 Schrödinger, Erwin (1944) What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simondon, Gilbert (1958) Du Mode D Existence Des Objets Techniques, Paris: Aubier. Virno, Paolo (2003) A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, tr. James Cascaito and Andrea Casson Isabella Bertoletti, Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e). 13
Human Capital and Information in the Society of Control
Beyond Vicinities Human Capital and Information in the Society of Control Callum Howe What Foucault (1984) recognised in Baudelaire regarding his definition of modernity was a great movement, a perpetual
More informationPhilosophical Background to 19 th Century Modernism
Philosophical Background to 19 th Century Modernism Early Modern Philosophy In the sixteenth century, European artists and philosophers, influenced by the rise of empirical science, faced a formidable
More informationJacek Surzyn University of Silesia Kant s Political Philosophy
1 Jacek Surzyn University of Silesia Kant s Political Philosophy Politics is older than philosophy. According to Olof Gigon in Ancient Greece philosophy was born in opposition to the politics (and the
More informationThe Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss Part II of II
The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss Part II of II From the book by David Bentley Hart W. Bruce Phillips Wonder & Innocence Wisdom is the recovery of wonder at the end of experience. The
More informationfoucault s archaeology science and transformation David Webb
foucault s archaeology science and transformation David Webb CLOSING REMARKS The Archaeology of Knowledge begins with a review of methodologies adopted by contemporary historical writing, but it quickly
More information8. The dialectic of labor and time
8. The dialectic of labor and time Marx in unfolding the category of capital, then, relates the historical dynamic of capitalist society as well as the industrial form of production to the structure of
More informationNotes on Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful
Notes on Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful The Unity of Art 3ff G. sets out to argue for the historical continuity of (the justification for) art. 5 Hegel new legitimation based on the anthropological
More informationTRAGIC THOUGHTS AT THE END OF PHILOSOPHY
DANIEL L. TATE St. Bonaventure University TRAGIC THOUGHTS AT THE END OF PHILOSOPHY A review of Gerald Bruns, Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy: Language, Literature and Ethical Theory. Northwestern
More informationAction Theory for Creativity and Process
Action Theory for Creativity and Process Fu Jen Catholic University Bernard C. C. Li Keywords: A. N. Whitehead, Creativity, Process, Action Theory for Philosophy, Abstract The three major assignments for
More informationAspects of Western Philosophy Dr. Sreekumar Nellickappilly Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
Aspects of Western Philosophy Dr. Sreekumar Nellickappilly Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Indian Institute of Technology, Madras Module - 26 Lecture - 26 Karl Marx Historical Materialism
More informationWas Marx an Ecologist?
Was Marx an Ecologist? Karl Marx has written voluminous texts related to capitalist political economy, and his work has been interpreted and utilised in a variety of ways. A key (although not commonly
More informationMarx, Gender, and Human Emancipation
The U.S. Marxist-Humanists organization, grounded in Marx s Marxism and Raya Dunayevskaya s ideas, aims to develop a viable vision of a truly new human society that can give direction to today s many freedom
More informationAn Intense Defence of Gadamer s Significance for Aesthetics
REVIEW An Intense Defence of Gadamer s Significance for Aesthetics Nicholas Davey: Unfinished Worlds: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Gadamer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. 190 pp. ISBN 978-0-7486-8622-3
More informationThe Powers of the Exploited and the Social Ontology of Praxis
triplec 16(2): 415-423, 2018 http://www.triple-c.at The Powers of the Exploited and the Social Ontology of Praxis Michael Hardt and Toni Negri Abstract: This contribution is the first part of a debate
More informationGender, the Family and 'The German Ideology'
Gender, the Family and 'The German Ideology' Wed, 06/03/2009-21:18 Anonymous By Heather Tomanovsky The German Ideology (1845), often seen as the most materialistic of Marx s early writings, has been taken
More informationExcerpt: Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
Excerpt: Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/epm/1st.htm We shall start out from a present-day economic fact. The worker becomes poorer the
More informationConclusion. One way of characterizing the project Kant undertakes in the Critique of Pure Reason is by
Conclusion One way of characterizing the project Kant undertakes in the Critique of Pure Reason is by saying that he seeks to articulate a plausible conception of what it is to be a finite rational subject
More informationThe Meaning of Abstract and Concrete in Hegel and Marx
The Meaning of Abstract and Concrete in Hegel and Marx Andy Blunden, June 2018 The classic text which defines the meaning of abstract and concrete for Marx and Hegel is the passage known as The Method
More informationThe Human Intellect: Aristotle s Conception of Νοῦς in his De Anima. Caleb Cohoe
The Human Intellect: Aristotle s Conception of Νοῦς in his De Anima Caleb Cohoe Caleb Cohoe 2 I. Introduction What is it to truly understand something? What do the activities of understanding that we engage
More informationLecture 24 Sociology 621 December 12, 2005 MYSTIFICATION
Lecture 24 Sociology 621 December 12, 2005 MYSTIFICATION In the next several sections we will follow up n more detail the distinction Thereborn made between three modes of interpellation: what is, what
More informationChapter 2: Karl Marx Test Bank
Chapter 2: Karl Marx Test Bank Multiple-Choice Questions: 1. Which of the following is a class in capitalism according to Marx? a) Protestants b) Wage laborers c) Villagers d) All of the above 2. Marx
More information1/8. The Third Paralogism and the Transcendental Unity of Apperception
1/8 The Third Paralogism and the Transcendental Unity of Apperception This week we are focusing only on the 3 rd of Kant s Paralogisms. Despite the fact that this Paralogism is probably the shortest of
More informationRousseau on the Nature of Nature and Political Philosophy
Rousseau on the Nature of Nature and Political Philosophy Our theme is the relation between modern reductionist science and political philosophy. The question is whether political philosophy can meet the
More informationWhy Intermediality if at all?
Why Intermediality if at all? HANS ULRICH GUMBRECHT 1. 173 About a quarter of a century ago, the concept of intertextuality sounded as intellectually sharp and as promising all over the international world
More information7. This composition is an infinite configuration, which, in our own contemporary artistic context, is a generic totality.
Fifteen theses on contemporary art Alain Badiou 1. Art is not the sublime descent of the infinite into the finite abjection of the body and sexuality. It is the production of an infinite subjective series
More informationThe aim of this paper is to explore Kant s notion of death with special attention paid to
1 Abstract: The aim of this paper is to explore Kant s notion of death with special attention paid to the relation between rational and aesthetic ideas in Kant s Third Critique and the discussion of death
More informationMAURICE MANDELBAUM HISTORY, MAN, & REASON A STUDY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY THOUGHT THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS: BALTIMORE AND LONDON
MAURICE MANDELBAUM HISTORY, MAN, & REASON A STUDY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY THOUGHT THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS: BALTIMORE AND LONDON Copyright 1971 by The Johns Hopkins Press All rights reserved Manufactured
More informationSECTION I: MARX READINGS
SECTION I: MARX READINGS part 1 Marx s Vision of History: Historical Materialism This part focuses on the broader conceptual framework, or overall view of history and human nature, that informed Marx
More informationMeaning, Being and Expression: A Phenomenological Justification for Interdisciplinary Scholarship
Digital Collections @ Dordt Faculty Work: Comprehensive List 10-9-2015 Meaning, Being and Expression: A Phenomenological Justification for Interdisciplinary Scholarship Neal DeRoo Dordt College, neal.deroo@dordt.edu
More informationAQA Qualifications A-LEVEL SOCIOLOGY
AQA Qualifications A-LEVEL SOCIOLOGY SCLY4/Crime and Deviance with Theory and Methods; Stratification and Differentiation with Theory and Methods Report on the Examination 2190 June 2013 Version: 1.0 Further
More informationPAUL REDDING S CONTINENTAL IDEALISM (AND DELEUZE S CONTINUATION OF THE IDEALIST TRADITION) Sean Bowden
PARRHESIA NUMBER 11 2011 75-79 PAUL REDDING S CONTINENTAL IDEALISM (AND DELEUZE S CONTINUATION OF THE IDEALIST TRADITION) Sean Bowden I came to Paul Redding s 2009 work, Continental Idealism: Leibniz to
More informationWhat do our appreciation of tonal music and tea roses, our acquisition of the concepts
Normativity and Purposiveness What do our appreciation of tonal music and tea roses, our acquisition of the concepts of a triangle and the colour green, and our cognition of birch trees and horseshoe crabs
More informationDurham Research Online
Durham Research Online Deposited in DRO: 15 May 2017 Version of attached le: Accepted Version Peer-review status of attached le: Not peer-reviewed Citation for published item: Schmidt, Jeremy J. (2014)
More informationREVIEW ARTICLE IDEAL EMBODIMENT: KANT S THEORY OF SENSIBILITY
Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 7, no. 2, 2011 REVIEW ARTICLE IDEAL EMBODIMENT: KANT S THEORY OF SENSIBILITY Karin de Boer Angelica Nuzzo, Ideal Embodiment: Kant
More informationDeliberate taking: the author, agency and suicide
Deliberate taking: the author, agency and suicide Katrina Jaworski Abstract In the essay, What is an author?, Michel Foucault (1984, pp. 118 119) contended that the author does not precede the works. If
More informationLecture 3 Kuhn s Methodology
Lecture 3 Kuhn s Methodology We now briefly look at the views of Thomas S. Kuhn whose magnum opus, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), constitutes a turning point in the twentiethcentury philosophy
More informationPHIL 144: Social and Political Philosophy University of California, Santa Cruz Department of Philosophy Summer 2015
INSTRUCTOR PHIL 144: Social and Political Philosophy University of California, Santa Cruz Department of Philosophy Summer 2015 CLASS MEETINGS Dr. Lucas Fain MW 6:00pm-9:30pm lfain@ucsc.edu Social Science
More informationSYSTEM-PURPOSE METHOD: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ASPECTS Ramil Dursunov PhD in Law University of Fribourg, Faculty of Law ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION
SYSTEM-PURPOSE METHOD: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ASPECTS Ramil Dursunov PhD in Law University of Fribourg, Faculty of Law ABSTRACT This article observes methodological aspects of conflict-contractual theory
More informationAccording to Maxwell s second law of thermodynamics, the entropy in a system will increase (it will lose energy) unless new energy is put in.
Lebbeus Woods SYSTEM WIEN Vienna is a city comprised of many systems--economic, technological, social, cultural--which overlay and interact with one another in complex ways. Each system is different, but
More informationNew York University Department of Media, Culture, and Communication Special Topics in Critical Theory: Marx
New York University Department of Media, Culture, and Communication Special Topics in Critical Theory: Marx Course number MCC-GE.3013 SPRING 2014 Assoc. Prof. Alexander R. Galloway Time: Wednesdays 2:00-4:50pm
More informationA Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy of Academic Labour
A Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy of Academic Labour Prof. Richard Hall, De Montfort, rhall@dmu.ac.uk @hallymk1 Joss Winn, Lincoln, jwinn@lincoln.ac.uk @josswinn Academic Identities
More informationAristotle. Aristotle. Aristotle and Plato. Background. Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle and Plato
Aristotle Aristotle Lived 384-323 BC. He was a student of Plato. Was the tutor of Alexander the Great. Founded his own school: The Lyceum. He wrote treatises on physics, cosmology, biology, psychology,
More informationCourse Description. Alvarado- Díaz, Alhelí de María 1. The author of One Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse lecturing at the Freie Universität, 1968
Political Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Social Action: From Individual Consciousness to Collective Liberation Alhelí de María Alvarado- Díaz ada2003@columbia.edu The author of One Dimensional Man, Herbert
More informationUNIT SPECIFICATION FOR EXCHANGE AND STUDY ABROAD
Unit Code: Unit Name: Department: Faculty: 475Z022 METAPHYSICS (INBOUND STUDENT MOBILITY - JAN ENTRY) Politics & Philosophy Faculty Of Arts & Humanities Level: 5 Credits: 5 ECTS: 7.5 This unit will address
More informationROLAND BARTHES ON WRITING: LITERATURE IS IN ESSENCE
ROLAND BARTHES ON WRITING: LITERATURE IS IN ESSENCE (vinodkonappanavar@gmail.com) Department of PG Studies in English, BVVS Arts College, Bagalkot Abstract: This paper intended as Roland Barthes views
More informationThe Shimer School Core Curriculum
Basic Core Studies The Shimer School Core Curriculum Humanities 111 Fundamental Concepts of Art and Music Humanities 112 Literature in the Ancient World Humanities 113 Literature in the Modern World Social
More informationMichael Dillon Life After Foucault
Michael Dillon, Biopolitics of Security: A Political Analytic of Finitude, New York: Routledge, 2015. ISBN: 978-0-415-48433-6 (paper); ISBN: 978-0-415-48432-9 (cloth) Life After Foucault No two books of
More informationUNIT SPECIFICATION FOR EXCHANGE AND STUDY ABROAD
Unit Code: Unit Name: Department: Faculty: 475Z02 METAPHYSICS (INBOUND STUDENT MOBILITY - SEPT ENTRY) Politics & Philosophy Faculty Of Arts & Humanities Level: 5 Credits: 5 ECTS: 7.5 This unit will address
More informationTranscendental field, virtual. Actualization. Operators of differenciating liaison. Matter (expansion), Life (contraction)
The following is a translation of a section containing a table of the evolutions of the names of the transcendental field and the operators of differenciating liaisons from L'Ontologie de Gilles Deleuze,
More informationChapter 2 Christopher Alexander s Nature of Order
Chapter 2 Christopher Alexander s Nature of Order Christopher Alexander is an oft-referenced icon for the concept of patterns in programming languages and design [1 3]. Alexander himself set forth his
More informationMarxism and. Literature RAYMOND WILLIAMS. Oxford New York OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Marxism and Literature RAYMOND WILLIAMS Oxford New York OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 134 Marxism and Literature which _have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available. Not all art,
More informationFour Characteristic Research Paradigms
Part II... Four Characteristic Research Paradigms INTRODUCTION Earlier I identified two contrasting beliefs in methodology: one as a mechanism for securing validity, and the other as a relationship between
More informationHEGEL, ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE RETURN OF METAPHYISCS Simon Lumsden
PARRHESIA NUMBER 11 2011 89-93 HEGEL, ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE RETURN OF METAPHYISCS Simon Lumsden At issue in Paul Redding s 2007 work, Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought, and in
More informationPhilosophy Pathways Issue th December 2016
Epistemological position of G.W.F. Hegel Sujit Debnath In this paper I shall discuss Epistemological position of G.W.F Hegel (1770-1831). In his epistemology Hegel discusses four sources of knowledge.
More informationGlen Carlson Electronic Media Art + Design, University of Denver
Emergent Aesthetics Glen Carlson Electronic Media Art + Design, University of Denver Abstract This paper does not attempt to redefine design or the concept of Aesthetics, nor does it attempt to study or
More informationLogic and Dialectics in Social Science Part I: Dialectics, Social Phenomena and Non-Equilibrium
03-090306-Guglielmo Carchedi.qxd 3/17/2008 4:36 PM Page 495 Critical Sociology 34(4) 495-519 http://crs.sagepub.com Logic and Dialectics in Social Science Part I: Dialectics, Social Phenomena and Non-Equilibrium
More informationNecessity in Kant; Subjective and Objective
Necessity in Kant; Subjective and Objective DAVID T. LARSON University of Kansas Kant suggests that his contribution to philosophy is analogous to the contribution of Copernicus to astronomy each involves
More informationThe Polish Peasant in Europe and America. W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki
1 The Polish Peasant in Europe and America W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki Now there are two fundamental practical problems which have constituted the center of attention of reflective social practice
More informationGeorg Simmel's Sociology of Individuality
Catherine Bell November 12, 2003 Danielle Lindemann Tey Meadow Mihaela Serban Georg Simmel's Sociology of Individuality Simmel's construction of what constitutes society (itself and as the subject of sociological
More informationIs Capital a Thing? Remarks on Piketty s Concept of Capital
564090CRS0010.1177/0896920514564090Critical SociologyLotz research-article2014 Article Is Capital a Thing? Remarks on Piketty s Concept of Capital Critical Sociology 2015, Vol. 41(2) 375 383 The Author(s)
More informationThe politics and possibilities of museum aesthetics: Reading Jacques Rancière
The politics and possibilities of museum aesthetics: Reading Jacques Rancière Klas Grinell Representation First, the concept of representation often implies that there is an original present that the re-presentation
More informationKuhn Formalized. Christian Damböck Institute Vienna Circle University of Vienna
Kuhn Formalized Christian Damböck Institute Vienna Circle University of Vienna christian.damboeck@univie.ac.at In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1996 [1962]), Thomas Kuhn presented his famous
More informationNarrating the Self: Parergonality, Closure and. by Holly Franking. hermeneutics focus attention on the transactional aspect of the aesthetic
Narrating the Self: Parergonality, Closure and by Holly Franking Many recent literary theories, such as deconstruction, reader-response, and hermeneutics focus attention on the transactional aspect of
More informationThe Rich Human Being: Marx and the Concept of Real Human. (Paper for Presentation at Marx Conference, 4-8 May 2004 Havana,
1 The Rich Human Being: Marx and the Concept of Real Human Development (Paper for Presentation at Marx Conference, 4-8 May 2004 Havana, Cuba) Michael A. Lebowitz Canada With the introduction of the UN
More informationFeel Like a Natural Human: The Polis By Nature, and Human Nature in Aristotle s The Politics. by Laura Zax
PLSC 114: Introduction to Political Philosophy Professor Steven Smith Feel Like a Natural Human: The Polis By Nature, and Human Nature in Aristotle s The Politics by Laura Zax Intimately tied to Aristotle
More informationCRITICAL THEORY BEYOND NEGATIVITY
CRITICAL THEORY BEYOND NEGATIVITY The Ethics, Politics and Aesthetics of Affirmation : a Course by Rosi Braidotti Aggeliki Sifaki Were a possible future attendant to ask me if the one-week intensive course,
More informationPolitical Economy I, Fall 2014
Political Economy I, Fall 2014 Professor David Kotz Thompson 936 413-545-0739 dmkotz@econs.umass.edu Office Hours: Tuesdays 10 AM to 12 noon Information on Index Cards Your name Address Telephone Email
More informationEnvironmental Ethics: From Theory to Practice
Environmental Ethics: From Theory to Practice Marion Hourdequin Companion Website Material Chapter 1 Companion website by Julia Liao and Marion Hourdequin ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE
More informationFoucault's Archaeological method
Foucault's Archaeological method In discussing Schein, Checkland and Maturana, we have identified a 'backcloth' against which these individuals operated. In each case, this backcloth has become more explicit,
More informationThe Strengths and Weaknesses of Frege's Critique of Locke By Tony Walton
The Strengths and Weaknesses of Frege's Critique of Locke By Tony Walton This essay will explore a number of issues raised by the approaches to the philosophy of language offered by Locke and Frege. This
More informationBy Rahel Jaeggi Suhrkamp, 2014, pbk 20, ISBN , 451pp. by Hans Arentshorst
271 Kritik von Lebensformen By Rahel Jaeggi Suhrkamp, 2014, pbk 20, ISBN 9783518295878, 451pp by Hans Arentshorst Does contemporary philosophy need to concern itself with the question of the good life?
More informationProduction and Distribution of the Common A Few Questions for the Artist
The Art Biennial Production and Distribution of the Common A Few Questions for the Artist Michael Hardt Essay February 6, 2006 According to Michael Hardt, the production of the common is the most important
More informationCategories and Schemata
Res Cogitans Volume 1 Issue 1 Article 10 7-26-2010 Categories and Schemata Anthony Schlimgen Creighton University Follow this and additional works at: http://commons.pacificu.edu/rescogitans Part of the
More informationCritical Theory. Mark Olssen University of Surrey. Social Research at Frankfurt-am Main in The term critical theory was originally
Critical Theory Mark Olssen University of Surrey Critical theory emerged in Germany in the 1920s with the establishment of the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt-am Main in 1923. The term critical
More informationPhenomenology and Non-Conceptual Content
Phenomenology and Non-Conceptual Content Book review of Schear, J. K. (ed.), Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate, Routledge, London-New York 2013, 350 pp. Corijn van Mazijk
More informationWatcharabon Buddharaksa. The University of York. RCAPS Working Paper No January 2011
Some methodological debates in Gramscian studies: A critical assessment Watcharabon Buddharaksa The University of York RCAPS Working Paper No. 10-5 January 2011 Ritsumeikan Center for Asia Pacific Studies
More information6. Embodiment, sexuality and ageing
6. Embodiment, sexuality and ageing Overview As discussed in previous lectures, where there is power, there is resistance. The body is the surface upon which discourses act to discipline and regulate age
More informationHamletmachine: The Objective Real and the Subjective Fantasy. Heiner Mueller s play Hamletmachine focuses on Shakespeare s Hamlet,
Tom Wendt Copywrite 2011 Hamletmachine: The Objective Real and the Subjective Fantasy Heiner Mueller s play Hamletmachine focuses on Shakespeare s Hamlet, especially on Hamlet s relationship to the women
More informationSOCI 421: Social Anthropology
SOCI 421: Social Anthropology Session 5 Founding Fathers I Lecturer: Dr. Kodzovi Akpabli-Honu, UG Contact Information: kodzovi@ug.edu.gh College of Education School of Continuing and Distance Education
More informationMetaphors we live by. Structural metaphors. Orientational metaphors. A personal summary
Metaphors we live by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson 1980. London, University of Chicago Press A personal summary This highly influential book was written after the two authors met, in 1979, with a joint interest
More informationCreative Actualization: A Meliorist Theory of Values
Book Review Creative Actualization: A Meliorist Theory of Values Nate Jackson Hugh P. McDonald, Creative Actualization: A Meliorist Theory of Values. New York: Rodopi, 2011. xxvi + 361 pages. ISBN 978-90-420-3253-8.
More informationCritical approaches to television studies
Critical approaches to television studies 1. Introduction Robert Allen (1992) How are meanings and pleasures produced in our engagements with television? This places criticism firmly in the area of audience
More informationTHE RELATIONS BETWEEN ETHICS AND ECONOMICS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS BETWEEN AYRES AND WEBER S PERSPECTIVES. By Nuria Toledano and Crispen Karanda
PhilosophyforBusiness Issue80 11thFebruary2017 http://www.isfp.co.uk/businesspathways/ THE RELATIONS BETWEEN ETHICS AND ECONOMICS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS BETWEEN AYRES AND WEBER S PERSPECTIVES By Nuria
More informationHans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d ed. transl. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London : Sheed & Ward, 1989), pp [1960].
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d ed. transl. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London : Sheed & Ward, 1989), pp. 266-307 [1960]. 266 : [W]e can inquire into the consequences for the hermeneutics
More informationInternational Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies (2014): 5(4.2) MATERIAL ENCOUNTERS. Sylvia Kind
MATERIAL ENCOUNTERS Sylvia Kind Sylvia Kind, Ph.D. is an instructor and atelierista in the Department of Early Childhood Care and Education at Capilano University, 2055 Purcell Way, North Vancouver British
More informationAbsurd Time: Understanding Camus Quantitative Ethics Through Bergsonian Duration
6 : Understanding Camus Quantitative Ethics Through Bergsonian Duration Thomas Ruan Only through time time is conquered T.S. Eliot In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus tries to work through what he calls
More informationLouis Althusser s Centrism
Louis Althusser s Centrism Anthony Thomson (1975) It is economism that identifies eternally in advance the determinatecontradiction-in-the last-instance with the role of the dominant contradiction, which
More informationHegel Prize Speech 1. Cultural Materialism Richard Sennett
Hegel Prize Speech 1 Cultural Materialism Richard Sennett My thanks go to you this evening, for awarding me the Hegel Prize for 2006. It's an honor for me to receive this prize in Germany, where throughout
More informationSemiotics of culture. Some general considerations
Semiotics of culture. Some general considerations Peter Stockinger Introduction Studies on cultural forms and practices and in intercultural communication: very fashionable, to-day used in a great diversity
More informationMarx s Theory of Money. Tomás Rotta University of Greenwich, London, UK GPERC marx21.com
Marx s Theory of Money Tomás Rotta University of Greenwich, London, UK GPERC marx21.com May 2016 Marx s Theory of Money Lecture Plan 1. Introduction 2. Marxist terminology 3. Marx and Hegel 4. Marx s system
More informationBook Review. John Dewey s Philosophy of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel. Jeff Jackson. 130 Education and Culture 29 (1) (2013):
Book Review John Dewey s Philosophy of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel Jeff Jackson John R. Shook and James A. Good, John Dewey s Philosophy of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel. New York:
More informationA Process of the Fusion of Horizons in the Text Interpretation
A Process of the Fusion of Horizons in the Text Interpretation Kazuya SASAKI Rikkyo University There is a philosophy, which takes a circle between the whole and the partial meaning as the necessary condition
More informationAdorno - The Tragic End. By Dr. Ibrahim al-haidari *
Adorno - The Tragic End. By Dr. Ibrahim al-haidari * Adorno was a critical philosopher but after returning from years in Exile in the United State he was then considered part of the establishment and was
More informationThe Aleatory Encounter and the Common Name: Reading Negri Reading. Let this book be, before all else, a book about ordinary rain.
The Aleatory Encounter and the Common Name: Reading Negri Reading Althusser Ronald E. Day School of Library and Information Science Indiana University It is raining. Let this book be, before all else,
More informationthat would join theoretical philosophy (metaphysics) and practical philosophy (ethics)?
Kant s Critique of Judgment 1 Critique of judgment Kant s Critique of Judgment (1790) generally regarded as foundational treatise in modern philosophical aesthetics no integration of aesthetic theory into
More informationArchitecture is epistemologically
The need for theoretical knowledge in architectural practice Lars Marcus Architecture is epistemologically a complex field and there is not a common understanding of its nature, not even among people working
More informationReview by Răzvan CÎMPEAN
Mihai I. SPĂRIOSU, Global Intelligence and Human Development: Towards an Ecology of Global Learning (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2004), 287 pp., ISBN 0-262-69316-X Review by Răzvan CÎMPEAN Babeș-Bolyai University,
More informationKent Academic Repository
Kent Academic Repository Full text document (pdf) Citation for published version Milton, Damian (2007) Sociological Theory: Cultural Aspects of Marxist Theory and the Development of Neo-Marxism. N/A. (Unpublished)
More informationA Letter from Louis Althusser on Gramsci s Thought
Décalages Volume 2 Issue 1 Article 18 July 2016 A Letter from Louis Althusser on Gramsci s Thought Louis Althusser Follow this and additional works at: http://scholar.oxy.edu/decalages Recommended Citation
More informationKINDS (NATURAL KINDS VS. HUMAN KINDS)
KINDS (NATURAL KINDS VS. HUMAN KINDS) Both the natural and the social sciences posit taxonomies or classification schemes that divide their objects of study into various categories. Many philosophers hold
More information