hardt falsify the currency 2012

The South Atlantic Quarterly 111:2, Spring 2012DOI 10.1215/00382876-1548257% 2012 Duke University Press

Michael Hardt

Falsify the Currency!

In his !nal lectures at the Collge de France, during the last months of his life, Michel Fou-cault celebrated the practices of the ancient cyn-ics as a model of philosophical and political life. He anachronistically characterized the work of the cynics as a form of militancy, which he situ-ated in line with modern revolutionary struggles. The dog philosophy of the cynics, in fact, their practices of poverty, their methods of attacking existing social institutions, and their strategies to create new forms of social life appear in Fou-caults hands to surpass the modern revolution-ary traditions in some respects and serve as a productive basis for thinking political activity and transformation in the age of biopolitics.1 In the course of his analysis of the cynics, Foucault recounts an enigmatic story about Diog-enes of Sinope. According to one account told by Diogenes Lartius, an ancient historian, Dioge-nes of Sinope goes to the Oracle at Delphi to seek advice, and the Oracle instructs him to Falsify the currency! (Parakharattein to nomisma). The ancient historian reports several versions of Diogeness biography to shed light on this enig-matic mandate. According to one source Foucault cites, for example, Diogeness father worked as a money changer in Sinope and was then convicted

360%The South Atlantic Quarterly Spring 2012

of counterfeiting and, thus, literally, changing the face or e$gy imprinted on coins. (Although the verb in the Greek phrase parakharattein to nomisma is usually rendered in English as to falsify, a more literal translation is to change the face or character of the currencyan etymology closely related to that of the English word counterfeit.) Foucault shows little interest in such biographical explanations, however, and focuses instead on the philo-sophical resonances of the Oracles words. What is important, and what in any case I want to retain, Foucault explains, is that the principlealter your currency, change the value of your currencyis taken to be a principle of life, and even the most fundamental and most characteris-tic principle of the cynics.2 Foucault goes even further by noting the lin-guistic resonance in Greek between nomisma (currency) and nomos (norms and customs). The principle to alter the nomisma, Foucault continues, is also that to change custom, break with it, smash the rules, habits, conven-tions, and laws.3 It is probable, in fact, Foucault claims, that regardless of its original formulation, the principle was received and understood in this way as a mandate for social transformation. To change the currency thus becomes a project to create a new life and a new world. Foucault passes over this story relatively quickly in his lectures, but I think it is useful to investigate more deeply the possible meanings of the Oracles mandate. What can we make of the Oracles instruction to change the face of the currency, and more importantly, what does this task illumi-nate about how the militancy of the cynics can serve, as Foucault seems to suggest, as an adequate strategy in the age of biopolitics? The ancient story of Diogenes becomes more meaningful for us, I will argue, once we recog-nize that value in the realm of biopolitics is not only plastic but also immea-surable, revealing a curious and disconcerting symmetry between the tech-nologies of !nance and those of biopolitical production. Particularly in the context of the current economic and !nancial crisis, the mandate to falsify the currency thus takes on a double meaning. On the one hand, it cap-tures the way that the instruments of !nancial control, especially !nancial derivatives, transform social values to corral and capture them in the pro-cesses of capitalist accumulation. On the other hand, though, and in oppo-sition to this, biopolitical struggles against neoliberal capitalist control also have to discover mechanisms or technologies to transform the currency or, really, to put a new face on social value. What I propose in this essay, then, is not so much an interpretation of Foucault but rather an investigation of the possibilities for biopolitical struggle in and against the crisis, which takes some of Foucaults suggestions as points of departure.

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Financial Falsi!cations

It can easily appear, especially in times of crisis, as if !nance capital and neoliberal governments have heeded the Oracles mandate to Diogenes because they do operate by falsifying the currency.4 When housing prices, stock market indexes, and other representations of value fall back to earth after a bubble, it is clear that !nance markets are not working in a !eld of !xed or stable values but rather treat values as mobile and plastic, manipu-lating them for pro!t. Finance works, one might say, by constantly seeking to change the face or character of value. The strategies applied by neolib-eral governments to address crises equally seek to transform (uid value structures. Currency devaluations, of course, such as the devaluation of the Argentine peso during the economic crisis of December 2001, are a standard weapon in the arsenal of neoliberal governments and the Interna-tional Monetary Fund to restructure economic values. In addition, falsi!ca-tion of the currency is an accurate characterization of austerity programs, projects to privatize public goods and industries, defunding of pensions, bailouts of banks and industries, along with the more general e)orts to recast established social contracts and restructure the relationship between business and labor. Programs of falsi!cation like these have been deployed on a massive scale throughout the world since the 2008 crisis. Here, too, even when such neoliberal strategies are cast as returning to real values by paying the debts of previous pro(igacy, these actions really serve to capital-ize on the plasticity of value by transforming its face or character in order to shift wealth and debt from one segment of society to another. Recognizing these strategies to transform values and, in this sense, falsify the currency by not only bankers, speculators, and !nanciers but also neoliberal governments and institutions leads many to advocate an opposite strategy. The cause of the crisis, such analyses contend, as well as the injustice of the neoliberal responses to it, derives from the fact that the real economy has been subordinated to the !ctional economy. Financial values are !ctional in the sense that they are not controlled by the stable tradi-tional measures of the industrial economy and are thus subject to irratio-nal, swift rises and falls. Casino capitalism fueled by the manipulations of speculation is not only unjust in its distribution of wealth but also con-stantly runs the risk of crisis. The root of economic and !nancial crisis from this perspective can thus be traced to the loss of measure: the !nan-cial instruments have defaced the real and measurable values of material goods, particularly industrial goods, and distorted their measures. The only possible strategy to address such crises, then, as well as the adequate form


of resistance to !nance is to restore the primacy of the real economy and subordinate to it !nance and !ctional values. This is, the argument goes, how we must counter the defacers of the currency. The mandate of the cyn-ics to falsify the currency thus serves in this context as an indictment of those powers that control and distort the contemporary economy.5 My view is that this conventional narrative about the priority of the !ctional over the real economy as both a basis of economic injustice and cause of crisis, which I have presented in abbreviated form, is half right. It is important to recognize today the !ctional nature of !nance, the plas-ticity of economic values, and the ways that !nancial instruments as well as neoliberal governments function by transforming values and changing the face of the currency. The mistake is to challenge these !ctional values by relying on the stable values of the real economy. There is nothing more real in the storeroom of capitalist production, Alain Badiou contends, than on its trading (oor or in its hedge funds.6 The division between real and !ctional, I argue, misrecognizes the dominant forms of production and property that characterize the economy today, maintaining, in e)ect, an industrial imaginary in the age of biopolitical production. In addition, in the context of my discussion here, this view of the contemporary economy limits us to seeing the mandate of the cynics as a purely negative opera-tion. In the contemporary economic context how can we make our own the project to change the face of the currency and transform economic and social values?

Immeasurable Values of Biopolitical Production

The !rst step toward understanding how Diogeness mandate could be made our own is to recognize that we are entering an age of biopolitical pro-duction in which the values of economic production are not stable and are, in themselves, fundamentally immeasurable. To avoid confusion I should state straight away that the claim that the capitalist economy has entered an age of biopolitical production, which many authors including Antonio Negri and myself have argued, does not imply that there are fewer workers today in industry, agriculture, or any other traditional sector. The claim is not primarily quantitative but qualitative. This is clear if one steps back to look at the previous stage. From the mid- nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth century, the predominance of industrial production was not de!ned in quantitative terms. Even in the most developed indus-trial countries during the height of Fordism, the majority of workers were


not in the factories. Instead what de!ned the era as industrial was that the qualities of industry, including its mechanical instruments, its wage rela-tions, its working day, and its temporalities, were progressively imposed over the other sectors of economic production and over society as a whole. Today the tendency, we claim, is for the qualities not of industry but rather of biopolitical production to dominate. By biopolitical production I understand this to mean the produc-tion of goods that are characterized primarily not by material but rather by immaterial attributes. The production of ideas, images, languages, code, a)ects, and social relationship is typical of the biopolitical economy. Health, education, service work, care work, scienti!c work, communications indus-tries, and cultural production are some of the economic sectors in which biopolitical production is most evident, but in order for the claim to hold water one would have to verify the tendency for all sectors of the econ-omy and the entire society to be progressively in(uenced and transformed by the qualities and relations of biopolitical production, in the same way that the in(uence of industrial production was felt previously. One would have to demonstrate, for example, the pressure for industrial production to become communicative, for agriculture to become more focused on infor-mation (in the germplasm of seeds, for example), and for other sectors to adopt such relational qualities.7 A series of transformations of economic life and economic theory follows from this tendency, including a blurring of the conventional boundary between production and reproduction as well as that between work time and nonwork time, putting into question the status of the working day. Such claims require extensive argumentation and evidence, which has been pursued elsewhere.8 Most important for my argument here is that the ultimate aim of biopolitical production is the cre-ation and maintenance of a form of life. This is indeed part of the rationale for naming such production biopolitical. The perspective of biopolitical production helps us understand Karl Marxs argument that, whereas the commodity is the initial form of appear-ance of value in capitalist society, capital is ultimately a social relation, which must constantly be reproduced. Foucault extends this Marxian line of thinking further in an interview with Duccio Trombadori, when, in order to explain the di)erence between his thought and that of the Frankfurt School, he re(ects on Marxs notion that man produces man. Whereas Marxs statement read as a principle of humanism would mean, Fou-cault explains, producing the human according to a preexisting essence, the process must be understood instead as an act of creation, producing a


humanity that did not previously exist, a production that conventional capi-talist economic schema cannot grasp. I do not agree, Foucault continues, with those who would understand this production of man by man as being accomplished like the production of value, the production of wealth, or of an object of economic use; it is, on the contrary, destruction of what we are and the creation of something completely other, a total innovation.9 Bio-political production, which involves the production of social relations, sub-jectivities, and forms of life, constantly exceeds the measures of capitalist command and accumulation. The passage to the predominance of biopolitical production in the economy can be recognized also in terms of a parallel tendency whereby immaterial forms of property are becoming increasingly important with respect to traditional material forms. In some ways, todays clash in the realm of property is similar to the con(ict at the dawn of the industrial era, which Marx describes between the property of the landed aristocracy and that of the new industrial bourgeoisie. He characterizes this as a battle between immobile property (such as land) and mobile property (including industrial commodities). The dynamic qualities of mobility, Marx claims, will inevitably overcome the !xed values of immobile property. Today the primary challenge in the realm of property is no longer the one that mobility poses to !xed property or even really what immateriality poses for material property but rather the challenge of reproducibility posed by bio-political products. Biopolitical products, such as ideas, knowledge, a)ects, code, and the like, are easily reproducible and tend to escape or over(ow the logic of scarcity and the legal boundaries that police and sustain traditional property relations. Legal mechanisms such as patents and copyrights seek to counter the reproducible nature of biopolitical goods in order to main-tain private ownership and impose over them a logic of scarcity. Struggles over pharmaceuticals, biopiracy, and the ownership of seeds are only some examples of the vast arenas of legal battles over biopolitical forms of prop-erty. But just as in Marxs time it was clear that mobility and mobile prop-erty would progressively come to predominate in property relations, so, too, is it clear today that the reproducibility of biopolitical products will eventually transform and characterize the legal realm of contemporary property relations.10 If it is true, as we maintain, that biopolitical production is becoming predominant in the economy, then, to come back to my earlier point, it makes little sense to criticize the !ctional capital of !nance and specula-tion in the name of the real economy and its solid values. It may appear


that in the biopolitical economy the relative stability provided by the pre-dominance of material, industrial commodities and their values has been undermined and instead economic goods and values are becoming increas-ingly unreal or !ctional. But the distinction between the real and the !c-tional does not capture the situation, nor does the notion that we have passed from a production- centered to a circulation- centered economy.11 Instead of assuming that production has remained the same and has been subordinated to !ctional power or circulation, the biopolitical claim locates the most important shift within production itself and highlights the repro-ducibility (in addition to the speed of circulation) of the goods that are emerging as predominant. One signi!cant consequence of the claim that we are entering an era of biopolitical production is that the measurement of economic values is becoming increasingly di$cult and indeterminate. In part because of their reproducibility, the values of biopolitical products are not measurable, at least not by the traditional, material metrics of the industrial economy. This is not to say that ideas, code, a)ects, and, more signi!cant, social relation-ships and forms of life are either unreal or worthless. On the contrary, their values are real and constantly exceed any traditional measures that can be stamped on them. This claim regarding the immeasurability of the value of biopolitical goods should be situated in line with the arguments that the so- called labor theory of value no longer functions in the capitalist econ-omy. Marx, following David Ricardo, posed a quantitative relation between the labor time required on average to produce a commodity and the value of that commodity. Beginning in the 1970s heterodox streams of Marxist theory, analyzing the changes in labor practices and the center of the econ-omys move outside the factory, claimed that it was becoming less and less plausible for this law to function by posing a quantitative relation between labor and value. Furthermore, they claimed, the capitalist law of value is, at base, a law of exploitation: a law that establishes and upholds a system of unequal values. The point was not to cast doubt on the causal relation between labor and valuelabor, these theorists maintained, remains the source of wealth in capitalist productionbut rather to question the possi-bility of establishing a quantitative measure and to challenge the relation-ship of exploitation.12 The claim about biopolitical products extends this line of thinking. Not only is the economic value of commodities not repre-sentable in quantities of labor-time, but the value of biopolitical products tends to betray and exceed any of the capitalist measurement schema. The contemporary economic problem of measure is not, of course,

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a conundrum only for Marxist theory. Armies of capitalist technicians struggle to quantify fundamentally immeasurable values. The insurance industries, for example, go through extraordinary gymnastics to quantify the value of a !rm, knowing well that the !rms material property as well as its immaterial property, such as patents and copyrights, forms only a part of its value. Accountants similarly use concepts such as goodwill and intangible goods to try to grasp the value of goods and brands. These are some indications of the fact of a growing inability to quantify value in the biopolitical economy.

Finance and Biopolitical Production

The !nance industries constitute the segment of the capitalist economy that engages most directly with the !eld of immeasurable values. Christian Marazzi argues that in order to understand the contemporary functioning of !nance, and speci!cally its engagement with immeasurable values, we have to situate it !rmly in the !eld of biopolitical production. Financiali-zation, Marazzi contends, is not an unproductive/parasitic deviation of growing quotas of surplus- value and collective saving, but rather the form of capital accumulation symmetrical with new processes of value produc-tion.13 The symmetry might be recognized, at !rst sight, in the fact that these are !elds in which the danger of counterfeiting or falsifying values is especially acute. This !rst impression, however, is not exactly correct. Whereas counterfeiting changes one stable and established economic value to another, the operation of !nance instead seeks to quantify (uid and immeasurable values. The symmetry really lies in the fact that !nance and biopolitical production deal fundamentally with !elds of value that are immeasurable or beyond measure. One of the basic operations accomplished by !nance in general and !nancial derivatives in particular is to create quantitative measures for goods whose value is fundamentally immeasurable, to stamp a face on them so that they can function and be traded in capitalist markets. This is most easily recognizable in the ways that derivatives make risk into a trad-able commodity. Risk, of course, is a de!ning element of all derivatives, from the historical forms of commodities futures to the most complex and abstract contemporary instruments. What renders the social relations of !nancial circulation so historically novel, Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee explain, is that they are de!ned and determined through the quanti!-cation and pricing of risk.14 Risk itself does not immediately have quantita-


tive measure. One can, however, project probabilities and create measures for risk. Derivatives essentially transform risk into a tradable commodity and, in order to do so, give their currency quantitative measure. One can make the same point from another angle. Keynesians cri-tique neoclassical and Chicago School economic theory for their assump-tion that risk can be priced correctly and that therefore !nancial markets can regulate themselves. Risk requires quanti!cation in order to function as a mechanism of stability. Keynesians maintain, on the contrary, that risk cannot be measured reliably. In contrast to todays dominant neoclassical theories and neoliberal policies, Keyness proposals to achieve economic and market stability, Robert Skidelsky explains, focus not so much on cal-culating risk but on managing uncertainty. Uncertainty, in contrast to risk, he maintains, does not have to be quanti!ed in order to be managed and regulated.15 The quantifying function of derivatives is not limited to the genera-tion of measures and the pricing of risk but in some cases also refers to the nature of the underlying assets. It is true that some derivatives, such as rice futures, are based on underlying assets that have readily quanti!able values in the capitalist economy, and in such cases the derivative quanti!es the risk attached to that commodity over time. More important, and more interest-ing, however, are the derivatives whose underlying assets are not readily quanti!able, such as weather derivatives or, more signi!cantly, derivatives that combine disparate underlying assets. Dick Bryan and Michael Raf-ferty describe this as the blending role of derivatives. Since derivatives are separate or abstract from their underlying assets, they can bundle a variety of asset types in one !nancial product. In order to form this assem-blage, however, the derivative must establish a common measure for all the values involved. The core function of derivatives, according to Bryan and Ra)erty, is thus computational: they embody systems of calculation that commensurate di)erent forms of capital according to notional competi-tive norms.16 A process of commensuration could involve simply bringing together two or more existing measurements or measurement systemsalready a di$cult procedure that is accomplished, in part, through abstrac-tion. The process accomplished by most derivatives is even more complex and thorny because before commensuration they must stamp a value on assets whose value is not easily quanti!able. Confronting an increasingly complex market of incommensurable and changing values, Lawrence Grossberg explains, a situation in which no one knows how to measure the value of speci!c !nancial assets or how to calculate their comparative

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value, derivatives seemed to embody an answer, presenting themselves as an impossible yet manageable calculating machine.17 Grossberg goes on to suggest that one root of the economic and !nancial crisis that erupted in 2008 is the false assumption that derivatives, as economic calculating machines, are able adequately to !x and make commensurate values in the contemporary economy18a challenging and important hypothesis that deserves to be pursued further. My main interest at this point in my argument, however, is to estab-lish the symmetrical relation, as Marazzi says, between !nance (and, spe-ci!cally, !nancial derivatives) and biopolitical production. The symmetry resides primarily in the fact that like biopolitical production, !nance oper-ates in a !eld of immeasurable values. It should come as no surprise, then, that the two have a similar historical trajectory. In the mid- 1970s when the predominance of industrial production began to shift to that of biopolitical production, the role of !nancial derivatives began to increase exponentially in the capitalist economy. It is even reasonable, I think, to hazard a hypothe-sis (which would have to be argued and veri!ed) regarding the causal rela-tion between the two. From somewhat di)erent perspectives, Marazzi and Grossberg both suggest or, at least imply, that the emergence of biopoliti-cal production created the condition of immeasurable or incommensurable values to which !nancial derivatives responded as an instrument to quan-tify value for capitalist accumulation.

Neoliberal Governance

Foucault does not develop an economic theory of biopolitical production as I have outlined it here but in some respects his analysis of neoliberalism dovetails with such a theory. In his 1979 lecture course, The Birth of Biopoli-tics, Foucault proposes to read neoliberalism as the general framework of biopolitics.19 His point of departure is the recognition that neoliberalism operates according to neither a state- centered logic nor, in contrast to tra-ditional laissez- faire notions of liberalism, an economic regime that seeks to protect itself and its market from government action. Neoliberalism, in other words, is not a strategy to minimize or limit government but rather a mode of governance that intervenes in the social and economic !elds just as strongly and frequently as any other form of rule. What makes neoliberal governance biopolitical for Foucault is that it acts not only to regulate populations and manage social and economic activity but also and most centrally to produce subjectivities and create a

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form of life. Neoliberal governmental intervention, he explains, has to intervene on society as such, in its fabric and depth (145). In one stream of his analysis that develops this theme, for example, Foucault insists that a focus on commodi!cation in capitalist society does not grasp su$ciently the depth of neoliberal strategies, which create, he says, not so much a mar-ket society (or even, as he puts it, a super- market society) but an enterprise society. A perspective based primarily in the relationship to commodities remains in his view too external to the subject, cannot grasp its central pro-ductive qualities, and tends to see the social !eld as homogeneous. Neo-liberal governmentality, he contends, involves obtaining a society that is not oriented toward the commodity and the uniformity of the commodity but towards the multiplicity and di)erentiation of the enterprise (149). Neoliberal governmentality generalizes the logic of the enterprise through-out the society and produces a multiplicity of enterprise individualsan enterprise form of life (241). Capital throughout its history and in all its forms has a strong relation to biopower, as Foucaults other writings on the subject demonstrate, but in these lectures neoliberal governance presents those biopolitical strategies as more direct and intense than ever. There is much more to say about neoliberal governance and Fou-caults understanding of it, but here I am primarily interested in the sym-metry between the biopolitical nature of neoliberal governance and that of contemporary productive forces. At the same time that the center of gravity of the capitalist economy shifts from the production of material commodi-ties to that of immaterial or biopolitical goods such as ideas, relations of care, a)ects, networks of communication, codes, and languages, and just when the methods of !nance and especially !nancial derivatives come to occupy the central role in managing economic life and guaranteeing the accumulation of capital, the dominant mode of governance comes to focus more strongly on the production of subjectivities and modes of life. In none of these cases is this a radical break with the past, but it is, rather, a subtle but nonetheless signi!cant point of in(ection. Production, capitalist con-trol, and political governance are ever more strongly grounded on the bio-political terrain.

A Strange Symmetry

What should we make of this strange symmetry that links biopolitical pro-duction to the technologies of !nance and the governance of neoliberal-ism? Does it degrade biopolitical production to the level of !nance and sug-


gest it is intimately tied to the neoliberal mode of capitalist accumulation? Or does it, on the contrary, ennoble !nance and neoliberalism as somehow adequate or even necessary for the contemporary productive processes? No, !nance and neoliberalism are symmetrical simply by operating in the same !eld; they function completely di)erently in that !eld. Finance engages immeasurable values, as does biopolitical production, but !nance, unlike biopolitical production, seeks to quantify these values in order that, !rst, they become tradable in capitalist markets and, second, and more impor-tantly, they conform to the needs of capitalist exploitation and accumula-tion. Finance is not only a vast calculating machine but also a capitalist technology for the expropriation and accumulation of wealth. Neoliberal-ism, like biopolitical production, is centrally engaged with the production of subjectivity, but it does so in a way that reorganizes social and economic values in the interests of capitalist accumulation. The symmetry suggests, then, that the problem with !nance and neoliberalism is certainly not their engagement with immeasurable values, their powers of abstraction, their orientation toward forms of life, or even the fact that they stamp a face on the currency of biopolitical values. The problem rather is the way that, through mechanisms of measure and quanti!cation, they impose control over the biopolitical !eld and, ultimately, establish and maintain relations of exploitation in the processes of capitalist accumulation. If we now return in this context to Foucaults interpretation of Dioge-ness mandate, it suggests that !nance and neoliberal governance are not the only strategies or technologies that can operate on the !eld of biopoliti-cal value. One can maintain that the expression parakharattein to nomisma means to change the currency, Foucault explains, but in two senses, one pejorative and one positive or, in any case, neutral. This can be, in e)ect, a dishonest alteration of the currency. This can also be a change of the e$gy carried on the currency, a change that allows re- establishing the true value of that currency (221). What would it mean in the biopolitical !eld to change the e$gy of the currency and reestablishor, really, establish for the !rst timeits true value? (My sense is that in Foucaults mind this formulation resonates with Nietzsches call to revalue all values, but Nietz-sches proposition does not seem to get us much further or give us more precision than Diogeness mandate when confronting biopolitical produc-tion.) Changing the e$gy, creating a face for biopolitical currency, does not imply measuring and quantifying value. Its purpose is instead to give meaning to and, in that sense, determine the character of this !eld of value.

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To make Diogeness mandate our own and to change the character of the currency in a positive sense we would have to invent a technology that is equal to !nances power to stamp a face on value and neoliberalisms ability to organize social productionbut a technology that does so in a completely di)erent way. This technology would institute what one might call, with considerable irony, a communist law of value, that is, a noncapi-talist, democratically determined, and equitable schema for the manage-ment and distribution of social wealth. This would be the true face we could stamp on the !eld of biopolitical value. How can we today ful!ll this mandate? How can we create and institute new forms of life in the !eld of biopolitical production that are equal to the powers of !nance and neoliber-alism? How can we change the character of the currency to establish what Foucault calls its true value? Foucault does not provide us with an answer to such questions, at least not directly. In the continuation of his lectures after analyzing Diog-eness mandate, he does interpret the practices of the cynics as a kind of biopolitical militancy, which suggests a project to create and institute new forms of life, but he does not develop this in a way that can address the problem of changing the face of the currency in the terms I have outlined here.20 To do so, one would have to investigate more fully the fundamen-tal aspects of our current political and economic situation, including the technical and political composition of biopolitical labor, the forms of labor organization existing and possible in biopolitical production, the potential political power of producers, the possibilities for the refusal of capitalist exploitation and sabotage of its systems of command, and ultimately the lineaments of a constituent power adequate to the age of biopolitics. All that, though extremely important and worthwhile, would take us far from Foucault. In order to !nd material for a response in Foucaults work, since that is my primary task here, we need to change gears and look not for any theo-retical proposition of a social alternative but instead to his accounts of exist-ing alternative biopolitical practices, particularly those focused on the pro-duction and transformation of subjectivity. The need for this shift should not be surprising, since Foucault constantly resists pressures to respond theoretically to political questions about what is to be done. Instead, mostly in brief, occasional writings, Foucault takes as a starting point what people are already doing and, on the basis of their struggles, articulates elements that could form part of a future political project.

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Biopolitical Struggle in Iran

Foucault interpreted the 1978 mass uprising in Iran against the Shah in terms that give us one useful point of departure for investigating the power of biopolitical struggle today. On commission from the Italian newspaper Corriere della sera, which engaged him as part of a series of philosophers acting as amateur journalists, he traveled to Iran for two weeklong visits in September and November of that year. In his articles for Corriere, Fou-cault took seriously his journalistic mission, providing readers with facts and political analyses regarding the relations of force in the country, the importance of Irans oil in the context of the Cold War, the relative politi-cal power of the Shah and the clergy, and the brutality of the repression of the popular revolt. Most interesting from my perspective is the way that, through his accounts of the development of the uprising, Foucault poses some of the basic features of revolt in the age of biopolitics, features that have been repeated and extended in some of the major struggles in the three decades since. One of these features is the global nature of the power structure against which the revolt must be waged. It is the insurrection of unarmed men, Foucault explains, who want to lift up the great weight that weighs on each of us, but more precisely on those, the workers in the oil industry, the peasants at the frontiers of empires: the weight of the order of the entire world. It is perhaps the !rst great insurrection against the planetary sys-tems, the most modern form of revolt and the most crazy.21 Foucault intu-its, through his engagement with the Iranian insurrection, the emergence of a new, properly global enemya neoliberal world order that is composed of planetary systems and extends beyond the divisions of the old imperial-ist projects and even the binary partition of the Cold War.22 The revolt, however, is not expressed directly against this new world order but rather, and this is a second feature, against a local enemy, in this case the Shah, that stands in for the wide range of global grievances and demands. It is the same protest, Foucault maintains, it is the same will that is expressed by a doctor in Tehran and a mullah in the countryside, by an oil worker, a postal employee and a student wearing the chador. This will has something disconcerting about it. It is always about the same thing, only one and very precise: the departure of the Shah. But this one thing, for the Iranian people, that means everything: the end of dependence, the disappearance of the police, the redistribution of the oil income, the battle against corruption, the reactivation of Islam, another mode of life, new rela-

Francois Richard


tions with the West, with the Arab countries, with Asia, etc.23 The Shah, in Foucaults estimation, although his departure constituted the explicit rally-ing cry, was not really the ultimate agent of domination that the rebels were confronting. The Shah functioned as a placeholder for a complex matrix of repression and control that extended well beyond national borders to the global level. Finally, the most important feature of the rebellion, which situates it on the terrain of biopolitics, is its central orientation toward the transfor-mation of subjectivity. Foucault dedicates his most careful and poignant analyses to the ambiguous relationship between Islam and the aspiration for a revolutionary transformation of subjectivity: The problem of Islam as a political force is an essential problem for our era and the years to come. The primary condition for approaching it with at least a little intelligence is not to begin with hatred of it.24 He is quite clear that the Shiite clergy is in no way a revolutionary force, but that does not mean that Islam and reli-gion in general do not play a revolutionary role. Religion has often in the past, Foucault reminds us, been the form that political struggle takes when mobilized among the poor. The religious practices widespread among the poor in Iran, in fact, with their focus on daily life, family ties, social rela-tions, and the care of the self, made Islam available as the basic vocabulary and the dramatic backdrop of the struggles. I think that there is where Islam played a role, Foucault explains. The fascination exerted by this or that obligation, this or that code? Perhaps, but above all, in relation to the form of life that was theirs, the religion was for them like the promise and the guarantee of !nding what could radically change their subjectivity. The ultimate object of the struggle, in his view, is not the overthrow of the Shah or even the emancipation of an existing social subject but rather the trans-formation or production of subjectivity itself, which he characterizes later in the same interview as the will to a radical change in existence.25 In this way Foucault reads the insurrection in Iran as fundamentally a biopolitical struggle.26 Why should we use the term biopolitical for these struggles in Iran? Foucault does not, in fact, mention biopolitics or neoliberalism in his writings on Iran. It seems clear to me, though, that these concepts are close to his mind when he writes of the care of the self and the transfor-mation of subjectivity in passages on the Iranian insurrection like these. Foucaults engagement with Iran came during the period when he worked most actively to develop the concept of biopolitics. Earlier in the year he had developed his notion of biopolitics in relation to governmentality in his

Francois Richard

Francois Richard


Security, Territory, Population lectures and a few months after the trips he begins the Birth of Biopolitics lectures in which he analyzes neoliber-alism.27 Considered together, Foucaults work during this period suggests that struggles over the form of life take on a new character and a new pri-ority under neoliberal governance. The fact that Foucault has the concept in mind, though, does not yet make clear what we gain by considering such struggles biopolitical. Are not a wide range of struggles throughout history, especially revolutionary struggles, characterized by a con(ict between di)erent forms of life and aimed at the transformation of subjectivity? One way to characterize the novelty of biopolitical struggles is to recognize how in them the traditional divisions between economic and political struggles, which were particu-larly central to Marxist strategy during the era of the Third International, become blurred; indeed cultural struggles also overlap substantially with both the economic and the political. To consider biopolitical struggles in this way does not mean that we can no longer in these contests make use of economic logics and make economic demands, for example, but rather we must always recognize the ways in which they are embedded in the politi-cal and cultural and, moreover, that all these are fundamentally concerned with struggles over modes of the production of subjectivity and forms of life. Class struggles in contemporary capitalism, Giuseppe Cocco claims in an analysis grounded in the Brazilian situation, are biostruggles [bio-lutas]: they occur precisely around the dual and paradoxical process of inclu-sion and fragmentation of life in work.28 One axis of biopolitical struggles, in other words, is the way that class struggles and economic demands become inseparable, as Cocco suggests, from struggles over forms of life and the production of subjectivity.

A New Face for Biopolitical Value

Some of the most interesting and intense political revolts in the decades since the Iranian Revolution have also been organized around several of the features Foucault individuated then. It would be a useful task, in fact, and a large endeavor to analyze to what extent the notion of biopolitical struggle characterizes adequately the wide range of struggles against neoliberalism in our era, from the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas to the 2001 insurrec-tion in Argentina, from the continuing social movements in Bolivia, Brazil, and South Africa to the riots in Paris and London, and innumerable other events. Such an analysis would undoubtedly reveal the ways in which con-

Francois Richard


temporary struggles go beyond what Foucault could recognize. Here, as means of conclusion, I want brie(y to consider in this light one such aspect of the 2010 and 2011 revolts in Tunisia and Egypt. The contemporary revolts throughout the Arab world certainly share one very visible element with the earlier insurrection in Iran: the central rallying cry of the departure of the dictator, although important in itself, functions also as a placeholder for a variety of demands that ultimately aim to challenge the domination of the emerging neoliberal world order. An important di)erence also stands out immediately: whereas in 1978 in Iran the promise of a radically changed subjectivity was primarily situated on the religious terrain, today, in line with so many instances of rebellion around the world, biopolitical struggle is combined with or, really, takes the form of experiments in self- governance and democratic organizing. Con-sider, !rst of all, the fact that the international media had such great di$-culty in understanding that the struggles in Tunisia and Egypt lacked cen-tralized leadership but were nonetheless strongly organized. During the height of the Egyptian struggles prior to Hosni Mubaraks departure, US journalists seemed particularly desperate to !nd a leader for the protests in order to !t them into a standard narrative and make them intelligible: one day they reported that Mohamed ElBaradei is emerging as leader, and the next that the leader instead is Google executive Wael Ghonim. They were incapable of understanding that, as in many other contemporary rebellions, these protests were organized in horizontal, network fashion, without any centralized leadership, and were all the more powerful for that. The tradi-tional parties and established opposition forces could only follow behind the movements of the multitude. One of the most signi!cant developments of the Egyptian revolt, in fact, and one of the most di$cult to discern from the outside, was the inter-nal organization and functioning of those occupying Tahrir Square and the structures for decision making of the multitude that maintained a presence there. The occupants of the square sought to bring together a wide range of social forces, make links to existing opposition parties, and still maintain the coherence necessary to resist brutal government attacks. Tahrir Square has become an emblem for a powerful organizational structure capable of not only resistance but also self- governance, albeit for a limited time and in a limited space. There are indeed strong resonances between the formations of Tah-rir Square and the occupations of other public squares in the months after dramatic events in Egypt. The protesters who gathered in the spring of 2011


to preserve public union rights in Wisconsin, those who occupied Athenss Syntagma Square to contest the Greek parliaments austerity measures, the indignant multitude squatting in Madrids Puerta del Sol, and the Occupy Wall Street movement each developed assembly structures for internal democratic decision making. It is interesting how in particular the so- called 15M movement in Spain transformed the occupation of the square from a protest about the economic crisis and government austerity programsbringing together demands regarding unemployment, precari-ous labor, housing, health services, the electoral system, and so forthinto a demand for and a new practice of democracy, with the slogan Real democracy now. It is a movement of not only radical democratization, Ral Sanchez Cedillo explains, but also democratic radicalization, that is, an experimentation with and reinvention of the practices of mass direct democracy in the public square.29 This is one novel mandate that contem-porary forms of rebellion have developed: today biopolitical struggle must also involve and even be oriented primarily toward an experimentation in the social organization of democracy and autonomy. Such recent biopoliti-cal struggles have been good at organizing a public square but as yet have not succeeded in organizing an alternative social formation. Foucaults interpretation of the Oracles mandate for Diogenes might once again be useful here: discover the means to stamp the true face on the !eld of biopolitical value and therefore transform the economic and social structures of value across the entire society. A true face of value furthermore, as contemporary biopolitical struggles teach us, can be cre-ated only by a constituent power capable of reinventing democracy and rela-tions of autonomy. To embark on this process we will need to create a tech-nology of transformation in some sense superior to the powers of !nance and neoliberal governance. Exploring such a path, now well beyond Fou-cault, may allow us !nally to ful!ll Diogeness enigmatic mandate to falsify the currency.

Notes

Thanks to Moishe Postone for his helpful comments on this essay. All translations, unless indicated otherwise, are my own. 1 I explore the notion of biopolitical militancy that Foucault develops in these lectures in

The Militancy of Theory, South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 1 (2011): 1935. 2 Michel Foucault, Le courage de la vrit: Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II, Cours au

Collge de France, 19831984 (The Courage of the Truth: The Government of Self and Others, vol. 2, Lectures at the Collge de France, 19831984), ed. Frdric Gros (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2009), 222.


3 Ibid., 22324. 4 One should keep in mind that periodic currency devaluations and crises are a regu-

lar feature of many colonial and postcolonial societies, where the instability of eco-nomic value corresponds in many cases to a similar instability of social values. See, for example, Charles Piots insightful analysis of one such moment in Togo, Hedging the Future: Togos Visa Lottery (American Anthropological Association annual meeting, November 18, 2011).

5 For the classic analysis and indictment of casino capitalism, see Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).

6 Alain Badiou, De quel rel cette crise est- elle le spectacle? (Of Which Real Is This Crisis the Spectacle?), Le monde, October 18, 2008. Badiou rightly critiques the stan-dard narrative that the cause of the current crisis is explained by the disjunction between the real and !ctional economies.

7 It is important in my view not to interpret this passage from the industrial to the biopolitical era in terms of the conventional distinction between manual and mental labor. Biopolitical production requires a mixture of corporeal and intellectual forces, as do industry, agriculture, and other forms of production. This is part of the reason I am reluctant to describe biopolitical production solely by its cognitive aspects, as some do, with such terms as cognitive capitalism and cognitariat.

8 For a sample of this extensive literature, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Yann Moulier Bou-tang, Cognitive Capitalism (London: Polity Press, 2011); and Andrea Fumagalli, Bioeco-nomia e capitalismo cognitivo (Bioeconomics and Cognitive Capitalism) (Rome: Carocci, 2007).

9 Michael Foucault, Entretien, in Dits et crits, vol. 4, ed. Daniel Denfert and Franois Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 4195, 74. This is published in English as Michel Fou-cault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991).

10 For Marxs analysis of the contest between mobile and immobile forms of property, see Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1975), 279400, 33641.

11 In their excellent analysis of derivatives, Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee do not characterize the current era in terms of real and !ctional economies but instead make a claim that we are undergoing a shift from a production- centered economy to a circulation- centered one dominated by speculative capital. See LiPuma and Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

12 For relevant critical assessments of the labor theory of value, see Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Antonio Negri, Marx beyond Marx (New York: Autonomedia, 1989); and Antonio Negri, Twenty Theses on Marx, in Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca Karl (New York: Routledge, 1995), 14980.

13 Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism, in Crisis in the Global Econ-omy, ed. Andrea Fumagalli and Sandro Mezzadra, trans. Jason Francis McGimsey (New York: Semiotext(e), 2010), 1759, 36.

14 LiPuma and Lee, Financial Derivatives, 141.


15 Robert Skidelsky, Keynes: The Return of the Master (New York: Public A)airs, 2009), 3242 and 8388.

16 Dick Bryan and Michael Ra)erty, Financial Derivatives and the Theory of Money, Economy and Society 36, no. 1 (2007): 13458, 142.

17 Lawrence Grossberg, Modernity and Commensuration, Cultural Studies 24, no. 3 (2010): 295332, 299.

18 Ibid., 324. 19 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell

(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. Even though these lectures were delivered before the Thatcher and Reagan governments implemented neoliberalism, Foucault grasps some of the dominant elements of neoliberalism under which we live today, primarily through readings of German- language authors and postwar actions of the German government.

20 On Foucaults interpretation of the cynics, see Hardt, The Militancy of Theory. 21 Michel Foucault, Le chef mythique de la rvolte de lIran (The Mythical Leader of the

Revolt in Iran), in Dits et crits, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 71316, 716. 22 During this same period Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari wrote of the emergence of a

new planetary war machine in very similar terms. The war machine reforms a smooth space that now claims to control, to surround the entire earth. Total war itself is sur-passed, toward a form of peace more terrifying still. The war machine has taken charge of the aim, worldwide order, and the States are now no more than objects or means adapted to that machine. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Mas-sumi (1980; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 421.

23 Foucault, Le chef mythique, 715. 24 Michel Foucault, Rponse de Michel Foucault une lectrice iranienne (Response

from Michel Foucault to a Female Iranian Reader), in Dits et crits, vol. 3, 708. 25 Michel Foucault, Lesprit dun monde sans esprit (The Spirit of a World without

Spirit), in Dits et crits, vol. 3, 74355, 749, 754. 26 During the course of the insurrection Foucault is conscious of the small chances of

victory of the revolutionary forces that inspire him, and he is disappointed but not surprised when, after the departure of the Shah, power is solidi!ed in the hands of the returning Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the clergy. Foucault is criticized in France and elsewhere for having expressed support for the insurrection, but he feels no need to apologize. Instead his reaction after the defeat is to celebrate the audacity and historical role of those who rebel, regardless of the outcome. I, too, see no reason to blame Foucault for his analyses of and enthusiasm for the revolutionary forces simply because they were defeated. World history would indeed be very easy to make, Marx writes soon after the Communards were slaughtered in Paris, if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly favourable chances (April 17, 1871, Letters to Dr. Kugelmann, in Civil War in France: The Paris Commune [New York: International Publishers, 1989], 87). Foucault remains inspired, despite their defeat, by the biopoliti-cal nature of the struggles, that is, their aim to produce new forms of life, new subjec-tivities, a new existence.

27 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collge de France, 19771978, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).


28 Giuseppe Cocco, As biolutas e a constituio do comum (Biostruggles and the Con-stitution of the Common), Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil, no. 46 (2011): 3637.

29 Ral Sanchez Cedillo, 15M, multitude que se sirve de mscaras para ser una (15M, the Multitude That Uses Masks in Order to Be One), Madrilonia.org blog, http://madrilonia.org/?p=3177 (accessed July 8, 2011). See also Toni Negri, Ri(essioni spag-nole (Spanish Re(ections), UniNomade 2.0 blog, June 4, 2011, http://uninomade .org/ri(essioni- spagnole/ (accessed July 8, 2011).

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