Hi, Michel!
Oh, hi! Nice to see you again…
Hm, I have a question regarding our last conversation
– the one on Marx, I mean.
Marx?
Yeah, Karl Marx, not Ernst.
OK, go ahead!
I have the impression you didn’t tell me
the truth.
At least you said very little – in fact:
too little –
about your own references to Marx.
Really?
Yep. I have re-read some of your texts
and I found this here, where you say – and I quote:
“It is impossible at the present time to
write history without using a whole range
of concepts
directly or indirectly linked to Marx’s
thought
and situating oneself within a horizon of
thought
which has been defined and described by Marx.
One might even wonder what difference there
could ultimately be
between being a historian and being a Marxist.”
Ah, that one!
But that’s only a rather general argument,
something I said in an interview with a literature
journal from France,
I believe in the mid-1970s or so…
Correct, but I also came across another, more
extended statement,
this time from one of your major works, namely
the "History of Sexuality."
In the first volume, you draw a close connection
between the development of capitalism and
the emergence of biopower.
I quote: “Biopower was without question
an indispensable element in the development
of capitalism;
the latter would not have been possible
without the controlled insertion of bodies
into the machinery of production and the adjustment
of the phenomena of population to economic
processes.“
I am not sure what you want.
In our last conversation I told you that it
is possible to read Marx as something like
a “critical vitalist.”
Apparently, this is precisely what I did.
And if I recall it correctly it did not even
start with the first volume of the "History
of Sexuality," in 1976, but somewhat earlier,
in "Discipline and Punish."
It’s somewhat strange, no?
Almost all of you are familiar with panopticism,
but only very few readers paid attention to
the fact that, in this book, I relied on and
referred to Marx.
Not just one or two times, and not just by
quoting the "Capital"!
Let me give you an example.
In the section about “Docile Bodies,”
I draw extensively on Marx in order to define
what I mean by the term “discipline,”
which, in turn, is quite close to my notion
of “biopower.”
In fact, I rather carefully read what Marx
writes about the organization of cooperative
labor in capitalist societies.
This is the reason why in "Discipline and Punish,"
I say the following:
“Discipline is no longer simply an art of
distributing bodies, of extracting time from
them and accumulating it, but of composing
forces in order to obtain an efficient machine.”
Please note that in this connection “machine”
is not exclusively referring to technological
objects
but – just as in Marx – to combinations
of man and machine, or worker and tool.
Now, to my great surprise hardly anyone was or is interested
in this argument.
As a consequence, I did not really insist
on these points during my lifetime.
Except for a talk I gave in Brazil in the
early 1980s.
In “The Mesh of Power” I highlight that,
when you’re interested in understanding
the productivity of power, you should not
just rely on Bentham and his model of the
panopticon.
In addition, you must also refer to Marx,
in particular to the things he has to say
about the division of labor in workshops and
factories.
What we find there is, among other things,
Marx’s argument that one power does not
exist, but many powers.
Following what he writes in section four of
"Capital" about factories, schools and workers
housings, I came to the conclusion that, and I quote again:
“A society is not a unitary body, in which
one and only one power is exercised.
Rather, society is an archipelago of different
powers.”
This strikes me as extremely relevant today:
to understand how the emergence and evolution
of biopower is tied to installing a multiplicity
of different forms of power:
in factories and offices, but also in hospitals
and schools as well as, for example, at home.
Given the commercial use of the Internet I
would even say: increasingly at home.
At the same time all these forms of power
are connected to the cultural logic of capitalism
that tends to exists all over the world.
So, thank you for clarifying these points.
Bye, bye!! I hope to see you again soon
– both of you.
