Immediate Social and Ecological Nature of Value
* Article: General Economy: The Entrance of Multitude Into Production. By Akseli Virtanen. Ephemera, (4) 3, p. 209+, 2004
URL = http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/4-3virtanen.pdf
The shift from biopolitics to noopolitics.
Abstract
"The concept general economy is an attempt to rethink economy or to understand economy on the same condition based on which political philosophy has began to talk about biopolitics. This condition means the general dissolution of the borders between economical and political, the spheres of life and politics which, for example, both Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben regard as the decisive event of modernity and the absolute condition for thinking politics today. I argue that this condition is as absolute for understanding economy as it is for thinking politics today. What defines economy and our experience of it today is that the bare humanness of human beings, that general potentiality and linguistic-relational abilities which distinguish human beings is revealing itself as the essence also of economic production. I will first concentrate on the dissolution of the borders between the spheres of economy and politics according to Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower. I will then define in what way is this entrance of life into political order bound up with the development of capitalism more precisely, and finally outline general economy as the multitude’s entrance into production which leads to a necessary rearticulation of its starting point: the very idea of biopolitics."
Summary
From the reading notes of Michel Bauwens, 2007:
A study of the origins of 'biopower', a form of political economy in which politics and economics merge, to be concerned with the management of the (quality of) life, so that the state may be strengthened. This is exemplified by the evolution of 18th Sweden and Finland.
The first aspect is the development of the disciplines for the management of the human-body (end of 17th cy); followed by the second aspect designed for the management of the human-species, in the mid-18th cy.
"Capitalism as the adjustment of the accumulation of men to that of capital 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. " (p. 216)
For Renaissance economists, money derived its value from its own preciousness, but for the mercantilist, money represented wealth through being a sign. The relation between wealth and money were now based on circulation and exchange.
But for the political economy, wealth is a function of production, of the labour units that produced it. What circulates is no longer objects of need representing one another, but workers' time and toil. For Smith, labour as productivity and labour as commodity were equated, but Ricardo would break this unity. He distinguished between the capacity for labour and the 'labour actually done'. Value comes from the former, from the capacity for subjective productive activity 'in general'.
Before, our social relations needed to be mediated by money, or the exchange of labour power, in order to have value. A thought needed to become actualized. Today however, our thought and social relations are directly productive.
We are no longer dealing with the power of life (biopower), but power of the life of the mind (moods, sentiments, etc...). We are dealing with 'bodies without organs'.
Instead of intimidation, power operates through anxiety and inadequacy, by setting expectations, standards, opinions, climates. There is a shift from biopolitics to noopolitics.
Excerpt
The definition of the Multitude
Akseli Virtanen:
"Multitude is not a poetic notion, but the simple name of the productive singularities whose productivity cannot be reduced to actual production. Paraphrasing Marx, we might call it ‘living labour’. As a power, which is not reducible to any specific act, to any specific mode of existence or to any historical time, living labour is multitude’s mode of being. It is activity that does not materialize into machinery or products but rather retreats from materiality and turning into actual products. This is precisely how we might describe the transformation of economy: from the confined or restricted economy where it was necessary to distinguish between work and leisure, production and reproduction, life and politics to general economy; where factory-office and its borders have dissolved into society; where the “foundation of productivity is no longer in the capitalistic investment but in the investment of the social brains... where the maximal amount of freedom and the breaking of the disciplinary relations becomes the absolute foundation of creating wealth” (Negri, 1998: 139-140). Thus, to ask ‘what is multitude?’ means not to affirm ‘the end of work’ nor, on the contrary, to announce that ‘everything has become work’, but rather to change the principles of assessment, to change the way of conceiving the ‘the value of value’. This revaluation is not a solution to a problem but rather an opening of potential: it reveals the nature of multitude as a question. Without this questioning multitude will remain abstract, deprived of meaning."
(http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/4-3virtanen.pdf)
Zoe, Mere Life, vs Bios, the Good Life
Akseli Virtanen:
"In the Classical world the simple, natural life, the fact of living (zoê), which was common to all living beings (animals, human beings, gods), was plainly marginal from the perspective of the way of living proper to an individual or a group, that is, from a qualified life, the good life (bios).2As a living being, man’s place was in oikos (dwelling, home, household) and as a political subject it was in polis (city-state, body of citizens). The entire Aristotelian tradition is quite clear that this was a difference constituted already in human nature: in so far as man was to realize his nature as a political animal, as a ‘living being who has language’, this was to take place in the polis, the community. Politics was almost as if the difference between the fact of living and good life, the place were mute life, realizing itself in the oikos) transformed itself into good life, that is, into political life that took place in language: political order was constituted on the humanness of living man, on his having a language, not on the fact of living itself, on him having a voice.Both Agamben and Foucault agree that we can no longer distinguish between the simple fact of living (zoê) and the good life (bios); between our biological life as living beings and our political existence; between what is incommunicable and mute (or has only a voice), and what is communicable and sayable (or whose place is in language). We are animals in whose politics our very life as living beings is at stake: “for millennia man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living man with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (Foucault, 1990: 143). Life ‘as such’, set apart from its different forms – an idea impossible in the Greek and Roman tradition – now becomes the centre of political order. Foucault analyses this entrance of life into the sphere of polis with his concept of biopower. According to Foucault, the ‘entrance of life into history’ – that is, the entry of phenomena particular to the life of the human species into the sphere of political techniques (the order of knowledge and power) – is begun at the moment when economy (oikonomia, the management of family and household) and politics (the government of polis) integrate. Life becomes the centre of politics at the moment when economy – at the time understood as oikonomia, the correct manner of managing individuals, goods and wealth within the household (which a good father is expected to do in relation to his wife, children and servants) and of making the family fortunes prosper – is introduced to politics, the minute attention of the father towards his family into the management of the state. This is political economy in the original sense."
(http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/4-3virtanen.pdf)
Akseli Virtanen:
"The science of General Householding is about all the ground rules that in some way affect the happiness of people – except those that concern those rights, connections and obligations by which states are dependent of one another, as these belong to the state wisdom [statsklokheten]” (Berch, 1747: 11). Berch was the first professor of the science of oeconomie (Jurisprudence, Oeconomie & Commerciel) in Sweden appointed at Uppsala University in 1741. The first chair in ‘Oeconomie, Politia und Cameralwisseschaften’ was established in 1727 in Halle, Germany.
The attempt to set up an economy at the level of the state found its form in the eighteenth century Sweden-Finland organized around the question of the Oeconomie or Allmänna hushållningen, that is, ‘general householding’ or ‘general economy.’6General economy was the general framework for organizing everything that directly and indirectly pursued the internal material and spiritual welfare of the state: it was about “all the ground rules that in some way affect the happiness of people.”7The ‘internal welfare’ of the state refers here to the distinction between the positive general householding or Politie (Polizei in German, police in French and English), the means for increasing the forces of the state from within, and Statsklokheten or Politik (politique in French, politics in English), which ensures and develops the forces of the state through a system of alliances and organizing an armed apparatus.
General householding had three parts which included all the measures, departments and facilities aiming to improve general well-being and making sure that everything in the state took place according to the appropriate order:
1. Politia (Ordningswärket) looked after the order that the happiness and prosperity of the state required among its members, in their endeavours and in their way of life. Its tasks were to see to the order of society, take measures to increase the population and guide their activities towards worthwhile sources of livelihood, take care of health, vaccinations etc. The happiness of people consisted of the bounties of spirit, body and fortune:
(a) Politia concerning anima bona facilitated and organized the religious service, upbringing and education; it looked after the way of life and supervision of those deeds that had to do with will, as well as public entertainment, luxury and games;
(b) Politia concerning corporis bona concentrated on the issues of health: diseases, epidemics, and taking care of tidiness, housing, living and controlling the use and trade of medicines;
(c) Politia concerning fortunae bona took care of general security and comfort, made sure that vagabonds and beggars are not on the streets, and included the issues of censorship, means of transport, roads and postal office.
2. Oeconomie focused on those rules on which the means of living had to be based on in order not to harm one another and to produce prosperity to society as a whole: farming, mining operations, handicrafts, trade.
3. Cammar Hushållningen again attained, collected and managed state income. It dealt with those means by which the necessary revenues may be collected and the circulation of money may be directed in order to enhance the beneficial ways of living, commerce and trade. The aim was not only to make the taxing department rich but to make sure that the inhabitants are in such a condition that the state may collect revenues from them. In short, general economy included everything.9It included the positive, active, productive aspects of life like education and useful occupations. But it also included the negative aspects of life: the poor and the unemployed, diseases, epidemics, accidents.
...
The aim was to develop those elements constitutive of individuals’ lives in such a way that their development also fosters that of the strength (resources) of the state. There was a new historical outlook where the nation state had emerged as a reality which needed to hold out in a competitive grid and a disputed geographical area for an indefinite length of historical time. By organizing in detail the relations of living, working, trading and desiring beings to others and to themselves, people were supplied with ‘little extra life’ while simultaneously the state was supplied with ‘little extra strength’. The happiness of the people (understood as survival, life and improving living – the state’s internal strength) was, in other words, not only dependent on fertile land and fair climate or other nature’s conditions, but on the exercise of healthy householding. It was the origin of the prosperity and well-being in a state.
...
For the Renaissance ‘economists’ the ability of money to measure commodities and to be exchanged (its exchangeability) rested upon its intrinsic value: fine metal was in itself a mark of wealth. It had a price because its intrinsic character was an indication of the wealth of the world: it was precious above all other things because it was itself wealth. For this reason it could be used as a measure of all prices and for this reason it could be exchanged (used as a substitution) for anything that had a price. The ‘theory of wealth’ contained in eighteenth century general householding broke down this circle of preciousness. The objective of general householding was to increase the power of the state.
One of the most important aspects of this power was wealth and its main sources were thought of as the colonies, the conquest and the surplus on the balance of trade. But wealth was not, as often claimed, simply equated with specie. Wealth – the one pole constituting the happiness of the state – was rather split into elements (objects of needs and desire marked by necessity, utility, pleasure or rarity) that can be substituted for one another by the interplay of the coinage that signifies them. In other words, the analysis is turned upside down: money can be used as a measure of wealth, and it receives a price because it could be exchanged (used as a substitution): gold is precious because it is money and money has value because it has properties (physical, not economic) that render it adequate for the task of representing wealth. Its ability to measure wealth and its capacity to receive a price were qualities that derived from its exchanging function. Money became now the instrument of the representation of wealth and wealth a content represented by money: wealth became now whatever was the object of needs and desires (marked by necessity, utility, pleasure or rarity), and money gained the power of representing all possible wealth. All wealth was coinable – by the means of which it entered circulation. Money was, in other words, that which permitted wealth to be represented, and without it wealth would remain immobile, useless or, as it were, ‘silent’. The value of things will therefore no longer proceed from the metal itself, but establishes itself according to the criteria of utility, pleasure or rarity which combines the forms of wealth (objects of needs and desire) one with another while money permits their real exchange.
The mercantilist theory of value made it possible to explain how certain objects can be introduced into a system of exchanges, but value was based on a total system of equivalency and the ability of things to represent one and another. This allows Foucault to conclude that for the mercantilists value was a sign. Therefore the emphasis in general householding is on the positive balance of trade: money is needed to represent wealth, that is, to attract it, to bring it in from abroad or manufacture it at home, and it is needed to make wealth pass from hand to hand in the process of exchange. It is important to import money and trade alone is able of producing this effect. The money accumulated is not intended to sleep and grow fat, but it is attracted into a state only so that it may be consumed by the process of exchange. Money became wealth only in so far as it fulfilled its representative function (in replacing commodities). The relations between wealth and money were now based on circulation and exchange and no longer on the preciousness of metal."
(http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/4-3virtanen.pdf)
The Entrance of Multitude into Production
Akseli Virtanen:
"Today firms are laying off employees, shutting production plants, transferring production to subcontractors and to countries where the production costs are low – in short, they are turning into firms without factories. What is this change about? It is not about pleasing the shareholders by increasing the dividends or raising the market price of the firm. Nor is the question here of an attempt to save the welfare state and the jobs at its foundation by decreasing the price of work, by prolonging the working hours or by eliminating the non-incentive qualities of employment. Rather, the logic of the production of value has changed: work in the traditional sense of the word, and the factory as the corresponding model of production, have converted into mere costs which must be eliminated from the system. In turning into firms without factories companies do not bring down their entire operations but rather concentrate on those which produce more profit more quickly in comparison to the production of thing-form commodities within the factory model (see Lazzarato in this issue). At the same time work, in its traditional sense, has lost its position as an important generator of social cohesion. And there is no return. The defenders of ‘wagework’ and the ones building their society on the institutions based on it are the Don Quixotes of today. In the ‘Fragment on Machines’, which is the logical culmination and the highpoint of the antagonistic dialectic used in the Grundrissse (between synchronic construction and historical determination), Marx (1973) thinks about this displacement of manufacturing labour in the production of wealth as a ‘natural development’ of capital.24The development of capital proceeds to its ‘last phase’ because it itself begets a change in the nature of the production of value which causes the collapse of production based on exchange value. According to Marx, the reason for this displacement is that at a point of this development it is likely that thinking and abstract knowledge will replace manufacturing labour as the most important force of production: knowledge replaces partitioned and repetitive labour, that is, industrial society and the society based on the division of labour in its traditional form. As a consequence of this transformation, it is neither direct human labour the worker performs (shaping materials of nature, production of new objects etc.) nor the time during which she or he works (the unit of this), but rather “the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth” (Marx, 1973: 705). In other words, the mere existence of human being as a human being and not as a performer of a particular task or as a member of a particular community (that is, man as such, man without any content) becomes now the foundation-stone of wealth. This is not to say that direct labour and factory production disappear but for the production of value they have become, as Marx puts it, a ‘miserable base’.
Knowledge and communicative abilities of human being have become an important force of production. At least in the financial economy collective opinion, or what Keynes called the convention, is decisive with regard to individual beliefs and opinions. According to studies on investment behaviour, what is important in the functioning of collective opinion is not so much that what is communicated (the information content), but the way in which that what is regarded as a wise investment decision by ‘others’ is communicated (the communication ‘in itself’) (e.g. Marazzi, 2002 and this issue; Orlean, 1999; Schiller, 2000; Shefrin, 2001; Keynes, 1973). It is the nature of financial markets to function on the basis of imitation: to function properly the financial economy depends on the mass behaviour whose point of origin is in the deficit of information. Imitation begins where information ends: imitation is not about any specific information or activity but about the absence of information or specific activity. According to Jussi Vähämäki, imitation seems to indicate the specific mental ‘place’ where value is today created: typical imitative or mimetic behaviour takes place when people run in the same direction where the others are running not knowing why they are running and where the others are going. They trust that the others know as the others trust that they know. Such trust does not have any positive content as information: it is based on general expectations of how people in general act or think. The deficit of information constrains people to navigate in the world with the help of these most elementary human faculties – ‘instincts’, as it were – which do not contain or transmit any specific information (see Vähämäki in this issue). Herein lies the reason why today’s financial techniques, derivatives, stock trend analyses and the attempts to calculate and feel the market sentiment seem to have very little to do with modern economics and its conception of value. The new financial techniques are statistical techniques but these statistics try to translate into time series corporeal measures (to buy, to sell) and intensities (desires and beliefs): they try to express social relations as tendencies and variations which is the only way to seize and regulate the unforeseeable character of the social in itself diffused by imitation, contagion and reproduction beyond any physical intercourse.26In other words, these techniques do not perform any specific act of communication or exchange of information but try rather to repeat and imitate a relation to the world. They seek an absolute identification with the social. Such identification requires a technique or a man ‘without content’, a kind of general ability imitate, to perform any task or any role. But these general abilities, or the man without content, plays a central role also in the transformations of the organization of the production process: knowledge and communication have an increasingly central and direct role also there.27Today’s production is not mute or silent. Language and the means of communication are the tools in common to every productive act: the labourer is and must be talkative. Indeed, the organization of production may today be described empirically as a complex of communication and linguistic acts. It no longer consists in the silent and solitary accomplishment of a particular task, product or objective, but rather in the continuous modulation, variation and intensification of social cooperation that occurs through interaction and linguistic performances which, far from giving rise to a final product, exhaust themselves in the communicative interaction that their own ‘performance’ brings about. As Paolo Virno has demonstrated, ‘communicative action’ does not hold any privileged or even exclusive place in politics or in the struggle for ‘mutual recognition’. On the contrary, the dialogic word is installed at the very heart of capitalist production: labour is interaction (Virno, 2001). On the other hand, work is becoming more and more independent and personal in the sense that the personal character and capabilities of the worker – not what she or he does, but what she or he is – are becoming increasingly decisive to the production process: the distinctions between the worker and the working assignment, between working time and free time have begun to blur. Compared to ‘old work’, where personality was a handicap, which the division of work and organization tried to demolish, today’s work is rather a subjective attitude, the worker’s skills indistinguishable from his or her personality and habits, aptitudes and experience. Indeed, it is difficult to distinguish what somebody does today at the level of external traits of work. Yet, even if the external or visible characteristics of work look similar (a writer, a manager, a social worker, an architect, a factory worker all seem to be doing the same things with the same tools), the know-how and experience are not at all equal: the work is intellectually different, it requires different education, upbringing, experience. It requires differences in all the things that make one a distinct person, but that do not show at the level of the external characters of work. The worker can no longer just mechanically perform a particular task, but he or she must rather put to work his or her feelings, senses and perception: it is impossible to say which part of such immaterial (e.g. managerial or caring) labour is part of production and which an expression of personality. It is also difficult to say where the actual act of production is being carried out: when is it time to work and when time to rest; when and where does one work and when and where not? The specific places and times of production have disappeared and production has instead become spatially boundless and temporally endless (Vähämäki, 2003). Together the communicative nature and independence of work seem to have transformed production into the worker’s self-expression, into the creation of her or his self and transmitting it to others which shifts the centre of production from material production into relationships and contexts. Cooperation and interaction are in themselves part of production, no longer something imposed from the outside: it is not the same thing to be coordinated ‘externally’ and to invent and produce cooperative relations oneself. When the relationship with others becomes the driving, essential element and not something accessory, and thus the solitary and restricted character (exclusion of communication from the production process) of labour dies away, production necessarily needs a publicly organized space. A ‘publicly organized space’ means the necessity of a presence of others and a relationship with the presence of others (the ability to relate to the presence of others, the ability to communicate, cooperate etc.). It means the sharing of communicative and cognitive abilities, a linguistic organization whose essence is in the communication not of something commensurable (information) but of the ability to communicate itself, of the communicativity itself. In short, what has always been thought to be the condition of political life now also becomes the condition of economic production: the boundaries between the economic and the political, poiesis and praxis, life and politics begin to dissolve. Rather than ‘the economy colonializing the life world’, the characteristics that have always been thought to belong to the ‘outside’ of economy, to the sphere of art and politics (as in classical philosophy), or to the sphere of ideology and superstructure (as in political economy and its critique), turn out as the essence of economy."
(http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/4-3virtanen.pdf)
The Immediately Social Nature of Value
Akseli Virtanen:
"According to Paolo Virno, the distinction between the spheres of politics (political life, good life, action whose origin and purpose is in itself) and economy (labour, the sphere of instrumental action and the necessities of life) begins to blur precisely when the elementary human faculties (the general conditions of being a human being) as a primary productive force cease to be ‘private’ and inconspicuous and become publicly organized, a matter of organization in general (Virno, 2004: 64). This change in the nature of the means of production is maybe best characterized as a change in the nature of real abstraction. For Marx, money or an act of exchange of labour power is a ‘real abstraction’: it makes real an abstract thought, the idea of equivalency. An actual act (the sale and purchase of labour power) expresses and makes real a structure of a bare thought. It has the validity, the value only of a thought. This is what a real abstraction is: a thought becoming actualized, a thought becoming a thing (see Virno, 1996: 23; 2004: 64). The directly social nature of value or the Vergesellschaftung of labour and production, however, changes the relation: it indicates no longer that a certain reality (a sale and purchase of labour power, for example) had the value and validity of a thought, but that it is now our thoughts in themselves that acquire the value of ‘actual’ or ‘material’ facts without the necessity of any mediation or a corporeal form in the value form. Our thoughts, understanding in general, or ‘the development of the social individual’ as such, presents itself now with the weight and incidence typical of the production that had as its precondition the mediation and unity of measurement. Intellect, the general human faculties (communicative interaction, abstraction, self-reflection) are now, in themselves, immediately – that is, without the mediation or incarnation into a thing – productive. They are no longer abstractions becoming real through an incarnation into things, products, meanings, objectives or common aims, but ‘ideals’ that are real in themselves without any such mediation. Rather than abstract and actual they are ideal and real: rather than real abstractions they are ideal reals. This means a radical reformulation of the constitution of value. Cooperation and mutual relations between people as such do not need any mediation in the use value of another commodity in order to have value and be productive. Value, in other words, needs no longer ‘deduction’ from the mediating conditions assumed abstractly as the element of unity of calculus. Its sense changes from deduction to induction, or from affect to value, as a line of its construction. This revaluation of value means that value is no longer commensurable, the time of its creation is no longer homogeneous, measurable and abstract labour time but time as real potentiality. Modern capitalism is a historical society where the a-historical human ability to produce in general, the mere humanness of human beings, steps forward from behind an actual meaning, an actual product, an actual mode of production, an actual use, that is, from behind history to our immediate experience. For the first time the common mode of existence of human beings, the potential dimension of human existence as the power to do anything appears to us without the mediation of a meaning, product or common cause. This is an event where the historicity of our experience, its relationship with doing something particular can be experienced historically, that is, as beginning and as deceasing, or in general as changing. Because of this we are able to see ourselves without the mediation of any particular action, meaning or use, as bare potentiality and capacity to do anything without the actualization into a particular action or community, without the need of turning into a Nation, a People or a Community. This is the same thing as to say that multitude enters production, a multitude of productive singularities, singularities whose productivity cannot be reduced to actual production, whose activity does not solidify into machinery or products but rather remains immanent in its performances. As Deleuze points out, the question here is not of an adjective or an attribute. Multitude is not put together of many, it is not composed of individuals. It is rather an element in which something happens and which cannot be reduced to spatial distinctions. It cannot be reduced to one and it cannot be represented. It is absolutely missing any transcendent common denominator: it consists of countless subjects, boundless amount of ‘points’ of absolutely differentiated constellation. It concerns being together, being in common – not the common as abstract labour, that ensemble of products and energies of labour accumulated, commodified and thus created by capitalism, the common of exploitation – but common (life of the mind) which is not actual in its mode of being. In other words, multitude does not take place in space, through a particular common cause that could be communicated (it does not have a content or a particular task). It does not actualize in particular actions by which it can be determined what is productive and what is not. Yet it is real. It is ideal but not abstract, real but not actual, heterogeneous but continuous, undividable without changing a nature. This is how Deleuze defines the category of virtual which is multitude’s mode of being, the tense form of production today. We must understand that “the foundation of productivity is no longer in the capitalistic investment but in the investment of the social brains. Or in other words: the maximal amount of freedom and the breaking of the disciplinary relations becomes the absolute foundation of creating wealth” (Negri, 1998: 139-140)."
(http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/4-3virtanen.pdf)