Configurations of Life

Sandro Chignola (Italy)

Università di Padova

Although it may seem eccentric, the purpose that stems from my peculiar research area is,

somehow, necessary. I think that talking about “life configurations” and proposing a discussion

about the topic requires some preliminary decisions which help to clarify our point of departure. In

other words, it is about “configuring” in a preliminary phase my presence among you, so that I can

communicate with the “machine”, with the hardware of the congress. The technical term must be

understood from its Latin etymology: cum-figurare, to make up, to adapt the members of the

present discussion, that is to say, the researchers who work in different disciplinary fields, to enable

the communication. As we know, the Latin cum offers different interpretations. It can indicate

simultaneity, concomitance – that is to say, connection – or, more radically, correlation, step,

interchange. According to this last meaning, cum-figurare signifies to attribute a thing the image of

other. To capture or to transform it. Figurare is a word very close to fingere; both share the root

dhigh (Sanskrit dig, according to the linguists the group dh belongs to the Greek th and the Latin f),

which refers to the clay, the earth. In Greek, thig-gano: I touch. Dei-gan, in ancient Gothic: to give

shape to the inert matter, to mix, to model. Figurare is to assign an external shape to things,

capturing them according to their specific nature. According to this meaning, to configure doesn’t

mean to connect, neither to refer nor symbolize, in the simplest sense of transference, a way or

another which offers the Latin etymology. Cum-figurare means to start to get in touch with things –

with the extended life as political “matter” – and to “fake” them, to redirect them to an efficient

fiction, capable of extracting out of them a shape or artifice.

I can imagine that you have understood the aim of my proposal. Or better: the point of departure. I

want to start from a form that shapes the modern politics and that configures – it doesn’t reproduce,

nor reflects, but transfers, models, makes – a precise image of life (in this case, the political life).

There is a figure, an image which stems from the modern politics: the image that Thomas Hobbes

exposes in the introduction of his Leviathan in 1651: “The Matter, Form and Power of a

Commonwealth Ecclesiastical or Civil”. If we accept the reference to the theological-political

symbol of Leviathan, that is to say, the confrontation between the telluric power of the conflict and

the unparalleled potestas of the animal evoked to neutralize it, we can see that matter, form and

power (the elements in politics) literally configure the image of the modern politics, based in the

great artifice of the Estate.

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Leviathan and Behemot are the two monstrous characters evoked in the book of Job as the two

poles in tension of the modern experience of politics. However, in the cover of the book by Thomas

Hobbes there are no monsters. The whale, the crocodile, the dragon, the fish from the Hebraic-

Christian demonology to what Leviathan refers don’t appear. We cannot find the hippo, the

elephant or the bull, animals that represent the violent power of the disorder: Behemot. The image

that Hobbes uses in his work is that of the dead nature. As I have just mentioned: matter, form and

power. A sovereign refigured holding a sword and a crosier, the two symbols of the secular and

religious power, extends his arms on the territory protected by the law, shaping – that is to say,

ordering – the people, the material base of the Estate. We go on under control. Up there, as an

emblem or an epigraph, we can observe the citation of the book of Job: “non est potestas super

terram quae comparetur ei” (Job, 41-24). At the bottom we can see a giant, the artificial

personification of the Estate, whose body is composed of an undifferentiated mass of countless little

men, and which protects the pacific city, establishing a parallelism between the action of the sword

and the crosier. Under each arm, the temporal and the spiritual, there is a series of five drawings:

under the back, a castle, a crown, then rifles, spears, flags and last, a battle; at the same time, under

the crosier, a temple, a bishop’s miter, the rays of the ex-communion, distinctions, syllogisms and

subtle dilemmas and last, a council. The political struggle, extended both in the civil and in the

ecclesiastical fields – The peace of Westfalia which closed the religious wars and gave the first step

towards the European system of Estates had been established three years before, in 1648. The

Catholics had gathered in Münster and the Protestants in Osnabrück, showing the impossibility of

conciliating the Christian faith with the order foundation – frames every human action, generates

the presence of weapons in both sides of the figure and increases the volcanic tremor in which the

“Stillstand” is imposed, the state of peace and stability, guaranteed by the sovereign.

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According to Carl Schmitt, for Hobbes the modern estate is “a civil war continually prevented by a

great power”. The Leviathan, effective biblical citation, embodies the strongest earthly power in the

shape of an animal whose overwhelming power kills any inferior power. However, it is an animal, a

living being and therefore, mortal. There is no earthly order which exists eternally. Evoked as the

mere power of intimidation to participate in a war of all against all, the Leviathan “mortal God”

must come back to the abyss of nothing, defeated by the civil war and the rebellion that cannot be

repressed any longer. “Alles was entsteht ist werth / daß es zu Grunde geht“, assures the diabolic

negative knowledge of Mephistopheles (Faust I Erster Teil, Studierzimmer).

I was talking about dead nature before, but not only because the death of the Leviathan is implicit in

the precariousness and contingence of its evocation. We must observe with attention the image of

the configuration of the pacific life of the city, guaranteed by the arrival of the sovereign. The

political body, that is to say, the matter made up of Law, is constituted by countless faceless

individuals. They are abstract individuals, who address the firm look of the king. Which is the

represented life (that is, which is presented to itself reflecting in the image of power) through the

mediation of the sovereign? This is the question I consider particularly important. Especially, we

must remember how the evocation of the intimidating power is determined. First of all, the natural

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state, that is, the war of all against all, doesn’t constitute a precise moment in time, nor its internal

segment. It is rather, a constant and silent threat, a “disposition”, the diffidence of all towards all

which defines the constant in an environment. It isn’t about “time”, but the “weather”, states the

author of Leviathan. The disposition to the war is what appears out of the equality of the desire,

category of the politics that Thomas Hobbes thinks from a political point of view. It is at the same

time, of the equality in the desire, that is, the unavailability of yielding to the desire of others, what

predisposes a man to a radical reciprocal enmity: “from this equality in ability ariseth the quality of

hope in the attaining of our Ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which

nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their End (which is

principally their own conservation […]), endeavour to destroy or subdue one another”

When it is cold, there is too much wind or snows, in Italy they talk about a “wolf’s weather”. The

described environment because of the appropriating predisposition of the desire releases packs of

wolves, ones against the others. Even worse, this same environment makes it impossible even the

least cooperation among the groups of predators, whether it is that they are hunting or defending

themselves. Each man embodies the pressing desire of nothing, because he cannot obtain anything

in a time unprotected by the law, which guarantees what is mine and yours. Therefore, each man is

a wolf for the man. This animalization generated out of the equality – and the consequent enmity –

defines a precise configuration of life. There is no industry, no commerce, no culture, no art, that is

to say, no possible social form. There is just a perpetual fear and danger of a violent death as the

possibility for each of us. From there, Hobbes dark words: “the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty,

brutish, and short”.

We can observe how this configuration – the man turned into an antisocial animal, life as a solitary

journey exposed to danger, unhappiness and an “agonizing death”, the relationship with the others

as a rival relationship and ferocious competence – literally mixed the political matter (life, relation,

power) to extract the image of the sovereign as unique and irresistible power capable of ruling the

animal instincts which describe the state of nature. In each word, the XIII chapter from Leviathan

reverses the definitions of Aristotle’s first book on Politics: the man a “political animal” (politikón

zoon) is provided with the word and naturally tends to relate. He finds himself from the moment of

birth in the middle of ordered political relations and shows his socialization power living a happy

life (eu zen), which is, at the same time, unthinkable outside the set of free relations governed by the

polis. Politics is understood as the greatest explicit thing of the human nature and the human nature

as social nature, cooperative, as nexus of relationships founded in friendship, reciprocity, the philia.

Against this anthropology of the relation, there appears the image of the man as a beast, aphasic

animal desire, isolated solitary predator living in an isolated and insecure place, and who casts his

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fearful and icy look (dominus non est in definitione patris, has written Hobbes in De cive in 1641, to

dismiss the political power of the patriarchy and even to take away from the Aristotelian oikos the

possibility of a human social nature), the image of a life constantly remote from death and

continually exposed to the threat of death. Hegel is the first to note that this “configuration” of the

human nature, that is, of life, is somehow pre-oriented by the desired ending. It is about the need for

an irresistible power evoked by the wolves as the only power capable of pacifying the animal spirits

of appropriation and enabling the property as inclusive form, legally assuring the title. In the

shadow of the sovereign, where the right of his sword extends, there will be the possibility of

distinguishing between mine and yours, assigning a property form to the subjects. The wolves

become subjects (subjects reciprocally functional and indifferent one against the other; equal in the

legal university in which they meet) only because they are tied to the apparatus that enacts and

executes the law. Because of this, in the figure that I am describing, the ones who make up the

sovereign’s body are addressing and surrendering to his look: addressing the sovereign in search of

protection; surrendering to the sovereign and the inexorable sentence for the committed crime,

which enables the existence of a general horizon of Law. These faceless subjects trust their own

need of security to their sovereign, who represents the desire of an ordered competence, the pacific

Ersatz of an armed hostility which could impose itself as the natural network (although averted) of

the relationships.

Those subjects are united in a body – they possess a body – only after the great Leviathan has been

called. Therefore, it is not the people who create the sovereign, but the sovereign who creates the

people. Because of this, what is represented here is the scene of dead nature. Not only because the

death (the death as a concrete risk in the state of nature and as a grand leveler: according to Hobbes

we are equal in front of death; death is interpreted as an entropic fall, from which the political

relationship must constantly escape. The death to which the big animal, that is to say, the political

body succumbs at the moment of returning from the conflict and the revolution) weaves the network

in which Hobbes paints the pact artifice, but also because the life which is represented in a passive,

rigid life. The political body isn’t a living body, but the product of a mechanical organization: an

automaton.

The reference to Hobbes can result pretentious or forced, but I consider it particularly important and

I will explain why. In spite of what we have been taught, Hobbes isn’t the “monster of

Malmesbury”, the absolutist theorist who, in order to justify the sovereign’s irresistible power,

assumes a radically pessimistic vision of the man, considering him as ruthless and evil beast. My

first discussion proposal is that Hobbes gives the first step towards the agencement, the logical

concatenation of premises and consequences, who explains the entire modern political theory of the

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Estate, including the democratic and liberal theories. Alexis de Tocqueville, extraordinary author

from the cannon of the western liberalism, will state the thesis of the perfect continuity between the

absolutism and the French Revolution. In Hobbes, the concept of representation developed in the

chapter XVI from Leviathan plays a vital role. But I prefer not to talk about that in this occasion.

However, that concept seems important because it is related to some of the things I am trying to

convey in this meeting. For Hobbes, the sovereign’s power is irresistible and absolute because it

assumes the task of personifying (I am referring to the theatrical term) the unity of the political

body, unity that turns visible only through him. Therefore, the unity is not guaranteed by the empty

crowd of the individuals who associate with each other through the pact (that is to say, after him),

but by the sovereign who creates the people. “It is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the

Represented, which make the Person One” writes Hobbes. There is no society without power. Then,

the possibility to think subjects provided with personality and external rights decreases in front of

the sovereign, who can resist his domain. It is about a decisive step for the constitutional history of

the modern Estate. But I don’t want to concentrate on that now. What interests me is the

retrospective effects that this fiction (from the Latin fingere, related to the semantics of

“configurate”) produces respect the image of life in the natural state. The ones who establish the

pact are the faceless men incorporated to the sovereign’s figure, which they authorize as the

representative of a unity that speaks for everybody and makes the law for everybody. The sovereign

assigns a shape to the amorphous flux of asocial drives which impose chaos and conflict as the

origins of politics. The faceless men are totally abstract subjects. They have no “life”, although their

subtraction to death ( a subtraction that proceeds as an immunization: the sovereign monopolizes

and manages the fear with the intimidation of his sword; this same fear that in the natural state

represented a constant environmental vibration) is what legitimates the evocation of Leviathan. As I

was saying, they have no life. They are individuals in series, disconnected (that is: far away from

the system on links and relationships through which lie in a society is created) made up of (that is

tos say: together beyond the war of all against all) by the mechanic force of Law, the faceless

individuals represented as body of Estate are a rigid and abstract fiction: the “configuration of life”

which the legal form turns operative and visible. They are personae iuris: subjects equaled by the

universal subordination to the imperative of law. They are mere shapes.

It is about a process of abstraction which belongs to other fundamental processes. This formal

device that turns the materiality of life abstract, ordering and joining the trajectories of identification

and submission which cross it and value it legally, is the same device which worked in the

mechanisms of exchange. The soviet jurist Evgeny Pashukanis, together with Lenin, thought about

the fundamental question of the extinction of the Estate after the Bolshevik Revolution, evidencing

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how the formal process of the law links genetically to the process which selects and imposes the

form-commodity. It is about a representation device which depoliticizes the social relations

monopolizing their expressive force. The figure which opens the Leviathan is the figure of the Party

and the Estate: the icon of an unavailable and sovereign power and a life directed to a close

representation which includes in its schemes the addition of its own political factors. The

individuals are abstract and the territory is part of a space submitted to the right issued by the

sovereign. It is about a decision that guarantees the existence of a collective singular, the people, in

which the system of material relationships turns to be abstract among the concrete individuals and

which considers “political” only what concerns and expresses this level of abstraction. The

movement of the picture is translated in purely quantitative terms, following the definition by

Hobbes of freedom as absence of impediment: what the power organizes and freezes, breaking the

perverse link of the war of all against all, is the distance among the individuals which will assign

each of them a private trajectory. However, as Heidegger asserted in the essay of 1938, “Die Zeit

des Weltbildes”, this movement doesn’t define a living being. In the dead nature of the sovereignty,

the legal subject is an abstract point, a trajectory, a quantum in motion projected in the smooth

surface delimited by norms.

The indicators that Kant would define as signs of the “Auszeichnung” of a time tell us that the life

configuration used by Hobbes to inaugurate the machine of the Estate has become totally obsolete.

This has happened not only because that configuration has been abandoned in the dusty pages of

Leviathan, but also because the material processes which characterize that contemporary era

overflow the image. On the one hand, institutions; on the other, subjectivity. Other configurations

are presented as transforming of the nexus among matter, form and power. Although temporary,

those configurations mark a decisive direction which determines our position on another aspect of

the political problem. I could mention some of them: The disarticulation and the successive re-

articulation of the political spaces (it is no longer about the system of international rights generated

by the ius publicum europaeum, but of imperial structures, areas of localizations of the flux of

global investment, global cities, transnational and sub-continental areas of influence…); the

processes of non estate legalization which break the hierarchies of the norms and which order the

relationships at a planetary level (patents right, new lex mercatoria, the semi- constituent role of

international private right); the increasing relevance of non representative powers in the mature

democracies; the break of the relationship among territory, national market and Estate as regards the

absence of constitutionality of social rights; the increasing impotence of the global migrations as

lines of escape and the deterritorialization of subjectivity… However, what is important for us now

is not the list of configurations. In this meeting, I’m not interested in describing the phenomenology

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of a progressive marginalization of the Estate, or the fall of the agencement among territory,

citizenship, representation and sovereignty, but to center myself on the focalized transition in the

concept of life, concept that describes and imposes it.

After the publication of the Courses in the Collège de France by Michel Foucault, the term

“biopolitic” was globally spread. Between 1976 and 1979, Foucault uses this concept with different

objectives. Considering his appreciation for the philosophical work as “ontology of the present”, he

particularly uses it in order to find a conceptual reference to the establishment of neoliberal policies:

the ones which originate the restructuring of the global policy, whose phenomenology I have

already mentioned. The sovereign “thanapolitics”, the dead nature of Hobbes, gathers the system of

relations among abstract subjects under the sovereign sword, symbol of the intimidating power of

the law on a territory. On the other hand, the “biopolitics” represents a device which politically

values a function of government, a “biopower” related to the “existent” relations, with processes

which are ordered by the sovereignty and which evolve autonomously, following trajectories which

result opaque for the panoptic view of the sovereign by Hobbes.

It is about what Foucault calls process of “governmentality” of the political. That process forces to

re-draw the genealogy at the right side of Hobbes, that is to say, the religious side. The sovereign

holds the sword as the “scepter of happening” (to take the citation of Walter Benjamin), that is to

say: the sovereign pre-figures the possible conditions of the political order and anticipates it, while

the function of government is presented after that, accompanying what must be governed, and

determining as a mobile and adaptive function, or, rather, as an sacrificial function: it mustn’t stop,

limit or compress, but stimulate the growth of the processes it is attached to. From there, we can

describe its main characteristics: the function of government – the process which guides the

governmentality of power removing it from Hobbes’ fiction – is the contingent form of regulation;

It is considered to be poor because, as we can see in the sailing semantics of gubernare (the term

derives from the Sanskrit kubara, the helm and, in most of the European languages, it is linked to

the metaphorical field of sailing, determining from Plato to Cicero and to more recent times, the

image of the gubernatio navis reipublicae…), although it expresses a function of orientation and

dominance, it is faced with the risk of insubordination or the wreck; it can’t be considered

independent from the amount of environmental factors in which its action is circumscribed and

delimited. Far from expressing an absolute and implicit power in the fundamental characteristics of

sovereignty, the government exercises a function which impacts on every administrative process of

the contemporary period. In those processes the governance techniques replace the democratic

participation. The government is also inserted in those foreign relations which are independent from

it and which materially resist normalization. Let’s think for example in the possibility of describing

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the flow of exchanges in the global economy. According to Foucault, the genealogy of the function

of the government is strictly linked to the genealogy of the economic aspect and, in particular, to the

establishment, development and implementation of the market. On the one hand, we talk about

biopolitics in relation to the technologies of the Welfare State of the 20th Century, to the assistance

tasks and the welfare which the Estate, in Europe and in the United States guarantees to its own

citizens. Those citizens are no longer considered simple, legal and private subjects, gathered

collectively under a political representation in charge of administrating the law. They recognize

themselves as part of the existing population, whose relationships are in constant evolution (elder

people, children, widows, mothers, unemployed, etc.) It is about a re-classification which demands

the political valuing of other pieces of knowledge and their acquisition in the field of the social

projects (demography, statistics, medical knowledge and care, etc.) On the other hand, when we talk

about biopolitics, we do it in reference to a function of government which cannot exorcise the risk

phenomena only because it regulatory action exists in an environment which expresses a resisting

dynamics. The politician is not the minister, said Plato in the Myth of the Politician. However, in

the genealogy of the biopolitics of the 20th Century, Foucault refers to the minister, inserting in the

Christian oikonomia the model of an assistance policy which is delayed in its government function

and exposed to the variables (ontologically uncontrollable) that the human freedom, essential

component of the salvation history and matrix of the disorder and sin, includes in the providential

picture of God. In the Trinity Theology, God not only reigns, but governs what has been created

considering the freedom an ontological quality in the service of the maintenance of order.

We are talking about freedom. And I think this is the core of Foucault’s ideas. And it is also the

reason why his Courses of biopolitics are so interesting in relation to the contemporary

transformations of power. Michel Foucault said that the power is not an object. And he said this

against those who had read his books as contributions to the criticism of power. The power is an

instance of circulation which orders binary relations in the social field and is interpreted as the

Wittgenstein’s linguistic games: the power, like the language, exists and we cannot deny it,

Foucault claimed. However, its existence is proved by that which makes it visible, as a “chemical

catalyst”. According to Foucault, the existence of power is proved by that which resists to it. Which

is the aim of the power transformations which de-territorialize and make it flexible, which use the

law as a semi-constituent machine out of the traditional channels representative of the democracy

and tend to re-configure it in an administrative sense? Which is the objective of the restructuring

processes of the global governance which start in the years when Foucault began to trace in a

“lurking” way (to use a term by Gilles Deleuze) the genealogy of neoliberalism? The freedom

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moves away from the classical ways of representation and resists the sovereign devices, because it

recognizes its limits and its compatibility with the commodities and the consumption. It is about a

freedom that no longer possesses the abstract and formal profile of the Hobbes’ device of

sovereignty. It is a freedom that, as an engine of political subjectivation set in motion in the 1960s

and 1970s, con-figures other needs and desires, trying to establish other lifestyles. The new power

technologies are organized in view of the appropriation of a freedom which no longer refers to the

Estate as an expressive power, but constantly surplus and centrifugal. According to Foucault, the

icon of the period of governance in not the citizen who addresses his own desire for security and

order to the sovereign, but the “perpetual dissident” who pretends to be the least possibly governed.

He wants to be free, to reach a freedom which eliminates the border between the public and the

private, in which the circuit of classical political obligation is organized and that sets inside the

sphere of the economic or moral everything that doesn’t deserve a political treatment.

Many people criticized Foucault for this way of reading the political transformations of the 1970s:

the years of neoliberal revolution of Thatcher and Reagan; the glorious years of the Chicago School

which still represents the mainstream in the global economic theory. It is as if he hadn’t been

capable of thinking about a politics that didn’t adhere to a hypothesis of simple internal

problematization of liberalism. It is as if he limits himself to move away from the hypotheses of

radical transformation related to the idea of a revolutionary counter-power. Already in his Course in

1976, Michel Foucault seemed to think that from a theoretical point of view it was necessary to

“behead the King”, leaving aside the lexicon and the sovereignty practices to escape definitely from

the iron cage of the modern categories of the Political. However, I believe that Foucault has another

idea. Unlike others who were trying to do it following Debord’s situationism or Frankfurt critical

theory (perspective which according to him were old fashioned), I think that Foucault wanted to

value the material criticism of the politics exposed by the social movements of the 60s and 70s: the

civil rights’ movement, the movement against Vietnam War in the USA, the antagonist Italian and

French movements after 1968 or the dissidence in the Eastern countries. What Foucault revealed

from those experiences was an idea and a practice of freedom that, far from being articulated with

the categories of representation and the direction towards the Estate as a natural place for political

recognition, they consciously expressed a rejection of those same categories and, more generally, of

the institutions as political fields. They expressed a radically militant tendency – Deleuze would

have said that they created authentic creepage – and a radical tendency to the political subjectivation

around the no indictable claims through the filter of representation. To reorganize the power devices

as functions of government was the only way to keep those processes and turn democracy into

something likely to be governed. This is my second proposal for this debate.

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However, the centre of the debate today is life. What I have just described could seem useless or

accessory, but I don’t think so. What I find interesting of Foucault’s thought - even more than the

way in which he defined the concepts of “biopower” and “biopolitics”, changing the idea according

to which politics is the “thanapolitics” of sovereignty together with its imaginative and figurative

series of subjectivity – is the relation between the freedom and the devices which try to make it

likely to be governed, present in his reasoning. One of the main aspects of the link that I was trying

to illustrate before takes one of the theoretical ideas of the Italian Marxism: the relationship among

struggles, crisis and development. The governmental reorganization of the devices of power is

related to the “life”. And not only – although it is about a decisive investigation line for the

contemporary critical thought – for the neoliberal “enclosures” through which the establishment of

proprietary codes in the communal goods and goes towards the appropriation and privatization of

the genome or the DNA, but for the need of promoting the development beyond the cycle of

struggles which, in the 60s and 70s, had definitely set in crisis the idea of a man or a woman who

can go by in closed production chains among the walls of a factory. Previously, I was talking about

freedom understood as an exodus or escape. A certain freedom which expresses itself as a savage

rejection of work and as a collective evasion of the “perpetual chain of factory” to which previous

generations have been condemned. The transition between the political and productive structure of

Fordism (verticality of power in the production chain, Union representation for the negotiations

with the management of the enterprise, reforms and salaries, work held for life, as the first social

right) and what has been called as Postfordism (systems of spread protection, uptaking of the

product of the social productive cooperation, cancellation of the distinction between time for life

and time for work, centrality of the cognitive work, economy of indebtedness) is pushed by the need

of considering the acquired freedom in the cycle of struggles during the 60s and 70s as autonomy

and desire of mobility. The process of valuing of freedom constitutes the basis of the social process:

the individuals are free to cooperate (let’s think about the mechanisms of collective development of

software or the elaboration of new social codes and new musical tendencies) and what they

produce, the fruit of their freedom of cooperation is valued. To conclude, this is the “life

configuration” which interests me.

In Hobbes, the individuals who constitute the figure of the sovereign are collectively recomposed

around the desire for security which personifies the collectivity. They become a people only

because a sovereign – that is to say, an infinite fear – unites them. The others are individuals

dedicated to their own privacy. It is about a personae iuris whose freedom has been channeled out

by laws which give them rights because they organize their division and their reciprocal non

interference. It is about subjects which possess a unity only thanks to who represents it. What are

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the cooperative networks of the general intellect of the cognitive capitalism, the way of

accumulation in which production and control of knowledge become the main objective of the

valuing of the capital? How are the necessary social times added for the constitution of knowledge

to the processes of organization of production, which tend to cross more borders than the

enterprises? How are those vital, autonomous and irreducible relationships which do not refer to the

projection of their management organized within the enterprises?

I can realize that those questions are exposed to a double objection. The first: These forms of

valuing do not replace the systems of the Fordist factory. Or they do not do it for everyone, for sure.

It is obviously like this. However, what interests me is the sharp point of the tendency which incites

the command reorganization. The fact that the control has to do with the forced indebtedness is

something that belongs to this kind of re-appropriation of management of masses and the problem

of their control. The second: It is true that in some productive sectors the desire for autonomy and

freedom of the subjects imposed the emergence of the factory society, but it also true that this same

desire produced a contrary effect: a business day which expresses the difference between time for

life and time for work (a trivial example: we work while we travel by train, constantly connected, at

weekends, at night; the person who chats with his friend on facebook is also working leaving freely

the traces of his preferences, choices, options which others will value by selling this “private” space

to the marketing enterprises; we work in the self-help forums which many telephone companies use

to replace the clients’ assistance…) the erosion of the times and spaces stolen from the market, an

exponential increase of the control through the figures of the general casualization of the society, of

the universalization of the insecurity with the deconstruction of the residual Welfare. So, as in all

social processes, I believe that here we don’t propose an alternative, but an ambivalence. An

ambivalence which draws the new battlefield between freedom and power.

There are then, two possible life configurations. On the one hand, that “governed” or in which the

new government technologies try to get inserted. Through the school and the university reforms

around the world today, from Europe to Latin America, we assist to the production of profiles of

self-venture forced in the processes of deconstruction of the residual devices of the social security

(in the neoliberal political theory there are people who think in the migrant worker as an

entrepreneur who bets on his future drawing “freely” his own migratory project, and it is very easy

to remember that the things are not exactly like that…) There are forms of control on the

indebtedness of the individuals which speeds up the processes of the global economy and force

them to work (a disciplinary, moral project whose genealogy could be understood by reading the

Second dissertation from the Genealogy of Morals by Nietzche). There are systems of symbols

oriented to the consumption to relate the freedom to a controlled and functional exercise for the

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economic growth. On the other hand, the rejection to the classical politics, capable of expressing

cooperative and helpful forms of life, capable of holding the autonomous social processes and the

de-constituent uses of freedom as regards the restricted order of the private law and formal legality.

Many battles for the freedom of the network claim this dimension (free downloading, file sharing,

creative commons) like many democratic practices against the diktat of the dictatorship of the

knowledge expertise of the global governance (IMF, ECB, WTO).

I think that this is the space the set of alternatives that we are discussing here. Of course, the

subjectivation processes which are produced under the framework of the mentioned transition – the

transition between the Estate and governance, between a sovereign European past and a global

future, between formal and legal abstract notions of individuality and singularity creators of needs

and desires which weren’t invested in representative political forms, but in free cooperative projects

– will not be proved on set back fields. The fundamentalisms and cultural beliefs, although

problematic, are simple defense symptoms in front of the irresistible tendencies which uproot

certainties and traditional lifestyles. What awaits us, if we want to assume the future challenge and

the responsibility of the freedom we embody, is to invent lifestyles capable of forcing the iron cage

which during centuries has enclosed the concept of politics, giving it to the monopoly of the Estate.

Only then we won’t be alone. We won’t be faceless atoms mechanically united by the fear of a

sovereign, without whom we would be lost. Only then will we be capable again of inventing a

future.

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