CC BY
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Jeffrey T. Nealon
64
Penn State University, USA ORCID: 0000-0001-9794-6924
Biopolitics, Marxism and Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century
doi: 10.22394/2074-0492-2021-1-64-83 Abstract:
This essay seeks to supplement Thomas Piketty's work in "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" by exploring connections between Piketty and Antonio Negri's post-Marxist work. Piketty tries to excise consideration of so called "human capital" from his analysis, whereas Negri puts such human, creative or what he calls "biopolitical" considerations front and center in his analysis of contemporary capitalism, opening up fresh points of intervention that can help us to understand where capitalism is headed in the future. As the nature of capital continues to mutate today, so must our responses to it. In Negri's biopolitical world, performative subjectivity or human capital finds its charge not through making products and commodities, but in the ongoing project of making ourselves. So aesthetics and the concerns of the humanities are not merely epiphenomenal, reflective, representational, or superstructural discourses (as Piketty understands them); but the arts and humanities — the powers of creative everyday subjectivity— remain a crucial linchpin for understanding the workings of (and against) capital in the twenty-first century.
Keywords: human capital, contemporary capitalism, Thomas Piketty, Antonio Negri, biopolitics
"Throughout this book, when I speak of 'capital,' without further qualification, I always exclude what economists often call (unfortunately, to my mind) 'human capital,' which consists of an individual's labor power, skills, training and
abilities."
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
"The philosophers of rue d'Ulm at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in the 1950s and 1960s ... faced the problem
Jeffrey T. Nealon — Edwin Erie Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy, Penn State University, USA. Research interests: Marxism, biopolitics, Foucault, theory and cultural studies, contemporary literature. E-mail: jxn8@psu.edu Джеффри Т. Нилон — профессор английского языка и философии Университет штата Пенсильвания, США. Научные интересы: марксизм, биополитика, Фуко, cultural studies, современная литература. E-mail: jxn8@psu.edu
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of reproduction by tracing the relations of production back to a series of anthropological equivalents, mainly the claim that everything, in society, is productive." Antonio Negri, "To the Origins of Biopolitics"
There's a lot for humanities scholars to like about Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. First of all, Piketty actually takes Karl Marx seriously, which is close to treason for most mainstream thinkers commenting on capitalism and its discontents today, inside or outside the academy. Precious few economists would be caught dead furthering the notion that "the very high level of private wealth that has been attained since the 1980s and 1990s in the wealthy countries of Europe and in Japan ... directly reflects the Marxian logic" [Piketty 2014: 10-11]1 about class inequity, accumulation and finance capital that was already laid out for us in the C19.
In telescopic shorthand, Piketty's primary formula for understanding capitalism's history is quite simple: capitalism is an economic regime that, absent external intervention by a global war or other large-scale disaster, is defined by the formula r > g (where the return on capital investment "r" is greater than the rate of increase in the output of goods and incomes "g"). As he explains, "When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the C19 and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unstable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based" (CT 1). In short, Piketty shows that capitalism's baseline formula "r > g implies that wealth accumulated in the past [and invested] grows more rapidly than output and wages" (CT 571), suggesting in turn that capitalism is less a system characterized by egalitarian, class-mobile possibility (as it may have seemed in capitalism's golden era after World War II in the West), than it is a system that inevitably fosters the increasing power and influence of entrenched old money (as capitalism had functioned for the better part of its history, from the early modern period until the mid-C20). In short, left to its own market devices, Piketty argues that capitalism in the C21 will look more like it did in the C19 than the C20, and as such capitalism going forward will favor political oligarchy rather than the liberal democracy we tend to associate with mid-C20 Euro-American nation-states (a notion of meritocratic consumption capitalism that ideological pundits have, at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall, tended to associate with "freedom" itself).
1 Page references hereinafter cited in the text with the abbreviation CT.
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As Piketty reminds us, without really unpacking the connection, this state of affairs (where big capital inexorably accumulates more capital, with scant "trickle down") was already foreshadowed for us in Marx's analysis of credit and finance in Capital — where in his own formulaic gambit, Marx explains how capital investment in commodity production (M-C-M') differs from financial investment, which requires no commodity (C) to be produced in order for invested capital (M) to be transformed into profit (M'). As Marx famously puts it, finance capital's formula is M-M' (invested capital M directly begets profit M', without the intervention of working-class labor power required to manufacture a commodity C). As such, finance-credit capital largely turns its back on Piketty's "g" or the potential for higher rates of growth in the wider economy, and thereby turns away from the concomitant possibilities for income gains by the working class. In short, one could translate Piketty's r > g formula for capitalism into Marxist terms like this: M-M' > M-C-M'. Or in a kind of commonsense shorthand, both Marx and Piketty show us that, when it comes to rates of return, Wall Street > Air Conditioner Factory.
However, Piketty's sideways nods to Marx are hardly the only things 66 to like about this surprising book that comes squarely from within the dismal science of Economics. For any academic who's ever been on a committee with an arrogant, loudmouth supply-sider, Piketty's takedowns of the discipline are themselves worth the price of admission. He speaks of economists on both sides of the Atlantic in terms of "their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything" (CT 29). His specific smackdown of North American economists is worth quoting at length:
To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics [in the United States] has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences. Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in. (CT 29)
Despite such entertaining broadsides against many economists' "highly ideological" conservative pandering (economists consistently shill for the "scientific" dogma of necessary tax cuts for the wealthy and the inherent evil of government intrusion on the free market), Piketty clearly continues to consider a numbers-based social science thinking as the only brand of thought that can offer us a proper handle on describing the workings of capital in the past and into the C21. Which is at least
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partially to say that in both the form and content of Piketty's analysis, any Humanities contributions to the project of understanding capitalism are left largely confined to the aesthetic sphere, narrowly understood as a kind of supplement to social science thinking — specifically through offering representative examples of the existential or personal toll of large-scale changes in economic rationality. For example, Piketty notes the ways in which Balzac's or Jane Austen's novels can show us the fine grains of class stratification in the C19.
In short, while Piketty offers us a clear critique of the worst tendencies in the social sciences, his faith for understanding and responding to the dangers and possibilities of capital in the C21 remains rooted in his calls for a more robust application of those very social science methodologies (bigger data sets, clearer math, less dogma concerning the role of government, fewer simplistic translations of numbers to policies)1. This is certainly both understandable and highly productive, and I realize that I risk mimicking the know-it-all economist's bluster if I simply feign indignant surprise that there's a lack of philosophical or aesthetic consideration in a book on economics (just as an economist could object that there are no charts, graphs and mathematical formulae in Derri-da's work, and thereby he can't be saying anything worthwhile). To be 67 clear, my desire in writing this essay is not to chide Piketty for being an economist (rather than a philosopher or cultural critic), but rather to ask whether some conceptual tools from recent philosophical and cultural theory might enhance, supplement, or even extend his fine-grained analysis of the numbers and their history.
Specifically, my question or thought experiment in this essay is simple: what can an examination of biopolitics (a genealogical and conceptual apparatus born in Foucault's work, and finds its most robust
1 This, though, is a faith in social science that I fear is misplaced — for all the pseudo-scientific, ideological mystification that Piketty outlines concerning his home discipline of Economics, and more. For example, in social science fields like Psychology, a recent replication study has shown that over 60% of the published research in the field's most highly respected journals is, to put it bluntly if unkindly, just plain bullshit [https://www.nature.com/news/ over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-reproducibility-test-1.18248]. If 61% seems a high rate of shenanigans, note the comment in that article by a Stanford epidemiologist who suggests that if one took into account all work published in Psychology journals, not just the top-tier ones used in this study, "the true replication-failure rate could exceed 80%." Though I'm pretty sure you could easily replicate published social-science research which shows that studying Economics as a college major makes you a worse person: self-interested, callous, deceitful, uncaring about the needs of others — the core principles of mainstream economic thinking. See http://www.businessinsider.com/ psychology-of-studying-economics-2013-10
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contemporary formulations in the neo-Marxist corners of Humanities disciplines like Philosophy and Literary-Cultural Studies) add to Piketty's big data social science analysis, or how can a consideration of bi-opolitics cut across his work in some ways that would offer a potentially enriching Humanities foothold within the terms of his work? I'm simply suggesting here that, when it comes to understanding the workings of capital in the C21, methods and concepts born in the Humanities can offer quite a bit to the economic analyses performed by Piketty.
To telegraph the argument, I'd begin by noting that one of the highly provocative upshots of Piketty's work, translated into a Marxian idiom, is that Capital in the Twenty-First Century gives us the numbers and the longue-durée analysis to back up the genealogical and social claims about class and worker discontent that autonomist Marxists have been making for decades: namely, that the Fordist compromise of the middle of the C20 in the overdeveloped world was a blip in the development of capitalism, a rare and forced capitulation of the capitalist class to the demands of the workers. As Piketty writes, "In the twentieth century, it took two world wars to wipe away the past and significantly reduce the return on capital, thereby creating the illusion that the fundamental 68 structural contradiction of capitalism (r > g) had been overcome" (CT 572). In short, the so-called golden age of capitalism in the C20 was a hiccup in the history of capitalism, a post-war period of widespread economic growth that constituted not an evolution of capitalism into a more democratic and worker-friendly form, but a brief interregnum or respite from the long-term accumulative rules of capitalism. And Piketty is likewise clear that capitalism's un-egalitarian r > g nature is due not to market manipulations or imposed externalities of any kind. As he insists, "It is important to note that the fundamental r > g inequality, the main force of divergence in my theory, has nothing to do with any market imperfection. Quite the contrary: the more perfect the capital market (in the economist's sense), the more likely r is to be greater than g" (CT 27).
Along a parallel track to Piketty's analysis, Marxists have long argued that the post-World-War II period in Europe and the United States signaled not the inevitable dawn of a new and more equal distribution of wealth, offering average workers a living wage and retirement stipend in return for their work in saving Western capitalism from the scourge of Fascism in Europe. Rather, the Fordist compromise was a short-lived truce with the working class, a pact that was destined to be rolled back by global neoliberalism once Europe had been rebuilt and the memories of those world wars had waned (by the 1970s, to be exact). Marco Revelli puts it starkly: through the neoliberal revolution of the late C20, "Capital sought to take back — with interest, we could say — what had been won by labor, in terms of income and rights, during the previous cycle
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of industry and conflict, in the 'social twentieth century." [Revelli 2019: 200-201]1.
As Antonio Negri narrates that history, the golden years of unions and workers' rights led to a centrality of the working class and its labor power in re-transforming Europe from rubble to prosperity, but the capitalist class couldn't abide that acknowledgment of workers' centrality for too long. Negri writes that by the 1970s, "to respond to the threat of workers' centrality, capital decided to bring down the centrality of industry and abandon, or revolutionize, the industrial society that had been both the reason for and the means of its own birth and development. This it did to the extent that it turned itself from industrial into financial capital. .... What was left of direct production started being "put out" of the factories, processes of "outsourcing" proliferated, and gradually and eventually, the company became computerized and placed under the control of financial capital. Enter post-Fordism." [Negri 2016: 48-64]2
As Negri narrates it, what Piketty calls capitalism's natural tendency to "undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based" was staved off for some part of the C20 only through a forced Fordist compromise between labor power and capital (a détente made necessary by the devastations of World War II). And for Negri the rem- 69 nants of that labor power, in a post-Fordist world, are characterized less by what Foucault calls the "disciplinary" power of the factory (and the Marxist labor theory of value), and more inexorably a kind of "biopower" spread across the surface of everyday life in the late C20 and early C21. (Much more on this below.)
It is, interestingly enough, precisely this biopolitical form of capital — what economists call "human capital" — that Piketty strictly excludes from consideration in his analysis. Any book on Capital in the Twenty-First Century begs a simple question about the definition of Piket-ty's terms, which he takes up like this:
But what is capital? .... First, throughout this book, when I speak of 'capital,' without further qualification, I always exclude what economists often call (unfortunately, to my mind) 'human capital,' which consists of an individual's labor power, skills, training and abilities. In this book, capital is defined as the sum total of nonhuman assets that can be owned or exchanged on some market. (CT 46)
While Piketty acknowledges that "There is also the idea, widespread among economists, that modern economic growth depends largely on the rise of 'human capital'" (CT 42), he rejects that case entirely, choosing instead to bracket any consideration of human capital in his analysis of
1 Hereafter cited in the text as NP.
2 Page references hereinafter cited in the text with the abbreviation OB.
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what capital really is or how it really works. Piketty goes on to enumerate all the things that count as capital for him: "To be clear, although my concept of capital excludes human capital (which cannot be exchanged on any market in nonslave societies), it is not limited to 'physical' capital (land, buildings, infrastructure, and other material goods). I include 'immaterial' capital such as patents and other intellectual property.... More broadly, many forms of immaterial capital are taken into account by way of the stock market capitalization of corporations. For instance, the stock market value of a company often depends on its reputations and trademarks" (CT 49); and at the end of the day, such immaterial or bi-opolitical notions of capitalizable innovation, brand loyalty, reputation and confidence are "reflected in the price of the common stock" (CT 49) and thereby obliquely measurable as "real" capital. But human capital itself remains unmeasurable for Piketty — precisely what attracts the attention of someone like Negri.
However "clean" this exclusion of human or biopolitical capital may prove to be methodologically (it's notoriously difficult to place a concrete price or value on interests, skills and capacities, especially of individuals), when Piketty defines capital tout court in this way (as held, priced 70 and tradable assets), he virtually guarantees the truth of his thesis — essentially, that the C20 rise in factory-worker Fordism (the building boom made necessary by the ravages of the two world wars in Europe and the Pacific) contradicted the economic energies of the late robber-baron era in the C19, where the greatest returns were not to be found in the production of goods or services, but in the returns on investment itself. And going forward, if you cut human capital out of the picture (even an old-fashioned labor theory of value version of human capital—where the worker's only asset is the labor power she can rent to the capitalist), then in the future there seems no real hope for capital to entertain the interests or well-being of the everyday person, other than through the faux-benevolent golden-shower trickle-down generosity of the corporation, the wealthy investor, or the government. None of these deep-pocketed entities will, I expect, be forthcoming in sharing their assets with the vast majority whose economic lives will stagnate under the r > g dictates of capitalism that Piketty presages as coming for us all in the C21.
Hence my interest in looking at what a consideration of human capital or biopower could add to Piketty's analysis. Following the Derridean training of my youth, it seems to me axiomatic that it's worth looking at those concepts or practices that a given theory excludes or remains unwilling to deal with — what an analysis sees as a marginal, uninteresting, or parasitic case is oftentimes the skeleton key to understanding the strengths and weaknesses of that theory. If nothing else it would seem to me that one needs, in classic deconstructive fashion, to account for the excluded cases if one wants a robust recent history of economic
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activity in the West. In any case, the rise in C20 human capital (everything from the cultural capital made more widely available by the GI Bill to the endless remaking of subjectivity that has become the home terrain of the C21 Culture Industries) would have to be taken into account somehow in Piketty's diagnosis — other than suggesting, as true as it is, that one end of the human capital spectrum (the wealthy, investing top of the capitalist food chain) that has innovated the cellphone, the GPS or robotic technologies has all but ravaged the human capital at the bottom (excising or outsourcing the jobs of the telephone operator, the cab driver or the assembly line worker).
In short, I'm going to want to argue there that the biopower of human capital today saturates not only or even primarily the supply side of the economic situation, but the demand side — through the attention economy necessitated by the rise of cognitive capitalism. Most commentators who want to discuss human capital tend to understand it in terms of the service economy (health care, repair services, information technology), and suggest that it's in the so-called "affective" industries that human capital became central (and measurable economically). And while the service economy is hardly disappearing, I think we only need to look at what robotics did to service jobs like factory worker, bank 71 teller, and travel agent, or what automation is about to do to those employed as truck and taxi drivers (as well as Amazon package handlers), and you can see that the service economy on the production side is not necessarily where the human capital gains or transformative powers are to be found in the near future. In the end, this double-edged sword of biopolitics and/as human capital may offer a bit more hope on the "workers" side of the class struggle, as we're all workers now, involved in the work of performatively sculpting and re-sculpting our identities, and indeed our lives.1
II. Adding Biopolitics to the Mix
The C20 was an era that, to borrow some terminology from Michel Foucault, saw a decisive shift in the individual's relation to the social whole, a shift that Foucault diagnoses as the movement from a society of "discipline" to one of "biopower," a distinction that we can initially translate like this: discipline functions within and depends on a Fordist understanding of factory society (where the individual is understood as a cog within the larger social machine, and thereby has a series of disci-
1 Though they mention Foucault and Negri each only once, this shift within capitalism is also something like the extended thesis of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in their The New Spirit of Capitalism [Boltanski, Chiapello 2018].
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plinary roles to fulfill — daughter, student, doctor, patient, tinker, tailor, soldier, spy). Contrast that with the laissez faire, neoliberal consumer society in which we presently live (where everyone's primary job is to become him- or herself, hopefully without external intrusion by the government), and you can see the disciplinary idea of fitting in within a larger social whole (or merely working on the assembly line of the social, for the greater good of all) is now looked upon as dangerous, totalitarian even. In a world where everything is filtered through an individual's life or lifestyle (rather than through larger disciplinary questions about configuring an optimal social cohesion), biopower has become the dominant logic: everything in a society of biopower gets filtered through the lens of the individual subject.
In Foucault's career, there is a well-known shift between his work on disciplinary institutions and power (culminating in 1975's Discipline and Punish, an exhaustive history of the prison as the central institution of disciplinary power), and his late work on sexuality, wherein he introduces a mutation in modes of modern power: according to Foucault, a new form called biopower (with its primary operating system of sexuality) is born in C19 Europe, and gradually becomes dominant in the C20.
72 Just to begin with the most obvious opening example of this mutation from discipline to biopower, think of the shifts in Western economic production over the past 100 years or so — from a factory economy of discipline (everyone trained to master his or her segment of the mass-production process), to the supposedly creative capitalism of our day, which is all about individual innovation and niche markets (lifestyles, innovation, creativity and identity). Today, the dominant mode of economic production entails producing any given person's life and lifestyle, not mass-producing identical objects; in fact, niche-market consumption is oftentimes ideally refined to a market of one: "Welcome to amazon.com, Jeffrey. We have some suggestions for you." Lifestyle purchasing is the primary economic driver in a neoliberal finance economy, and that form of hyper-consumption is dependent on constant biopolitical innovation. (This for example explains why China is relocating masses of its population, around 250 million people, from the rural countryside into pre-fab cities: to unleash the power of the Chinese consumer.)1
In his lecture courses touching on the concept of biopower (Society Must Be Defended and The Birth of Biopolitics), Foucault discusses the ways in which an emergent biopower might differ from the disciplinary mode of power (which aims at modifying individual behaviors and is always mediated through institutions). As Foucault explains in his 1975-76 lec-
1 Read about it here: www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/asia/chinas-great-uprooting-moving-250-million-into-cities.html
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ture course Society Must Be Defended, biopower comprises a new technology of power, but this time it is not disciplinary. This technology of power does not exclude the former, does not exclude disciplinary technology, but it does dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some extent, and above all, use it by sort of infiltrating it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques. This new technique does not simply do away with the disciplinary technique, because it exists at a different level, on a different scale, and because it has a different bearing area, and makes use of very different instruments. Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies, the new non-disciplinary power is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being [Foucault 2003: 242].
As Foucault insists, this new form of biopolitical power doesn't simply replace discipline, but extends and intensifies the reach and scope of power's effects by freeing them from the disciplinary focus on "manas-body" through the "exercise" of training carried out within various institutions.
Biopower, one might say, radically expands the scale of power's sway: by moving beyond discipline's "retail" emphasis on training individual bodies at linked institutional sites (family, school, church, army, factory, hospital), biopower enables an additional kind of "wholesale" saturation 73 of power effects, saturating these effects throughout the entire social field. What Foucault calls this "different scale" and much larger "bearing area" for the practices of power make it possible for biopower to produce more continuous effects, because one's whole life (one's identity, sexuality, diet, health) is saturated by power's effects, rather than power relying upon particular training functions carried out in the discontinuous domain of X or Y institution (dealing with health in the clinic, diet at the supermarket and the farm, sexuality in the family and at the nightclub, and so on). Hence biopower works primarily to extend and intensify the reach of power's effects: not everyone has a shared disciplinary or institutional identity (as a soldier, mother, nurse, student, or politician); but everyone does have an investment in biopolitical categories like sexuality, health, or quality of life — our own, as well as our community's.
Discipline forged an enabling link between subjective aptitude and docility: as Foucault concisely puts it in Discipline and Punish, the disciplinary body becomes "more obedient as it becomes more useful." [Foucault 1979: 138] For its part, biopower forges an analogous enabling link, but this time between the individual's life and the workings of the so-cius: one might say we become more "obedient" to neoliberal, biopolitical imperatives the more we become ourselves, insofar as the only thing that we as biopolitical subjects have in common is that we're all individuals, charged with the task of creating and maintaining our lives. And that biopower-saturated task is performed not solely at scattered institutional sites (as it was for discipline), but virtually everywhere, all
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the time, across the entirety of your life. That being the case, the major difference between discipline and biopower is that in a biopolitical society, power no longer primarily has what we might call a "mediated" relation that is aimed at confining or rigidly defining individuals (which is to say, power is not primarily doled out through institutional training the as much as it is a question of direct access to one's life or lifestyle). Foucault describes the biopolitical society as a world "in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, ... in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjection of individuals." [Foucault 2010: 259-260] The bearing area of disciplinary power is what you can do, and it's primarily invested in training at a series of institutional sites. Through a kind of intensification of discipline, the bearing area of biopower has morphed into your entire life, and thereby biopower's relation to any given individual tends to be less mediated by institutional factors, and instead constitutes a more "environmental," diffuse, engulfing — one might even call it "ambient" — form of power.
Which brings us back to Negri's specifically economic, Marxist ver-74 sion of this biopolitics story, the story of post-Fordist capital that was outsourced from factories in response to worker activism and power in the so-called first world. Recall that for Negri, this shift occurs precisely because of the fact that such a biopolitcal lifestyle capitalism (which emerged out of Fordist credit regimes and the increasing necessity of a skilled service workforce) offered too much power to the worker, or the ordinary person, and thereby necessitated the move from a disciplinary capitalism of factory production to a biopolitical capitalism of everyday consumption. As Negri writes, "Here the biopolitical entered the scene: biopolitical as life put to work, and therefore as politics mobilized to organize the conditions and control of the social exploitation of all realms of life. As we said in Marxian terms, capital 'subsumed' the whole of society" (OB 51). In the biopolitical world of our era, your life is your job and vice versa — no longer can you clock out at the factory and get at least some distance from your job before you return the next day. When your primary job is constantly creating and updating your subjectivity (at work as well as at home), life has been decisively put to work. As Negri writes, once there's a complete biopolitical subsump-tion of the socius,
There is no longer a realm "outside" production. Whether it critiqued or denied the centrality of workers' labor, [this] was not an anti-Marxist stance; quite the contrary, because it emphasized the importance of labor understood as a social activity.. Production and reproduction are one, a whole. A refusal, contra the tradition of orthodox Marxism, of any possibility of mediation that is external to the movements, of any
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recourse to a dualist model, including the claim to the truth of the Party, thus became possible. (OB 52-3)
For Negri, the total subsumption of everyday life by capital is less a lamentable cage that imprisons the worker and negates the importance of her work, than it is a possibility for the living power of labor (here, re-understood ultimately as the power of subjectivity to remake itself) to be finally brought front and center, rather than merely disappearing into the mediations of factory labor (the finished product of the commodity, as it does in the labor theory of value) or the mediations of the Communist Party (as "representing" the interests of the working class).
As Negri insists, "If there is no 'outside' of production, and knowledge, ideology, and the concept are found in the process of reproduction, then the whole of powers is organized autonomously, or rather structurally" (OB 53); and subsequently, the new question becomes, "how to reestablish subjectivity and situate it within a new framework that was solidly and fully immanent? To this challenge rose Foucault's thought, which confronted it [the problem of reestablishing subjectivity] by turning the structuralist perspective into a biopolitical one"(OB 53). In short, for Negri, the whole of life becomes saturated with the face-off between the "bi- 75 opolitical" everyday actions of everyone, and the top-down "biopower" deployed by the parasitic, ideological state and corporate apparatuses of capture that are built upon those everyday creative actions (everything from the race-baiting policing tactics of the nation-state — See something, say something! — to the culture industries of celebrity and the ubiquity of advertising, which depend completely upon harvesting creative attention from subjects).
In short, the grounds of class contestation shift as the dominant modes of power shift, in Negri's world, from the primary contestatory site of the factory strike (in the era of Foucaultian discipline) to the surface of each of our everyday lives, our subjectivity itself comprising both the stake and the driver of biopolitical capitalism:
the transition from the "disciplinary society" ("government") to the so-called [biopolitical] "society of control" ("governance") was being registered. An analysis developed to recognize that, in the society of control, production and resistance are organized into "modes of life." This operation amounted to a total reversal of the structural field and thus to an articulation of the "field of immanence" as a biopolitical terrain. There is no "outside," dehors; the bios is that "inside" wherein each one is entirely enveloped. Resistance thus exemplifies acting in this contradiction, but the contradiction one is immersed in is a biopolitical reality. The collective body lives there because it produces everything, because it works, but most of all because it resists, and in this resistance it configures reality. (OB 55)
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Like the transformative power of labor in its day, in a biopolitical field, something like human attention and creativity comes first and bestows value, rendering all of us — the disbursed working class that Negri re-dubs the global "multitude" — as the creative and value-generating power of biopolitical capitalism.
III. Attention Deficit
In fact, Jonathan Beller argues that attracting and managing human attention has become the hot commodity of the C21, and a quick Google search will concur—as one website puts it straightforwardly, "attention is now the ultimate commodity." In her article "I Attend, Therefore I Am," philosopher and cognitive scientist Carolyn Dicey Jennings goes as far as to redefine human subjectivity not in terms of its reasoning or language-using abilities, but as the being capable of paying attention: "the self comes into being with the first act of attention, or the first time attention favours one interest over another." [Jennings 2017] (One is tempted here to insert a comment about the Lacanian mirror stage relocated to the clothing-store fitting room, but I will defer.) Be-76 hind this turn to attention economics is a larger biopolitical harnessing of the productivities of everyday human life, including the body and the senses, within an expanding world-media system. Just to take the most obvious example, in a disciplinary society the workday was pretty much over when you clocked out or left the office. Not anymore, as smartphones, email, texts, FaceTime, Skype and a hundred other web-and app-based intrusions make it clear you can never escape from your job—both your actual job (what you do for a living) and the ancillary job you have as a productive consumer who's in charge of endlessly remolding his or her life.
With a relatively inexpensive smartphone and a wifi or data connection, you can pay attention — that is to say, you can buy things, answer email, read reviews, track a delivery, hail a ride, or update Fa-cebook — from virtually anywhere, at any time. As Beller puts it in his article "Paying Attention," we have entered into a period characterized by the full incorporation of the sensual by the economic. This incorporation of the senses along with the dismantling of the word emerges through the visual pathway as new orders of machine-body interface.. All evidence points in this direction: that in the twentieth century, capital first posited and now presupposes looking as productive labor, and, more generally, posited attention as productive of value. [Beller 2006a]
Beller's argument revolves around cinema as an intense site of training in the early C20. In his view, the movie theater constituted a kind of factory for training spectators to extract value from their attention,
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as a kind of testing ground for the biopolitical expansion of capitalism into everyday life. In The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, Beller goes as far as to call this new form the "attention theory of value": "What I will call 'the attention theory of value' finds in the notion of 'labor,' elaborated in Marx's labor theory of value, the prototype of the newest source of value production under capitalism today: value-producing human attention." [Beller 2006b: 4] And this attention theory of value constitutes an experimental R&D operation within each of us, a biopolitical niche market of one wherein "New affects, aspirations, and forms of interiority are experiments in capitalist productivity." [Ibid.: 27]
In the 100 years since the disciplinary era of the cinema's emergence (Beller talks largely about early modernist film, Vertov and Eisenstein), we've seen a decisive intensification and general spread of such attention labor, into your home through television and into your everyday routines through the near-ubiquity of computer and smartphone screens today, where it seems everyone's always looking at something. In short, modes of focusing our distributed attention are the hot advertising and business commodities of our time. As Beller reminds us, "perception is increasingly bound to [value] production" [Ibid.: 3] — think of the way the 77 stock market fluctuates with changing perceptions about the future, or the ways that brands are managed not by making changes in the products, but largely through influencing consumers' feelings about them. And most obviously, various forms of click-bait on the internet are vying for attention as value: you have to click through for someone to get paid, and before you can click through, something first has to draw your attention. Beller convincingly shows us how the movie theater was a visual factory for mass training in disciplinary capitalism, and watching remains an important pedagogical practice for the intensification of subjective attention in the move from discipline to biopower (from the theater to the home TV and finally to the portable ubiquity of the smartphone screen). Thereby popular culture, as Adorno shows us in his "Culture Industry" essay, becomes a mode of production in its own right — finding its end-product not in songs or films or TV shows, but in the form of subjects, consumers who produce their whole lives out of their consumption patterns.
Just in passing I'd note that one could construct a similar argument concerning the cash value of attention and the senses, not only for film or TV, but in terms of Euro-American museum art in the C20. Virtually everything having to do with "artfulness" (and concomitantly with economic value) from Dada forward shifts art's value from the object (and from the question of representation) to the kind of attention paid to the object once it's brought into a museum or gallery space: from Hugo Ball's performances and Duchamp's urinal through Jackson Pol-
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lock's splatter works, Jean-Michel Basquiat's layered semiotic universe and Cindy Sherman's movie stills, all the way to conceptual art, whose anti-commodity stance barely conceals the ways in which the high art scene over the past few decades has constituted an immense Economics seminar in Beller's "attention theory of value." Which is to say, we learn from contemporary art the invaluable lesson that drawing attention to an object or practice, then manipulating or even merely holding that attention, has become the most highly-prized marker of cultural "value" in our time.
This turn to the biopolitical subject as producer of artistic value also reveals for us the mistake continually made by the exasperated parents in the museum, looking at a Duchamp hat-rack, a Paul Klee painting, or a Jenny Holzer scroll of banal phrases on a pixel screen, shaking their head and saying "My kid could do that." For the expert, of course, this kind of comment immediately rebounds onto the person making the judgment, who seems not to realize that the artfulness isn't in the object, but in the kind of attention that the object asks you to pay to it: the way the artwork invites you to infuse the work with artfulness, and thereby to separate it from the common mass of artless things. This 78 move to elevate the everyday is of course the holy grail of the attention economy, and we can thereby see how the high art markets of the C20 were the attention-grabbing proving grounds for the clickbait advertising and endless Facebook posting of today, desperate to draw a certain kind of attention in order to add value to an otherwise worthless practice or object.
Pierre Bourdieu points out that modern art requires much from its consumers, as it is the beholder's attention (not the objects themselves) that must finally articulate the "artistic" quality of otherwise mundane objects in a gallery:
never perhaps has more been asked of the spectator, who is now required to 're-produce' the primary operation whereby the artist (with the complicity of his whole intellectual field) produced this new fetish. But never perhaps has he been given so much in return. The native exhibitionism of 'conspicuous consumption,' which seeks distinction in the crude display of ill-mastered luxury, is nothing compared to the unique capacity of the pure gaze, a quasi-creative power which sets the aesthete apart from the common herd by a radical difference which seems to be inscribed in 'persons' .... The new art is not for everyone, like Romantic art, but destined for an especially gifted minority. [Bourdieu 1987: 30-31] What Bourdieu describes in the 1960s as a class-mobile striving (to accumulate cultural capital, to allow the artist or art lover to break out of the class strictures inherent in Bourdieu's mid-century, Fordist, disciplinary society) has intensified and spread to become the central pillar of the logic of everyday identity in the biopolitical era — where no one
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is comfortable being ordinary, and everyone is charged with the task of infusing his or her life with meaningfulness, making your life a work of art. However, this mission of personal branding, of not disappearing into the crowd, is no longer merely the purview of the upper classes and the striving artist class, as it is in Bourdieu's disciplinary analysis. This manufacturing and updating of identity, this constant performative remaking of your life, is the everyday job of each and every one of us in a biopolitical world.
In terms of a Marxist analysis, what changes historically over time is not so much any given theory's imbrication with the economic imperatives dominant in its moment of historical emergence; rather, what changes are those dominant economic imperatives themselves, and how they bear upon individuals. Likewise, theory as well as modes of subjectivity must evolve to respond to those economic shifts. And this is most clearly where Negri the Marxist and Piketty the social scientist differ: for Piketty, there seems to be one, iron law of capitalism (r > g) and even very intense, revolutionary shifts in human subjectivity or technology have little to no effect on that properly and autonomously economic law. However, what counts as a properly economic question or field within the mid-century, disciplinary, essentially Fordist capi- 79 talism will not be the same as what counts as an economic question within the biopolitical finance capitalism of our era. It's no longer possible, to put it bluntly, simply to pit "proper" economic questions (of the tradable, productive economic base) against fanciful questions of social identity (superstructural questions of human capital), precisely because social questions of identity fuel the economic imperatives of our biopolitical day.1 What's changed from disciplinary to biopolitical capitalism, in other words, is the very intense becoming-economic of what used to be thought of as merely cultural questions about identity or personal tastes and desires. Within the attention economy of biopower, these "inside" questions about personal identity or desire have met up with "outside" questions of economic class and finance. As Foucault puts it, in a biopolitical world, "the class struggle still exists; it exists more intensely," [Foucault 1996: 73] distributed across the surfaces of our lives and identities, rather than being enforced from above or below everyday life by the various Ideological State Apparatuses that train and constrain us.
To circle back to Negri, it is this wide distribution of the new class struggle, into the saturated level of everyday life, that makes the biopolitics of something like attention less an individual whimsy to be manipulated and more of a distributed site of contestation to be negoti-
1 See on this topic Judith Butler's "Merely Cultural" [Butler 1998].
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ated. Negri flat-out asks a question that many Marxists have struggled with in recent years:
Where is class struggle today? How does critical Marxism work as a movement practice rather than a philosophy? There are two possibilities that follow what has been said thus far. By the end of the 1970s, evidently dogmatic Marxism was over, but it seemed obvious that historical materialism invaded the entire field of political thought. One can no longer escape class antagonism. Second, and this is very important, the concept of class, without losing its antagonistic characteristics, had profoundly changed as a social subject. The working class had changed its technical composition via a process that it itself had set in motion — from the factory to society. Against the ontological backdrop of these transformations of the relations of production and political struggle, the working class thus reappeared as a multitude, as a collection of singularities that built the common. (OB 56)
While Piketty clearly wants nothing to do with this kind of revolutionary Marxism, much less with the very strong — even excessive — emphasis that Negri puts on the transformative power of the multitude's "human capital," Negri's sentiments about the potentials of biopolitics 80 at least share Piketty's realistic sense that the terrain of capitalism can be (and has been) transformed, so our tools for understanding or reshaping it will have to be refashioned as well. As Piketty writes, "Capital is not an immutable concept: it reflects the state of development and prevailing social relations of each society" (CT 47), which is a simple historical claim that we can trace: "the nature of capital itself has changed radically (from land and other real estate in the eighteenth century to industrial and financial capital in the twenty-first century)" (CT 42). And as the nature of capital continues to mutate today, so must our responses to it. In a biopolitical world, performative subjectivity or human capital finds its charge not through making products and commodities, but in the ongoing project of making ourselves. So aesthetics and the concerns of the Humanities are not merely epiphenomenal, reflective, representational, or superstructural discourses (as Piketty understands them); but the Arts and Humanities remain a crucial linchpin for understanding the workings of (and against) capital in the C21. And this finally is where Piketty and Negri may find some uneasy but common ground, a convergence that Piketty sums up when he writes, "I do not see any genuine alternative: if we are to regain control of capitalism, we must bet everything on democracy" (CT 573). Which is finally betting everything not on benevolent government intervention through taxation (Piketty's reformist suggestions), nor appeals to corporate charity on our behalf, but on a more robust biopolitics, understood as a redirected emphasis not on the bankrupt politics of the nation-state, but on the radically democratic, transformative power of the multitude.
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In closing, though, I would note that much of the work on capitalism in the C20 took the horizon of disciplinary, liberal democracy as the (inevitable, if unevenly developing) horizon of modern capitalism itself, capitalism's preferred and most efficient form going forward (think most obviously of Fukuyama's "The End of History"). However, it's become clear in the last decade that representative liberal democracy is not the preferred state form we'll see in the future of capitalism. As Vladimir Putin provocatively argued in 2019, it's beginning to look like "liberalism is obsolete" as a governance model today.1 This too is, unfortunately, aligned with the rise of performative biopolitics.
While there's quite a lot of discourse dedicated to explaining the rise of the new populism, and average citizens' declining faith in liberal democracy, there remains a fairly clear Marxist explanation for the up-tick in populist xenophobia over the past decade: since the 2008 global crash, western democracies have seen an already-large wealth disparity grow to enormous proportions. As Revelli insists, the new populism is perhaps best grasped as an old-fashioned class war: "the exponential growth in inequalities across the whole globalised West between 2005 and 2014 opened up an outright social chasm, and ... in twenty-five advanced economies between 65 and 70 percent of citizens had seen their 81 incomes flatline or fall: which is to say, a mass of between 540 and 580 million people who feel themselves being pushed to the margins or losing their class position. Of these, just 10 million — a tiny 2 percent—had reported in 2005 that they had remained at a standstill or become poorer over the previous decade, between 1993 and 2004" (NP 198-99). When 70 percent or more of the western democracies' populace — more than half a billion people, most of those working class — see their incomes flatline or fall over the last 15 years, while only 2 percent had reported such declines in the decade prior, it's not clear to me that you need to go hunting for psychological explanations for the alarming rise in global xenophobic populism. The greater the income stagnation in any given country, the more intense the populist backlash against immigrants and other "outsiders." Revelli reminds us that "the great freeze has not hit everyone in a homogeneous way — that some countries have been hit more violently, and that Italy is by far the worst case, with the largest proportion of the population having become impoverished [since 2005], some 97 percent of families, followed by the United States with 81 percent and the United Kingdom with 70. France is doing a little better, with 63 percent déclassés.... This map of malaise, which takes account of the
1 "Vladimir Putin says liberalism has 'become obsolete.'" Financial Times UK, 27 June 2019. Online at https://www.ft.com/content/670039ec-98f3-11e9-9573-ee5cbb98ed36
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reduction in both 'disposable income' and 'market income,' can almost entirely be traced onto the map of the insurgent phenomena classified as 'populism'" (NP 199). The more income stagnation, the more populist sentiment—and insofar as neoliberal income stagnation for most of the working populace seems here to stay, we'd better brace ourselves for more pitched battles with those angry displaced, displaced workers who fuel it—folks who only a few decades ago were our neighbors and seemingly natural comrades in the fight against neoliberalism.
And while this is maybe another topic altogether, a difficult one to bring up at the end of an essay, let me just say that I'm not sure the present fashionability of just calling this "the return of fascism" is quite accurate, as these are seriously capitalist, neoliberal projects; Brexit or Italy-First are of course nationalist phenomena of a seemingly old-fashioned disciplinary kind, but their drivers are more neoliberal economics ("me first!") than anything else — though racist xenophobia is of course a close second, followed by a nostalgia for the very Fordist compromise years that their free-market heroes have systematically eviscerated. While many in the white working classes can be brought behind these nationalist economic policies, largely through combining them with 82 race-baiting rhetoric, it's protecting the narrow interests of 1% hyper-capitalism that finally drives these policies, and turning poor, working-class populations against each other along racial and ethnic lines is a proven tactic to keep said poor folks from banding together to eat the rich. That being the case, the ways in which biopolitics functions within these regimes will need to be rethought again, from the ground up, as most of our thinking about biopolitics and capitalism works itself out in terms of a liberal democracy model of the state that is quickly fading from hegemony. But whatever state form emerges as the preferred delivery system for capitalism in the future, Piketty importantly shows us that a corrupt inequality has been baked into the capitalist cake from the beginning — from the tulip bulbs of early modern Holland to the Coronavirus Crisis, and beyond.
References
Beller J. (2006a) Paying Attention. Cabinet 24, july. http://www.cabinetmagazine. org/issues/24/beller.php
Beller J. (2006b) The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Dartmouth University Press.
Boltanski L., Chiapello E. (2018) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Gregory Eliot. London: Verso.
Bourdieu P. (1987) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Butler J. (1998) Merely Cultural. New Left Review 227 (January-February).
Foucault M. (1979) Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York:
Vintage.
Foucault M. (1996) Foucault Live: Interviews 1961-84, edited by Sylvere Lotringer, translated by Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e). Foucault M. (2003) "Society Must Be DefendedLectures at the College de France, 1975-76. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador.
Foucault M. (2010) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978-79. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador.
Jennings C.D. (2017) I Attend, Therefore I Am: You Are Only as Strong as Your Powers of Attention. Aeon: A World of Ideas. 10 July. https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-the-self-if-not-that-which-pays-attention
Negri A. (2016) To the Origins of Biopolitics (translated by Diana Garvin). Biopower: Foucault and Beyond, ed. by Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Piketty T. (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Revelli M. (2019) The New Populism: Democracy Stares into the Abyss. Translated by David Broder. London: Verso. 83
Рекомендация для цитирования:
Nealon J.T. (2021) Biopolitics, Marxism and Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Социология власти, 33 (1): 64-83.
For citations:
Nealon J.T. (2021) Biopolitics, Marxism and Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Sociology of Power, 33 (1): 64-83.
Поступила в редакцию: 15.12.2020; принята в печать: 11.01.2021 Received: 15.12.2020; Accepted for publication: 11.01.2021
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