Jouissance and Antagonism in the Forms of the Commune: A Critique of Biopolitical Subjectivity

Abstract

In recent years a growing literature on biopolitical governmentality, prompted by the work of Michel Foucault, presents subjectivity as the decisive locus of both the rule of neoliberal capitalism and the production of the common. While sharing its central focus of subjectivity, we are concerned with what this literature leaves out (due to what we discern to be certain implicit tendencies of behaviorism): the constitutive role that subjective investments and “enjoyment” (jouissance) play in the crisis-ridden formations of capitalism and in the constructive turns to communism. We proceed from the premise that there is no balanced relation to jouissance and that class antagonism is irreducible. From this perspective, we propose to approach capitalist and communist subjectivities in terms of two different “forms of the commune”: that is, as two distinct subjective orientations toward enjoying the impossibility of instituting the common once and for all.

Keywords:

• Subjectivity
• Biopolitical Governmentality
• Jouissance
• Common
• Forms of the Commune

Notes

¹For insightful surveys of various Althusserian legacies, see Elliot (1994), Kaplan and Sprinker (1993), Lezra (1995), and Callari and Ruccio (1996).

²We consider the governmentality literature post-Althusserian not only because the governmentality approach developed in the Anglo-American context in tandem with post-Althusserian tendencies (Lemke 2002), but also because the concept of governmentality is Foucault's answer to what we referred to above as the post-Althusserian theoretical problematic. When Foucault proposes to treat capitalism as “a singular figure in which economic process and institutional framework call on each other, support each other, modify and shape each other in ceaseless reciprocity,” he simultaneously refuses to treat “the problem of the survival of capitalism” as a foregone conclusion “determined by the logic of capital and its accumulation.” Instead, he insists that “[t]he history of capitalism can only be an economic-institutional history” (Foucault 2008, 164–5). In other words, Foucault explains the rule of capitalism as a function of a nondialectical, strategic logic of articulation that establishes connections across (conjugates) a heterogeneous field of institutions, dispositifs, regimes of truth, disciplines, and so forth without reducing the field into a homogeneous unity (secured, for instance, by the dialectical logic of capital accumulation) (42–3).

³The emergence of the governmentality literature in the Anglo-Saxon context could be traced back to publication of The Foucault Effect, a collection of essays edited by Burchell, Gordon, and Miller (1991). Subsequently, among others, we can refer to Barry, Osborne, and Rose (1996), Lemke (2001, 2002), Brown (2003), Donzelot (2008), Read (2009), and Binkley (2009) as contributors to the governmentality literature.

⁴Foucault offers a very interesting definition of (Chicago-style) economics as a behavioral science: “economics [is] the science of the systematic nature of responses to environmental variables” (269). Where we slightly depart from Foucault in our reading of the texts by Alchian (1950), Friedman (1953), and Becker (1962) is that, for these Chicago economists, the entity that responds in a nonrandom and systematic manner is not the individual (who is explicitly assumed to respond randomly, erratically, or habitually), but rather, the market (Madra 2007).

⁵An important exception is Sam Binkley's work on the self-help bestseller Rich Dad Poor Dad (2009).

⁶On one occasion, in his analysis of financialization, Christian Marazzi argues that we must take the “public” in “the public demand for financing” literally: “[I]t was no longer just the investment banks, or business, or nation-states, but also wage-earners and salaried employees who wanted to participate as small investors in the big party organized by the securities markets” (2008, 39; emphasis added). While the image of “the big party” invokes a possible form of enjoyment that comes along with partaking in financialization, we find nowhere in Marazzi a discussion of why the “wage-earners” or “salaried employees” “wanted to participate” in the big party in the first place. Is this yet another manifestation of mimetic, herd behavior? Or is it a manifestation of innate desire for more wealth?

⁷Marazzi borrows some components of this notion of subjectivity from behavioural finance and behavioral economics—two emerging “cyborg” branches of economics that have been developing under the influence of cognitive sciences (Mirowski 2002)—and others from André Orléan's (1999) reading of J. M. Keynes's “beauty contest.”

⁸This path entails not rejecting Marx's problematic of fetishism per se, but rather assuming a nonhumanist interpretation of it. Indeed, following Étienne Balibar's original treatment of Marx's discussion of “the forms of the commune” in Reading Capital, we understand the problematic of fetishism not in its restricted and humanist definition (that is, as the misrecognition of the relations between men as the relation between commodities in capitalism), but rather, in its more generalized and materialist application to both “precapitalist” and capitalist modes of production. The way Balibar's reading severs Marx's critique of fetishism from the humanist framing of misrecognition is through repositioning it as a mystification of social determination: “whenever the place of determination is occupied by a single instance, the relationship of the agents will reveal phenomena analogous to ‘fetishism’” (Althusser and Balibar 1970, 218). We understand Balibar's position on the forms of the commune to be similar to that of Amariglio in that the form embodies an understanding of subjectivity as both socially constitutive of and socially constituted by the social relations of production. What Balibar adds to the discussion of “the commune,” it seems to us, is the “fetishistic” form that it can take.

⁹If anything, such “particular” antagonisms between the occupants of various class positions are secondary antagonisms that are formed through particular articulation of the libidinal economies of the participant social subjects (Özselçuk and Madra 2005).

¹⁰For two extensive and original discussions of Nuestras Raices and the ethical dynamics of a community economy that it fosters, see Healy and Graham (2008) and Graham and Cornwell (2009).