Biopolitical production, the common, and a happy ending: on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's<i>Commonwealth</i>

Frassinelli, Pier Paolo

doi:10.1080/02560046.2011.569056

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…This has been the focus of several autonomist Marxists—Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, most prominently—who have extended Foucault’s insights so as to analyze the current regime of biopolitical production, which they see as increasingly central to capital accumulation given the (ostensible) immaterialization of the economy over the past several decades (Hardt and Negri, 2000). For these thinkers, biopolitical production “describes how what produces value today is not just the labour congealed in material objects … but life itself, the substance of life, social relations, ideas, images, affects, codes, and what economists call ‘services’” (Frassinelli, 2011: 121). In short, this work attempts to describe how post-Fordism entails the “colonization of forms of life by capital” (Negri, 2008: 17; see also Hardt and Negri, 2000, 2004, 2009).…”

Section: The Biopolitical Commonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The biopolitical commons: A revised theory of urban land in the age of biopolitical production

Conroy

2019

Planning Theory

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The literature on biopolitical production largely presumes that contemporary capital is parasitic, enclosing and capturing value that is autonomously and collectively produced across the urban landscape. In contrast, this article suggests that in particular contexts, planners—acting largely as surrogates for urban real estate capital—play an active role in the production of the urban commons for the sake of future enclosure. Using contemporary Chicago as a point of reference, it argues that such commons are (generally) produced in locales of racialized “ontological devaluation”—in spaces that have been historically marginalized under racial capitalism. Further still, this article develops a theoretical concept, the “biopolitical commons,” to name those spaces and practices that are produced for the sake of future racialized biopolitical accumulation—pulling together, in the process, research on biopolitical production and “abolition ecology.” Finally, this article concludes by posing a series of questions for future research on the biopolitical commons.

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Section: The Biopolitical Commonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The biopolitical commons: A revised theory of urban land in the age of biopolitical production

Conroy

2019

Planning Theory

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“…Hence their unflinching optimism and the contestable claim that: ‘Cognitive labor and affective labor generally produce cooperation autonomously from capitalist command, even in some of the most constrained and exploited circumstances, such as call centers or food services’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 140). As many commentators have already pointed out, the thesis of a radical shift toward cognitive capitalism overestimates the extent to which capitalism has changed and consequently overlooks the persistence of hierarchies, be it in international divisions of labor, in new ‘horizontal’ modes of management that hide rather than challenge their implicit hierarchy or in the enduring importance of the first and the second sectors of the economy in the Global South (Frassinelli, 2011).…”

Section: From the ‘Commons’ To The ‘Common’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Conflicts in common(s)? Radical democracy and the governance of the commons

Deleixhe

2018

Thesis Eleven

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Prominent radical democrats have in recent times shown a vivid interest in the commons. Ever since the publication of Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom, the commons have been associated with a self-governing and self-sustaining scheme of production and burdened with the responsibility of carving out an autonomous social space independent from both the markets and the state. Since the commons prove on a small empirical scale that self-governance, far from being a utopian ideal, is and long has been a lived reality, a few authors have attempted to turn them into the conceptual matrix of their own account of radical democracy. Negri and Hardt, on one hand, Laval and Dardot, on the other, have jointly coined the term ‘the common’ (in the singular) to suggest that the self-governance quintessential to the commons could be turned into a general democratic principle. Though this is an attractive theoretical prospect, I will contend that it fails to account for an important contradiction between the two theoretical frameworks it connects. Whereas the governance of the commons depends on harmonious cooperation between all stakeholders which in turn relies on a strong sense of belonging to a shared community, radical democracy is highly suspicious of any attempt to build a totalizing community and constantly emphasizes the decisive role of internal agonistic conflicts in maintaining a vibrant pluralism. I will further contend that the short-sightedness of radical democrats on this issue may be partially explained by the strong emphasis in the commons literature on a related but distinct conflict, that which opposes the commoners to the movement of enclosures. I will argue, however, that this conflict is not of an agonistic nature and does little to preserve the dynamism and the constant self-criticism proper to the radical democrat regime.

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Biopolitical production, the common, and a happy ending: on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri'sCommonwealth

Cited by 2 publications

References 7 publications

The biopolitical commons: A revised theory of urban land in the age of biopolitical production

The biopolitical commons: A revised theory of urban land in the age of biopolitical production

Conflicts in common(s)? Radical democracy and the governance of the commons

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