Biopolitical Production and the ‘New Science of Democracy’

Abstract

In the previous section I argued that David Held’s notion of cosmopolitan democracy is problematic in the sense that it lacks an adequate account of the technological transformations through which global capitalism continues to expand. New prosthetic, informatic, digital and communications systems, in other words, have fundamentally altered the topology of exploitation; and so the regimes of disciplinarity, subjection and policing which have emerged under the conditions of the global economy cannot be properly understood in terms of the categories which Held deploys in his account of international law. This is not, of course, to say that the rights of equal worth, informed consent and democratic inclusion which he seeks to uphold are worthless abstractions, but rather that the possibility of their being mobilized within the networks of global capitalism depends upon a clear understanding of the ways in which technological systems have become universally involved in the reproduction of human life as living capital. This ‘biopolitical’ transformation of capitalism is the fundamental concern of Hardt and Negri’s Marxism; for they argue that in order to salvage Marx’s revolutionary politics we must give up conventional notions of class solidarity and examine the processes of affective, linguistic and cultural composition which are put into play by the mobilization of life as capital. I will say more about Hardt and Negri’s attempts to trace the emergence of the cosmopolitical subject which they call the multitude at the end of the section. For the moment however I need to look in more detail at the concepts of biopolitical production, immaterial labour and imperial sovereignty through which they conceptualize the global transformation of capital.