I contributed something to the LS symposium on Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan. John asked a question there about a remark I made, asking if I think power is always reactive. My remark was a repetition of the sense in various things I read, to the effect that constituted power is always reactive.
I said:
The sense in which constituted power has little autonomous productive capacity, only reacting, should of course not be hypostatized into an ontological principle. Doing so repeats the worst of vulgar cultural studies, wherein everything expresses resistance, the mirror image of a vulgar Situationist and Frankfurt School perspective capable only of ever seeing further encroaching domination in all phenomena. The point, rather, is methodological. Developments are addressed in attempt in understand the active role of resistance in their constitution, and to see them as political maneuvers in a war of position.
John asked if I really think power is reactive. Here’s what I said in response:
The important part for me is primarily basically a matter of ethical or political orientation - foregrounding our capacity to act rather than lamenting our many injuries and incapacities. I’ve just recently found a quote from Kant I like very much that relates, I think. We should “proceed as though everything depended upon [us]; only on this condition dare [we] hope that higher wisdom will grant the completion of [our] well-intentioned endeavors,” it’s from Religion Within The Bounds of Reason. Put another way, to my mind the point of departure has to be our power to (self)determine and the nonexhaustive nature of the ways we are already determined (self- and otherwise).
On the other hand, this is at least partially in tension with the more concrete aspects I’m gesturing at by saying the should be methodological point rather than ontological. As much as I think the “proceeding as though” effect is important, precisely because of the “as though” this doesn’t rely on any actual condition. That’s part of my growing distance from Negri and such, as much as that work has been important to me - there’s a sort of derivation of the power to proceed as though, rather than a positing or asserting thereof.In any case, all of that is I think in tension with taking the point as methodological, which to me means basically that the analysis of power relations in a more empirical sense should first of all be partisan - for Us and against Them - because there isn’t any third or neutral point of view, and it should center on conflicts involved in the determination of various instantiations of power. I’m not as clear on this as I’d like to be, regarding technology in particular, but I think I’d want to say that this second aspect should be subordinate to the latter. So research into, say, the workings and constitution of labor law and workplace machinery like that done in vol 1 of Capital is valuable either for its ethical impact (what Benjamin calls the hatred, qua source of power, generated by the materialist historian) or for its practical use in organizational activity (for instance, if we know how the bosses responded in the past and in other activities in the present then we may be more likely to succeed in new initiatives).
So the point has value - an ethical value, a use in subjectification, in self-creation. Another way to put this is a sort of “leave what is Ceasar’s to Caesar” - as in, let them worry about what they’re able to do, let’s us focus on what we’re able to do. Of course, given the conflict between Us and Them, this is a little too pat. We do have an interest in attending to and understanding what they do in order to try and prevent them from doing it, to try to beat them in skirmishes and eventually the whole class war. And I don’t think there’s any use to thinking that They don’t act, or even that they just react.
I saw Hardt speak once where he commented that there are a few different senses of this position. There’s Deleuze, “the last word on power is that resistance comes first,” which posits the only ontologically creative power - which I take to mean the power to produce social life - is in resistance. There’s also Tronti and related others among the operaisti, for whom it’s historically the case that the working class pioneers the forms that capital will take - development is cooptation of activities and forms produced by the class, and working class struggle is the dynamic factor within capitalism. There’s also the British social historians - Thompson and others - and the Subaltern Studies group - Guha and others - who did a sort of “bottom up” history, trying to recover the agency of people who were treated as object by capital and the state and who are sometimes treated the same way in historical and theoretical accounts.
But there’s also a tension here. For instance, if one considers Foucault’s claims that (constituted, top down) power is productive, either Foucault is wrong or the claim that the only productive power is resistance is wrong.
There’s also a sense in which the idea of the ontological priority of resistance to power risks replaying a bad version of the thesis of alienated labor (that the world is all something that we - a unitary we - do to ourselves). And the idea that “we made everything,” while true and attractive in one sense, can be flattening - the world as one thing, produced by one entity called we. Not that a dualism is much better, necessarily. I’m definitely out to lunch on this in a way I didn’t used to be.
What I am sure about, though, is the following:
- there is a way in which we participate in the production of the world we want to leave (such that we have a potential power to leave via the withdrawal of our participation)
- we do have a power of self- (and world-) determination.
- we can live without them in way that they can’t live without us (since they’re power is predicated upon seeking to subordinate them, whereas we could do without them entirely, via escape or some other means)
Perhaps it makes sense to think of it in as analogous to centrifugal and centripetal force. The latter is the force exerted upon an object that moves in a circle, the force that pulls the object toward the center, making the center the axis of rotation. The former is the force that the object exerts such that, if it’s strong enough, it moves the center (this would be analogous to the capitalization of resistance) or manages to fly off at a tangent from the circle. (Think of a kid with a model rocket on a string - if the rocket’s motor force is strong enough the kid will be pulled in some direction such that the center around which the rocket is rotating will move, if it’s stronger still the string will break or be pulled from the kid’s hands.)
In this case, then, there are clearly two forces. But their’s is directed at corraling or enclisubg us, bridling us. It has to be, because that’s what gives them their power over us. Ours can be directed against that process and, if we slip the bridle, can be directed in any number of directions.