The Antagonistic Ground of Constitutive Power: An Essay on the Thought of Antonio Negri

Abstract

labor: labor that produces value. The foundation of this subordination is the division between labor as abstract labor, defined as that which creates value, and all other activities, which are given the negative definition of “nonwork” or nonproductive work (this includes housework and all other labor defined as nonproductive). As Hardt and Negri write, “If labor is the basis of value, then value is equally the basis of labor. What counts as labor, or value creating practice, always depends on the existing values of a given social and historical context; in other words, labor should not simply defined as activity, any activity, but specifically activity that is socially recognized as productive of value” (1994,9). While the distinction between valued labor and labor deemed nonproductive is itself a site of contestation and antagonism, in a capitalist society this division between valued and nonvalued labor is ultimately drawn by the demands of capitalist accumulation. If in the first instance capitalist command differentiates and separates the sphere of work from nonwork, in the second it establishes a hierarchy and discipline internal to work, which is necessary to the production of surpl~s-value.’~ As Mam indicated in chapter 13 of Capital, the more capitalist production is dependent upon the cooperation and subjectivity of labor (as in the production of relative surplus-value), the more it must impose structures of command and discipline to control the productive forces it requires (Hardt and Negri 1994, 77). It might be possible to say that capital is a kind of worldly potestas that functions by separating power (potenria) from “what it can do.” Capital continually subordinates the subjectivity and sociality of living labor to the constraints and demands of surplus-value. The conflict between capitalist command (as a worldly form ofporestas) and living labor is not limited to the direct and immediate conflict that takes place between worker and capitalist in the labor process. It also includes the political and social effects and mediations of this relation, such as law and state power (Balibar 1988, 33). These “mediations and effects” are transformed by the passage from formal to real subsumption, and the most notable effect of this transformation is a breakdown in the spatial and temporal division between the sites of production and reproduction. The factory as an isolated site of production has given way to the “social factory” in which social cooperation and communication (not to mention the productive forces of immaterial labor such as subjectivity, knowledge, style, and affect) have become directly productive. Production has become coextensive with the social. “If the factory has been extended across the social plane, then organization and subordination, in their varying relationship of interpenetration, are equally spread across the entire society” (Hardt and Negri 1994, 79).15 This socialization intensifies and multiplies the contours of antagonism. It intensifies antagonism by elevating and 14. Following Deleuze and Guattari, capital can be identified as an “apparatus of capture.” An apparatus of capture is defined by two moments that are mutually constitutive, a direct comparison of activities (the division between labor and nonlabor) and a monopolistic appropriation (surplus labor) ( 1987. 444). 15. Gilles Deleuze (1995) has developed some of the implications of the breakdown of spatial and temporal divisions between techniques of control.