Photos from BIOS: Life, Death, Politics, 4/30 - 5/1/2010

Monday, May 3, 2010

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Priscilla Wald (Duke) opens the conference with her keynote address, "Human Being After Genocide: Cells, Genes, and Stories."


April 30 - May 1, 2010


Timothy Campbell (left) and Cesare Casarino (below) follow with a panel addressing Tekhne and the Life-Image, respectively.


Neni Panourgia (Columbia), Baris Karaagac (York), and Elizabeth Dauphinee (York)consider comments from the audience during the second panel.



The first day concludes with a keynote by Paul Kahn (right) on the distinction between criminal and enemy.







The second day opens with a keynote
address by Paul Rabinow (left).



Susan Greenhalgh (UC, Irvine), Sharad Chari (London School of Economics), and Jonathan Inda (Illinois) present papers on the obesity 'epidemic', the remains of apartheid in South Africa, and the intersection of race and the pharmaceutical industry.

Right: Cesare Casarino poses a question to the panel.

Above Left: The conference concludes with a roundtable featuring short presentations by (pictured left to right) Emanuel Rota, Gilberto Rosas, A. Naomi Paik, and Jennifer Baldwin.


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Author's Roundtable I: Roberto Dainotto's Europe (in Theory)

Response: Work Makes You Free

Thursday, September 18, 2008

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Written by Emanuel Rota, Italian

In his latest book, Roberto Dainotto argues that, with the rise of modernity, European identity, hegemonized by French authors, acquires a Northern/Southern opposition, next to the traditional Orient/Occident opposition. Inspired by Gramsci, Dainotto uses his sharp philological tools to identify the emergence of such a tradition, convincingly showing that this new narrative, and a few counternarratives, take shape in the French Enlightenment and become part of the ideological debate of the 19th century. Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws and its theory of climates were, in Dainotto’s convincing account, the original formulation of this new Northern disdain for the South of Europe. In my response, thinking with professor Dainotto’s excellent book, I argue that labor and the new work discipline required by the emerging capitalist production constitute one of the central subtexts of this North/South opposition.


Montesquieu's elaborate theory of climate is a logical necessity of his philosophical construction. He believed in natural laws, monogenesis, and on an idea of Europe based on the notion of the Ius Publicum Europaeum. These three elements could on ly work together thanks to his theory of climate. Monogenesis, which Montesquieu inherited from the biblical tradition, asserts that human nature is one and the same everywhere. Natural laws were supposed to be laws that stemmed directly from nature and existed in an extra-juridical space, independent from the sovereign's will and as natural as the laws of physics. The Ius Publicum Europaeum was the specific form that natural laws had acquired in the European territory and that governed the inter-European international relations despite the absence of a European sovereign. Why, if human beings were the same everywhere and natural laws came from nature, was the Ius Publicum Europaeum European and not worldwide? Montesquieu's answer was that human nature did not change, but natural climates did, hence climates were responsible for the differences.


This weak argumentation, which would be attacked, within the borders of liberal ideology, by racists--human nature change--and by legal positivism--might makes right--serves the ideological purpose of limiting the power of the sovereign without putting the existence of the state at risk. Laws are natural; they exist above the king, who becomes a despot if he wants an absolute power, and also above the multitude, who becomes an unruly mob and gives birth to ochlocratic governments if it does not respect natural laws (including private property, of course).

Thus, Montesquieu’s book always serves two purposes: challenge absolutism while keeping a watchful eye on the multitudes and its desire for democracy. With this in mind, we can try to interpret the emergence of a Southern narrative as brilliantly highlighted by Dainotto. The Occident/Orient binary opposition perfectly serves the purpose of attacking absolutism as Oriental despotism, but what about the North/South distinction?

Let’s hear from the French Enlightenment. Here is Montesquieu (most relevant parts in Bold, a summary of the points at the end of the quotes):

In Europe there is a kind of balance between the southern and northern nations. The first have every convenience of life, and few of its wants: the last have many wants, and few conveniences. To one nature has given much, and they demand little from nature; to the other she has given but little, and they demand a great deal. The equilibrium is maintained by the laziness of the southern nations, and by the industry and activity which she has given to those in the north. The latter are obliged to undergo much labour, without which they would want everything, and degenerate into barbarians. This has naturalized slavery to the people of the south: as they can easily dispense with riches, they can more easily dispense with liberty. But the people of the north have need of liberty, for this can best procure them the means of satisfying all those wants which they have received from nature. The people of the north, then, are in a forced state, if they are not either free or barbarians. Almost all the people of the south are, in some measure, in a state of violence, if they are not slaves.
Here is Voltaire:

The Oriental climate, nearer to the South, obtains everything from nature; while we, in our northern West, we owe everything to time, to commerce and to a belated industry.
And here is Rousseau’s Social Contract:

Luxury in clothes shows similar differences. In climates in which the changes of season are prompt and violent, men have better and simpler clothes; where they clothe themselves only for adornment, what is striking is more thought of than what is useful; clothes themselves are then a luxury. At Naples, you may see daily walking in the Pausilippeum men in gold-embroidered upper garments and nothing else. It is the same with buildings; magnificence is the sole consideration where there is nothing to fear from the air. In Paris and London, you desire to be lodged warmly and comfortably; in Madrid, you have superb salons, but
not a window that closes, and you go to bed in a mere hole... To all these points may be added another, which at once depends on and strengthens them. Hot countries need inhabitants less than cold countries, and can support more of them. There is thus a double surplus, which is all to the advantage of despotism.
If you did not have the patience to read the quotes, here is what they all say: Northern people have to work because nature does not give much; Southern people don’t have to work because nature is generous there. Only necessity makes people work, whereas abundance makes them lazy. Lazy people are prone to despotism, hard working people, instead, are good for the rule of laws. Abundance leads to despotism, scarcity of resources leads to good citizens.

Really? Were people in Southern Europe, not just the aristocrats, everybody, so rich that they did not have to work? Fortunately, what the French philosophes managed to obscure with their elaborate constructions, is readily revealed by English sources: (don’t skip this one):

The industry of the people was considered extraordinary, their peculiarity of life remarkable. They lived like the inhabitants of Spain, or after the custom of the Orientals. Three or four o'clock in the morning found them at work. At noon they rested; many enjoyed their siesta; others spent their time in the workshops eating and drinking, these places being often turned into taprooms and the apprentices into pot boys; others again enjoyed themselves at marbles or in the skittle alley. Three or four hours were thus devoted to play; and then came work again till eight or nine, and sometimes ten, the whole year through.

Birmingham Journal, 26 Sept. I855, “Hints for a History of Birmingham”
The Birmingham Journal uses 18th century sources to describe the life of the Birmingham workers who, thanks to the abundance created by their successful work, have the freedom to organize their time according to their desire: they work and they play, they take siestas, like the inhabitants of Spain, or after the custom of the Orientals. Abundance creates a non European space.

Here is another, even more revealing quotation: (Hutton, An History of Birmingham (I78I), p. 69)

The men... [are] regulated by the expense of their families, and their necessities; it is very well known that they will not go further than necessity prompts them, many of them.


As economic historians have pointed out, workers, in the early stage of the capitalist reorganization of production, refused to work more than they needed to support their standard of life. They preferred lower pays and more leisure time than higher pay and no free time. Montesquieu and the other philosophes provided a philosophical justification for the predatory instincts of the early capitalist owners: abundance will make you lazy and slaves: work all day long to earn the bare necessity and you will be free. The European South, with its preindustrial life style had to be racialized and moralized so that the Northern European workers could be threatened with the early stage of a racial division of Europe: overexploit the workers because necessity is Northern Europe, whereas abundance is the degenerate South. Learn this work discipline because exploitation and work will make you free. From the early stages of the original accumulation of power and capital, one can almost imagine a world where in all the factories of Europe one cold write: Work Makes You Free. Read more

Meeting Toni Negri: Introduction to “Antonio Negri: A Revolt that Never Ends”

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

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Written by Emanuel Rota, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese

I met the Italian philosopher Toni Negri in his apartment a couple of weeks ago. Around the walls there were the usual books that make up the living space of a university professor, plus some memorabilia of his past and present as a revolutionary intellectual: posters, leaflets, paintings. Some of the books he owned, he told a couple of visitors while I was waiting for my turn to speak to him, were irremediably lost when he escaped from Italy to avoid a jail sentence for terrorism. He is now a free man, after spending the required time in jail for what he had written and said in the ’60s and ’70s. Still, he will probably never be able to set foot in the United States, despite the extraordinary success that his books have here. There is still hope if the last existing superpower is afraid of a 75-year-old intellectual!

The movie below is a long interview that chronicles some of his life and some of the ideas for which he went to jail. As with Marx, his ideas should be studied by those who want to interpret the world, and not only by those who want to change it. Some of them are pretty simple, and they come from the great tradition of Italian operaismo, one of the many western marxist heresies, a heresy with a twist. (parts one and two below)

Forget Hegel, be suspicious of dialectics, and be very skeptical of historicism and its teleologies. History is not the result of the mysterious cunning of Reason, of the Spirit, or, even less, of the development of productive forces. History is class struggle in all the forms in which the conflict between classes manifests itself, even those traditionally refused by the workers’ organizations, like Luddism. Sabotage is more responsible for technological, social, and economic progress than the entrepreneurial minds of thousands of capitalists.

Those who want to understand what Negri is talking about should just open their eyes to the present of the music industry. The new models of production and distribution are not the result of the self-development of the industry. Even less are they the fruits of the music industry executives’ creative minds. People simply started to sabotage the industry by refusing to pay for the product. The result was that, first, the music industry called the police, then it tried to adapt to the new conditions, and finally it will disappear in a world where nobody will get incredibly rich, but a lot of people will be able to make a decent living. Everybody will be able to enjoy music according to their needs and make music according to their abilities.

What is making this revolution possible, among other things, is the end of the ability of nation states to police their economies, in the name of those who control the music business, or the software business, or the other industries. Bittorrents don’t need to be in a specific place. In a world where most of the value added is kept in patents and licenses, only a worldwide system, an Empire, can hope to police the multitude that wants to use the software for their computers, the medicines for their health, and the corn to plant in their fields without paying licensing fees. The multitude seems unwilling to pay the lion’s share to those who “expropriate” for themselves the general intellect of humanity.

And it’s an “expropriation” of our general ability to produce. We are now constantly at work, thanks to the revolution of past generations that have put cell phones, computers and cameras in our hands. The same computer that we use to write a paper is used to write a program, to participate in a social network, to write blogs, share photographs, listen to music, watch movies and, for those who like it, have cybersex. All of these can be exploited. Don’t worry about a business model is the new mantra, if the idea is good— a social network, a search engine—it is possible to find a way to make money out of it. The smart industries try to stay on top of the curve, but the desires and intelligence of the multitude to use for themselves what they make in the new service-oriented productive world are the permanent counterweight to the desire to exploit our fellow human beings.

Negri and others have been describing this new world since the sixties. All the time they spent talking to the workers outside the factories, seeing the workers who did not want to spend eight hours in the same place, and who wanted flexibility, control over their time, and a way to use their intelligences, all that time has paid off in one of the few radical theories that still looks at the future with hope, rather than with fear
Enjoy the movie..

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