Posited by Hardt and Negri, we have moved from a society of nation-states and international power and to one where international rule only becomes relevant “within the dynamic of the biopolitical production of world order,” of Empire (31). This seems to be a useful mapping of the world geo-political system but I at first found it difficult to relate to our guiding topics: publicity and surveillance.
Their analysis of the communications industry may lead us where we want to go. Quoting Hardt and Negri at length will be useful. They say, within Empire “the biopolitical production of order is in the immaterial nexuses of the production of language, communication, and the symbolic that are developed by the communications industries… the imaginary is guided and channeled within the communicative machine… inside, immanent to the productive and social relations. Mediation is absorbed within the productive machine. The political synthesis of social space is fixed in the space of communication.” (33). Already it seems that private as public lose autonomy and are embedded within communication. Communication then produces, organizes and distributes subjectivities and the imaginary in such a way that the imperial machine is legimated. Hardt and Negri compare this to Habermas’ communicative action’ and that leads back to publicity. They continue “when Habermas developed the concept of communicative action, demonstrating so powerfully its productive form and the ontological consequences deriving from that, he still relied on a standpoint outside these effects of globalization, a standpoint of life and truth that could oppose the informational colonization of being (33-4). Habermas’s public of deliberation is no longer possible when the political imaginary is absorbed by information flows that produce for the machine and validate the machine. Publicity is no longer argument encountered by subjects but a flow of information where subjects can be found.

A number of questions arise. First, what exactly is biopolitics? Second, the movement beyond societies of gaze and spectacle to societies immersed in information seems to be the major discursive shift for the week. Hardt and Negri lay out a nice macro-power but how might the immanence of information effect micro-power?
posted by chr15 at 12:23 AM