By Stefano Harney, from various email lists (also see Harney's "Governance, State, and Living Labour," this video interview for the Edufactory project, and his book State Work)

The Third Term
1.      Governance is a third term, beyond sovereignty or
governmentality.  Although the term governance may still mark a form
of government.  It is longer only a political term.  Governance is
also now a term of the economy, not in the sense that the economy is
also governed, as in corporate governance, but as economy itself.
Governance is a form of economic production itself.

2.      Sovereignty establishes the public and private.  Governmentality
makes this establishment of the private productive, through the
production of the public.  Governance today marks the emergence of
the public as directly productive.  No longer is the public, in all
its micropolitics of subjectivity and macropolitics of population, an
instrument for creating a private that can then be exploited.  Today
the public itself in all its anti-social glory, because the public is
the most anti-social moment of capitalist society, is also a direct
and dominant source of capitalist wealth.  This is because the public
holds all of the social qualities of the general intellect up to the
light, making the general intellect obvious even in its disfiguration
in the figure of the public, and offering up this captured aspect of
the general intellect for exploitation.

3.      Governance puts the public to work, or, perhaps we could say,
after Mario Tronti, governance is the new labour process.  Mario
Tronti said the capitalist brings only this labour process, brings
only work, while the worker brings her class relation, her
socialisation, and her living labour, in short she brings the
capital.  Today we could say the capitalist brings only governance,
as for instance one might understand the Davos meetings, or the rise
of the business schools of ignorance, or the sinister efforts of
African debt relief, all experiments in governance as labour process,
in governance as the effort to locate the general intellect and, as
Tiziana Terranova says, to harness it.  The capitalist brings
governance as a desperate attempt to arrange a labour process beyond
his control.  And how does he do this?  How does governance work as a
labour process?


The Mosquito
4.      Being in public is different from being public, and being in
public has always been criminal.  Once that criminality was connected
to sovereignty, as in reckless eyeballing and the African slave.  The
male African slave needed to be in public to work, but if his being
in public threatened the idea of being public, he could be accused of
looking at a white woman, being in public, ‘reckless eyeballing,’ and
punished or killed.  The public was dominated by a sovereign
definition here.  Later this is not enough, and perhaps was never
enough, for labour discipline.  Malcolm X tells the story of a
hanging in London of a pickpocket, and even while the pickpocket was
being hanged, other pickpockets worked the crowd watching the
hanging.  Clearly sovereign power was not enough for the kind of
labour discipline emerging in London at that time.  Governmentality
names the experiments that come to supplement this power.

5.      But now to be in public, but not public, is a form of direct
sabotage of the labour process. This is why we see the disconnection
between the ever smoother operations of governmentality at new ever
greater levels of differential inclusion, and at the same time the
more regressive uses of prisons, police violence, rendition, and
social censure, co-existing in one space.  Today being in public does
not threaten the public only as the process of securing private
exploitation.  It threatens exploitation itself.

6.      Social time, as Toni Negri says, cannot be recognized as such by
capital, as pure social potentiality.  But it can be recognized as
waiting time, if the wait is for work, as Paolo Virno says.  We can
call this exhibition time, after Virno, the time during which we
exhibit to all who pass our potential to labour.  And this is the key
to establishing the difference between being in public and being
public.  Because how do we exhibit this willingness to stand beside
production and yet to attend to it (rather than having it attend to
us)?  In other words, what does ‘sabotage of the capitalist capture
of the general intellect’ look like?  I would say, it looks like a
lack of governance.

7.      And what does governance look like?  I would say in large part it
looks like the continuous production and exhibition of  self-
generated, intelligible public interests. This is not just our
interest in the public, but our interest in generating the public
through the production of more interests, more politics if you like,
even more politics of difference, as long as this difference is
public, and therefore not different.  The exhibition of willing
labour-power in the form of public interests is increasingly what
composes the public.  And it is the exhibition that governance seeks
to organize.  And why public interests?  Because public interests are
a way to capture all the social cooperation, all the social
interests, that reside in the general intellect, and that are, as
Michael Hardt and Toni Negri have taught us, the chief source of
capitalist wealth today.  Governance that provokes the production and
exhibition of public interests therefore mines the wealth of the
general intellect for what it cannot reach without the aid of all
those who identify, volunteer, and offer up their public interests.

8.      This is the way, I suggest, to understand the Eighteenth Brumaire
of Barack Obama.  American interest in politics under this ‘fetish of
the public interest’ is a manifestation of the overwhelming labour
discipline of that society, the overwhelming willingness to identify,
volunteer and offer up public interests, or in other words the
overwhelmingly willingness to exhibit the capacity for capitalist
work.  On the other hand, it is also the way to understand ‘the
mosquito’ – a device used by the English police to disperse young
people in public squares and malls by using a high-pitched noise only
people under 20 years of age can hear.  Those who do not exhibit this
capacity for capitalist work must be cleared from the public space
because it is the site of capitalist exploitation today.  Rather than
close the public space, as in earlier phases of neo-liberalism still
trying to invent governance, it must be open for production and
appropriation, but only for this.


NGOs, Art Museums, and the Metroversity
9.      As I have said elsewhere, the laboratory of the production of
public interests is the NGO.  The ethos of the NGO is that
populations must be provoked into identifying and volunteering their
own public interests.  The NGO regards it as counter-productive to
speak for the illegal migrant.  Only the illegal migrant knows the
contours of her own public interests.  An illegal migrant ought to
know her rights, says the NGO.  In this boiling cauldron of neo-
liberalism and civil society was this new meaning of governance born,
and from there has it spread.

10.     This is also the key in my view to the creative industries.  It
is not a question of business invading culture or even of culture
invading business.  On the one hand, the creative industries do offer
new private sources of exploitation as scholars like Andrew Ross have
shown us.  On the other hand as I have tried to show, the business
school has no subject except itself, and is therefore filled with
creativity, politics, and cultural forms.  But these two sides alone
of the creative industries leave out its real attraction to capital
as a vehicle of governance, as a new labour process carved through
the general intellect, strip-mining social attention and opinion.
The creative industries are harnessed as the way art makes audiences,
and audiences make public interests, in the form of taste, attention,
prohibition, pleasure, and from all of this, new value.  This is art
as governance, as labour process.  The market is a market in what can
be revealed about audiences through new art.  This is what is worth
millions.

11.     And finally the metroversity, which thanks to the Edu-factory
collective has come so much into view for me.  What seems important
here is the reversal of the visibility of the general equivalent.
Broadly one could say the university was a place where one acted on
the possibility of an original use-value while suspecting (correctly
as we see in Christopher Newfield’s work) the world of exchange
outside was also inside.  Now, in the university this suspicion has
become common sense.  The university is overtly the place of the
production of knowledge as exchange-value, and no one has any
illusions about it.  Curiously outside the university, however, one
is now supposed to act like original use-value is possible.  Out in
the city one acts as one used to act in the university, like original
use-value is possible while suspecting (again correctly) that
exchange-value reigns.  Thus we fetishize public difference and
accept pure command over our time as once was the case in the
nostalgic university.  Taken together these two conditions and their
reversal and blending are for me the definition of the metroversity.


Dumb Insolence of the Undercommons
12.     Fred Moten and I tried to think about the metroversity through
its workers, through the undercommons produced by the self-
organisation of these workers.  (In the US the metroversity also
remains a form of rural patronage as well as tending toward an urban
social factory of a new kind.)  For us, the undercommons is, from the
revolutionary point of view, the self-organisation of the
incommensurate.  From the point of view of capital, the undercommons
is the unacknowledged self-organisation of the despised, discounted,
and anti-social.  The first act of self-organisation in the
undercommons is a refusal of subjectivation through, and only
through, self-organisation.  This disidentification through self-
organisation is also, for us, not a prerequisite to what Toni Negri
calls the common management (gestione) of the commons, but the
potential of that organisation.

13.     Those who work in the undercommons of the metroversity are often
said to be dumb, and often said to be insolent.  They must not go out
in public.  They do not exhibit the right attitude.  They are workers
from the darkness of the private.  To governance they offer only dumb
insolence.  But they seek a way to be together that does not require
explanation or interests first, and is only of use to others who seek
a similar ensemble.  This is why for us translation is crucial and
the work of Sandro Mezzadra and his colleagues so important.  But
dumb insolence is also about bodies and senses and social affect, not
just cognition and language.  It is also about, paradoxically,
laughter, music, touch, and the invitation to an ensemble of these
affects and comprehensions that is not issued but remains possible,
even necessary, nonetheless.

THREE TALKS BY LOREN GOLDNER
London, Jan 19th, 21st and 22nd, 2008

New York-based Marxist Loren Goldner is giving a series of talks in London this month, hosted by Mute magazine.

Best known for his prescient and revelatory analysis of the global credit bubble of the last thirty years, Goldner has revived and synthesised the theoretical insights of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Marx and CLR James suppressed by orthodox Marxism and the mainstream Left  to offer a rigorous and revolutionary critique of contemporary life, politics, economy and culture.

This is a rare opportunity to hear one of today’s most interesting left communist analysts discuss a broad spectrum of his research and writing.

There are 3 talks at 2 venues:

From Mass Strike to Casualization and Retreat: The Korean Working Class, 1987-2007

Saturday January 19th 2008, 6pm – Housmans Bookshop

This talk will focus on the recent history of class struggle in Korea, from mass strikes, wage increases and radically democratic unions in the  late 1980s - mid ‘90s to casualisation and bureaucratisation today when as many struggles take place between regular and casualized workers as against capital itself. (More below)

Housmans Bookshop ,
5 Caledonian Road, 
Kings Cross, London
N1 9DX. Entry: Free
How to get there: http://www.housmans.com/contact/index.htm

Class Struggle and the Adamic Imagination in Herman Melville    

Monday January 21st 2008, 7pm – Housmans Bookshop

1848-1850 witnessed the birth of communism, modern art, the end of classical political economy, and the formulation of the entropy law, or 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. This talk explores the mid-19th century crisis of the bourgeois ego, and the emergence of the working class onto the stage of world history, as echoed in Melville’s novels. Against the cliché of the US as lagging behind Europe on the long parliamentary march to socialism, a Melvillean, and un-orthodoxly Marxist account emphasizes instead the radically anti-statist character of the multiracial working class as portrayed in Moby Dick, and manifest in the struggles of the 70 years after 1850 in the US. (More below)

Housmans Bookshop ,
5 Caledonian Road, 
Kings Cross, London
N1 9DX. Entry: Free
How to get there: http://www.housmans.com/contact/index.htm

Fictitious Capital and Today's Global Crisis

Tuesday January 22nd 2008, 7pm – The Whitechapel Centre

The fallout from 2007’s credit crunch becomes daily more visible as the global financial system goes from shock to recoil to shock. To understand the stakes of the current crisis and the possible impact – both from the perspective of capital and of the working class – one needs to understand the nature of the 30-year-plus ‘fictitious capital’ bubble whose bursting we may now be witnessing. If this is indeed the end of that long and perverse combination of boom and depression in which capital has ‘successfully’ cannibalised itself, what will ‘the new 1973’ – or ‘new 1929’ be like? How is the global balance of power likely to be affected? (More below)

The Whitechapel Centre,
85 Myrdle Street (off Commercial Road), Whitechapel, London E1 1HQ
UK. Entry: Free.
How to get there: http://linkme2.net/co

About Loren Goldner:
Loren Goldner is a writer and activist who divides his time between New York and Seoul, South Korea. He has written on various economic, political and cultural matters over the past three decades. He is currently writing a book on the Korean working class. Most of his work is available on the Break Their Haughty Power web site at: http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner

Mute Magazine:
Mute is a quarterly print magazine dedicated to culture and politics after the net. The Mute website is updated weekly with web-only content and it’s complete archive is made available free: http://metamute.org

Mute Vol2 #6 (July 2007), a special issue on credit, debt and crisis, featured Loren’s article: ‘Fictitious Capital For Beginners’ :
http://www.metamute.org/en/Fictitious-Capital-For-Beginners

Mute Vol 2 #6 - Living in a Bubble: Credit, debt and crisis

Interesting discussion on the aut-op-sy list in response to an article by Michael Heinrich called "Profit without End." The most useful comments so far are from Loren Goldner:

Heinrich [...] does not comment, for example, on the
crucial differences between the current emergence of
China and India and the emergence of the U.S. and
Germany ca. 1890.
That earlier development ultimately "lifted all boats"
in the 1945-1974 boom years, whereas even the rosy
scenarios for China and India frankly admit that 1.5
billion people in those countries will be "left out".
What will become of them and how will they react?
Heinrich scoffs at the idea that the purpose of
capitalism is to provide good wages and welfare for
workers, which is true enough,
but such a formulation overlooks Marx's view that
capitalism was historically progressive because it
materially expanded the reproduction of society. If
capitalism destroys society (i.e.the working class)
while "booming" for capitalists, or if it destroys the
environment and shortcircuits all possible social
reproduction, Heinrich's portrait of the future will
be meaningless.

I have myself argued in different texts that the
defeat of the old revolutionary movement (particularly
in 1917-1921, and to a lesser extent the explosion of
1968-1977) occurred precisely because capitalism had
new territories into which it could expand. But this
expansion does not change the fact that something
fundamental seemed to change in capitalist
accumulation around the time of World War I. Broadly
speaking, pre-1914 capitalist growth expanded the
working class
as a percentage of the world capitalist population.
German and American competition squeezed the
circumstances of British workers, true enough, but
capitalist innovation was creating new proletarians
all the time, not eliminating them. The situation
today is quite different. The rise of the new Asian
economies happens at the EXPENSE of the working class
in the West. There is a net contraction, in value
terms, of the global social wage. Heinrich doesn't
mention that even China has LOST 20 million industrial
jobs through its boom, and 100 million layoffs were
announced at the party congress in 1997. Korea, hailed
as the "next Japan" 20 years ago, is today being
squeezed by Chinese competition as China moves "up the
value chain". Vietnam and Bangladesh have surpassed
China in the race to the bottom in wages. Outsourcing
to India has raised wages in the high tech sector to
the point that, already, the costs of outsourcing are
becoming not worth the trouble.

Heinrich mentions two world wars, the great
depression, fascism and the Holocaust as if they were
some anomaly, when in fact they signaled a qualitative
break from the nature of crisis in capitalism in the
1815-1914 period.
There are those of us, and I am one of them, who see
in those events a "decadent" phase of capitalism. Does
Heinrich imagine that the U.S. will peacefully hand
its imperial status over to the Asian powers, any more
than Britain lost its hegemony to America through
exactly the decades of upheaval he describes? 

Starting to catch up on the world of research and theory - to crawl out of the black hole I've been lost in for the past few months. Somehow never heard of this journal before - seems pretty good, and at least the current issue (free pdf) relates directly to my topic (I want to make "social movement theory" or "anthropology of social movements" one of my subject areas for my general exams next year, but I don't like most of the mainstream literature in this area, which seems aimed primarily at helping governments control or prevent social movements, and even the subversive stuff tends to reject or ignore theories about global systems). Here's the ToC:

From the new Edu-Factory list. This guy is a little too pomo and moralist (Levinaso-Spivakian) for me, but the similiarities between our situations and projects caught my eye: