Tiziana Terranova on Foucauldian and Deleuzian Circulation
Discussion
Nick Dyer-Whiteford:
" The concept of Foucault’s (1993) most widely applied to the study of networked accumulation is that of “panoptic” monitoring, and, particularly as it is modulated by Giles Deleuze’s (1995) cybernetic revision in his “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, remains crucial to all understandings of “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019). However, as Tiziana Terranova has argued in a series of important studies (2004; 2009; 2015), panopticism is enriched and surpassed in Foucault’s later works on the topic of “biopower”. “Biopower” of course designates the “technologies of power” developed by sovereign states in the era of emergent capitalism to enable rule at the level of entire of populations (Foucault 2009; 2010). And as Terranova (2015) makes clear, the central aim of such population-level modern governance is to secure the conditions of “circulation”, the movement of bodies, merchandise, information, increasingly necessary to a new political economy of accumulation.
This “biopolitical” account of circulation is similar to Marx’s discussion of “universal intercourse”, and Terranova mentions its consonance with Marx’s later writings on capital’s increasing subsumption of social processes. Yet her portrayal of Foucault’s theory of circulation emphasizes elements missing in Marx’s account. It highlights the role of “governmentality”—largely, the activities of the state, however much Foucault eschews that term--alongside and supporting the operations of capital in the fostering and securing of circulation. Foucault’s concept of biopower is, however, more ample than Marx’s focus on labour-power. His treatment of circulation is correspondingly both larger and smaller than Marx’s. On the one hand, he highlights the importance of circulation issues to population-level controls (such as those of pandemic regulation); on the other, through attention to processes of subjectification, Foucault insists on the micro-political affective and attentional dimensions of circulatory control and expansion.
Terranova develops this concept of circulation via Foucault’s discussion of the passage from liberalism to neoliberalism, with the latter dissolving the former’s formal demarcations between the spheres of civil society and capitalist economic calculation. Crucially, for our purposes, Terranova brings her interpretation of Foucault’s work directly into the digital era, and the domain of Big Tech, with a detailed analysis of Facebook’s social graph and its metricisation of relations and affect (“likes”) as an instance of how networks become central to securing the conditions of circulation, and compellingly situates within neoliberal project of capitalizing all aspects of human relation. If there is a weakness in her essays, it is perhaps only that they do not clearly enough negotiate the transition from the governmental exercise of biopower to the privatized exercise by capital demonstrated in by Zuckerberg’s empire. This calls for is a more detailed anatomization of the collaborative and contradictory relations at play in the relations between platform capitalism and the capitalist state in the development of networked biopower-- of the sort on display in the virtual appearance of Zuckerberg before the anti-trust congressional hearing.
The integration of Marxian and Foucauldian analysis of network circulation posited by Terranova also opens towards a correction of the Eurocentrism of both thinks, by inviting comparison with the inversion of Foucauldian biopolitics in Achille Mbembe’s (2001; 2019a; 2019b) work on “necropolitics”. Mbembe’s account of "contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death", a subjugation that includes not just the power to kill, but to allow to die, for example by starvation or disease or sustained social oppression or exposure to ecological disaster. It is applied specifically to the postcolonial situation of racialized populations. Mbembe’s work can be read as a scathing corrective to Marx’s Eurocentric analysis of “universal intercourse” and the way it grossly overlooks the experience of populations, for whom the “intolerability” of capitalist verkher did not gradually become apparent but was rather immediately inflicted as slavery, conquest and genocide. The relevance of “necropolitical” analysis to digital circulation is explicit in his recent discussion of “digital computation” as a “deglobalizing” weapon of “boderization”. In this process, ubiquitous computation is part of “the process by which world powers permanently transform certain spaces into places that are impassable to certain classes of people”, a social division that operates both externally, on international frontiers excluding migrants and internally in the divisions of subtly and not-so-subtly racially segregated regions, cities, prisons and internment camps (2019b).
Our “circulationary” approach to the sequence of platforms, populisms, pandemics and riots therefore lies through a synthesis of Marxian concepts of labour-power, Foucauldian biopower and Mbembe’s necropolitics. "