Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology

Bios: Surplus qua Labor-Power

Bios Surplus qua Labor-Power At stake, therefore, is the modern bios that emerges at the moment at which surplus takes on that specific modulation that involves disequilibrium in all systems of value that constitute the plane of immanence. The generalized “fixed” idea that, with capitalism, economy is no longer dependent on slavery but on “free” laborers introduced an unforeseen transformation in the nature of labor. As Marx writes in the Grundrisse , labor-power is “the use-value which the worker has to offer to the capitalist, which he has to offer to others in general, [and which] is not materialized in a product, does not exist apart from him at all, thus exists not really, but only in potentiality” (Marx 1993, 267). Since the inception of capitalism with its “free” workers, labor-power, whether it produces boots, linen, coats, or information, is sheer “potentiality.” As Paolo Virno astutely remarks, biopolitics “is merely an effect . . . or . . . one articulation of that primary fact—both historical and philosophical— which consists of the commerce of potential as potential,” that is, the commerce of labor-power (84). For, “where something which exists only as possibility is bought and sold,” Virno continues, “this something is not separable from the living person of the seller,” the “living body of the worker,” which “is the substratum of that labor-power which, in itself, has no existence” (82). The body and life, Virno continues, understood as “pure and simple bios, acquires a specific importance in as much as it is the tabernacle of dynamis, of mere potential,” and it is “for this reason, and this reason alone, [that] it is legitimate to talk about ‘bio-politics’ ” (82). If in capitalist modernity we can legitimately talk of biopolitics— defined as a mode of politics that is concerned with the commerce of the potential as potential—it is because, through the commodification of 105 106 / Being, Time, Bios labor-power in this historical block, “mere potential” becomes a commodity . Biopolitics means that intrinsically entangled with the system of relations that constitute and sustain power is not simply biological life (the physical body of the laborer) but, due to the commodification of labor-power’s potential to actualize itself, also potentiality. Virno’s remarks foreground the historico-philosophical revolution in the capitalist commodification of labor-power. For the first time in history, what is bought and sold is labor-power, that is, pure potentiality , the power of self-actualization—in one word, being or surplus itself. Unlike any other commodity, which in its aspect as use-value is an initself , the use-value of labor-power is being-for-itself-in-itself, the potential (for-itself) of labor to actualize (in-itself) itself. The specific object of biopolitics in the block of capitalist modernity, therefore, is neither biological life nor the immaterial labor and products of informatized capital, but bios qua surplus. The body as the object of biopolitics is the tabernacle of surplus, the potentiality of being to actualize itself in the form of “labour-power . . . as a capacity of the living individual” (Marx 1990, 274; emphasis mine). If this historical philosophic-economic revolution has begun to occur already since the advent of capitalism, why is it first the postmodern or late capitalist discourse that becomes conscious of biopolitics or biopower, so as to render it an explicit object of analysis? Because, as we saw in the chapter “Historiographical Project” in part 2, if there is any teleology in the stages of a given historical block, this is the tendency to actualize in its fullest the potential of the formal structure of the block to which they belong.1 This is why, as Foucault has rightly argued, and both Marx and Virno reaffirm, our discussion of biopolitics must retroactively presuppose an indissoluble link between bios and political power in all secular capitalist modernity. The following is a close examination of bios qua labor-power against the background of the ontology presented in the first part of this work, which will eventually lead us to unraveling at least some aspects of the logic and workings of biopolitics. ...