nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

the individual as homo economicus, citizen, juridical subject is produced by themarket and capital, taxation, sovereign power, border regimes, welfare apparatuses,censuses, the legal system... But it also works the other way around: thefact of individualisation, which is based on the separation of bodies throughthe destruction of communal and traditional ties in the processes of primitiveaccumulation, has allowed for the extension and development of totalisingpowers. To understand how we arrive at today’s highly mediated society (integratedyet divided, totalising, individualising) we must understand how processesof dispossession and enclosure make possible a new mode of social integration,which reproduces separation as it abolishes its most brute existence.The separation brought about by the violence of dispossession and displacement,destroys social bonds of trusts, throws people into abject povertyand mi/vagrancy. Many have to steal to live. The destruction of communitiesof custom and morality means that the state and churches take on the task ofimposing new customs and laws on the scattered individuals from without.The ‘modern epoch’ in Europe began with a dismembering of feudal societywhich produced the ‘necessity’ of totalising bodies, the re-joining of the brokenlimbs into something which was always considered monstrous, even byits ideologues, for instance Thomas Hobbes. Processes of primitive accumulationare at once political and economic, or rather they precede and create theconditions for the separation between politics and economics: politics as theordered mediation of conflicts within an economy which is the normalisationof the relation between the dispossessed, virtual paupers and capitalists.Primitive accumulation forces people into towns and cities, to engage inrelations with the urban bourgeoisie whose existence was hitherto relativelyirrelevant to the everyday of the peasants. At first the relation between thesegroups is one of real opposition between the propertied town dwellers and thenew migrants: the dispossessed poor steal and engage in illicit business, andincreasingly have to rely on traditional rights and the commons. 30 And just asfast as this happens new and harsher penalties for old crimes are introduced,while new legal prohibitions and hence new crimes are invented. 31 As daylabourers the paupers engage in brief relations with the wealthy town folks,mediated by money. Bringing together the surplus wealth of the expropriatorsand the ‘free labour power’ of the paupers capitalism as a social modeof production can and does arise. Money becomes the general condition forparticipation in society: If you don’t have it you are compelled to obtain it, beit by working, stealing, or selling:If money is the bond which ties me to human life and society to me,which links me to nature and to man, is money not the bond of all209