nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

onds? Can it not bind and loosen all bonds? Is it therefore not theuniversal means of separation? It is the true agent of separation and thetrue cementing agent, it is the chemical power of society. 32Slowly this mediation is stabilized and generalised as a relation betweenworking poor and employers; the wage becomes a mediation holding togetherlabourers and capital (and leaves many women as dependants on eitherside: as maids of the bourgeoisie or wives of workers). In these processes therelations of externality between different individuals and groups of people –owners, paupers etc. – are stabilized into a functioning and crisis ridden system.As the opposed forces produced by primitive accumulation become evermore integrated, it becomes more and more difficult to imagine their reproductionautonomously of one another: real oppositions are mediated to becomecontradictions in a system very different from the monarchical systempreceding it. If the social body of Hobbes’ Leviathan is a mechanistic bodyconsisting of competing and warring forces united under the will of the king,the new body is organic, self-organised, and functionally integrated. We canthus read Foucault’s analysis of the passage from sovereign power to biopowerin terms of a transition between two ways of dealing with the proletarianizedmasses: from the penal state to the bourgeois state. Arguably, Hegel’s dialectic– where contradiction is central to development – is a perfect representationof the way capital and the bourgeois state makes conflict productive, i.e. anelement of the augmentation, development of the system itself, and how ittransforms external opposition into a dynamic organic unity.Money and the law are ways the opposing forces of the poor and thewealthy become ‘passively’ combined. Then, within the mediation of state andcapital, the opposition between these forces is subsumed but not abolished, ina productive and uneasy mutual dependence, in a contradictory unity ratherthan an real opposition. When money functions as capital its relation tothe workers becomes active, teleological: the telos is the increment of capital,valorisation. A systemic antagonism is formed. The secret of the relation is itsasymmetry: capital cannot survive without the proletariat (and the state withoutits subjects...), the proletariat can – if it abolishes the proletarian condition,i.e. itself – survive without capital and the state. Still capital and the stateare in control as long as the proletarians are dispersed and individualised,competing, hostile, fearful... This gives us the obverse of the asymmetry before:the body of a proletarianised individual cannot survive without capital,while capital can survive without any contingent body individual, it can anddoes cast people off in great numbers as unemployed, and slum-dwellers. 33It is through the collective organisation and struggle of proletarians that the210