I don't have something very interesting to add, I found that chapter fascinating and your summary made the concept clearer to my mind.
But LOL did Focault really believe the body was constituted merely by words and thoughts and societal ideas?? I can't fathom how someone can think that. Like, the first time after conceiving that idea that he stumbled over some door step, or had a bout of diarrhea or something it should have become clear to him that physical existence is a reality. Now, I haven't read Focault but I translate the way you describe 'discourse' into 'words, thoughts and societal ideas' which makes that particular idea sound utterly and obviously dumb. Unironically was that what Focault meant? Because if, then damn, we're out of touch as humanity. Only a species of interdimansional beings floating in the information void should ever conceive their bodies as consisting of ideas.
It’s a little -- but not much -- more complex than that. The key is that Foucault and structuralists in general don’t believe we can really know much about or make truth statements regarding physical reality except through our minds.
In fact, this is postmodernism at its core : what we say or think about a thing is the only basis for knowing anything. That’s also why only urban “intellectuals” ever really consider these thinkers worth their attention.
I'm definitely not a Foucault scholar, but I wanted to point out that Foucault is widely regarded not as a structuralist but as a post-structuralist. There appears to be a significant difference.
At the heart of the whole post-modern / post-structuralist wave of philosophy is an important insight about how we 'represent' reality, the world, things, etc. In our representations are conceptual schemas which come not from the thing itself, but from our language and culture. And this amounts to some degree or another of social construction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism There's really no getting around this social construction phenomenon.
However, I agree that it's rather absurd to characterize the body as something which is for the main part nothing more than a social construction, or as being 'constituted' mainly by words. What we require is both an understanding that our representations of the world (and bodies) are inevitably bound up with social construction AND the understanding that the real body is very real indeed. These things are not in opposition to one another in the least. Reason consists in our being able to talk about the real body and the socially constructed one so that the two are fully acknowledged and embraced. Think of this famous painting by Magritte for help on that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
"What we require is both an understanding that our representations of the world (and bodies) are inevitably bound up with social construction AND the understanding that the real body is very real indeed. These things are not in opposition to one another in the least."
I think that the impression that these things are opposed to each other comes partially from the annoying habit (I'm not sure if it's Federici's or Foucault's) of writing "the body" when one means "(the perception of) the body". I assume that this is done in order to point to the fact that Foucault believes that perceiving "the body itself" is impossible, so might as well write "the body" when one means "the perception of the body" but I also think this is somewhat purposeful obfuscation.
It's all a rather vast and difficult topic, this question of the actual body (real body) and the body as presented in representation. I have not read all of the principal philosophical literature on this topic--the Kant and Hume and Descartes and Hegal and Husserl, etc. I hope I never have to! But then, I'm presently writing what amounts to a philosophy book, so damned it all! I suppose I'd have to read all of the fragments of the presocratics and work my way through Plato and Aristotle and all of that crap until my eyes bleed and I die of a heart attack from lack of exercise. The eye strain would be killing, and my soul would not be fed. So I'm not gonna do it. F**k it. I'll find another way -- one which draws a lot on phenomenology and my own damned lived / embodied experience. Who needs Kant and Descartes? I mean, sh*t. What a sorry batch of losers.
The project of setting Certain Knowledge on a logically unassailable Foundation is so last century!
I'm interested in the love of wisdom. And the love of wisdom sure as hell doesn't result in unassailable logical certainty. It wends into the flesh and the world and weaves these two together in such a way that one knows -- KNOWS! -- they were always together to begin with.
Nobody needs Kant or Descartes. Kant didn't even need Kant. But Plato and Aristotle are a joy to read and not at all like the tortured verbiage found in later philosophical texts. They aimed to educate, not to impress upon you how clever they were.
If you read Foucault you can't help but notice his deep skepticism and avoidance of the whole concept that there is such a thing as an objective reality, let alone that it is knowable. He's at his best when discussing the limits of human knowledge, particularly the limits of what can be known through categorization, taxonomy, and quantification, the main tools of the scientific method for fact finding. The Order of Things is his best work on this.
He's at his worst when he clumsily imports concepts that look straight out of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics - something like if an underlying reality cannot be observed, we should accept that it doesn't exist. This pattern of thinking is how you end up with apparent nonsense like "the body is a collection of discursive processes". Or that the only reality is the language we use to describe it. It's internally consistent in his frame but IMO has nothing useful to say (and I suppose that postmodernists might argue that utility is beside the point).
It is pretty clear that capitalism doesn't lead to 'liberation' at all for most people; it needs to keep exploiting and most people (and the natural environment) end up exploited. It's always a case of 'jam tomorrow' but never 'jam today'. The 'jam tomorrow' is held out as a sort of lure which theoretically anyone can get to as long as they 'work hard enough', but which few people do get no matter how hard they work. The few people who do have the jam seem to have inherited it and not got it through 'working hard enough'. Seeing as this has been going on for so long with centuries of evidence I'm surprised that people still fall for the capitalist lure, just as I'm very surprised that people fall for the 'privatisation lure'; better services, more choice, lower prices; when time and time again they've ended up with the exact opposites of these.
'Globalisation', always hailed as so very great for everyone, has just been a project of finding more people to exploit and more natural resources to take and sell.
>> this has been going on for so long with centuries of evidence I'm surprised that people
>> still fall for the capitalist lure, just as I'm very surprised that people fall for the 'privatisation
Sadly, quite a lot of people in this world have never experienced living in any other system; and even sadder - either they never had much imagination to start with, or it got trained/beat out of them at a very early age. They appear unable to imagine the possibility of "doing life" any other way...
Nothing particularly thoughtful to add, but I do so appreciate you taking the time to do this. Your analysis really helps me sort through and solidify what I have read and I do find you much more readable than Ms. Federici.
Not to down play the horror of the witch hunts, from what I have seen of the numbers estimated of deaths it was way less than 100,000’s. Also I was raised in the era of the 1950’s home, which actually extended up into the early 70’s and I didn’t see a low regard for the homemaking wife, but instead a lot of strong respected by their husbands women doing a different style of work than the husband, neighboring women, women friends of my parents, my aunts. This was in working class, rural parts of the Midwest. These women were the volunteer backbone of small town, farming society in so many ways. I did not experience an oppressed class.
No just responding to what you posted and the stereotype of the oppressed 1950’s housewife and what I think may be an inaccurate statistic. I do agree capitalism has fractured society, ripping us away from the natural world and physicality - trans
humanism as liberation - yuck! and the continuing trends are bad. I find the quotes from the author a style of dense academese that makes me think it could be expressed more clearly without loss of meaning. Working my way through it would be painful. Intellectual laziness perhaps? Letting you pre-digest it for me I guess.
I know I did contradict the assumed truths of the horrors of 1950’s family life and the higher postulated number of the witch hunt casualties. According to a long running poll American happiness peaked in 1956! But, deal! I will read these posts and refrain from commenting.
I saw this comment only after having made a couple of comments. And, no, I've not been reading the book -- yet. But I very well might! It sounds great.
Oh, I understand! I just wasn't entirely clear about that when I commented. And now that I know that the book can be downloaded for free immediately, I'll be a legit contributor to the dialogue soon enough. Thanks! It looks like a wonderful and important book.
Not sure about the witch hunt numbers but whatever they are it also worth remembering that the population was far lower then. 50,000 people when the world population (counting India and China) was closer to 1 billion is way more violence per capita than it would be today.
As far as the 1950s thing, I have definitely seen communities where the labor of women is upheld with great honor. That does not mean there is not oppression happening. I have worked in union construction beside men who gave their whole paychecks to their wives to manage. They drove a Geo Metro to work while she had a Cadillac. But some of those women were physically or emotionally abused. They had fewer options in the workforce and could not command a living wage. I know some women in my own family who are now living in poverty because they gave up their own career to do the homemaker thing and then left their husbands after decades of abuse. Back in those days, women couldn’t get their own place to live, or their own bank account without a male relative signing off on it. Women’s career prospects were greatly limited. Many were forced to be homemakers to have any chance at a comfortable life. And once there, women were (and still are) trapped by lack of work experience and lack of independent access to money. It’s worth pointing out that many say they don’t see the oppression of women, yet women who point to oppression get vilified as strident feminists or dismissed and argued into silence. Many women remain silent about their oppressive cause they have internalized patriarchy, or they think whatever they get is the best they can do, or they have simply been punished too much for fighting what they are forced to be and the face they are expected to put on for the world
Thanks, I will look for it. I really identified with many of the stories in the anthology 'Leaning Into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West' by Linda M. Hasselstrom.
Came here to say this, especially in light of her most recent book, 'Feminism Against Progress'. I haven't yet read Federici but my sense is that she and Harrington are in agreement in a number of places.
There is a lot of overlap but also a few very crucial differences between their thinking.
The big place of difference is about control of sexual reproduction. Though both are highly critical of prostitution and the way that capitalism turns women into objects and machines, Federici links the struggle for birth control to a much longer history. Women have always used herbs and other means to prevent conception and birth long before the “cyborg” and “the pill.”
I think Harrington, who is quite brilliant, is nevertheless historically short-sighted in this regard.
Yes, without having read her book, I think I agree with you. Listening to recent interviews she has done, it also seemed like she was making the mistake of seeing pre-capitalist (feudal) Europe as static, as well. I’ll have to check out her book after Federici’s, but in the meantime I’ll ask her if she’s familiar with Federici’s work. I’ll be mighty surprised if she is not.
As always, I’m grateful for the work you do. I read a lot. I find your writing always to be fresh and insightful in ways that stand out.
This is awesome! Caliban and the Witch is such a dense book to unpack. One thought which I’ve had recently (due to the US government whining about deficits and Social Security again) is a consideration of the way in which culture has shifted away from viewing children as having a responsibility to their parents in old age. The new attitude is that parents should be supported by investments in their elder years. Failure to create adequate investments is coming to be seen as a failing, and as an unfair burden upon the younger generations. Which has a couple of interesting implications:
1) The reproductive labor of parents (primarily women) is performed solely as a hobby. There is no reciprocal obligation of mutual aid.
2) The labor of the old is worthless. If Grandma watches the kids, it’s a hobby, not economical vital labor.
3) We can/ should entrust our futures to capitalism rather than to our next of kin. The parents kick their kids out at 18 with a bootstrap lecture and their kids dump them in a nursing home at 80 and move on.
I don’t know, I’m short on time to really think hard enough about this. It just seems to me that there’s something precious being lost when people no longer plan to hand a business off to their kids, or when they are getting a reverse mortgage instead of their kids inheriting their home. Of course, these are privileged positions to be in, to have that kind of wealth to hand down. And then there is the reality that the elderly phase of life will look more and more different for rich vs poor. Poor Grandma will watch her grandkids so her kids can work and be shamed for being a burden while performing economically vital work (daycare is running $1000+/ month with a desperate shortage of providers in the US). Rich Grandma will die of loneliness in a five star nursing home staffed by immigrant women whose mothers are watching their kids at home and being shamed for not having independent retirements.
Edit: I was about to say, that I think that raising children obligates those children towards their parents, but does not obligate society as a whole towards the parents. But rereading your comment, I think you're saying the same anyway.
I think it’s complex. I did see your original comment via email and I both agree and disagree. On the one hand, there are definitely too many humans and having a kid is a dubious “social good”. On the other hand, if everyone chose not to have children (or to not provide the children they have with proper care) human society would crumble. There is also the matter of how child rearing went from a communal event as it is in many cultures to a private matter. I think there are some serious conversations to be had about whether child rearing should be a private matter for the nuclear family and whether telling parents who need support “you chose to have the kids” (and therefore don’t deserve society’s support) is ideological cognate to other arguments like “women choose to take lower paying jobs” or “women choose to take more time off for their families”. Choices are made in a specific social context, and to simply blame “choice to have kids” for the burdens parents face unsupported by society when the continued existence of society depends on having kids seems off to me. Especially when women bear the brunt of the problems arising from writing off their struggles as the result of choices. But yeah, not quite the same issue as elder care.
It's true that there is rarely a choice that women (or anyone, really), make that is not being pushed in the conventional direction by societal forces. But based on that logic, those who do not make the conventional "choice" would never be ethically allowed to argue against having to support those who do, because it could never be proven that the conventional "choice" was 100% a free decision. That just doesn't seem right to me either.
I don’t necessarily agree that the existence of pressures which deeply influence choices means that we can’t ethically argue against having to support the choices made. That seems very either- or and life isn’t either- or. I think there is some balance to be found where we can accept and acknowledge both the consequences of a choice and its social nature without taking on all the responsibility for it. Or, in plainer language, we can both acknowledge that parenting is not a pure social good and still recognize that one of the purposes of human sociability in general is the support of mothers and children.
In the case of deciding to become a parent, most people- including those who have no children and who feel that having children is a morally dubious choice- would be shocked or horrified if every woman decided to get their tubes tied tomorrow. Such a mass move would likely be met with violence to force reproduction if it happened. So it seems clear to me that while individuals have a choice to become parents or not, the institution of parenting is not optional in a real way. And of course, this is an extreme example- no one is threatening a mass tube-tying or forced baby- farming in response. But considering the extreme case can lend insights to less extreme cases- such as pushes to ban abortion or birth control or propaganda directed at parents about how fulfilling parenting (supposedly) is. And it can clarify what choice really means. I find all too often people wave the choice card when they would be extremely unhappy if everyone made the choice they claim is a good option for the individual.
But further, I would say the logic of treating parenting as a hobby could be extended to all reproductive labor. Take cooking. Most in our society could function eating nothing but microwaved prepackaged meals. Therefore, we could say that cooking is nothing more than a hobby and that society has no obligation to respect the labor performed by those who cook meals of quality. Gardening is “inefficient” by capitalist standards compared to buying produce.So why should we as society make room for green spaces? In fact, I would argue that every bit of reproductive labor can be classified as a “hobby”- and that it is the removal of socially necessary work from the public sphere of “social good” to the private sphere of “hobby” that Federici is talking about when she talks about how reproductive labor is an unpaid source of wealth creation.
There is one other thing going on here that I think is worth pointing out in patriarchal culture. And this is the fear of cuckoo syndrome or cuckolding. It’s the fear that one’s effort, labor, or sacrifices will benefit some unrelated child. This is not a given within human societies or among other species. A part of the development of patriarchy was the division between the public and private spheres and the creation of the private home sphere as separate from the public sphere where men did politics and economics. In many societies (including many male-dominated ones) child-rearing is seen as a public affair, and unrelated men and women are expected to support the next generation. It is only within the context of women and children as private property on an individual man that a child’s need becomes a private matter, or that adults feel the need to resource- guard against children. Of course, there is some more complexity here, since the development of civilization led to a vast surplus of humans and the necessity of not sharing everything communally with every kid on the block- let alone in the world. So, I’m not completely blind to the fact that living as we do we can’t take responsibility for all the kids, and we need some sort of deterrent to unbridled population expansion. I just hate the idea of that deterrent being a reality of parents (especially single moms) existing with their children in abject poverty while people smugly tell them it was their choice to have children. In some ways, I think China had the right idea with the one child policy. Society should be able to limit how much it can/ will support children, but parents should also be able to make some reasonable demands on society. For an example, a lot of European countries offer paid maternity leave and guaranteed access to healthcare for kids, which seem like reasonable asks. But then I think you are from Europe, so our differences may just be the result of you feeling society is meeting its obligations to parents while here in the US it’s a shitshow.
"In the case of deciding to become a parent, most people- including those who have no children and who feel that having children is a morally dubious choice- would be shocked or horrified if every woman decided to get their tubes tied tomorrow. Such a mass move would likely be met with violence to force reproduction if it happened."
To turn this around though, if the state decided to forcibly sterilise the entire population, I couldn't imagine the public uprising in the streets then. So having children is not considered optional from the side of the people (most definitely including women as a collective) either.
But yes, I do not think or feel that mothers should be left to starve with their children as punishment for having those, or anything like that. That's utterly barbaric. What I'm arguing against is, perhaps, this martyr-like vibe of motherhood that I get (more on the anglophone internet than in Germany, come to think) that makes it sound as if motherhood is such an affliction that basically everyone owes a mother, honor, endless emotional support and money. I don't trust this attitude in any case I see it.
Quite possibly though, when I think about it, this really is an artifact of living in two different politcal systems. Perhaps for a good number of women in the US, the vibe of motherhood is that of of living in a pityless place, with the abyss always as a possibility beneath you. I'd scream for money, empathy and honor then as well!
Yes, I think you are spot on with the difference in political geography. Because “the vibe of motherhood is that of of living in a pityless place, with the abyss always as a possibility beneath you” describes exactly what motherhood is in the US for many. I can tell you are horrified by the idea of punishing women for having kids, but that’s actually boring normal political fare over here.
Thanks for this introduction to Silvia Federici's thinking: I'll order the book now! Published in 2004, so there's quite a long history of comment and critique: it's good therefore to have your explanation nearly twenty years on. Also, positioning the work in the context of bifurcation in anglophone leftism and feminism is very helpful to a new reader of SF. Her key concept of reproduction immediately made me think of Ivan Illich's Shadow Work. Isn't the same disembodying transition to capitalism being described there in the movement from subsistence to landless wage labour: gives a new meaning to everything solid is melting, or liquifying, perhaps? Rob Simpson.
I am really looking forward to your analysis and the discussions that will follow from this analysis.
For myself it will be exciting to compare and contrast the Kingsnorth tendency towards what he has recently labeled as his reactionary radicalism with the arguments presented in the "No Left Turn," chapter of the recent Hine book "At Work in the Ruins," with your own endorsement of the idea that "by looking at what happened to women's bodies in the transition to capitalism we learn about what happened to all of us as bodies."
Just maybe portions of the recent political/religious ferment on the substack/rumble platforms will help to lead us out of or maybe into the wild!
I get an “unsupported element” for the “pull quote” so I can’t read what is being commented on. Otherwise this is very interesting and I’d like to participate. I believe I’m a paying supporter so I’m wondering if it’s my little iPad. Can anybody help me? 
I have yet to read the book, myself, but I plan to. I've read about it, and the concept of embeddedness, disembeddedness and re-embedding has me very curious to learn more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embeddedness
The pre-capitalist body was, indeed, a very different thing from the capitalist body, as was the relation of that body to the land -- which is really very much at the heart of the matter -- the relation of bodies to land ... and the obliteration of the commons / commoning, and thus of anything resembling functional human communities.
Thanks for the food for thought!
**** Edit ****
I downloaded the book in PDF and then looked in the bibliography, and there it was, as I had hoped!
Polanyi, Karl. (1944). The Great Transformation. New York: Rinehart &
Thank you so very, very much, Rhyd, for the introduction to Federici's work and your, as always, clear elucidations and the platform to discuss it all. And thank you, too, to my co-readers and commenters, so delighted to meet you here!
I have a lot of skin in this puzzle, as a 67 year old woman whose work has been primarily reproductive (forty consecutive years of full-time childrearing, ahem). As a 'mature' student in my early 40s, I studied the anthropological construction of gender, and as a lifelong herbalist, the historical treatment of women healers and the imposition of medical control over the body, and especially the reproductive body. I am well versed in WHAT has happened, but have racked my brains since the age of seventeen over what my years of embodied experience have still been unable to reconcile - WHY? Caliban and the Witch (so far, I am half way) is a revelation.
I'm late to posting! Lovely summary Rhyd. Just wanted to add my thoughts on discourse, as best I understand it. I think a better understanding of what Foucault was trying to make sense of helps explain why the witch hunts are such a glaring omission that Federici takes him to task for.
Foucault wanted to describe the conditions in which human beings shift from the subject to object of political, scientific, economic, legal, and social power. Discourse was the term he used to describe “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” … “The games of truth and error through which being is historically constituted as experience; that is, as something that can and must be thought. what are the games of truth by which man proposes to think his own nature.” (Foucault 1969, 1984).
Discourse is both a model and an instrument that is produced by knowledge and power. Though Foucault doesn’t see power as emanating from a particular source (e.g., the state as in Marxist theory) nor as a strictly a force of oppression, but rather a fluid thing which congeals at terminal points “Power is exercised through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit and exercise this power. They are never the inert or consenting targets of power; they are always it's relays. In other words, power passes through individuals it is not applied to them” (Decoteau 2017).
The power and knowledge which creates this discursive feedback loop with their subject/objects, also created institutions of government that historically have shifted man from being the subject to the object of knowledge.
Since discourse is historically situated, Foucault selected three periods in history (the renaissance, the classical era and the modern era) and attempted to excavate and understand the rules and technologies of power of those times by using a technique of investigation called Archeology. Through Archeology, one uncovers the remnants of an organization of thought he referred to as Episteme – an unconscious scaffolding or network that is used to arrange thought. “The condition of these links resides henceforth outside representation, beyond its immediate visibility, in a sort of behind-the-scenes world even deeper and more dense than representation itself.” (Foucault 1964)
The episteme of the Renaissance era was one which united words and things in terms of resemblance or similarities. Resemblance is the lens through which nature of things is understood. For example, this sort of knowledge might dictate that an attractive person is good because they resemble beauty and a disfigured person is bad because their body is incomplete an ugly. Every aspect of live is a sign or symbol placed by God for man to find and interpret. “And representation … was posited as a form of repetition: the theater of life or the mirror of nature, that was the claim made by all language, its manner of declaring its existence and of formulating its right of speech.” (Foucault 1975)
Resemblance is the condition for knowledge and power in this era and the technology of power at this time is Sovereignty, the power of the crown. Foucault described the power of sovereignty as one that “makes die and lets live.” And the the text which defined the art of this means of governance was Machiavelli’s The Prince. For Machiavelli, the objective of the sovereign is to protect their position as sovereign. “The Prince and the judicial theory of sovereignty are constantly attempting to draw the line between the power of the Prince and any other form of power because its task is to explain and justify this essential discontinuity between them and the art of government is to establish a continuity.” (Foucault 1978). During this period in history, violence and sovereign law are the technologies by which a sovereign maintains power.
During the Classic era, resemblance is replaced by representation as the condition of knowledge. Things are no longer categorized by superstition and resemblances but rather by the use of reason to determine the nature of things. It is this shift that leads to the development of a science which takes into consideration the security and wellbeing of the group rather than just the territory of the sovereign. It’s here that a new form of power technology immerges which is Disciplinary power. This power is not interested in taking but in extracting or obtaining good behavior. It is a matter the economic relation between the cost of repression and the cost of delinquency The power of this era is given by the law. Law can be understood as a force of subtraction in that which removes options and puts restrictions on the body of its subjects.
The intention of these reforms wasn’t longer or harsher punishments but rather to discipline and repress more effectively. Disciplinary power was helped by instruments such as an organized police force, statistics, the coding of criminal behavior and a carceral system. This new science of statistics and standards brought the concept of a population into the discursive and illustrates the shift from subject of power to object of power. “The population now represents more the end of government than the power of the sovereign; the population is the subject of needs, of aspirations, but it is also the object in the hands of the government” (Foucault 1978).
Now the next episteme shift is from representation and reason and to the examination of the internal nature of things as the source of knowledge. The value of the qualities observed is determined by their common denominator. “All value is determined, not according to the instruments that permit its analysis, but according to the conditions of production that have brought it into being; and, even prior to that, the conditions in question are determined by the quantities of labor applied in producing them.” (Foucault 1978)
Conceiving of a society of humans as a population has given rise to more standards and norms by which individuals are measured. A population is what provides the power by which that society’s wealth is created. Thus, standardizing biological concerns like activity rates, diets, sickness, accidents, birth outcomes, etc... allows the population to be assessed, and for those who may fall below the standards encouraged (by varying means) to move towards the center of the curve. This modern conception of population has given rise to a modern governing technology Foucault identified as Biopower.
Described as “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.” Biopower is a set of mechanisms through which basic biological features of people become subject to political power. “And instead of affecting them as a multiplicity of organisms, of bodies capable of performances, and of required performances – as in discipline – one tries to affect, precisely, a population.” (Foucault 1978) It represents the technology of the epistemic shift into the Modern era.
Thanks, I will look for it. I really identified with many of the stories in the anthology 'Leaning Into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West' by Linda M. Hasselstrom.
I'm late because I've been traveling to different communes and just got back to the one I live with in the Ouachita Mts. on unceded Caddo lands. Okay, so I friggin' love this book and I convinced (with no effort) other communards to order a copy. Sitting after two hours setting up pea trellises at Little Flower Catholic Worker's garden it dawned on me that the rigid gender binary she identifies as the basis for the primitive accumulation of each fresh generation of laborers and their estrangement from their labor opens avenues for the reiteration of proletariat strategy. This is what I saw:
- The woman has in her hands the means of production to revive villages and neighborhoods materially and if not the means, she has been expected by the capitalists to know how to mend and sew and heal and reproduce with no material support and has simultaneous been delegated the power to resist these knowledge enclosures through initiating trade guilds, syndicates and unions to pass along the tribal skills she has gaurded through history;
- this shows for queer marxists an understanding of the androgyne as a role to bring unity together within households, trades, cultures, ecologies and parish communes, and hence the liberation of the queer is interdependent with union organizing and models of democracy in loosely federated communal alternatives and solidarity networks so when the end of history comes the earth and means of production are commons. And unity of trade will always call forth androgyny.
Thanks so much! Looking forward to reading chapter 1 and 2
I don't have something very interesting to add, I found that chapter fascinating and your summary made the concept clearer to my mind.
But LOL did Focault really believe the body was constituted merely by words and thoughts and societal ideas?? I can't fathom how someone can think that. Like, the first time after conceiving that idea that he stumbled over some door step, or had a bout of diarrhea or something it should have become clear to him that physical existence is a reality. Now, I haven't read Focault but I translate the way you describe 'discourse' into 'words, thoughts and societal ideas' which makes that particular idea sound utterly and obviously dumb. Unironically was that what Focault meant? Because if, then damn, we're out of touch as humanity. Only a species of interdimansional beings floating in the information void should ever conceive their bodies as consisting of ideas.
It’s a little -- but not much -- more complex than that. The key is that Foucault and structuralists in general don’t believe we can really know much about or make truth statements regarding physical reality except through our minds.
In fact, this is postmodernism at its core : what we say or think about a thing is the only basis for knowing anything. That’s also why only urban “intellectuals” ever really consider these thinkers worth their attention.
I'm definitely not a Foucault scholar, but I wanted to point out that Foucault is widely regarded not as a structuralist but as a post-structuralist. There appears to be a significant difference.
At the heart of the whole post-modern / post-structuralist wave of philosophy is an important insight about how we 'represent' reality, the world, things, etc. In our representations are conceptual schemas which come not from the thing itself, but from our language and culture. And this amounts to some degree or another of social construction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism There's really no getting around this social construction phenomenon.
However, I agree that it's rather absurd to characterize the body as something which is for the main part nothing more than a social construction, or as being 'constituted' mainly by words. What we require is both an understanding that our representations of the world (and bodies) are inevitably bound up with social construction AND the understanding that the real body is very real indeed. These things are not in opposition to one another in the least. Reason consists in our being able to talk about the real body and the socially constructed one so that the two are fully acknowledged and embraced. Think of this famous painting by Magritte for help on that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
"What we require is both an understanding that our representations of the world (and bodies) are inevitably bound up with social construction AND the understanding that the real body is very real indeed. These things are not in opposition to one another in the least."
I think that the impression that these things are opposed to each other comes partially from the annoying habit (I'm not sure if it's Federici's or Foucault's) of writing "the body" when one means "(the perception of) the body". I assume that this is done in order to point to the fact that Foucault believes that perceiving "the body itself" is impossible, so might as well write "the body" when one means "the perception of the body" but I also think this is somewhat purposeful obfuscation.
It's all a rather vast and difficult topic, this question of the actual body (real body) and the body as presented in representation. I have not read all of the principal philosophical literature on this topic--the Kant and Hume and Descartes and Hegal and Husserl, etc. I hope I never have to! But then, I'm presently writing what amounts to a philosophy book, so damned it all! I suppose I'd have to read all of the fragments of the presocratics and work my way through Plato and Aristotle and all of that crap until my eyes bleed and I die of a heart attack from lack of exercise. The eye strain would be killing, and my soul would not be fed. So I'm not gonna do it. F**k it. I'll find another way -- one which draws a lot on phenomenology and my own damned lived / embodied experience. Who needs Kant and Descartes? I mean, sh*t. What a sorry batch of losers.
The project of setting Certain Knowledge on a logically unassailable Foundation is so last century!
I'm interested in the love of wisdom. And the love of wisdom sure as hell doesn't result in unassailable logical certainty. It wends into the flesh and the world and weaves these two together in such a way that one knows -- KNOWS! -- they were always together to begin with.
Nobody needs Kant or Descartes. Kant didn't even need Kant. But Plato and Aristotle are a joy to read and not at all like the tortured verbiage found in later philosophical texts. They aimed to educate, not to impress upon you how clever they were.
If you read Foucault you can't help but notice his deep skepticism and avoidance of the whole concept that there is such a thing as an objective reality, let alone that it is knowable. He's at his best when discussing the limits of human knowledge, particularly the limits of what can be known through categorization, taxonomy, and quantification, the main tools of the scientific method for fact finding. The Order of Things is his best work on this.
He's at his worst when he clumsily imports concepts that look straight out of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics - something like if an underlying reality cannot be observed, we should accept that it doesn't exist. This pattern of thinking is how you end up with apparent nonsense like "the body is a collection of discursive processes". Or that the only reality is the language we use to describe it. It's internally consistent in his frame but IMO has nothing useful to say (and I suppose that postmodernists might argue that utility is beside the point).
It is pretty clear that capitalism doesn't lead to 'liberation' at all for most people; it needs to keep exploiting and most people (and the natural environment) end up exploited. It's always a case of 'jam tomorrow' but never 'jam today'. The 'jam tomorrow' is held out as a sort of lure which theoretically anyone can get to as long as they 'work hard enough', but which few people do get no matter how hard they work. The few people who do have the jam seem to have inherited it and not got it through 'working hard enough'. Seeing as this has been going on for so long with centuries of evidence I'm surprised that people still fall for the capitalist lure, just as I'm very surprised that people fall for the 'privatisation lure'; better services, more choice, lower prices; when time and time again they've ended up with the exact opposites of these.
'Globalisation', always hailed as so very great for everyone, has just been a project of finding more people to exploit and more natural resources to take and sell.
>> this has been going on for so long with centuries of evidence I'm surprised that people
>> still fall for the capitalist lure, just as I'm very surprised that people fall for the 'privatisation
Sadly, quite a lot of people in this world have never experienced living in any other system; and even sadder - either they never had much imagination to start with, or it got trained/beat out of them at a very early age. They appear unable to imagine the possibility of "doing life" any other way...
Yes, sadly very true.
Nothing particularly thoughtful to add, but I do so appreciate you taking the time to do this. Your analysis really helps me sort through and solidify what I have read and I do find you much more readable than Ms. Federici.
I’m glad this helps!
Not to down play the horror of the witch hunts, from what I have seen of the numbers estimated of deaths it was way less than 100,000’s. Also I was raised in the era of the 1950’s home, which actually extended up into the early 70’s and I didn’t see a low regard for the homemaking wife, but instead a lot of strong respected by their husbands women doing a different style of work than the husband, neighboring women, women friends of my parents, my aunts. This was in working class, rural parts of the Midwest. These women were the volunteer backbone of small town, farming society in so many ways. I did not experience an oppressed class.
Are you reading along with us?
No just responding to what you posted and the stereotype of the oppressed 1950’s housewife and what I think may be an inaccurate statistic. I do agree capitalism has fractured society, ripping us away from the natural world and physicality - trans
humanism as liberation - yuck! and the continuing trends are bad. I find the quotes from the author a style of dense academese that makes me think it could be expressed more clearly without loss of meaning. Working my way through it would be painful. Intellectual laziness perhaps? Letting you pre-digest it for me I guess.
Ah I see. :)
You know I adore your comments elsewhere. I think maybe for a book club, it might be best to engage also with the book before commenting.
Similar, say, to how those in a bible study group would probably prefer comments only from those who were also reading with them. 😘
I know I did contradict the assumed truths of the horrors of 1950’s family life and the higher postulated number of the witch hunt casualties. According to a long running poll American happiness peaked in 1956! But, deal! I will read these posts and refrain from commenting.
I saw this comment only after having made a couple of comments. And, no, I've not been reading the book -- yet. But I very well might! It sounds great.
Yeah it’s polite to comment in a book club only if you’re reading with everyone else.
Oh, I understand! I just wasn't entirely clear about that when I commented. And now that I know that the book can be downloaded for free immediately, I'll be a legit contributor to the dialogue soon enough. Thanks! It looks like a wonderful and important book.
Not sure about the witch hunt numbers but whatever they are it also worth remembering that the population was far lower then. 50,000 people when the world population (counting India and China) was closer to 1 billion is way more violence per capita than it would be today.
As far as the 1950s thing, I have definitely seen communities where the labor of women is upheld with great honor. That does not mean there is not oppression happening. I have worked in union construction beside men who gave their whole paychecks to their wives to manage. They drove a Geo Metro to work while she had a Cadillac. But some of those women were physically or emotionally abused. They had fewer options in the workforce and could not command a living wage. I know some women in my own family who are now living in poverty because they gave up their own career to do the homemaker thing and then left their husbands after decades of abuse. Back in those days, women couldn’t get their own place to live, or their own bank account without a male relative signing off on it. Women’s career prospects were greatly limited. Many were forced to be homemakers to have any chance at a comfortable life. And once there, women were (and still are) trapped by lack of work experience and lack of independent access to money. It’s worth pointing out that many say they don’t see the oppression of women, yet women who point to oppression get vilified as strident feminists or dismissed and argued into silence. Many women remain silent about their oppressive cause they have internalized patriarchy, or they think whatever they get is the best they can do, or they have simply been punished too much for fighting what they are forced to be and the face they are expected to put on for the world
Yes, the same can be said of "farm wives" and woman ranchers. Though their recognition is sparse.
Along those lines, for avid readers the book "Breaking Clean" by Judy Blunt is a vivid account of an eastern Montana ranch wife's experiences.
Thanks, I will look for it. I really identified with many of the stories in the anthology 'Leaning Into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West' by Linda M. Hasselstrom.
Hey Rhyd, have you been following Mary Harrington's work of late? It would be great to hear the two of you in conversation regarding this topic.
Came here to say this, especially in light of her most recent book, 'Feminism Against Progress'. I haven't yet read Federici but my sense is that she and Harrington are in agreement in a number of places.
See my comment above.
There is a lot of overlap but also a few very crucial differences between their thinking.
The big place of difference is about control of sexual reproduction. Though both are highly critical of prostitution and the way that capitalism turns women into objects and machines, Federici links the struggle for birth control to a much longer history. Women have always used herbs and other means to prevent conception and birth long before the “cyborg” and “the pill.”
I think Harrington, who is quite brilliant, is nevertheless historically short-sighted in this regard.
Yes, without having read her book, I think I agree with you. Listening to recent interviews she has done, it also seemed like she was making the mistake of seeing pre-capitalist (feudal) Europe as static, as well. I’ll have to check out her book after Federici’s, but in the meantime I’ll ask her if she’s familiar with Federici’s work. I’ll be mighty surprised if she is not.
As always, I’m grateful for the work you do. I read a lot. I find your writing always to be fresh and insightful in ways that stand out.
Her book is on a very long list of books I'd like to read this year. Hopefully I'll be able to make the time.
This is awesome! Caliban and the Witch is such a dense book to unpack. One thought which I’ve had recently (due to the US government whining about deficits and Social Security again) is a consideration of the way in which culture has shifted away from viewing children as having a responsibility to their parents in old age. The new attitude is that parents should be supported by investments in their elder years. Failure to create adequate investments is coming to be seen as a failing, and as an unfair burden upon the younger generations. Which has a couple of interesting implications:
1) The reproductive labor of parents (primarily women) is performed solely as a hobby. There is no reciprocal obligation of mutual aid.
2) The labor of the old is worthless. If Grandma watches the kids, it’s a hobby, not economical vital labor.
3) We can/ should entrust our futures to capitalism rather than to our next of kin. The parents kick their kids out at 18 with a bootstrap lecture and their kids dump them in a nursing home at 80 and move on.
I don’t know, I’m short on time to really think hard enough about this. It just seems to me that there’s something precious being lost when people no longer plan to hand a business off to their kids, or when they are getting a reverse mortgage instead of their kids inheriting their home. Of course, these are privileged positions to be in, to have that kind of wealth to hand down. And then there is the reality that the elderly phase of life will look more and more different for rich vs poor. Poor Grandma will watch her grandkids so her kids can work and be shamed for being a burden while performing economically vital work (daycare is running $1000+/ month with a desperate shortage of providers in the US). Rich Grandma will die of loneliness in a five star nursing home staffed by immigrant women whose mothers are watching their kids at home and being shamed for not having independent retirements.
Edit: I was about to say, that I think that raising children obligates those children towards their parents, but does not obligate society as a whole towards the parents. But rereading your comment, I think you're saying the same anyway.
I think it’s complex. I did see your original comment via email and I both agree and disagree. On the one hand, there are definitely too many humans and having a kid is a dubious “social good”. On the other hand, if everyone chose not to have children (or to not provide the children they have with proper care) human society would crumble. There is also the matter of how child rearing went from a communal event as it is in many cultures to a private matter. I think there are some serious conversations to be had about whether child rearing should be a private matter for the nuclear family and whether telling parents who need support “you chose to have the kids” (and therefore don’t deserve society’s support) is ideological cognate to other arguments like “women choose to take lower paying jobs” or “women choose to take more time off for their families”. Choices are made in a specific social context, and to simply blame “choice to have kids” for the burdens parents face unsupported by society when the continued existence of society depends on having kids seems off to me. Especially when women bear the brunt of the problems arising from writing off their struggles as the result of choices. But yeah, not quite the same issue as elder care.
It's true that there is rarely a choice that women (or anyone, really), make that is not being pushed in the conventional direction by societal forces. But based on that logic, those who do not make the conventional "choice" would never be ethically allowed to argue against having to support those who do, because it could never be proven that the conventional "choice" was 100% a free decision. That just doesn't seem right to me either.
I don’t necessarily agree that the existence of pressures which deeply influence choices means that we can’t ethically argue against having to support the choices made. That seems very either- or and life isn’t either- or. I think there is some balance to be found where we can accept and acknowledge both the consequences of a choice and its social nature without taking on all the responsibility for it. Or, in plainer language, we can both acknowledge that parenting is not a pure social good and still recognize that one of the purposes of human sociability in general is the support of mothers and children.
In the case of deciding to become a parent, most people- including those who have no children and who feel that having children is a morally dubious choice- would be shocked or horrified if every woman decided to get their tubes tied tomorrow. Such a mass move would likely be met with violence to force reproduction if it happened. So it seems clear to me that while individuals have a choice to become parents or not, the institution of parenting is not optional in a real way. And of course, this is an extreme example- no one is threatening a mass tube-tying or forced baby- farming in response. But considering the extreme case can lend insights to less extreme cases- such as pushes to ban abortion or birth control or propaganda directed at parents about how fulfilling parenting (supposedly) is. And it can clarify what choice really means. I find all too often people wave the choice card when they would be extremely unhappy if everyone made the choice they claim is a good option for the individual.
But further, I would say the logic of treating parenting as a hobby could be extended to all reproductive labor. Take cooking. Most in our society could function eating nothing but microwaved prepackaged meals. Therefore, we could say that cooking is nothing more than a hobby and that society has no obligation to respect the labor performed by those who cook meals of quality. Gardening is “inefficient” by capitalist standards compared to buying produce.So why should we as society make room for green spaces? In fact, I would argue that every bit of reproductive labor can be classified as a “hobby”- and that it is the removal of socially necessary work from the public sphere of “social good” to the private sphere of “hobby” that Federici is talking about when she talks about how reproductive labor is an unpaid source of wealth creation.
There is one other thing going on here that I think is worth pointing out in patriarchal culture. And this is the fear of cuckoo syndrome or cuckolding. It’s the fear that one’s effort, labor, or sacrifices will benefit some unrelated child. This is not a given within human societies or among other species. A part of the development of patriarchy was the division between the public and private spheres and the creation of the private home sphere as separate from the public sphere where men did politics and economics. In many societies (including many male-dominated ones) child-rearing is seen as a public affair, and unrelated men and women are expected to support the next generation. It is only within the context of women and children as private property on an individual man that a child’s need becomes a private matter, or that adults feel the need to resource- guard against children. Of course, there is some more complexity here, since the development of civilization led to a vast surplus of humans and the necessity of not sharing everything communally with every kid on the block- let alone in the world. So, I’m not completely blind to the fact that living as we do we can’t take responsibility for all the kids, and we need some sort of deterrent to unbridled population expansion. I just hate the idea of that deterrent being a reality of parents (especially single moms) existing with their children in abject poverty while people smugly tell them it was their choice to have children. In some ways, I think China had the right idea with the one child policy. Society should be able to limit how much it can/ will support children, but parents should also be able to make some reasonable demands on society. For an example, a lot of European countries offer paid maternity leave and guaranteed access to healthcare for kids, which seem like reasonable asks. But then I think you are from Europe, so our differences may just be the result of you feeling society is meeting its obligations to parents while here in the US it’s a shitshow.
"In the case of deciding to become a parent, most people- including those who have no children and who feel that having children is a morally dubious choice- would be shocked or horrified if every woman decided to get their tubes tied tomorrow. Such a mass move would likely be met with violence to force reproduction if it happened."
To turn this around though, if the state decided to forcibly sterilise the entire population, I couldn't imagine the public uprising in the streets then. So having children is not considered optional from the side of the people (most definitely including women as a collective) either.
But yes, I do not think or feel that mothers should be left to starve with their children as punishment for having those, or anything like that. That's utterly barbaric. What I'm arguing against is, perhaps, this martyr-like vibe of motherhood that I get (more on the anglophone internet than in Germany, come to think) that makes it sound as if motherhood is such an affliction that basically everyone owes a mother, honor, endless emotional support and money. I don't trust this attitude in any case I see it.
Quite possibly though, when I think about it, this really is an artifact of living in two different politcal systems. Perhaps for a good number of women in the US, the vibe of motherhood is that of of living in a pityless place, with the abyss always as a possibility beneath you. I'd scream for money, empathy and honor then as well!
Yes, I think you are spot on with the difference in political geography. Because “the vibe of motherhood is that of of living in a pityless place, with the abyss always as a possibility beneath you” describes exactly what motherhood is in the US for many. I can tell you are horrified by the idea of punishing women for having kids, but that’s actually boring normal political fare over here.
Yeah you are completely correct on this.
Thank you Anne, this is such a timely and important discussion.
Summed it up perfectly, Anne. Thank you.
Thanks for this introduction to Silvia Federici's thinking: I'll order the book now! Published in 2004, so there's quite a long history of comment and critique: it's good therefore to have your explanation nearly twenty years on. Also, positioning the work in the context of bifurcation in anglophone leftism and feminism is very helpful to a new reader of SF. Her key concept of reproduction immediately made me think of Ivan Illich's Shadow Work. Isn't the same disembodying transition to capitalism being described there in the movement from subsistence to landless wage labour: gives a new meaning to everything solid is melting, or liquifying, perhaps? Rob Simpson.
There are many more places where Illich’s analysis and Federici’s seem quite complementary, especially in the first chapter.
I am really looking forward to your analysis and the discussions that will follow from this analysis.
For myself it will be exciting to compare and contrast the Kingsnorth tendency towards what he has recently labeled as his reactionary radicalism with the arguments presented in the "No Left Turn," chapter of the recent Hine book "At Work in the Ruins," with your own endorsement of the idea that "by looking at what happened to women's bodies in the transition to capitalism we learn about what happened to all of us as bodies."
Just maybe portions of the recent political/religious ferment on the substack/rumble platforms will help to lead us out of or maybe into the wild!
I’ll admit that a tiny motivation in hosting this book club was to coax both Paul and Dougald into reading Federici.
My only disagreement with Dougald’s brilliant book was that he used the Techno-Utopian Socialists as a stand-in for the entire left in that chapter.
Thanks for clarifying some of the academic jargon ("discursive" and "reproduction," particularly.
I get an “unsupported element” for the “pull quote” so I can’t read what is being commented on. Otherwise this is very interesting and I’d like to participate. I believe I’m a paying supporter so I’m wondering if it’s my little iPad. Can anybody help me? 
Can you try another browser perhaps? It is probably something with the iPad. Or maybe check the email version.
Thanks Rhyd. This is a good piece.
It had me wondering whether Caliban & The Witch drew upon or mentioned
The Great Transformation, by Karl Polanyi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Transformation_(book)
Happily, the book is available for free online.:
https://ia801401.us.archive.org/6/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.46560/2015.46560.Great-Transformation_text.pdf
I have yet to read the book, myself, but I plan to. I've read about it, and the concept of embeddedness, disembeddedness and re-embedding has me very curious to learn more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embeddedness
The pre-capitalist body was, indeed, a very different thing from the capitalist body, as was the relation of that body to the land -- which is really very much at the heart of the matter -- the relation of bodies to land ... and the obliteration of the commons / commoning, and thus of anything resembling functional human communities.
Thanks for the food for thought!
**** Edit ****
I downloaded the book in PDF and then looked in the bibliography, and there it was, as I had hoped!
Polanyi, Karl. (1944). The Great Transformation. New York: Rinehart &
Company, Inc.
I'm going to dig into Caliban & the Witch now.
Thank you so very, very much, Rhyd, for the introduction to Federici's work and your, as always, clear elucidations and the platform to discuss it all. And thank you, too, to my co-readers and commenters, so delighted to meet you here!
I have a lot of skin in this puzzle, as a 67 year old woman whose work has been primarily reproductive (forty consecutive years of full-time childrearing, ahem). As a 'mature' student in my early 40s, I studied the anthropological construction of gender, and as a lifelong herbalist, the historical treatment of women healers and the imposition of medical control over the body, and especially the reproductive body. I am well versed in WHAT has happened, but have racked my brains since the age of seventeen over what my years of embodied experience have still been unable to reconcile - WHY? Caliban and the Witch (so far, I am half way) is a revelation.
I'm late to posting! Lovely summary Rhyd. Just wanted to add my thoughts on discourse, as best I understand it. I think a better understanding of what Foucault was trying to make sense of helps explain why the witch hunts are such a glaring omission that Federici takes him to task for.
Foucault wanted to describe the conditions in which human beings shift from the subject to object of political, scientific, economic, legal, and social power. Discourse was the term he used to describe “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” … “The games of truth and error through which being is historically constituted as experience; that is, as something that can and must be thought. what are the games of truth by which man proposes to think his own nature.” (Foucault 1969, 1984).
Discourse is both a model and an instrument that is produced by knowledge and power. Though Foucault doesn’t see power as emanating from a particular source (e.g., the state as in Marxist theory) nor as a strictly a force of oppression, but rather a fluid thing which congeals at terminal points “Power is exercised through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit and exercise this power. They are never the inert or consenting targets of power; they are always it's relays. In other words, power passes through individuals it is not applied to them” (Decoteau 2017).
The power and knowledge which creates this discursive feedback loop with their subject/objects, also created institutions of government that historically have shifted man from being the subject to the object of knowledge.
Since discourse is historically situated, Foucault selected three periods in history (the renaissance, the classical era and the modern era) and attempted to excavate and understand the rules and technologies of power of those times by using a technique of investigation called Archeology. Through Archeology, one uncovers the remnants of an organization of thought he referred to as Episteme – an unconscious scaffolding or network that is used to arrange thought. “The condition of these links resides henceforth outside representation, beyond its immediate visibility, in a sort of behind-the-scenes world even deeper and more dense than representation itself.” (Foucault 1964)
The episteme of the Renaissance era was one which united words and things in terms of resemblance or similarities. Resemblance is the lens through which nature of things is understood. For example, this sort of knowledge might dictate that an attractive person is good because they resemble beauty and a disfigured person is bad because their body is incomplete an ugly. Every aspect of live is a sign or symbol placed by God for man to find and interpret. “And representation … was posited as a form of repetition: the theater of life or the mirror of nature, that was the claim made by all language, its manner of declaring its existence and of formulating its right of speech.” (Foucault 1975)
Resemblance is the condition for knowledge and power in this era and the technology of power at this time is Sovereignty, the power of the crown. Foucault described the power of sovereignty as one that “makes die and lets live.” And the the text which defined the art of this means of governance was Machiavelli’s The Prince. For Machiavelli, the objective of the sovereign is to protect their position as sovereign. “The Prince and the judicial theory of sovereignty are constantly attempting to draw the line between the power of the Prince and any other form of power because its task is to explain and justify this essential discontinuity between them and the art of government is to establish a continuity.” (Foucault 1978). During this period in history, violence and sovereign law are the technologies by which a sovereign maintains power.
During the Classic era, resemblance is replaced by representation as the condition of knowledge. Things are no longer categorized by superstition and resemblances but rather by the use of reason to determine the nature of things. It is this shift that leads to the development of a science which takes into consideration the security and wellbeing of the group rather than just the territory of the sovereign. It’s here that a new form of power technology immerges which is Disciplinary power. This power is not interested in taking but in extracting or obtaining good behavior. It is a matter the economic relation between the cost of repression and the cost of delinquency The power of this era is given by the law. Law can be understood as a force of subtraction in that which removes options and puts restrictions on the body of its subjects.
The intention of these reforms wasn’t longer or harsher punishments but rather to discipline and repress more effectively. Disciplinary power was helped by instruments such as an organized police force, statistics, the coding of criminal behavior and a carceral system. This new science of statistics and standards brought the concept of a population into the discursive and illustrates the shift from subject of power to object of power. “The population now represents more the end of government than the power of the sovereign; the population is the subject of needs, of aspirations, but it is also the object in the hands of the government” (Foucault 1978).
Now the next episteme shift is from representation and reason and to the examination of the internal nature of things as the source of knowledge. The value of the qualities observed is determined by their common denominator. “All value is determined, not according to the instruments that permit its analysis, but according to the conditions of production that have brought it into being; and, even prior to that, the conditions in question are determined by the quantities of labor applied in producing them.” (Foucault 1978)
Conceiving of a society of humans as a population has given rise to more standards and norms by which individuals are measured. A population is what provides the power by which that society’s wealth is created. Thus, standardizing biological concerns like activity rates, diets, sickness, accidents, birth outcomes, etc... allows the population to be assessed, and for those who may fall below the standards encouraged (by varying means) to move towards the center of the curve. This modern conception of population has given rise to a modern governing technology Foucault identified as Biopower.
Described as “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.” Biopower is a set of mechanisms through which basic biological features of people become subject to political power. “And instead of affecting them as a multiplicity of organisms, of bodies capable of performances, and of required performances – as in discipline – one tries to affect, precisely, a population.” (Foucault 1978) It represents the technology of the epistemic shift into the Modern era.
Sorry that turned into a lot.
Thanks, I will look for it. I really identified with many of the stories in the anthology 'Leaning Into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West' by Linda M. Hasselstrom.
I'm late because I've been traveling to different communes and just got back to the one I live with in the Ouachita Mts. on unceded Caddo lands. Okay, so I friggin' love this book and I convinced (with no effort) other communards to order a copy. Sitting after two hours setting up pea trellises at Little Flower Catholic Worker's garden it dawned on me that the rigid gender binary she identifies as the basis for the primitive accumulation of each fresh generation of laborers and their estrangement from their labor opens avenues for the reiteration of proletariat strategy. This is what I saw:
- The woman has in her hands the means of production to revive villages and neighborhoods materially and if not the means, she has been expected by the capitalists to know how to mend and sew and heal and reproduce with no material support and has simultaneous been delegated the power to resist these knowledge enclosures through initiating trade guilds, syndicates and unions to pass along the tribal skills she has gaurded through history;
- this shows for queer marxists an understanding of the androgyne as a role to bring unity together within households, trades, cultures, ecologies and parish communes, and hence the liberation of the queer is interdependent with union organizing and models of democracy in loosely federated communal alternatives and solidarity networks so when the end of history comes the earth and means of production are commons. And unity of trade will always call forth androgyny.
Thanks so much! Looking forward to reading chapter 1 and 2