Course Schedule

Course Schedule

Veranstaltungen von Raffaele Maria Campanile

Lehrveranstaltungen

Transformation 13: From the "norm" to the "performance": A critique of the present and perspectives for a radical democracy (Übung)

Inhalt: The aim of this course is to retrace, through a genealogical approach, the transition from a society of the “norm”, corresponding to the Fordist phase of factory production, to a society of “performance”, emerging in a neo-liberal and post-Fordist horizon, in which production tends to become increasingly intellectual and affective. Through this genealogical path, it will be possible not only to identify the conflicts that run through the present spaces and forms of life, but also to meditate on the possibilities of emancipation that are opening up: that is, on the possibility of a “radical democracy”, in the dual sense of self-government – universal participation in the definition of “common” strategies – and of “common” access to collectively produced wealth. We will start with some essentially paradigmatic questions: what does transformation mean? How does it relate to history? And then, what is power? How does it relate to knowledge? How is it exercised? What is at stake, in fact, in the light of the Foucauldian genealogy and of his analytics of power, is to show how power should be understood as a “device”, as a rationality – which produces and presupposes knowledge – that disposes of social operators according to certain regularities, certain strategies and certain logics crossed by conflictual and moving configurations: as a “government”. On this basis, the essential features of the “government of the norm” and the relations of forces that run through it will be analyzed. With Marx, Gramsci and Foucault (in a comparison with Taylor’s scientific management) it will be shown how this type of society emerges in a phase in which production is essentially factory production – manual labor – which requires a worker accustomed to the high rhythms of the machine. This presupposes a system of disciplines, both internal to the factory and external, that give a “norm” to the bodies: inside the factory the worker’s body must be adapted to the dispositions that the “manager” identifies as most rational; outside, his desire must be controlled, moralized, so that activities that make him ineffective at work are neutralized (prostitution, alcoholism, gambling…); bodies without norms must be renormalized through penal systems, asylums, hospitals, whose purpose is, on the one hand, to transform the body into a matter that can receive a rhythm and, on the other, to accustom the individual to the market: that is, to transform him into labor-force; women’s bodies, on the contrary, taking Federici’s approach, are to be transformed into reproductive machines and sexual objects for the male worker. The society of the norm, therefore, defines forms of social disqualification in terms of “abnormality”: he who cannot give himself a norm is disqualified. It will therefore be a matter of identifying the three main forms of subordination that modernity has produced: class, gender, race (the latter analyzed mainly through Fanon). It will then be a matter of recognizing the transition from this government of the “norm” to the government of “performance”. As a first point, it is necessary to identify which transformations in production processes took place around the 1970s: 1) a process of financialization of the economy, as a reaction to the increase in wages that followed both the post-war economic expansion and the workers‘ and students’ demands of the 1960s; 2) a restructuring of the nation-state and the dismantling of welfare systems, i.e. the increasing dependence of the nation-state on the markets (and profit expectations), which has necessitated – in the name of “competitiveness” – processes of privatization, reduction of public spending and, consequently, the abandonment of social objectives that do not guarantee profits; 3) a transformation of production in the western world as a result of the “democratization of knowledge”, i.e. the emergence of an increasingly intellectual and affective production that has transformed the spaces and times of work (increase of “flexible” jobs outside the factory). This has led to a new logic of government no longer centered on the “norm” but on “performance”; that is, it is a matter of making every social agent, from the state to the individual, competitive, i.e. putting the whole of life at work: on the one hand, in fact, in post-Fordist production aptitudes, skills, creativity, the individual in his totality are subsumed under the processes of valorization and, on the other, it is desire itself – held back in the society of the norm – that is unleashed: it becomes, in fact, not only what sets consumption in motion but, above all, what leads one to be as high-performing as possible. It imposes self-discipline and self-exploitation. This is, therefore, the way in which the worker is made more competitive. This historical horizon has allowed the emergence of a neo-liberal government of life, i.e., a society of “performance”. Its logic, in fact, aims to produce scarcity everywhere so as to create competition among individuals reduced to entrepreneurs. In this sense, the ideal of “profit” is what mobilizes bodies, whereas the ideal of the norm gave fixed places. If, therefore, the disqualification of the society of the norm referred to abnormality, the subordination typical of the society of performance corresponds to the different access to goods and services in a system of borders. This historical-genealogical reconstruction allows us not only to propose a map to understand and criticize the present, but also to identify a perspective of emancipation. If, in fact, all capitalist production has operated through “differential inclusions”, whether through the norm or through the competition, a democratic social transformation can only be based on the universal access both to decision-making processes and to socially produced goods. In the first case, taking up a tradition that goes from Marx to Negri, passing through Gramsci, “democracy” can only be constructed through the translation into a common language of the dispersed demands that oppose any form of social disqualification: the “forum” or “assembly” seem, therefore, to be the institutional paradigms for a democratic practice. In the second case it is necessary to hypothesize a common use of wealth starting from a critique of the concept of “private property”. Assuming Esposito’s perspective, which refers at least implicitly to Rousseau and Marx, “private property” is thought as a “negation of the common”, i.e., as appropriation. This category therefore presents an aporia: insofar as the appropriation appropriates, it testifies to how the appropriated object is originally, essentially non-property; in other words, property presupposes the “improper”. In this sense, the reproduction of property (through state, police, discipline, low) confirms the possibility of common access to wealth. This path seeks to integrate issues of political philosophy, of history of economic processes and law. Its aim is not only to identify the social transformations that led from a society of the norm to a society of competition, but above all to hypothesize a social transformation leading to a form of democratic life. This course will present two methods of research and critique within the field of political philosophy and, in particular, within the Marxist and post-structuralist tradition: the analytics of power – of the mechanisms that regulate social reproduction – and genealogy – as the reconstruction of historical processes on the basis of relations of forces. Both present, in fact, a critical potential capable of understanding not only the historicity of practices consolidated in the present but also the possibilities of transformation that they open up. The idea of this seminar is to be as horizontal as possible. In each lesson, after an introduction on the central methods of research and the fundamental questions, a debate is planned. The students will receive the didactic material before each lesson so that the dialogue will be more participative. Similarly, each student (in different research groups) will be required to present ideas and thoughts emerging from the indicated pages. Each student (through group works) will be required to investigate one of the themes identified and to present it in class. They will have to carry out a research work that, although based on an agreed bibliography, leads to autonomous reflections that contribute to the seminar and to the horizontal nature of the course. If required, other topics inherent to the course can be developed by the students in their presentations: for example, the ecological question, perspectives from the queer studies, the problem of colonialism… Main points and authors: 1) Exposition of the question 2) Modern paradigm of historical knowledge (Hegel) 3) Challenging the dominant modern historicity: genealogy (Foucault) 4) Power as rationality and as government of conducts (Foucault) 5) Discipline and law (Foucault) 6) The norm, the abnormal and the government of the population (Foucault) 7) Class, Gender, Race: Class (Foucault) 8) Class, Gender, Race: Gender (Federici, Foucault) 9) Class, Gender, Race: Race (Fanon, Said) 10) Post-Fordism and Neoliberalism (Marazzi, Dardot, Laval) 11) Society of performance (Dardot, Laval) 12) Immunization: State and Property (Esposito, Locke, Hobbes) 13) Communitas and Common (Esposito, Dardot, Laval) 14) Conclusion and recapitulation

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