-
The South Atlantic Quarterly 111:2, Spring 2012DOI
10.1215/00382876-1548257% 2012 Duke University Press
Michael Hardt
Falsify the Currency!
In his !nal lectures at the Collge de France, during the last
months of his life, Michel Fou-cault celebrated the practices of
the ancient cyn-ics as a model of philosophical and political life.
He anachronistically characterized the work of the cynics as a form
of militancy, which he situ-ated in line with modern revolutionary
struggles. The dog philosophy of the cynics, in fact, their
practices of poverty, their methods of attacking existing social
institutions, and their strategies to create new forms of social
life appear in Fou-caults hands to surpass the modern
revolution-ary traditions in some respects and serve as a
productive basis for thinking political activity and transformation
in the age of biopolitics.1 In the course of his analysis of the
cynics, Foucault recounts an enigmatic story about Diog-enes of
Sinope. According to one account told by Diogenes Lartius, an
ancient historian, Dioge-nes of Sinope goes to the Oracle at Delphi
to seek advice, and the Oracle instructs him to Falsify the
currency! (Parakharattein to nomisma). The ancient historian
reports several versions of Diogeness biography to shed light on
this enig-matic mandate. According to one source Foucault cites,
for example, Diogeness father worked as a money changer in Sinope
and was then convicted
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360%The South Atlantic Quarterly Spring 2012
of counterfeiting and, thus, literally, changing the face or
e$gy imprinted on coins. (Although the verb in the Greek phrase
parakharattein to nomisma is usually rendered in English as to
falsify, a more literal translation is to change the face or
character of the currencyan etymology closely related to that of
the English word counterfeit.) Foucault shows little interest in
such biographical explanations, however, and focuses instead on the
philo-sophical resonances of the Oracles words. What is important,
and what in any case I want to retain, Foucault explains, is that
the principlealter your currency, change the value of your
currencyis taken to be a principle of life, and even the most
fundamental and most characteris-tic principle of the cynics.2
Foucault goes even further by noting the lin-guistic resonance in
Greek between nomisma (currency) and nomos (norms and customs). The
principle to alter the nomisma, Foucault continues, is also that to
change custom, break with it, smash the rules, habits,
conven-tions, and laws.3 It is probable, in fact, Foucault claims,
that regardless of its original formulation, the principle was
received and understood in this way as a mandate for social
transformation. To change the currency thus becomes a project to
create a new life and a new world. Foucault passes over this story
relatively quickly in his lectures, but I think it is useful to
investigate more deeply the possible meanings of the Oracles
mandate. What can we make of the Oracles instruction to change the
face of the currency, and more importantly, what does this task
illumi-nate about how the militancy of the cynics can serve, as
Foucault seems to suggest, as an adequate strategy in the age of
biopolitics? The ancient story of Diogenes becomes more meaningful
for us, I will argue, once we recog-nize that value in the realm of
biopolitics is not only plastic but also immea-surable, revealing a
curious and disconcerting symmetry between the tech-nologies of
!nance and those of biopolitical production. Particularly in the
context of the current economic and !nancial crisis, the mandate to
falsify the currency thus takes on a double meaning. On the one
hand, it cap-tures the way that the instruments of !nancial
control, especially !nancial derivatives, transform social values
to corral and capture them in the pro-cesses of capitalist
accumulation. On the other hand, though, and in oppo-sition to
this, biopolitical struggles against neoliberal capitalist control
also have to discover mechanisms or technologies to transform the
currency or, really, to put a new face on social value. What I
propose in this essay, then, is not so much an interpretation of
Foucault but rather an investigation of the possibilities for
biopolitical struggle in and against the crisis, which takes some
of Foucaults suggestions as points of departure.
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Hardt Falsify the Currency!%361
Financial Falsi!cations
It can easily appear, especially in times of crisis, as if
!nance capital and neoliberal governments have heeded the Oracles
mandate to Diogenes because they do operate by falsifying the
currency.4 When housing prices, stock market indexes, and other
representations of value fall back to earth after a bubble, it is
clear that !nance markets are not working in a !eld of !xed or
stable values but rather treat values as mobile and plastic,
manipu-lating them for pro!t. Finance works, one might say, by
constantly seeking to change the face or character of value. The
strategies applied by neolib-eral governments to address crises
equally seek to transform (uid value structures. Currency
devaluations, of course, such as the devaluation of the Argentine
peso during the economic crisis of December 2001, are a standard
weapon in the arsenal of neoliberal governments and the
Interna-tional Monetary Fund to restructure economic values. In
addition, falsi!ca-tion of the currency is an accurate
characterization of austerity programs, projects to privatize
public goods and industries, defunding of pensions, bailouts of
banks and industries, along with the more general e)orts to recast
established social contracts and restructure the relationship
between business and labor. Programs of falsi!cation like these
have been deployed on a massive scale throughout the world since
the 2008 crisis. Here, too, even when such neoliberal strategies
are cast as returning to real values by paying the debts of
previous pro(igacy, these actions really serve to capital-ize on
the plasticity of value by transforming its face or character in
order to shift wealth and debt from one segment of society to
another. Recognizing these strategies to transform values and, in
this sense, falsify the currency by not only bankers, speculators,
and !nanciers but also neoliberal governments and institutions
leads many to advocate an opposite strategy. The cause of the
crisis, such analyses contend, as well as the injustice of the
neoliberal responses to it, derives from the fact that the real
economy has been subordinated to the !ctional economy. Financial
values are !ctional in the sense that they are not controlled by
the stable tradi-tional measures of the industrial economy and are
thus subject to irratio-nal, swift rises and falls. Casino
capitalism fueled by the manipulations of speculation is not only
unjust in its distribution of wealth but also con-stantly runs the
risk of crisis. The root of economic and !nancial crisis from this
perspective can thus be traced to the loss of measure: the
!nan-cial instruments have defaced the real and measurable values
of material goods, particularly industrial goods, and distorted
their measures. The only possible strategy to address such crises,
then, as well as the adequate form
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of resistance to !nance is to restore the primacy of the real
economy and subordinate to it !nance and !ctional values. This is,
the argument goes, how we must counter the defacers of the
currency. The mandate of the cyn-ics to falsify the currency thus
serves in this context as an indictment of those powers that
control and distort the contemporary economy.5 My view is that this
conventional narrative about the priority of the !ctional over the
real economy as both a basis of economic injustice and cause of
crisis, which I have presented in abbreviated form, is half right.
It is important to recognize today the !ctional nature of !nance,
the plas-ticity of economic values, and the ways that !nancial
instruments as well as neoliberal governments function by
transforming values and changing the face of the currency. The
mistake is to challenge these !ctional values by relying on the
stable values of the real economy. There is nothing more real in
the storeroom of capitalist production, Alain Badiou contends, than
on its trading (oor or in its hedge funds.6 The division between
real and !ctional, I argue, misrecognizes the dominant forms of
production and property that characterize the economy today,
maintaining, in e)ect, an industrial imaginary in the age of
biopolitical production. In addition, in the context of my
discussion here, this view of the contemporary economy limits us to
seeing the mandate of the cynics as a purely negative opera-tion.
In the contemporary economic context how can we make our own the
project to change the face of the currency and transform economic
and social values?
Immeasurable Values of Biopolitical Production
The !rst step toward understanding how Diogeness mandate could
be made our own is to recognize that we are entering an age of
biopolitical pro-duction in which the values of economic production
are not stable and are, in themselves, fundamentally immeasurable.
To avoid confusion I should state straight away that the claim that
the capitalist economy has entered an age of biopolitical
production, which many authors including Antonio Negri and myself
have argued, does not imply that there are fewer workers today in
industry, agriculture, or any other traditional sector. The claim
is not primarily quantitative but qualitative. This is clear if one
steps back to look at the previous stage. From the mid- nineteenth
century through the end of the twentieth century, the predominance
of industrial production was not de!ned in quantitative terms. Even
in the most developed indus-trial countries during the height of
Fordism, the majority of workers were
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Hardt Falsify the Currency!%363
not in the factories. Instead what de!ned the era as industrial
was that the qualities of industry, including its mechanical
instruments, its wage rela-tions, its working day, and its
temporalities, were progressively imposed over the other sectors of
economic production and over society as a whole. Today the
tendency, we claim, is for the qualities not of industry but rather
of biopolitical production to dominate. By biopolitical production
I understand this to mean the produc-tion of goods that are
characterized primarily not by material but rather by immaterial
attributes. The production of ideas, images, languages, code,
a)ects, and social relationship is typical of the biopolitical
economy. Health, education, service work, care work, scienti!c
work, communications indus-tries, and cultural production are some
of the economic sectors in which biopolitical production is most
evident, but in order for the claim to hold water one would have to
verify the tendency for all sectors of the econ-omy and the entire
society to be progressively in(uenced and transformed by the
qualities and relations of biopolitical production, in the same way
that the in(uence of industrial production was felt previously. One
would have to demonstrate, for example, the pressure for industrial
production to become communicative, for agriculture to become more
focused on infor-mation (in the germplasm of seeds, for example),
and for other sectors to adopt such relational qualities.7 A series
of transformations of economic life and economic theory follows
from this tendency, including a blurring of the conventional
boundary between production and reproduction as well as that
between work time and nonwork time, putting into question the
status of the working day. Such claims require extensive
argumentation and evidence, which has been pursued elsewhere.8 Most
important for my argument here is that the ultimate aim of
biopolitical production is the cre-ation and maintenance of a form
of life. This is indeed part of the rationale for naming such
production biopolitical. The perspective of biopolitical production
helps us understand Karl Marxs argument that, whereas the commodity
is the initial form of appear-ance of value in capitalist society,
capital is ultimately a social relation, which must constantly be
reproduced. Foucault extends this Marxian line of thinking further
in an interview with Duccio Trombadori, when, in order to explain
the di)erence between his thought and that of the Frankfurt School,
he re(ects on Marxs notion that man produces man. Whereas Marxs
statement read as a principle of humanism would mean, Fou-cault
explains, producing the human according to a preexisting essence,
the process must be understood instead as an act of creation,
producing a
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humanity that did not previously exist, a production that
conventional capi-talist economic schema cannot grasp. I do not
agree, Foucault continues, with those who would understand this
production of man by man as being accomplished like the production
of value, the production of wealth, or of an object of economic
use; it is, on the contrary, destruction of what we are and the
creation of something completely other, a total innovation.9
Bio-political production, which involves the production of social
relations, sub-jectivities, and forms of life, constantly exceeds
the measures of capitalist command and accumulation. The passage to
the predominance of biopolitical production in the economy can be
recognized also in terms of a parallel tendency whereby immaterial
forms of property are becoming increasingly important with respect
to traditional material forms. In some ways, todays clash in the
realm of property is similar to the con(ict at the dawn of the
industrial era, which Marx describes between the property of the
landed aristocracy and that of the new industrial bourgeoisie. He
characterizes this as a battle between immobile property (such as
land) and mobile property (including industrial commodities). The
dynamic qualities of mobility, Marx claims, will inevitably
overcome the !xed values of immobile property. Today the primary
challenge in the realm of property is no longer the one that
mobility poses to !xed property or even really what immateriality
poses for material property but rather the challenge of
reproducibility posed by bio-political products. Biopolitical
products, such as ideas, knowledge, a)ects, code, and the like, are
easily reproducible and tend to escape or over(ow the logic of
scarcity and the legal boundaries that police and sustain
traditional property relations. Legal mechanisms such as patents
and copyrights seek to counter the reproducible nature of
biopolitical goods in order to main-tain private ownership and
impose over them a logic of scarcity. Struggles over
pharmaceuticals, biopiracy, and the ownership of seeds are only
some examples of the vast arenas of legal battles over biopolitical
forms of prop-erty. But just as in Marxs time it was clear that
mobility and mobile prop-erty would progressively come to
predominate in property relations, so, too, is it clear today that
the reproducibility of biopolitical products will eventually
transform and characterize the legal realm of contemporary property
relations.10 If it is true, as we maintain, that biopolitical
production is becoming predominant in the economy, then, to come
back to my earlier point, it makes little sense to criticize the
!ctional capital of !nance and specula-tion in the name of the real
economy and its solid values. It may appear
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Hardt Falsify the Currency!%365
that in the biopolitical economy the relative stability provided
by the pre-dominance of material, industrial commodities and their
values has been undermined and instead economic goods and values
are becoming increas-ingly unreal or !ctional. But the distinction
between the real and the !c-tional does not capture the situation,
nor does the notion that we have passed from a production- centered
to a circulation- centered economy.11 Instead of assuming that
production has remained the same and has been subordinated to
!ctional power or circulation, the biopolitical claim locates the
most important shift within production itself and highlights the
repro-ducibility (in addition to the speed of circulation) of the
goods that are emerging as predominant. One signi!cant consequence
of the claim that we are entering an era of biopolitical production
is that the measurement of economic values is becoming increasingly
di$cult and indeterminate. In part because of their
reproducibility, the values of biopolitical products are not
measurable, at least not by the traditional, material metrics of
the industrial economy. This is not to say that ideas, code,
a)ects, and, more signi!cant, social relation-ships and forms of
life are either unreal or worthless. On the contrary, their values
are real and constantly exceed any traditional measures that can be
stamped on them. This claim regarding the immeasurability of the
value of biopolitical goods should be situated in line with the
arguments that the so- called labor theory of value no longer
functions in the capitalist econ-omy. Marx, following David
Ricardo, posed a quantitative relation between the labor time
required on average to produce a commodity and the value of that
commodity. Beginning in the 1970s heterodox streams of Marxist
theory, analyzing the changes in labor practices and the center of
the econ-omys move outside the factory, claimed that it was
becoming less and less plausible for this law to function by posing
a quantitative relation between labor and value. Furthermore, they
claimed, the capitalist law of value is, at base, a law of
exploitation: a law that establishes and upholds a system of
unequal values. The point was not to cast doubt on the causal
relation between labor and valuelabor, these theorists maintained,
remains the source of wealth in capitalist productionbut rather to
question the possi-bility of establishing a quantitative measure
and to challenge the relation-ship of exploitation.12 The claim
about biopolitical products extends this line of thinking. Not only
is the economic value of commodities not repre-sentable in
quantities of labor-time, but the value of biopolitical products
tends to betray and exceed any of the capitalist measurement
schema. The contemporary economic problem of measure is not, of
course,
Francois Richard
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366%The South Atlantic Quarterly Spring 2012
a conundrum only for Marxist theory. Armies of capitalist
technicians struggle to quantify fundamentally immeasurable values.
The insurance industries, for example, go through extraordinary
gymnastics to quantify the value of a !rm, knowing well that the
!rms material property as well as its immaterial property, such as
patents and copyrights, forms only a part of its value. Accountants
similarly use concepts such as goodwill and intangible goods to try
to grasp the value of goods and brands. These are some indications
of the fact of a growing inability to quantify value in the
biopolitical economy.
Finance and Biopolitical Production
The !nance industries constitute the segment of the capitalist
economy that engages most directly with the !eld of immeasurable
values. Christian Marazzi argues that in order to understand the
contemporary functioning of !nance, and speci!cally its engagement
with immeasurable values, we have to situate it !rmly in the !eld
of biopolitical production. Financiali-zation, Marazzi contends, is
not an unproductive/parasitic deviation of growing quotas of
surplus- value and collective saving, but rather the form of
capital accumulation symmetrical with new processes of value
produc-tion.13 The symmetry might be recognized, at !rst sight, in
the fact that these are !elds in which the danger of counterfeiting
or falsifying values is especially acute. This !rst impression,
however, is not exactly correct. Whereas counterfeiting changes one
stable and established economic value to another, the operation of
!nance instead seeks to quantify (uid and immeasurable values. The
symmetry really lies in the fact that !nance and biopolitical
production deal fundamentally with !elds of value that are
immeasurable or beyond measure. One of the basic operations
accomplished by !nance in general and !nancial derivatives in
particular is to create quantitative measures for goods whose value
is fundamentally immeasurable, to stamp a face on them so that they
can function and be traded in capitalist markets. This is most
easily recognizable in the ways that derivatives make risk into a
trad-able commodity. Risk, of course, is a de!ning element of all
derivatives, from the historical forms of commodities futures to
the most complex and abstract contemporary instruments. What
renders the social relations of !nancial circulation so
historically novel, Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee explain, is that
they are de!ned and determined through the quanti!-cation and
pricing of risk.14 Risk itself does not immediately have
quantita-
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Hardt Falsify the Currency!%367
tive measure. One can, however, project probabilities and create
measures for risk. Derivatives essentially transform risk into a
tradable commodity and, in order to do so, give their currency
quantitative measure. One can make the same point from another
angle. Keynesians cri-tique neoclassical and Chicago School
economic theory for their assump-tion that risk can be priced
correctly and that therefore !nancial markets can regulate
themselves. Risk requires quanti!cation in order to function as a
mechanism of stability. Keynesians maintain, on the contrary, that
risk cannot be measured reliably. In contrast to todays dominant
neoclassical theories and neoliberal policies, Keyness proposals to
achieve economic and market stability, Robert Skidelsky explains,
focus not so much on cal-culating risk but on managing uncertainty.
Uncertainty, in contrast to risk, he maintains, does not have to be
quanti!ed in order to be managed and regulated.15 The quantifying
function of derivatives is not limited to the genera-tion of
measures and the pricing of risk but in some cases also refers to
the nature of the underlying assets. It is true that some
derivatives, such as rice futures, are based on underlying assets
that have readily quanti!able values in the capitalist economy, and
in such cases the derivative quanti!es the risk attached to that
commodity over time. More important, and more interest-ing,
however, are the derivatives whose underlying assets are not
readily quanti!able, such as weather derivatives or, more
signi!cantly, derivatives that combine disparate underlying assets.
Dick Bryan and Michael Raf-ferty describe this as the blending role
of derivatives. Since derivatives are separate or abstract from
their underlying assets, they can bundle a variety of asset types
in one !nancial product. In order to form this assem-blage,
however, the derivative must establish a common measure for all the
values involved. The core function of derivatives, according to
Bryan and Ra)erty, is thus computational: they embody systems of
calculation that commensurate di)erent forms of capital according
to notional competi-tive norms.16 A process of commensuration could
involve simply bringing together two or more existing measurements
or measurement systemsalready a di$cult procedure that is
accomplished, in part, through abstrac-tion. The process
accomplished by most derivatives is even more complex and thorny
because before commensuration they must stamp a value on assets
whose value is not easily quanti!able. Confronting an increasingly
complex market of incommensurable and changing values, Lawrence
Grossberg explains, a situation in which no one knows how to
measure the value of speci!c !nancial assets or how to calculate
their comparative
Francois Richard
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value, derivatives seemed to embody an answer, presenting
themselves as an impossible yet manageable calculating machine.17
Grossberg goes on to suggest that one root of the economic and
!nancial crisis that erupted in 2008 is the false assumption that
derivatives, as economic calculating machines, are able adequately
to !x and make commensurate values in the contemporary economy18a
challenging and important hypothesis that deserves to be pursued
further. My main interest at this point in my argument, however, is
to estab-lish the symmetrical relation, as Marazzi says, between
!nance (and, spe-ci!cally, !nancial derivatives) and biopolitical
production. The symmetry resides primarily in the fact that like
biopolitical production, !nance oper-ates in a !eld of immeasurable
values. It should come as no surprise, then, that the two have a
similar historical trajectory. In the mid- 1970s when the
predominance of industrial production began to shift to that of
biopolitical production, the role of !nancial derivatives began to
increase exponentially in the capitalist economy. It is even
reasonable, I think, to hazard a hypothe-sis (which would have to
be argued and veri!ed) regarding the causal rela-tion between the
two. From somewhat di)erent perspectives, Marazzi and Grossberg
both suggest or, at least imply, that the emergence of
biopoliti-cal production created the condition of immeasurable or
incommensurable values to which !nancial derivatives responded as
an instrument to quan-tify value for capitalist accumulation.
Neoliberal Governance
Foucault does not develop an economic theory of biopolitical
production as I have outlined it here but in some respects his
analysis of neoliberalism dovetails with such a theory. In his 1979
lecture course, The Birth of Biopoli-tics, Foucault proposes to
read neoliberalism as the general framework of biopolitics.19 His
point of departure is the recognition that neoliberalism operates
according to neither a state- centered logic nor, in contrast to
tra-ditional laissez- faire notions of liberalism, an economic
regime that seeks to protect itself and its market from government
action. Neoliberalism, in other words, is not a strategy to
minimize or limit government but rather a mode of governance that
intervenes in the social and economic !elds just as strongly and
frequently as any other form of rule. What makes neoliberal
governance biopolitical for Foucault is that it acts not only to
regulate populations and manage social and economic activity but
also and most centrally to produce subjectivities and create a
Francois Richard
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Hardt Falsify the Currency!%369
form of life. Neoliberal governmental intervention, he explains,
has to intervene on society as such, in its fabric and depth (145).
In one stream of his analysis that develops this theme, for
example, Foucault insists that a focus on commodi!cation in
capitalist society does not grasp su$ciently the depth of
neoliberal strategies, which create, he says, not so much a mar-ket
society (or even, as he puts it, a super- market society) but an
enterprise society. A perspective based primarily in the
relationship to commodities remains in his view too external to the
subject, cannot grasp its central pro-ductive qualities, and tends
to see the social !eld as homogeneous. Neo-liberal governmentality,
he contends, involves obtaining a society that is not oriented
toward the commodity and the uniformity of the commodity but
towards the multiplicity and di)erentiation of the enterprise
(149). Neoliberal governmentality generalizes the logic of the
enterprise through-out the society and produces a multiplicity of
enterprise individualsan enterprise form of life (241). Capital
throughout its history and in all its forms has a strong relation
to biopower, as Foucaults other writings on the subject
demonstrate, but in these lectures neoliberal governance presents
those biopolitical strategies as more direct and intense than ever.
There is much more to say about neoliberal governance and
Fou-caults understanding of it, but here I am primarily interested
in the sym-metry between the biopolitical nature of neoliberal
governance and that of contemporary productive forces. At the same
time that the center of gravity of the capitalist economy shifts
from the production of material commodi-ties to that of immaterial
or biopolitical goods such as ideas, relations of care, a)ects,
networks of communication, codes, and languages, and just when the
methods of !nance and especially !nancial derivatives come to
occupy the central role in managing economic life and guaranteeing
the accumulation of capital, the dominant mode of governance comes
to focus more strongly on the production of subjectivities and
modes of life. In none of these cases is this a radical break with
the past, but it is, rather, a subtle but nonetheless signi!cant
point of in(ection. Production, capitalist con-trol, and political
governance are ever more strongly grounded on the bio-political
terrain.
A Strange Symmetry
What should we make of this strange symmetry that links
biopolitical pro-duction to the technologies of !nance and the
governance of neoliberal-ism? Does it degrade biopolitical
production to the level of !nance and sug-
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370%The South Atlantic Quarterly Spring 2012
gest it is intimately tied to the neoliberal mode of capitalist
accumulation? Or does it, on the contrary, ennoble !nance and
neoliberalism as somehow adequate or even necessary for the
contemporary productive processes? No, !nance and neoliberalism are
symmetrical simply by operating in the same !eld; they function
completely di)erently in that !eld. Finance engages immeasurable
values, as does biopolitical production, but !nance, unlike
biopolitical production, seeks to quantify these values in order
that, !rst, they become tradable in capitalist markets and, second,
and more impor-tantly, they conform to the needs of capitalist
exploitation and accumula-tion. Finance is not only a vast
calculating machine but also a capitalist technology for the
expropriation and accumulation of wealth. Neoliberal-ism, like
biopolitical production, is centrally engaged with the production
of subjectivity, but it does so in a way that reorganizes social
and economic values in the interests of capitalist accumulation.
The symmetry suggests, then, that the problem with !nance and
neoliberalism is certainly not their engagement with immeasurable
values, their powers of abstraction, their orientation toward forms
of life, or even the fact that they stamp a face on the currency of
biopolitical values. The problem rather is the way that, through
mechanisms of measure and quanti!cation, they impose control over
the biopolitical !eld and, ultimately, establish and maintain
relations of exploitation in the processes of capitalist
accumulation. If we now return in this context to Foucaults
interpretation of Dioge-ness mandate, it suggests that !nance and
neoliberal governance are not the only strategies or technologies
that can operate on the !eld of biopoliti-cal value. One can
maintain that the expression parakharattein to nomisma means to
change the currency, Foucault explains, but in two senses, one
pejorative and one positive or, in any case, neutral. This can be,
in e)ect, a dishonest alteration of the currency. This can also be
a change of the e$gy carried on the currency, a change that allows
re- establishing the true value of that currency (221). What would
it mean in the biopolitical !eld to change the e$gy of the currency
and reestablishor, really, establish for the !rst timeits true
value? (My sense is that in Foucaults mind this formulation
resonates with Nietzsches call to revalue all values, but
Nietz-sches proposition does not seem to get us much further or
give us more precision than Diogeness mandate when confronting
biopolitical produc-tion.) Changing the e$gy, creating a face for
biopolitical currency, does not imply measuring and quantifying
value. Its purpose is instead to give meaning to and, in that
sense, determine the character of this !eld of value.
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To make Diogeness mandate our own and to change the character of
the currency in a positive sense we would have to invent a
technology that is equal to !nances power to stamp a face on value
and neoliberalisms ability to organize social productionbut a
technology that does so in a completely di)erent way. This
technology would institute what one might call, with considerable
irony, a communist law of value, that is, a noncapi-talist,
democratically determined, and equitable schema for the manage-ment
and distribution of social wealth. This would be the true face we
could stamp on the !eld of biopolitical value. How can we today
ful!ll this mandate? How can we create and institute new forms of
life in the !eld of biopolitical production that are equal to the
powers of !nance and neoliber-alism? How can we change the
character of the currency to establish what Foucault calls its true
value? Foucault does not provide us with an answer to such
questions, at least not directly. In the continuation of his
lectures after analyzing Diog-eness mandate, he does interpret the
practices of the cynics as a kind of biopolitical militancy, which
suggests a project to create and institute new forms of life, but
he does not develop this in a way that can address the problem of
changing the face of the currency in the terms I have outlined
here.20 To do so, one would have to investigate more fully the
fundamen-tal aspects of our current political and economic
situation, including the technical and political composition of
biopolitical labor, the forms of labor organization existing and
possible in biopolitical production, the potential political power
of producers, the possibilities for the refusal of capitalist
exploitation and sabotage of its systems of command, and ultimately
the lineaments of a constituent power adequate to the age of
biopolitics. All that, though extremely important and worthwhile,
would take us far from Foucault. In order to !nd material for a
response in Foucaults work, since that is my primary task here, we
need to change gears and look not for any theo-retical proposition
of a social alternative but instead to his accounts of exist-ing
alternative biopolitical practices, particularly those focused on
the pro-duction and transformation of subjectivity. The need for
this shift should not be surprising, since Foucault constantly
resists pressures to respond theoretically to political questions
about what is to be done. Instead, mostly in brief, occasional
writings, Foucault takes as a starting point what people are
already doing and, on the basis of their struggles, articulates
elements that could form part of a future political project.
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Biopolitical Struggle in Iran
Foucault interpreted the 1978 mass uprising in Iran against the
Shah in terms that give us one useful point of departure for
investigating the power of biopolitical struggle today. On
commission from the Italian newspaper Corriere della sera, which
engaged him as part of a series of philosophers acting as amateur
journalists, he traveled to Iran for two weeklong visits in
September and November of that year. In his articles for Corriere,
Fou-cault took seriously his journalistic mission, providing
readers with facts and political analyses regarding the relations
of force in the country, the importance of Irans oil in the context
of the Cold War, the relative politi-cal power of the Shah and the
clergy, and the brutality of the repression of the popular revolt.
Most interesting from my perspective is the way that, through his
accounts of the development of the uprising, Foucault poses some of
the basic features of revolt in the age of biopolitics, features
that have been repeated and extended in some of the major struggles
in the three decades since. One of these features is the global
nature of the power structure against which the revolt must be
waged. It is the insurrection of unarmed men, Foucault explains,
who want to lift up the great weight that weighs on each of us, but
more precisely on those, the workers in the oil industry, the
peasants at the frontiers of empires: the weight of the order of
the entire world. It is perhaps the !rst great insurrection against
the planetary sys-tems, the most modern form of revolt and the most
crazy.21 Foucault intu-its, through his engagement with the Iranian
insurrection, the emergence of a new, properly global enemya
neoliberal world order that is composed of planetary systems and
extends beyond the divisions of the old imperial-ist projects and
even the binary partition of the Cold War.22 The revolt, however,
is not expressed directly against this new world order but rather,
and this is a second feature, against a local enemy, in this case
the Shah, that stands in for the wide range of global grievances
and demands. It is the same protest, Foucault maintains, it is the
same will that is expressed by a doctor in Tehran and a mullah in
the countryside, by an oil worker, a postal employee and a student
wearing the chador. This will has something disconcerting about it.
It is always about the same thing, only one and very precise: the
departure of the Shah. But this one thing, for the Iranian people,
that means everything: the end of dependence, the disappearance of
the police, the redistribution of the oil income, the battle
against corruption, the reactivation of Islam, another mode of
life, new rela-
Francois Richard
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Hardt Falsify the Currency!%373
tions with the West, with the Arab countries, with Asia, etc.23
The Shah, in Foucaults estimation, although his departure
constituted the explicit rally-ing cry, was not really the ultimate
agent of domination that the rebels were confronting. The Shah
functioned as a placeholder for a complex matrix of repression and
control that extended well beyond national borders to the global
level. Finally, the most important feature of the rebellion, which
situates it on the terrain of biopolitics, is its central
orientation toward the transfor-mation of subjectivity. Foucault
dedicates his most careful and poignant analyses to the ambiguous
relationship between Islam and the aspiration for a revolutionary
transformation of subjectivity: The problem of Islam as a political
force is an essential problem for our era and the years to come.
The primary condition for approaching it with at least a little
intelligence is not to begin with hatred of it.24 He is quite clear
that the Shiite clergy is in no way a revolutionary force, but that
does not mean that Islam and reli-gion in general do not play a
revolutionary role. Religion has often in the past, Foucault
reminds us, been the form that political struggle takes when
mobilized among the poor. The religious practices widespread among
the poor in Iran, in fact, with their focus on daily life, family
ties, social rela-tions, and the care of the self, made Islam
available as the basic vocabulary and the dramatic backdrop of the
struggles. I think that there is where Islam played a role,
Foucault explains. The fascination exerted by this or that
obligation, this or that code? Perhaps, but above all, in relation
to the form of life that was theirs, the religion was for them like
the promise and the guarantee of !nding what could radically change
their subjectivity. The ultimate object of the struggle, in his
view, is not the overthrow of the Shah or even the emancipation of
an existing social subject but rather the trans-formation or
production of subjectivity itself, which he characterizes later in
the same interview as the will to a radical change in existence.25
In this way Foucault reads the insurrection in Iran as
fundamentally a biopolitical struggle.26 Why should we use the term
biopolitical for these struggles in Iran? Foucault does not, in
fact, mention biopolitics or neoliberalism in his writings on Iran.
It seems clear to me, though, that these concepts are close to his
mind when he writes of the care of the self and the transfor-mation
of subjectivity in passages on the Iranian insurrection like these.
Foucaults engagement with Iran came during the period when he
worked most actively to develop the concept of biopolitics. Earlier
in the year he had developed his notion of biopolitics in relation
to governmentality in his
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Security, Territory, Population lectures and a few months after
the trips he begins the Birth of Biopolitics lectures in which he
analyzes neoliber-alism.27 Considered together, Foucaults work
during this period suggests that struggles over the form of life
take on a new character and a new pri-ority under neoliberal
governance. The fact that Foucault has the concept in mind, though,
does not yet make clear what we gain by considering such struggles
biopolitical. Are not a wide range of struggles throughout history,
especially revolutionary struggles, characterized by a con(ict
between di)erent forms of life and aimed at the transformation of
subjectivity? One way to characterize the novelty of biopolitical
struggles is to recognize how in them the traditional divisions
between economic and political struggles, which were particu-larly
central to Marxist strategy during the era of the Third
International, become blurred; indeed cultural struggles also
overlap substantially with both the economic and the political. To
consider biopolitical struggles in this way does not mean that we
can no longer in these contests make use of economic logics and
make economic demands, for example, but rather we must always
recognize the ways in which they are embedded in the politi-cal and
cultural and, moreover, that all these are fundamentally concerned
with struggles over modes of the production of subjectivity and
forms of life. Class struggles in contemporary capitalism, Giuseppe
Cocco claims in an analysis grounded in the Brazilian situation,
are biostruggles [bio-lutas]: they occur precisely around the dual
and paradoxical process of inclu-sion and fragmentation of life in
work.28 One axis of biopolitical struggles, in other words, is the
way that class struggles and economic demands become inseparable,
as Cocco suggests, from struggles over forms of life and the
production of subjectivity.
A New Face for Biopolitical Value
Some of the most interesting and intense political revolts in
the decades since the Iranian Revolution have also been organized
around several of the features Foucault individuated then. It would
be a useful task, in fact, and a large endeavor to analyze to what
extent the notion of biopolitical struggle characterizes adequately
the wide range of struggles against neoliberalism in our era, from
the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas to the 2001 insurrec-tion in
Argentina, from the continuing social movements in Bolivia, Brazil,
and South Africa to the riots in Paris and London, and innumerable
other events. Such an analysis would undoubtedly reveal the ways in
which con-
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Hardt Falsify the Currency!%375
temporary struggles go beyond what Foucault could recognize.
Here, as means of conclusion, I want brie(y to consider in this
light one such aspect of the 2010 and 2011 revolts in Tunisia and
Egypt. The contemporary revolts throughout the Arab world certainly
share one very visible element with the earlier insurrection in
Iran: the central rallying cry of the departure of the dictator,
although important in itself, functions also as a placeholder for a
variety of demands that ultimately aim to challenge the domination
of the emerging neoliberal world order. An important di)erence also
stands out immediately: whereas in 1978 in Iran the promise of a
radically changed subjectivity was primarily situated on the
religious terrain, today, in line with so many instances of
rebellion around the world, biopolitical struggle is combined with
or, really, takes the form of experiments in self- governance and
democratic organizing. Con-sider, !rst of all, the fact that the
international media had such great di$-culty in understanding that
the struggles in Tunisia and Egypt lacked cen-tralized leadership
but were nonetheless strongly organized. During the height of the
Egyptian struggles prior to Hosni Mubaraks departure, US
journalists seemed particularly desperate to !nd a leader for the
protests in order to !t them into a standard narrative and make
them intelligible: one day they reported that Mohamed ElBaradei is
emerging as leader, and the next that the leader instead is Google
executive Wael Ghonim. They were incapable of understanding that,
as in many other contemporary rebellions, these protests were
organized in horizontal, network fashion, without any centralized
leadership, and were all the more powerful for that. The
tradi-tional parties and established opposition forces could only
follow behind the movements of the multitude. One of the most
signi!cant developments of the Egyptian revolt, in fact, and one of
the most di$cult to discern from the outside, was the inter-nal
organization and functioning of those occupying Tahrir Square and
the structures for decision making of the multitude that maintained
a presence there. The occupants of the square sought to bring
together a wide range of social forces, make links to existing
opposition parties, and still maintain the coherence necessary to
resist brutal government attacks. Tahrir Square has become an
emblem for a powerful organizational structure capable of not only
resistance but also self- governance, albeit for a limited time and
in a limited space. There are indeed strong resonances between the
formations of Tah-rir Square and the occupations of other public
squares in the months after dramatic events in Egypt. The
protesters who gathered in the spring of 2011
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376%The South Atlantic Quarterly Spring 2012
to preserve public union rights in Wisconsin, those who occupied
Athenss Syntagma Square to contest the Greek parliaments austerity
measures, the indignant multitude squatting in Madrids Puerta del
Sol, and the Occupy Wall Street movement each developed assembly
structures for internal democratic decision making. It is
interesting how in particular the so- called 15M movement in Spain
transformed the occupation of the square from a protest about the
economic crisis and government austerity programsbringing together
demands regarding unemployment, precari-ous labor, housing, health
services, the electoral system, and so forthinto a demand for and a
new practice of democracy, with the slogan Real democracy now. It
is a movement of not only radical democratization, Ral Sanchez
Cedillo explains, but also democratic radicalization, that is, an
experimentation with and reinvention of the practices of mass
direct democracy in the public square.29 This is one novel mandate
that contem-porary forms of rebellion have developed: today
biopolitical struggle must also involve and even be oriented
primarily toward an experimentation in the social organization of
democracy and autonomy. Such recent biopoliti-cal struggles have
been good at organizing a public square but as yet have not
succeeded in organizing an alternative social formation. Foucaults
interpretation of the Oracles mandate for Diogenes might once again
be useful here: discover the means to stamp the true face on the
!eld of biopolitical value and therefore transform the economic and
social structures of value across the entire society. A true face
of value furthermore, as contemporary biopolitical struggles teach
us, can be cre-ated only by a constituent power capable of
reinventing democracy and rela-tions of autonomy. To embark on this
process we will need to create a tech-nology of transformation in
some sense superior to the powers of !nance and neoliberal
governance. Exploring such a path, now well beyond Fou-cault, may
allow us !nally to ful!ll Diogeness enigmatic mandate to falsify
the currency.
Notes
Thanks to Moishe Postone for his helpful comments on this essay.
All translations, unless indicated otherwise, are my own. 1 I
explore the notion of biopolitical militancy that Foucault develops
in these lectures in
The Militancy of Theory, South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 1
(2011): 1935. 2 Michel Foucault, Le courage de la vrit: Le
gouvernement de soi et des autres II, Cours au
Collge de France, 19831984 (The Courage of the Truth: The
Government of Self and Others, vol. 2, Lectures at the Collge de
France, 19831984), ed. Frdric Gros (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2009),
222.
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Hardt Falsify the Currency!%377
3 Ibid., 22324. 4 One should keep in mind that periodic currency
devaluations and crises are a regu-
lar feature of many colonial and postcolonial societies, where
the instability of eco-nomic value corresponds in many cases to a
similar instability of social values. See, for example, Charles
Piots insightful analysis of one such moment in Togo, Hedging the
Future: Togos Visa Lottery (American Anthropological Association
annual meeting, November 18, 2011).
5 For the classic analysis and indictment of casino capitalism,
see Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
6 Alain Badiou, De quel rel cette crise est- elle le spectacle?
(Of Which Real Is This Crisis the Spectacle?), Le monde, October
18, 2008. Badiou rightly critiques the stan-dard narrative that the
cause of the current crisis is explained by the disjunction between
the real and !ctional economies.
7 It is important in my view not to interpret this passage from
the industrial to the biopolitical era in terms of the conventional
distinction between manual and mental labor. Biopolitical
production requires a mixture of corporeal and intellectual forces,
as do industry, agriculture, and other forms of production. This is
part of the reason I am reluctant to describe biopolitical
production solely by its cognitive aspects, as some do, with such
terms as cognitive capitalism and cognitariat.
8 For a sample of this extensive literature, see Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2009); Yann Moulier Bou-tang, Cognitive Capitalism (London:
Polity Press, 2011); and Andrea Fumagalli, Bioeco-nomia e
capitalismo cognitivo (Bioeconomics and Cognitive Capitalism)
(Rome: Carocci, 2007).
9 Michael Foucault, Entretien, in Dits et crits, vol. 4, ed.
Daniel Denfert and Franois Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 4195,
74. This is published in English as Michel Fou-cault, Remarks on
Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori (New York: Semiotext(e),
1991).
10 For Marxs analysis of the contest between mobile and immobile
forms of property, see Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in
Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton
(London: Penguin, 1975), 279400, 33641.
11 In their excellent analysis of derivatives, Edward LiPuma and
Benjamin Lee do not characterize the current era in terms of real
and !ctional economies but instead make a claim that we are
undergoing a shift from a production- centered economy to a
circulation- centered one dominated by speculative capital. See
LiPuma and Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
12 For relevant critical assessments of the labor theory of
value, see Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Antonio Negri, Marx
beyond Marx (New York: Autonomedia, 1989); and Antonio Negri,
Twenty Theses on Marx, in Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. Saree
Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca Karl (New York: Routledge,
1995), 14980.
13 Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism, in
Crisis in the Global Econ-omy, ed. Andrea Fumagalli and Sandro
Mezzadra, trans. Jason Francis McGimsey (New York: Semiotext(e),
2010), 1759, 36.
14 LiPuma and Lee, Financial Derivatives, 141.
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378%The South Atlantic Quarterly Spring 2012
15 Robert Skidelsky, Keynes: The Return of the Master (New York:
Public A)airs, 2009), 3242 and 8388.
16 Dick Bryan and Michael Ra)erty, Financial Derivatives and the
Theory of Money, Economy and Society 36, no. 1 (2007): 13458,
142.
17 Lawrence Grossberg, Modernity and Commensuration, Cultural
Studies 24, no. 3 (2010): 295332, 299.
18 Ibid., 324. 19 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, ed.
Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell
(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); hereafter cited
parenthetically by page number. Even though these lectures were
delivered before the Thatcher and Reagan governments implemented
neoliberalism, Foucault grasps some of the dominant elements of
neoliberalism under which we live today, primarily through readings
of German- language authors and postwar actions of the German
government.
20 On Foucaults interpretation of the cynics, see Hardt, The
Militancy of Theory. 21 Michel Foucault, Le chef mythique de la
rvolte de lIran (The Mythical Leader of the
Revolt in Iran), in Dits et crits, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard,
1994), 71316, 716. 22 During this same period Gilles Deleuze and
Flix Guattari wrote of the emergence of a
new planetary war machine in very similar terms. The war machine
reforms a smooth space that now claims to control, to surround the
entire earth. Total war itself is sur-passed, toward a form of
peace more terrifying still. The war machine has taken charge of
the aim, worldwide order, and the States are now no more than
objects or means adapted to that machine. Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Mas-sumi (1980; Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 421.
23 Foucault, Le chef mythique, 715. 24 Michel Foucault, Rponse
de Michel Foucault une lectrice iranienne (Response
from Michel Foucault to a Female Iranian Reader), in Dits et
crits, vol. 3, 708. 25 Michel Foucault, Lesprit dun monde sans
esprit (The Spirit of a World without
Spirit), in Dits et crits, vol. 3, 74355, 749, 754. 26 During
the course of the insurrection Foucault is conscious of the small
chances of
victory of the revolutionary forces that inspire him, and he is
disappointed but not surprised when, after the departure of the
Shah, power is solidi!ed in the hands of the returning Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini and the clergy. Foucault is criticized in France
and elsewhere for having expressed support for the insurrection,
but he feels no need to apologize. Instead his reaction after the
defeat is to celebrate the audacity and historical role of those
who rebel, regardless of the outcome. I, too, see no reason to
blame Foucault for his analyses of and enthusiasm for the
revolutionary forces simply because they were defeated. World
history would indeed be very easy to make, Marx writes soon after
the Communards were slaughtered in Paris, if the struggle were
taken up only on condition of infallibly favourable chances (April
17, 1871, Letters to Dr. Kugelmann, in Civil War in France: The
Paris Commune [New York: International Publishers, 1989], 87).
Foucault remains inspired, despite their defeat, by the
biopoliti-cal nature of the struggles, that is, their aim to
produce new forms of life, new subjec-tivities, a new
existence.
27 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at
the Collge de France, 19771978, trans. Graham Burchell
(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
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Hardt Falsify the Currency!%379
28 Giuseppe Cocco, As biolutas e a constituio do comum
(Biostruggles and the Con-stitution of the Common), Le Monde
Diplomatique Brasil, no. 46 (2011): 3637.
29 Ral Sanchez Cedillo, 15M, multitude que se sirve de mscaras
para ser una (15M, the Multitude That Uses Masks in Order to Be
One), Madrilonia.org blog, http://madrilonia.org/?p=3177 (accessed
July 8, 2011). See also Toni Negri, Ri(essioni spag-nole (Spanish
Re(ections), UniNomade 2.0 blog, June 4, 2011, http://uninomade
.org/ri(essioni- spagnole/ (accessed July 8, 2011).