The Agonistics of Life in the Age of Cyber-biopower

Foucault, Negri and Hardt on Biopolitcs and Intelectual Property Disputes

Thiago Mota

thiago.mota@egs.edu

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into

conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing

in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have

operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn

into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.

Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

1. Biopolitics, Subjectivity and Capital

Not long ago, the notion of biopolitics became fashionable. If, some years ago, the

term was only employed in experts’ circles, today it crosses disciplines as different as

medicine and economics, biology and political theory, geography and media studies.

Nowadays, the word biopolitics may be found in very diverse speeches on

questions like: the totalization of a surveillance society legitimated on the terms of the

republican-democrat policy of war on terror that begins with 09/11; DNA mapping and

production of cells, organs and organisms, as well as limits of bioengineering,

especially when applied to human life; the demographic transformations and population

displacement, transportation infrastructure and social fluxes, tourism, exile,

immigration, clandestinity; the crisis of the protection system of licenses, patents and

copyrights in a moment in which knowledge does not becomes only capital, it becomes

common vital knowledge. For these reasons, not strangely, beyond specialists, the

notion is attracting the attention of media and reaches now and then even the main

audience.

However, the expansion of the usage of concept of biopolitics did not lead to more

comprehension of its meaning because instead of being attempts of synthesis, in

general, the approaches are conceived as new perspectives. Thus, the divergences do not

cease to reproduce and no systematic approach is credible.

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On the other hand, there is a positive side in the proliferation of this second hand

literary chaos. The multiplication of perspectives on what may be biopolitics also

proves the power (puissance), the capacity of producing effects, the vitality of the

conceptual apparatus that mobilizes biopolitics as its central conception, especially in

relation to political and social theory.

In what follows, we try a minimal reconstruction of one of the lines in the debate

on biopolitics, namely the one that goes from Michel Foucault (*1923 +1984) to

Antonio Negri (*1933 ). The zigzag reading their writings on biopolitics proves to be

able to constitute a very accurate and original description of the production process of a

life, which is no longer only human, over the last decades in the capitalist societies.

Let us now introduce some provisional definitions. Biopolitics is the set of

technologies used by life to (re)produce its own forms of existence, within force

correlations that change from time to time. In other words: life produces itself in a

political way, through conflicts and agreements, dissensus and consensus, negotiation,

deliberation, decision, that ultimately determine what lives and what dies. Thus, the

term biopolitics denotes the agonistics between power and resistance (counter-power)

inherent to the repetition and differentiation of life.

From the stand point of political economy, it is interesting to observe that

biopolitical production is not only about products (nor goods, commodities) production

but above all it is about productors (or workers, employees) production. Negri as well

as Foucault show that, from some point in time on, the production of subjects, as

economically useful life, coincides with the production of capital1.

In other words, the analysis of biopolitics coincides, for certain reading of

Foucault and Negri, with the critique of capitalism. After all, relations of power and

relations of production are the two sides of the same coin. This is a basic assumption of

this research, whose raw object is then constituted by the pair biopower and capitalism.

2. Foucault, Biopower and Capitalism

Foucault introduces the term biopolitique in his analyses, incidentally, in a lecture

on the “Birth of Social Medicine” (1974). The basic idea of this paper is that the social

or public medicine is part of a larger medical power-knowledge device. Social medicine

1 A first use of this hypothesis has already been tried in the essay Decodificando o neocapitalismo: para

uma genealogia da governamentalidade neoliberal (Mota 2012).

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was born as response to an evolutive requirement of the capitalist mode of production.

Thus, medical power is considered as a biopolitical strategy, whose aim is the

production of economically useful human life, which may be exemplified, at first, by

the fit soldier, but just after that, and in very widespread way, by the healthy worker.

Sometime later, in 1976, in the final text of the first volume of History of

Sexuality, consecrated to the will to knowledge, “Right of Death and Power over Life”,

the notion of biopolitics is retaken and reinvested, in order to get a more important

function in strategically epistemological framework that Foucault sets up. Beyond the

power regime of sovereignty, oriented by a logic of repression – a power to make die or

let live –, emerges a new power regime that is oriented by a logic of production and

control – a power of make live or let die. The birth of biopower is registered exactly in

the inversion, in this fold, between making die or letting live and letting live or making

die.

In consequence, a series of government techniques, a whole technology of power

is engendered, as response to the evolutive injunctions of capitalist society that seeks

permanently to produce economically useful life, always at increasing levels. Hence the

idea of a birth of biopolitics: about the end of the 18th Century, power ceases being only

negative and repressive, ceases being only a subtraction mechanism that constitute the

sovereign right to punish, to violate and, ultimately, to kill, and becomes also a power,

above all, positive because productive, always looking for the optimization and

implementation of life, for this is productive force.

The new technology of life production and control, the biopower has two basic

forms, both intrinsically bound to the necessities presented by each moment of the

evolution of capitalism (industrial capitalism; post-industrial capitalism): discipline and

biopolitics strictu senso. Both seek the optimization of human life through

normalization, but while discipline is applied on the life and body of individuals,

biopolitics founds its incidence surface on the body of the population and its life.

Born already in the end of 18th Century, disciplinary power supposes the cognitive

device of a political anatomy of individual bodies which, by means of surveillance and

punishment procedures and inside a series of institutions (prison, military, hospital,

school, family, industry), formats subjects, always aiming their integration to the mode

of production and trying to assure the elevation of their performativity (FOUCAULT

1975).

On the other hand, the biopolitical device, which is born about mid-19th Century,

implies another subjectivation strategy, the government of life though regulation of the

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population outdoors. For example, instead of discipline rigidity, biopolitics is flexible;

the former punishes the latter awards; in epistemological perspective, the former is

disciplinary, the latter is in-disciplinary. But despite all the distinctions, the aim of both

devices is to increase the productivity of the global economic system by means of the

regulation of its human element, at population level as well as at individual level

(FOUCAULT 1976).

Although valuable, the distinctions between sovereignty, discipline and biopolitics

do not mean that these power regimes succeeded each other historically, the younger

replacing completely the older. On the contrary, genealogical analysis shows that the

different power technologies overlap each other, so that the emergence of a subsequent

form always implies the aggregation of the earlier forms. Therefore, this is not an

inflexible distinction, but rather a triangulation between sovereignty, discipline and

biopolitics, that covers the full spectrum of power relations (at least it is what Foucault

seems to believe in 1976).

The specific transition from discipline to biopolitics – two forms of biopower,

which distinguish themselves from sovereignty, but also distinguish themselves from

one another – should not be taken in a too schematic way. Certainly, discipline inscribes

itself on the individual body – it is impossible here not to remember the machine

Kafka’s In the Penal Colony (1919) – and produces the individualization processes

revealed by the micropolitical genealogy of power relations. Nevertheless, discipline

has also a totalizing feature: social panopticism. The logic of surveillance and

punishment, which appears explicitly in prisons, goes across the whole of social life

from end to end (FOUCAULT 1975).

In analogy, in fact, biopolitics regulates population phenomena such as mortality,

birth, longevity, housing, immigration etc. However, this does not mean that a

macropolitical genealogy of the population has come to replace the old microphysics of

power. Despite assuming a macro perspective, biopolitics has also an individualizing

feature, namely, the entrepreneurship of individuals and their interiorities (cognitive

Power Triangle

Discipline

Biopolitcs

Sovereignty

5

capacity and affectivity). It is the phenomenon described in The Birth of Biopolitics

(FOUCAULT 2004b), in terms of the subjectivation of homo œconomicus.

In short, the macropolitical as well as the micropolitical perspectives belong to

analysis of discipline and to analysis biopolitics. They complement each other turning

possible a comprehensive and depth genealogy of biopower.

3. (Neo)Liberal Governmentality and Alienated Freedom

The lectures dedicated by Foucault to The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-1979) work

with a specific meaning of the concept of biopolitics. The idea of biopolitics is linked to

the question of the government of people and, in particular, to the question of the form

or art of government that embodies in liberalism.

In this course, as in the previous2, Security, Territory, Population (1977-1978),

biopolitics is associated with the notion of governmentality, which is the rationality of a

specific practice of government. Government practices succeed and overlap each other

as time goes by, but the younger form also incorporate and embrace the older. They

have a history, or strictly speaking, a genealogy. In addition, government practices are

not mere practice, are not blind practices, on the contrary, they are endowed with

reflexivity, they are able to perceive and conceive themselves, to correct and to design

future. In short, these practices of government are historical forms of rationality. Since

these forms of rationality belong to government processes, they are called

governmentalities.

The genealogy of governmentality implies the mobilization of a broader temporal

series in relation to that used in the texts on the biopolitics of 1974 and 1976/1977. The

starting point becomes the pastoral power, followed by the power of sovereignty and by

the discipline arriving to the biopolitical governmentality. In general, it can be said that

the power triangulation gives its place to the quadrangulation of governmentality

(FOUCAULT 2004a).

2 De modo muito coerente a nosso ver, na Alemanha, os cursos Sécurité, territoire, population e

Naissance de la biopolitique formam os volumes 1 e 2 de uma Geschichte der Gouvernamentalität

(FOUCAULT 2006), isto é, uma história da governamentalidade.

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In the context of the lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics, biopolitics is, above all,

the political economy of life, the power-knowledge device that governs life on the basis

of a political economic rationality. In the West, in the last centuries, but especially since

the end of World War II, by chance, this rational practice has been mostly liberal or

capitalist.

Liberal government of life is practiced, on the one hand, in the form of

entrepreneurship of the socius (FOUCAULT 2004b: 203), which means the insertion of

any form of social life into the logic of the company and market. Any social group takes

the form of an enterprise, which should be managed accordingly liberal principles. Even

the State turns out to be governmentalized. At stake is to make the logic of private

management overrule the logic of public management, which proves, by the way,

obsolescence of the private/public distinction. Ultimately, the State becomes apolitical.

It becomes nothing but an instance of help assurance for the market rule that responds to

its requirements with liberal or neoliberal polices and laws.

The rationality of political economy expands its reach until the most distant

boundaries of social life. On the other hand, it penetrates in its most hidden intimacies.

Within the framework of liberal governmentality, a specific process of formation of

labor, of production of producers, takes place. It is the subjectivation of homo

œconomicus (FOUCAULT 2004b), in which a subject that conceives himself as a

micro-enterprise, as an entrepreneur of himself, gets individualized. This individual

deals with his own cognitive, emotional and motor capacities and skills as they were

capital, on which one should invest, in order to avoid stagnation and the consequent

decadence. That is the human being as human capital, as Milton Friedman and Theodor

Schultz lecture, and it plays a central strategic role for the legitimation apparatus of

neoliberalism.

Governmentalized and entirely apolitical, the individual is fully included in the

logic of the market. If someone is not employed, he is employable; if someone is

employed, he can be promoted. After all, it is skilled labor, which, according to the

daily news, is always missing, is always the object of employers’ competition. The

Governamentality

Square

Pastoral Power Sovereignty

Biopolitics Discipline

7

physical, psychic and spiritual health must be fine, otherwise how this subject could

accumulate such a range of qualifications? His standards of quality life are, therefore,

quite high. He struggles to conquer it, maintain it and, if possible, expand it. In short,

the genealogical analysis of the (neo)liberal subject reveals a highly insidious form of

exercise of power on oneself: self-management as political economy of oneself, self-

governmentality.

The radicality of Foucault's position lays on the assumption a conception of

biopower that leaves no room for any other possibility. It is a regime of power or a form

of governmentality that includes everything and leaves no space for anything possible.

Ultimately, self-government practices – generally considered as lines of flight – and

even the autonomy of the subject prove to be part of a biopolitical strategy of self-

control and self-normalization. This specific kind of subjectivation is ruled by a logic

which is, at the same time, strange and familiar (Umheimliche) for the subject, the logic

of market, freedom of production and consumption, laissez-faire, laissez-passer.

The analysis of the subjectivation under the rationality of political economy,

which Foucault names liberalism, reveals a bizarre control device which is

paradoxically able to control through freedom, or to impose freedom – not the right but

the duty of freedom. Neoliberalism is this uncanny practice of government of individual

and population bodies that we have invented for ourselves and it provides us with both

the most of freedom and the most of control, security, surveillance. At the same time in

which the human territory becomes the globe, and the subject may freely deterritorialize

all over it, the surveillance device also deterritorializes and becomes a global system of

security.

From an extra-moral perspective, avoiding the dichotomy good/bad, genealogical

analysis demoralizes the notion of freedom, which is no longer necessarily conceived as

something positive or good. For the genealogy, it is not about asking if it is good or bad,

but about the fact that freedom is also economically productive and, we may say,

positive, in the sense that it poses or produces something. Under capitalism, however,

every produced thing, in order to continue existing, must be converted into capital.

Ultimately, that is no more than biopoliticaly governmentalized, controlled,

normalized, alienated freedom. We may still call it freedom, but we know it is not

freedom enough. The reason is simple: in this case, freedom does not mean the

liberation in relation to the logic of capital. On the contrary, it is the logic of market

highly diversified and sophisticated and deeply interiorized and automatized that

determines the subjectivation of regular neoliberal subjects. Although sometimes it

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seems to be very close of doing it, the full of freedom neoliberal homo œconomicus will

never liberate from the logic of capital, he will break the contract. As long as the

standard of quality of life does not decrease critically, he will never stop agreeing with

the conditions (even if he never reads them). And he will be always pleased to purchase

lots of alienated freedom on sale.

The Birth of Biopolitics closes in an aporetic way, without finishing project of

understanding biopolitics through a genealogy of liberal governmentality, without

properly rephrasing a series of questions it has raised itself. As in other courses – and

differently from Foucault's books – the text is constitutively experimental in the sense

that it is unfinished, inherently aporetic, designed to be left open. We believe, however,

that this type of experiment can be finished in a variety of open ways, all of them,

indeed, also experimental.

4. Negri: From Biopower to Biopolitics

The extension of experiments as the one of “Right of Death and Power over Life”

(FOUCAULT, 1976) and The Birth of Biopolitics (FOUCAULT 2004b) is being carried

out, among others, in partnership or solo, since the late 1990 at least – and with a series

of adjustments and cuts and additions – by Antonio Negri. Especially in his writings in

coauthored with the American political philosopher Michael Hardt (*1960 ), Negri

notes the advent of a new stage of capitalism, a post-industrial or post-modern

capitalism, which we could designate as cognitive capitalism – just to emphasize the

special role which is now played by knowledge in the whole system .

Cognitive capitalism basis is the extraction of surplus value out of the so called

immaterial work. Instead of material work, which implies physical or corporal energy

expenditure by the worker, immaterial work involves the use of intellectual (perception,

communication, imagination, reason) and affective (irrational feelings, emotions,

passions) energies. Imagination, communication, learning, emotions, passions, affects,

are more produced and more consumed than ever. They have become commodities,

value or capital. In this new stage, the intangible elements of the vital process are at

stake for the logic of market. Spreading everywhere and penetrating in the most

intimate, capitalism operates a new real and integral subsumption of social life.

The advent of cognitive capitalism corresponds to the formation of a new power

regime, which was called Empire (HARDT & NEGRI 2000). Not to be confused with

imperialism, imperial power is exercised in decentralized and deterritorialized

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(globalized) way, breaking the boundaries of nation-States and establishing a new form

of sovereignty. The Empire operates horizontally, networking, with flexibility, mixing

itself with the heterogeneity of the social tissue.

In addition, the exercise of imperial power does not require outside intervention.

On the contrary, the imperial logic is deeply rooted in the individuals, groups and

cultures capable of reflexive control (self-management) at different levels. Thus the

autopoietic machine of biopower gets in charge of controlled production of life as whole

and continually produces on a global scale alienated autonomy.

However, we want to emphasize it, the same life subsumed by the Empire exerts

resistance. Introducing a positive meaning in the notion of biopolitics, Negri demarcates

its position towards Foucault. Thus, biopower, as discipline as well as regulation, is the

power over life, while biopolitics is the power (puissance) of life that animates the

practices of resistance and freedom.

The biopower of Empire contrasts the biopolitics of multitude. This one is not to

be confused with the people, which is endowed with a general will, nor with the crowd

(or mass), which is homogeneous in everything. In the sense of Negri and Hardt (2004),

multitude is a misshapen aggregate, an agencement of singularities, pure multiplicity,

headless, heterogeneous, centrifuge etc. The most important is that wherever Empire is,

there is multitude, in intensity inversely proportional.

Agonistics of life’s self-production: where is power, there is resistance. The

principle formulated by Foucault (1976) is radically incorporated by Negri and Hardt

(2004). This means that the becoming of power is always a paradox: all conquest,

expansion and maintenance imply the constitution of a counter-power, a form of

resistance that opposes every step. In this sense, for instance, globalization of the

Empire is opposed by the alter-globalization of the multitude.

In search of a line of flight out of the conception of an omnipotent biopower, and

inspired by Negri and Hardt, we can say that the most of the time self-management

practices are captured by imperial biopower and capitalized in the form of micro-

enterprises. However, those practices keep a libertarian and biopolitical force that can

be exercised as a form of resistance, in the same place in which these micro-enterprises

financed with human capital are developed. We assume that it is always possible to

destabilize the micro-enterprise and turn it into micro-experiment. But this is only

possible through in a practice of resistance and real freedom, a non-normalizing practice

of autonomy.

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The price to pay for this kind of freedom, the risk that runs on behalf of this

micro-experiment is unavoidably measured in terms of quality of life or financial

security. The “full employment” is very likely to be threatened or even lost because of

manifestations of resistance in and out the working place. In any case, a destabilizing

effect can be produced by the micro-entrepreneur that pays the price. As consequence,

his manifestations of resistance may trigger an intra-individual guerrilla, radicaly

changing the coordinates of his own process of process of subjectivation. This is a

biopolitical self-management, in the sense of Negri and Hardt, against neo-liberal self-

governmentalization. And it may be just a spark, but it is a powerful one.

The analytical exercise done up to this point demonstrates the productivity of a

zigzag reading of Foucault and Negri to the approach main issues of contemporary

capitalism through a framework which has its key in the concept of biopolitics. With

this in mind, we would like to finish quickly addressing one of several questions that

were left open here, namely, the relationship between the critique of biopolitics and the

crisis of intellectual property, patents and copyrights.

5. Cyber-Biopower and the Crises of Cognitive Capitalism

Capitalism is not only an economic mode of production, but a mode of life

production or subjectivation. Therefore, it is not only about the reproduction of capital,

but above all the reproduction of subjects, the effective producers of economic value.

This subjective production, production of forms of life, is what results from the exercise

of biopower, to which capitalism was and is attached.

In industrial capitalism, lives are produced through disciplinary devices (an

anatomo-politics), according to the model of the machine. Thus, the population numbers

of subjects were mechanized (an image of this is the Tramp in Modern Times, by

Charlie Chaplin, 1936). However, with the transition to a post-industrial and cognitive

capitalism, lives are also produced through regulatory (or imperial biopolitical)

strategies, in accordance with the model provided by the computer. Today, subjects are

computerized or digitalized (approximately as illustrates, for example, the character of

George Clooney in Up in the Air, 2009).

Disciplinary

Power

Cognitive

Capitalism

Industrial

Capitalism

Imperial

Biopower

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These parallel transitions should not be mistaken. Indeed, the transition from

disciplinary society to control society (imperial biopower) and the one from industrial

capitalism to post-industrial and cognitive capitalism overlap. Everything have we said

before about the transitions of power regimes or of forms of governmentality is also

valid here. The different types of society as well as the diverse species of capitalism

distinguish from each other in the measure that the emergence of new form implies the

aggregation of the old form, never its abolition. The uprising of cognitive capitalism, the

post-industrialization of capital does not imply that industry, nor agriculture, has come

to an end. Naturally, they continue existing, but in order to keep alive, they tend to be

post-industrialized. Agriculture and industry start to be practiced according to a new

logic, which is no longer the logic of machines (hardware), but rather the logic of

computers (software), or rather the logic of production of logic.

Knowledge economy or society (CASTELLS 2000) is how has being called this

society for which the main input, the primary factor of production – we are now in the

foundations of economics – is no longer the land, labor, capital, natural resources nor

technology, but data, information, knowledge. In this context, the biopower generalizes

the digitization of life, at home, at school and at work. Today, we seem to be born

already connected to touch screen monitors. It is very common that the first morning

habit, often prior even to tooth brushing, is check new messages in a notebook or smart

phone. And that, after closing the preparation for sleep turning off the TV with a

universal remote control. The process is neither banal nor random. It affects the basic

agonistics of life, the biopolitical infrastructure of our times. This is the digitalization of

subjectivation itself. We deal with a cyber-bipower which is exercised according to the

logic of a capitalism, which was radically renewed, reformed, or better revolutionized:

the cognitive capitalism.

However, the advent of high performance cognitive capitalism stirs up the

inherent antagonisms and exposes the social fractures. The logic of buying-and-selling,

on the edge, constrains production and contradicts itself. Finally, the bubble bursts. If

not yet, it will soon explode. The Marxist vulgate proves to be extremely interesting

when we take into account the idea of cognitive capitalism and of a knowledge-based

society, because knowledge and information are radically different from other types of

goods.

Passing by an important area in Law Studies, namely, Property Law, we learn that

knowledge and information, as they are produced nowadays, are special goods because

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they seem to do not match exactly with which a good is expected to be. For many

reasons: (a) they are immaterial or intangible goods; (b) they are highly reproducible

and resettable, without loss of quality; (c) they do not become scarce with exchange nor

use, on the contrary, the more you share, the more you have; (d) they need to be shared

or communicated, otherwise they do not really exist, do not come into life; (e) their high

reproducibility makes its price tends decrease until zero (or to the cost of an internet

connection, which is another thing). In the vocabulary of Property Law, we would say

that they tend to be off-trade goods, such as air or sunlight. Considering the information

twister in the center of which the regular neoliberal subject lives, those goods are now

so available that we need to protect ourselves from their impact, and we need more than

sunglasses to do it. In other words, cognitive capitalism transformed the society in an

information society, a kind of society in which goods such as information and

knowledge constitutively tend to be common (HARDT & NEGRI 2009).

As shown, among others, by Yochai Benkler (2006), the production of

knowledge, the epistemological production realized in the field of science, is an

example of this: the more information circulates, the more new knowledge is produced.

On the other hand, the restriction or blockage of information flow causes the decrease of

knowledge production and, with it, of the production of wealth. In the field of the arts, it

is similar. Restriction of the information flow (images, sounds, texts) implies the

decrease of aesthetic production.

That cognitive, artistic, immaterial wealth which could be produced, but is not, is

indeed wealth that should be common, for its production is no longer only production of

wealth; it is production of the common, communalization. In other words, the

development of informational technologies, especially the internet, was entirely decisive

to cognitive capitalism because it led to an exorbitant production and consumption

immaterial goods. We produce and consume like never before. And it is this exchange

that produces capital. But it also produces a wealth that is no longer taken into account

because it to become common, in the sense of Negri and Hardt (2001). That is where the

capitalist shot on the gigantic .com market backfires.

It is clear that a strategy of containment of the overproduction crisis of immaterial

good and the resulting formation of a common wealth has been adopted by the Empire

(States and large corporations) (HARDT & NEGRI, 2009). The term consecrated by the

main media and advertising to designate, as a whole, this cyber-strategy of biopower

may be used here: war on piracy.

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This is part, among others, of the democratic wars fought in the name of human

rights – Bush's legacy which Obama provided with softer and also more sophisticated

style – as the war on terror or the war on drugs. Increasingly criminalized, piracy is

also included between "the four horsemen of the infoapocalispe" which, according to

Assange (2013), circulate with impunity on the internet encrypted, the so called Deep

Web: child pornography, money laundering, drug trafficking and terrorism. Specifically,

the war on piracy aims, of course, the protection of patents, licenses and copyrights.

These have become a cause for war by the fact that, in cognitive capitalism, intellectual

property, especially patents and licenses on products and procedures have become the

axis of the reproduction of capital.

In other words, in the post-industrial information society, intellectual property

plays the role that property of the means of production played in industrial society. The

chapter of copyrights constitutes the foundations of the whole legal and ideological

superstructure of cognitive capitalism. They work like firewalls damming the

information and knowledge communalization, restricting their flow, making them

scarce, turning them into commodities. However, with the continual increase of the

flow, the dam presents growing difficulty to contain it. At some point, the dropper no

longer retains the abundance of output and this erupts where least expected. Within the

dam overflow, we have, in this case, very clearly, the crisis of intellectual property and

of its legal safeguard mechanism, the entire field of power-knowledge of copyrights.

According to Negri and Hardt (2004 and 2009), patents, licenses and copyrights

constitute a great mechanism for the privatization of the common wealth circulating in

the digital networks, in the form of texts, sounds, images, videos. These data are not

products of an author or group of authors; they are rather product of networks that host

and use of them in common, in network. From the point of view of information and

knowledge production networks, patents, licenses and copyrights interrupt the process

of collective production, creation and innovation. But not only that, it is not just about

ceasing profits. There is an immediate and much more aggressive alienation process in

motion, namely, the confiscation of the common product of networks, in the form of its

privatization, with support in the legal mechanisms of protection of intellectual

property.

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Nonetheless, in the same territory where cyber-biopower rules, foci of resistance

hatch in experiences of cyber-activism (or hacktivism)3. For the most of them we do not

have any map, only a few clues.

Despite their specificities, these cyber-resistance practices seem to share some

assumptions. One of them may be found visionary works of Roland Barthes and Michel

Foucault. Even in the late 1960, both promoted a massive de-subjectivation of

philosophy, showing that, from the standpoint of the practice of discourse, the author is

dead. In the same line of argument, Jean-François Lyotard, in 1983, noted that the

“book is dead”, sentence that may now be easily read in an e-book reader. In 1998, Tom

Zé signed the “cultural trawler manifest” 4, proposing an “aesthetics of plagiarism” in

which the author gives his place to the “plagicombiner”.

Text with no beginning and no end, no separation between author and reader (or

even with no author), the hypertext is the most obvious expression of the death of the

author in our daily digital lives, in our cyber-biopolitics of every day. One of its most

striking results is Wikipedia, which is simply the largest encyclopedia of available

throughout human history (LOVINK & TKACZ 2011). Wikipedia has become an

immense mine of information and knowledge thanks precisely to its construction logic,

which is based on multiplying anonymous authorship, a fragmentation or even a

schizofrenization of the subjectivity producing the hypertext. As it has innumerable and

unidentifiable authors, one can say that Wikipedia has no author. Hypertext can be text

with no identifiable author.

If the text no longer needs an author, if knowledge does not need a subject, if the

work of art does not need an individualized genius creator – if the author is dead, what

sense there is in talking about the rights of the author or about copyrights? In other

words, which legitimacy may have the prohibition of the reproduction of intangible for

someone’s own use or for free of charge distribution? Who wins with that? Contrary to

what the propaganda against the piracy makes it seems to be, there is no a crisis in

scientific nor in artistic production. This is not a crisis of authors or readers. This is a

crisis is of publishers, record labels, producers, namely, the faithful custodians of the

author’s assets – and his only beneficiaries. Hence the emergence of certain political

3 Check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacktivism 4 In the original: “manifesto do arrastão cultural”. Impossible to translate, the term “arrastão” (trawler)

means indeed a collective strategy of assault, in which the crowd of burglars penetrates another crowd,

generaly, of consumers, to grab everything they can. Tom Zé thinks that it exactly what musicians should

do. Check his album: Com Defeito de Fabricação (1998).

15

movements of resistance that performs counter-conduct in the present day, which we

may describe as performances of counter-cyber-biopower.

Resistance to the war on piracy assumes, for example, the form of copyleft

practices, as well as the development of open access licenses such as Creative

Commons, that prevent the marketing by third parties of works whose authorship has

been renounced. This is an extremely important resistance focus within the field of Law

and its production. If the copyright is a legal mechanism of alienating privatization of

the common, copyleft is the legal mechanism that contests and counterclaims it, directly

resisting against it. There’s an entire work of resistance incubated in bureaucracy – who

was Kafka but a resistant burocrat? It is this work, in its specificity, with its technicity,

which enables the operator of Law to become an effective Law producer – to stop

standing “before the Law” and finally break on through the door. There are technical

and legal, positivist and formalistic battles to be fought. Resistance always needs tough

contaminants on the front line. The scenario is not so adverse: concerning copyleft, in

the USA, there is already a consolidated precedent as result from a worthy of the name

lawyerly militancy (LESSIG 2005).

Cyber-biopolitical resistance experiences include, of course, the actions of

WikiLeaks and its spokesman, Julian Assange (2013), which draws attention to the fact

that the internet is the main control apparatus in a society where surveillance become

largely widespread. “The Big Brother does not exist, it is everywhere” (KYROU 2010):

we take surveillance devices in our pockets and bags, we need to be connected 24/7.

Retaking a term of Foucault (1975), we can say that we live in a global cyber-

panopticism. As resistance tactics, Assange (2013) proposes the encryption of the code

that travels in the info-ways, in order to pull it out of the reach of the interceptors of

States and enterprises (Empire). The cypherpunk movement, literally, “the punks of

cryptography”, from which Assange and WikiLeaks are part, believe in encryption, that

is, disguise, destabilization, un-identification, anonymity.

In fact, many cyber-resistance movements are explicitly organized around the

anonymity, somehow imitating the anonymous character of power to which they resist.

An example is the French movement Comité invisible, linked to the anonymous

collective Tiqqun, who after publishing and practicing counter-conduct, got started an

interesting dialogue with Giorgio Agamben. Another is Anonymous, which emerged in

the USA to expand rapidly around the world (SILVEIRA 2013). Unidentifiable by

definition, somehow, these movements express the (counter-)power of anonymous

16

resistance, which does not have a leader or a name or an author, because the author is

dead, long time ago.

Therefore, this is our hypothesis: anonymity is one of the most striking features of

the multitude, particularly in contexts of cyber-biopolitical resistance. Anonymous is the

dividual subjectivity that resists. Anonymous is the multitude, biopolitical subject

endowed with general intellect that produces common knowledge. Or, in other words,

the epistemological subject of common knowledge is the anonymous multitude. Instead

of being neglected, the resistance power, the biopolitics of anonymity should serve as

Leitfaden for a cartography of the cyber-biopolitical experiences. In addition, this one

could include the analysis of the implications of cyber-resistance in demonstrations that

erupted in Brazil in May 2013 and whose ends none knows.

However, a warning is necessary. In spite of the remarkable potential of resistance

that cyber-activism has, it is important not to neglect its politically correct and

neutralized version, which has been called slackactivism.5 It is a lazy militancy, a

pseudo-activism, highly practiced, which lends no more than the comfort of

consciousness for those who believe to contribute to a better world by signing online

petitions or forwarding right claim messages.

5 Check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacktivism

17

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