Beyond the Periphery of the Skin by Silvia Federici

Author:Silvia Federici
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move.

—Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1995

Introduction: Why the Body?

There are different reasons why we must speak of the body despite the vast literature that already exists on this subject.1 First, there is the old truth that “in the beginning is the body,” with its desires, its powers, its manifold forms of resistance to exploitation. As is often recognized, there is no social change, no cultural or political innovation that is not expressed through the body, no economic practice that is not applied to it (Turner 1992). Second, the body is at the center of both the main philosophical debates of our time and a cultural revolution continuing, in some respects, the project inaugurated by the movements of the 1960s and 1970s that brought the question of instinctual liberation to the forefront of political work. But the main reason why we must speak of the body is that rethinking how capitalism has transformed our bodies into labor power helps us place in a context the crisis our bodies are currently undergoing and, at the same time, read behind our collective and individual pathologies the search for new anthropological paradigms.

The framework of analysis I have proposed differs from the orthodox Marxist methodology and from the accounts of the body and disciplinary regimes proposed by poststructuralist and postmodern theories. Unlike the orthodox Marxist descriptions of the “formation of the proletariat,” my analysis is not limited to changes in the body produced by the organization of the labor process. As Marx recognized, labor power does not have an independent existence; it “exists only as a capacity in the living individual,” in the living body (Marx 1976, 274). Thus, forcing people to accept the discipline of dependent labor cannot be accomplished only by “expropriating the producers from their means of subsistence” or through the compulsion that is exercised by means of the whip, the prison, and the noose. From the earliest phase of its development to the present, to force people to work at the service of others, whether the work was paid or unpaid, capitalism has had to restructure the entire process of social reproduction, remolding our relation not only to work but also to our sense of identity, to space and time, and to our social and sexual life.

The production of laboring bodies and new “disciplinary regimes” cannot therefore be purely conceived of as changes in the organization of work or as an effect of “discursive practices,” as postmodern theorists propose. “Discourse production” is not a self-generating, self-subsistent activity. It is an integral part of economic and political planning and the resistances it generates. Indeed, we could write a history of the disciplines—of their paradigm shifts and innovations—from the viewpoint of the struggles that have motivated their course.

Conceiving our bodies as primarily discursive also ignores that the human body has powers, needs, desires that have developed in the course of a long process of coevolution with our natural environment and are not easily suppressed.

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