The critique is a demand for a strategic investigation into the biopolitical state that forms an ontological resonation with the common.

The external standpoint and the foundation in identity that give such epistemological critiques their power can also, as many of the practitioners are keenly aware, prove to be a limitation. Donna Haraway, for example, warns that any search for a standpoint outside, based in identity, is tinged with the dream of returning to a Garden of Eden, a site of absolute purity.79 Another way of posing this danger, to use the slogan we derived from Fanon earlier, is that such projects risk getting stuck in antimodernity. In epistemology as in politics, we need to focus on the forces of critique and resistance that are inside modernity and from this internal position discover the means to create an alternative. The passage from anti- to altermodernity, in the epistemological context, must lead to a biopolitical conception of rationality.

Two intuitions serve us as initial guides for exploring the terrain of biopolitical reason. First, the experience of the common provides a framework for breaking the epistemological impasse created by the opposition of the universal and the particular. Once we have critiqued the false universals that characterize dominant modern rationality, any new attempt to promote universal truths is rightly viewed with suspicion, because the critique has unmasked not only those specific claims to universality but also the transcendent or transcendental basis on which universal truths are proclaimed. It is not sufficient, though, in reaction to this, simply to limit ourselves to particular knowledges with no claim to truth. The common cuts diagonally across the opposition between the universal and the particular. Normal usage of the terms “common sense” and “common knowledge” captures some of what we have in mind insofar as they extend beyond the limitations of the particular and grasp a certain social generality, but these terms generally view the common as something passive, already given in society. We concentrate instead, following Spinoza’s conception of “common notions,” on the production and productivity of the common through collective social practices. Like the universal, the common lays claim to truth, but rather than descending from above, this truth is constructed from below.80

This leads directly to our second guiding intuition: that epistemology has to be grounded on the terrain of struggle—struggle that not only drives the critique of the present reality of domination but also animates the constitution of another reality. Saying that truth is constructed from below means that it is forged through resistance and practices of the common. Our conception of the biopolitical and its development, then, is not just analogous to the political passage from antimodernity to altermodernity, as we suggested earlier. It is in some sense the same process of struggle seen now through a different attribute—a biopolitical struggle that produces at once a new reality and a new truth.

Discovering a basis for knowledge in the common involves, first of all, a critique of the pretense of objectivity of the scientific tradition, but one that, of course, does not search for an outside to that tradition. This critique instead arises from the inside, through what Foucault calls “the insurrection of knowledges . . . against the centralizing power-effects that are bound up with the institutionalization and workings of any scientific discourse organized in a society such as ours.”81 The critique of the objectivity of science, which is allied with the politics of truth that has supported and developed colonial, capitalist, masculinist, and imperial practices of domination, has now become conventional and widely accepted, at least within progressive scholarly circles. What interests us specifically, though, and is revealed especially from the internal, insurrectionary perspective, is that a common subject is formed here that has nothing to do with the transcendental.

The emergence of the common, in fact, is what has attracted so many authors to the epistemological and political possibilities opened by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notions of language games and forms of life. “So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?” Wittgenstein asks himself rhetorically. And he responds: “It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life [Lebensform].”82 We should highlight two aspects of Wittgenstein’s operation. First, by grounding truth in language and language games, he removes truth from any fixity in the transcendental and locates it on the fluid, changeable terrain of practice, shifting the terms of discussion from knowing to doing. Second, after destabilizing truth he restores to it a consistency. Linguistic practice is constituent of a truth that is organized in forms of life: “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.”83 Wittgenstein’s concepts manage to evade on one side individual, haphazard experience and, on the other, transcendental identities and truths, revealing instead, between or beyond them, the common. Language and language games, after all, are organizations and expressions of the common, as is the notion of a form of life. Wittgensteinian biopolitics moves from knowledge through collective practice to life, all on the terrain of the common.84

Numerous other instances in the philosophical tradition of the critique of epistemology are similarly linked to the common. Earlier, for example, we explored briefly that path in phenomenology that leads from Merleau-Ponty to Levinas and Derrida, in which the critique of knowledge is combined with an analytics of Mitsein (being-with), which is, of course, another powerful conception of the common. The question, however, is not simply reference to the common but where the common is posed or—whether the common is, on the one hand, naturalized in some other way hypostatized or, on the other, grounded in collective practice. Consider, for example, the kind of hypostasis that is familiar to functionalist anthropology and sociology. Philippe Descola characterizes such functionalism as a perspective in which all of the constitutive elements of a natural set agree—based on a definite place—serving to perpetuate a stable totality.85 Just as Claude Lévi-Strauss asserts that “every use of the concept of identity must begin with the critique of this notion,” that is, the critique of every “substantial iden-tity” or natural totality, so too every use of the notion of the common must begin with its critique.86 The common is thus in the paradoxical position as being a ground or presupposition that is also the result of the process. Our analysis, then, from this point on in our research, should be aimed at not “being common” but “making the common.”

Some contemporary anthropologists, pursuing a path parallel to ours, arrive at a similar conclusion about the role of the common in an alternative, biopolitical rationality, which goes beyond the division between nature and culture, between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, for example, uses the unmodern ontology of Amerindians of the Brazilian Amazon as a standpoint to critique the tradition of modern epistemology. He provocatively poses the Amerindian perspective as an inversion of a series of conventional modern philosophical positions to explain the consequences of the fact that Amerindians conceive animals and other nonhumans as “persons,” as kinds of humans, such that human interactions with what would normally be called “nature” take a form something like “social relations.” As a result, whereas modern philosophy (from Kant to Heisenberg) posits that the point of view creates the object, here the point of view creates the subject; and whereas modern philosophy conceives of one nature and many cultures, here there is one culture (all are in some sense human) but many natures (occupying different worlds). Viveiros de Castro thus discovers, in contrast to the “multiculturalism” of modern philosophy, an Amerindian “multinaturalism”: “One culture, multiple natures—one epistemology, multiple ontologies. Perspectivism implies multinaturalism, for a perspective is not a representation. A perspective is not a representation because representations are a property of the mind or spirit, whereas the point of view is located in the body,” and “what I call ‘body’ is not a synonym for distinctive substance or fixed shape; body is in this sense an assemblage of affects or ways of being that constitute a habitus.”87 Multiple ontologies do not imply fixed divisions between beings. Rather Viveiros de Castro describes, in his study of Araweté cos-mology, a universe where Becoming is prior to Being and where the relation to alterity is not just a means of establishing identity but a constant process: becoming-jaguar, becoming other.88 Our aim here—and Viveiros de Castro’s too—is not to advocate an unmodern Amerindian ontology but rather to use that perspective to critique modern epistemology and push it toward an altermodern rationality. As we saw in the route we took through Wittgenstein, here too what is required is a shift of emphasis from knowing to doing, generating a multiplicity of beings constantly open to alterity that are revealed through the perspective of the body, which is an assemblage of affects or ways of being, which is to say, forms of life—all of which rests on a process of making the common.

Bruno Latour arrives by different means at a similar affirmation that the common must be constructed, but he is satisfied at that point simply to conclude: we must organize the tâtonnement, that is, the groping trial and error of experience. We agree with Latour that, between nature and culture, we always experience the world in fragments, but we insist on a much stronger power, not to recompose some lost totalities but to translate them into the fabric of a common experience and through practice to constitute from them a new form of life.89

When we place so much weight on the common, as we do here, some are likely to object that this amounts to an assumption of sameness or identity that denies or negates difference. We should emphasize, on the contrary, that when the common appears in the thought of Wittgenstein or Viveiros de Castro, it brings with it an affirmation of singularities. Wittgenstein’s conceptions of language games and forms of life present the common only insofar as they engage alterity: the common is composed of interactions among singularities, such as singularities of linguistic expression. The same is true for the Amerindian multiple ontologies and the processes of becoming that Viveiros de Castro describes. Differences in perspective mark differences over not only opinions or principles but also what world we inhabit—or really they indicate that we inhabit different worlds. And yet every world is defined by becomings, constantly engaged with alterity. Whereas identity and difference stand in opposition, the common and singularity are not just compatible but mutually constitutive.

We are now in the position to offer provisionally three characteristics that a biopolitical reason would have to fulfill: it would have to put rationality at the service of life; technique at the service of ecological needs, where by ecological we mean not simply the preservation of nature but the development and reproduction of “social” relations, as Viveiros de Castro says, between humans and nonhumans; and the accumulation of wealth at the service of the common. That makes it clear (to move now through the same three items in inverse order) that economic valorization is no longer possible except on the basis of the social appropriation of common goods; that the reproduction of the lifeworld and its physical environment is no longer possible except when technologies are directly controlled by the project of the common; and that rationality can no longer function except as an instrument of the common freedom of the multitude, as a mechanism for the institution of the common.

All of this remains lifeless and inert, however, unless biopolitical reason is grounded on the terrain of collective practice, where the state of being-in-common is transformed into a process of making the common. The collective practice of biopolitical reason has to take the form of strategic investigation, a form of militancy. This is necessary, first of all, because, as we argued in De Corpore 1, in the biopolitical context truth is born and dies as an event of being, produced by a common experience. Spinoza jokes at one point that in order to speak the truth of the sestertius or the imperial (two different coins) that I have in my hand and grasp their value, I have to refer to the common voice that gives them monetary value. Truth can only be proclaimed out loud. In De Homine 1, however, we see that truth must be not only proclaimed but also acted, which Spinoza identifies with the formula experientia sive praxis, the principle of a truth formed by the activism of subjects who want to live a common life. No transcendent or transcendental force can stand between subjects and truth, citizens and their power. “With regard to political theory,” Spinoza writes, “the difference between Hobbes and myself . . . consists in this, that I always preserve the natural right in its entirety, and I hold that the sovereign power in a State has right over a subject only in proportion to the excess of its power over that of a subject. This is always the case in a state of nature.”90 Said out loud, the truth is produced in action made in common, without intermediaries.

The kind of strategic investigation we have in mind resembles, on the one hand, the traditional Marxist “factory investigation” that inquired into the conditions and relations of workers with a combination of sociological detachment and political goals, but remained fundamentally external to the situation, in the hands of the party intellectual elite.91 It also resembles, on the other, the kind of interactive production of knowledge common to the “teach-ins” of the 1960s, which was indeed conceived as a kind of ethical practice entirely invested in the common fabric of the social situation, but one which was not effectively mobilized as political action.92 Closer to the strategic investigation we have in mind is a third conception, which incorporates elements of these two but goes beyond them: Foucault’s use of the notion of dispositifs, that is, the material, social, affective, and cognitive mechanisms active in the production of subjectivity. Foucault defines the dispositif as a network of heterogeneous elements oriented by a strategic purpose:

By dispositif I understand a sort of formation, let’s say, whose primary function, at a given historical moment, is to respond to a demand [urgence]. The dispositif thus has an eminently strategic function [which means that] it involves a certain manipulation of relations of force, a rational and concerted intervention in those relations of force, either to develop them in some direction or to block them or to stabilize and utilize them. The dispositif is thus always inscribed in a power relation [un jeu de pouvoir], but always also tied to one or several limits of knowledge, which derive from it and, at the same time, condition it.93

Foucault’s notion of strategic knowledge allows us to conceive the collective production of the common as an intervention in the cur-rent relations of force aimed at subverting the dominant powers and reorienting forces in a determinate direction. The strategic production of knowledge in this sense implies immediately an alternative production of subjectivity. The dynamic of the dispositif not only extends from a knowledge process to the prescription of subjectivity but also is always open to the constitution of the common, internal, one might say, to history and life, and engages in the process of revolutionizing them. Biopolitical reason is thus defined by a kind of ontological resonance between the dispositifs and the common.