Paris has been doing this too. Anne Hidalgo has been mayor since 2014 — almost exactly Colau's tenure. She has closed the Seine quays to cars. She has pushed the fifteen-minute city, removed parking spaces by the thousand, and built bicycle infrastructure where before there was only traffic. Paris on a Sunday in central arrondissements is recognizably different from Paris a decade ago — pedestrians on the Seine quays where the cars used to be.
Hidalgo was born in Spain. Her family came to France from Franco's Spain when she was a child. She knows the lineage. But her position is not Colau's position, and the contrast is the lesson.
Hidalgo governs inside the French centralized state. The mayor of Paris is constrained by national authority in ways the mayor of Barcelona — operating inside the Catalan autonomous community — is not. Her political base is the French Socialist Party, not a citizen platform built from assemblies. She is a career politician advancing a progressive program from inside an existing party, against opposition from drivers and conservatives and the right press, and the program has produced real change. But the next mayor can put the parking spaces back. The structure that produced Hidalgo can also produce her opposite.
What Colau had — what Hidalgo does not — is a coalition rooted in the neighborhoods that elected her, with cultural infrastructure older than her mayoralty and longer-lived than it. The Barcelona that Colau changed has an immune system. What Hidalgo is building in Paris is a different kind of power — vulnerable in a different way.
Michel Foucault, working in Paris in the 1970s, identified something Gramsci had named but not fully anatomized. Power, he argued, had undergone a transformation. Classical sovereign power — the power of the king — was the right to take life or let live. Modern power is something different. It doesn't primarily kill; it domesticates. A wolf is not hunted into a dog — it is bred into one, generation by generation, its development bent toward tameness until the docility looks like its own nature. Neoteny is the mechanism: the domesticated animal keeps its juvenile traits for life, the dependence and the pliancy that the wild adult would have outgrown, because those are the traits that serve the keeper. This is what biopower does to a population. It does not take your life; it administers it. It manages, regulates, optimizes — bends the body's development toward usefulness until the usefulness feels like character. The prison, the hospital, the school, the factory: not just places where bodies are controlled but where the definition of normal and deviant, productive and useless, is manufactured and maintained.
Antonio Negri built the answer to Foucault's unfinished question over decades. Arrested in Italy in 1979 on charges widely understood to be political, he wrote The Savage Anomaly from prison. He was elected to Parliament from his cell, and used parliamentary immunity to escape to France in 1983. From exile through the 1990s, he and Michael Hardt would write Empire. He died in Paris in December 2023, at ninety.
What Negri and Hardt built across Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth: if biopower is power operating through life, then biopolitical production is what capitalism now primarily depends on. Not the extraction of value from raw materials or repetitive factory labor, but from life itself — from language, from affect, from care, from knowledge, from the accumulated capacity of human beings to cooperate, communicate, and create. The call center worker selling warmth. The nurse managing pain and fear. The teacher producing the capacity to learn. The neighborhood whose longtime residents make it desirable enough for developers to gentrify. None of this produces a material good you can hold. All of it produces value that capital captures.
At the far end of domestication is the thing that does not breed its host but rewrites it. A fungus infects an ant, and the ant climbs — not where the ant was going, but where the fungus needs to fruit; it locks its jaws onto a leaf at the right height and dies there so the fungus can grow out of its head. The ant does the climbing. The ant feels, presumably, like it is doing what ants do. That is biopolitical production at its limit: not the body coerced, but the body's own striving turned to another's harvest, the worker selling warmth and calling it a career, the neighborhood making itself lovely for the developer who will price it out. The capacity is yours. The fruiting is someone else's.
And what is the substrate of all this production?
Ostrom was in Indiana counting cases. Negri was in Paris completing Foucault. Neither knew the other existed. Both arrived, from opposite directions, at the same answer: the commons is prior to the market and prior to the state. It is what we are before either claims us. Enclosure doesn't create value. It captures value that communities have already produced, and then charges them to access what they made.
The question Foucault couldn't ask is the one Achille Mbembe was formed to ask.
Mbembe grew up in Cameroon in the 1960s — a country with formal independence, a flag, a president who gave speeches about self-determination, and an economy structured by French interests, politics shaped by the accommodations a postcolonial state makes with the powers that could still undermine it. Cameroon was governed by Ahmadou Ahidjo, who maintained power through a security apparatus and Paris's approval. The independence was real. The sovereignty was partial. Growing up inside that condition — neither colonized in the explicit sense nor free in the material sense, inside a state with the form of self-governance but not yet the substance — produced a specific vantage point. From inside the gap between the form and the substance of freedom, you can see something that Foucault, working entirely from within the European experience, could not. Foucault had described how modern power rules less by killing than by managing life — regulating bodies, administering whole populations. What he never examined was the prior foundation that apparatus is built on. Mbembe could see what that foundation was.
He was born in Otélé, Cameroon, in 1957 — the year France was actively suppressing the Union des Populations du Cameroun, the nationalist movement that had been demanding independence since the 1940s. France killed tens of thousands in a counterinsurgency campaign it would spend decades refusing to acknowledge. His parents were involved in the struggle. He grew up in a country where independence arrived in 1960, the French flag came down, and the violence continued under different administration.
His father — Ruben Um Nyobè, the founding leader of the UPC, the man France had spent a decade trying to kill, shot dead by French troops in 1958, the year after Mbembe was born — told him it would be better if he went away for a while. So he went to Paris, immersing himself in the French poststructuralists — Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan — while writing archival history of anti-colonial resistance in southern Cameroon. He was learning the colonizer's most sophisticated tools of analysis, and learning what they could and couldn't see.
By 1940 Benjamin was in flight. The Nazis had taken Paris. He had spent thirteen years working on a book about the Paris shopping arcades — Das Passagen-Werk — a book made of fragments, quotations, the debris of the nineteenth century, and it was never finished. The manuscript in his suitcase when he crossed the Pyrenees on foot in September was something smaller and sharper: On the Concept of History. Eighteen theses. He gave a copy to Hannah Arendt before he left, in case he did not make it.
Imagine the arcades.
Iron-and-glass passages cut between Paris streets in the 1820s and 1830s, before the department store ate their function — covered shopping promenades roofed in panes of milky glass, the cast-iron ribs holding the roof up the way a greenhouse holds a sky. The floors were marble. Gaslight burned overhead until the electric came, and then the electric burned, and then both at once, and the light was a quality of light no one alive has seen — sulfur-yellow at one end of a passage, blue-white at the other, the human face changing color as you walked.
The shops sold what the nineteenth century thought it wanted: silk gloves, glass eyes, panoramas of vanished battles, photographers' studios where you sat very still for a daguerreotype, dressmakers' rooms where the bolts of cloth reached the ceiling. Above the shops were apartments. Above the apartments were small rooms rented by women whose names the registers did not record. The arcades held all of this at once: commerce, art, sex, kitsch, the official story and its underside, the dream-house of the bourgeoisie with the working life of the city humming under its roof.
By Benjamin's day they were obsolete. Half the shops were closed. Water stained the marble. The mirrors had gone milky and reflected milky mirrors. The flâneur drifted through them — the wandering observer with no errand, all gaze. Benjamin walked them for thirteen years. He wrote in the Passagen-Werk: every epoch dreams its successor. The kitsch of one age is the unconscious of the next. He read the arcades because they were the dream-image of the nineteenth century decaying in plain sight in the twentieth, and the decay was legible — the seam between the dream and what the dream actually was.
This is aura in a corridor. You can walk a place that has been condemned to forgetting and feel the specific weight of what it once dreamed itself to be. The forgotten thing is still there, attending to you, asking to be read.
The collector worked the city. Benjamin walked Paris because Paris was where the debris was densest and where the encounters that produced the new were densest. The metropolis is where capital deposits its wreckage and where, against its intentions, capital produces the encounters that read the wreckage.
This is what the wizard is doing in the city. Not collecting in the antiquarian sense — preserving everything against forgetting — but waiting in the dense terrain of the metropolis until a specific fragment becomes legible to the specific need being carried. The arcade flashed up to Benjamin because Paris in the 1930s was the only Paris that could read what 1830 had dreamed. The Rolling Jubilee flashed up to Graeber because the secondary debt market existed in the precise form it did at the precise moment his organizing needed an opening. The chip from the cut flashed up because two people walking the Scar had spent years learning to read what was killed.
In May 1968, students in Paris took this argument into the streets.