The Ontological Communism of the Multitude

Nate Holdren

I am grateful to Chris Hurl, Keir Milburn, Angelica Mortensen, Colin McQuillan, Sebastian Touza, and Steve Wright for their helpful comments on drafts of this paper.

 

What does ‘communism’ mean in postmodernity, after previously solid categories have melted into air? Marx and Marxism deploy multiple meanings of the term, two of which include communism as production by freely associated labor and communism as "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things." These meanings typically refer to different temporal registers: the real movement exists now, while freely associated labor waits to make its entrance after the wreckage of history has been cleared away.

Antonio Negri is profoundly invested in the problem and project of communism. An important re-envisioning of communism has emerged in Negri’s work - and, for Negri, in the world - uniting these two meanings and temporalities of communism. Communism becomes the real movement of production by freely associated labor, which destroys the present order at the same time and to the degree that it carries a new world in its heart.

In a key essay, Negri writes that today "new technical conditions of proletarian independence are determined within the material passages of [capitalist] development", opening up the "possibility of a rupture in the restructuration [of class relations] which is not recuperable and which is independent of the maturation of class consciousness." These ruptures are communism, the ‘real movement’, operating now to destroy the present order. The possibilities of rupture arise from within the specific composition of the present. Marx states in The German Ideology, "[t]he conditions of this movement [of communism] result from the premises now in existence." Negri sees new and profound conditions for communism in the premises of our current era. Negri’s understanding of these possibilities is linked to the twin themes of ontology and multitude.

Michael Hardt states "Negri will only accept ‘superficial’ responses to the question ‘what makes being possible?’" Negri addresses "a strictly immanent and materialist ontological discourse that refuses any deep or hidden foundation of being.... [Being] is fully expressed in the world." Negri focuses on the production of being by cooperative practice, how "existence precedes the essence that founds it [and] beings are constitutive of the Being that makes them possible." Put in Spinozian terms, Negri’s ontology "sets out from the ‘modes’, from practice in order to construct ‘substance’".

Negri’s is a heterodox ontology, based, as Timothy Murphy notes, "in the categories of causal immanence and projective labor". Negri’s is an ontology of how the present order is continually produced anew, how living labor calls the future into being. The most recent name for this labor in Negri’s work is multitude. The theme of multitude has arisen from Negri’s "effort to define ontological categories of subversive subjectivity".

Before proceeding, it is important to note the different temporalities at work in these concepts. Negri identifies two orientations toward time in Marx’s work: diachronic and synchronic. The diachronic maps the present, tracing its shape. The synchronic seeks to read the historical tendency, noting where, when and how the future will emerge.

Hardt and Negri identify two orientations toward time in their own work: the always-already and the not-yet. The always-already, like the diachronic, operates a mapping and a criticism of the present. The not-yet is the time of the future, the project of the coming communism.

These times gesture toward a thoroughly non-theological communism, an earthly rather than a heavenly city. The heavenly city comes about only by an act of God, an intervention from outside the present order. The earthly city, by contrast, grows from moments of grace present within the fallen world. That is, communism is built from the interior of the present order.

The linchpin which holds these disparate times together is the central axiom of Negri’s ontology: "[t]he world is not a practico-inert backdrop but a context of activities." This insight links the diachronic and the synchronic, the always-already and the not-yet. "With each instant the world is created anew in its totality." The continual creation of the world occurs as "living labour takes the world in hand, transforming and innovating it radically in the common." The permanently open door between past and future is living labor: the real movement of communism in the present. This makes Negri’s ontology historical and political. "The ontology of living labor is an ontology of liberation", of the continuous and dynamic production of being, the permanence of subversive possibility.

Negri’s work on ontology and multitude results from his analysis of real subsumption of labor by capital. As Jason Read puts it, "the question of real subsumption as the contemporary articulation of capitalism is the historical-political axis of Negri’s thought." Real subsumption - identified by Hardt and Negri with the transition to postmodernity - has two aspects, one in which the labor process is internally reorganized to meet the dictates of capital, and another in which capitalist relations inhere throughout society, not simply in designated workplaces. Under real subsumption, production and reproduction tend to coincide. The borders of the space-times of life and work become increasingly fluid.

The tendentially hegemonic mode of labor under real subsumption is immaterial labor. Immaterial labor refers to the production of the immaterial content of commodities such as media and art, as well as the role of information and communication in sectors of material production, and the production of affect, in service work and elsewhere. Aspects of immaterial labor are logically differentiable, but Hardt and Negri note that in actuality these aspects functionally intermingle. "Most actual jobs involving immaterial labor combine these [different] forms."

While the concept of immaterial labor has been criticized as overly broad, it has a key critical force: it foregrounds the centrality of the production of subjectivity in contemporary capitalism. Immaterial labor is the "production of subjectivity, the creation and reproduction of new subjectivities in society." Today "it is no longer possible to imagine the production of wealth and of knowledges if not through the production of subjectivity".

Today the production of subjectivity - what Paolo Virno, following Debord, terms ‘the spectacle’ - "plays the role of industry of the means of production", producing "communicative procedures, which ... function also as means of production in the more traditional sectors of our contemporary economy." Immaterial labor produces products such as training manuals, computer code, or artistic technique that other immaterial labor may use in production, as well as the affective content which renders commodities desirable - advertising associating a product with a given lifestyle, product and showroom design, the ‘buying experience’ that a salesperson creates for customers, etc. Subjectivity today is a key means of production, both object and agent of production: "[s]ubjectivity ... is produced through cooperation and communication and, in turn, this produced subjectivity itself produces new subjectivity, and so forth."

The spectacle - that is, immaterial labor in the industries of the spectacle - produces the subjectivities and capacities, the "communication, social relations, and cooperation," required for immaterial labor. These capacities are internal to social and biological life, so that biological life, society, and politics enter a zone of indistinction. The cooperative productivity of this zone tends to define and drive society. "The capitalist regime ... no longer produces through factories alone, but makes the whole of society work for its enrichment ... [it] has invested the whole of life." Thus, the range broadens over which capital must impose and maintain command.

Central to immaterial production is general intellect. In Marx, general intellect refers to scientific knowledge used in value production, "social knowledge [that] has become a direct force of production". For Marx, science and knowledge enter the labor process only via machinery, via fixed capital. Negri and others have reinterpreted general intellect to include the accumulation of knowledge and productive capacity within variable capital, that is, within the bodies and brains of the working class. General intellect becomes a potentiality of labor power, actualized for capital in immaterial labor.

General intellect radically transfigures the old project of seizing the means of production. The mass worker could collectively occupy the factory, seizing and alternatively employing the means of production. Where is the means of production, however, for a graphic designer? Spanish teacher? Author? Childcare provider? Variably in their laptop, home library, etc, but above all in their body and brain. "Today people have become the owners of the instruments, the tools with which they produce wealth. They no longer need to borrow their tools." These tools reside in the bodies and brains of workers, linked in cooperative production with other bodies and brains. This means old modes of political action and subversive association are inadequate to present conditions. As Sergio Bologna remarks, computer operators in the diffused factory "cannot strike against their computer, because they sit basically alone in front of their screens and often do not know who their client is."

The entry of general intellect into variable capital, into labor power, and the centrality of the production of subjectivity, entails that production becomes biopolitical. As Marx writes in the Grundrisse, "the conditions of the process of social life itself ... come under the control of the general intellect". If the laboring subject has already seized the means of production, the problem for capital becomes not defending the winter palace - preventing seizure of power - but policing those who have already stormed the palace gates, policing via mechanisms of precarization, monetary policy, ideological mechanisms, etc. Capital must continually repropose command in every instance of production throughout the social field, to sabotage and disrupt living labor’s ability to divert the means of production toward ends other than capital accumulation. Maintaining command forces power to map more tightly to the bodies, brains, and sociality of collective labor power. Power’s need to more closely control labor power opens new sites of struggle which give new meaning to old demands. As Virno writes, today "we cannot seriously invoke freedom of speech without aiming to suppress wage labour." One could say the same of demands for reproductive and sexual freedom. At stake is control over the general intellect - whether it will be functional for capital accumulation or the desires of the multitude. Giorgio Agamben poses this as the difference between the "inscription of social knowledge into the production processes" and "intellectuality as an antagonistic power and form-of-life".

I would like to note that the engine of these changes is struggle and production on the part of living labor. Living labor is ontologically the "first agent," the motor force which produces social reality. As Deleuze puts it, "the final word on power is that resistance comes first." Taking the ontological priority of living labor as his point of departure allows Negri to analyze the globality of capitalism without becoming a theorist of domination. The transition to real subsumption is "precisely the result of our struggles." Capital was compelled to change, to take into the labor process demands and practices of subversive struggles. Virno explains, capital "transformed into a productive resource precisely those modes of behavior which, at first, made their appearance under the semblance of radical conflict," converting "collective propensities ... [such as] exit from the factories, indifference to steady employment, [and] familiarity with learning and communication networks" into the requisite qualities of labor power.

Not only is the progression of capitalist development conditioned by struggle, but so are the everyday workings of capital. While living labor is within capital and empire, it does not exist as simply a mode of empire. If anything, empire is a mode of the multitude, just as in parts of the marxist tradition capital is only alienated labor. "Empire is constantly dependent on the multitude and its social productivity, [but] the multitude is potentially autonomous and has the capacity to create society on its own." The multitude produces and can over-run the bounds of capital and Empire.

The multitude can produce without capital, but the reverse is not true. The movement ontologically is from mode to substance. Capital exists as a mode of the multitude. In real subsumption, struggle becomes not seizing but escaping constituted power: autonomously exercising the multitude’s productive capacity, or in other words, seeking to control its own collective life and invent new ways of being: "the multitude is an ontological power [that] ... wishes to recreate the world in its image and likeness, ... to make a broad horizon of subjectivities that freely express themselves and that constitute a community of free [humanity]." The multitude as the power and desire to produce communism

Multitude is an old name. Virno argues that multitude once referred to the groups of humans who pre-existed the rise of the nation state. This multitude exercised the right to resist against encroaching power. The right to resist is less of a juridical category than an antagonistic practice, a collective hostility and self-defense. ^{The right to resist was the defense of a certain sociability and organization of being - the commons - against capital’s command, "safeguarding forms of life which have already been affirmed as free-standing forms, ... defending something positive". The multitude rematerializes under real subsumption, transformed "in the shift from the modern to the postmodern (or if you like, from Fordism to Postfordism)."}

It seem paradoxical to discuss the many-as-many under one name, ‘the multitude’. The point, however, is to sketch the possibilities of a collectivity in action that does not collapse into simple unity and homogeneity. While the multitude is internally heterogeneous, Hardt and Negri point out the multitude "is not fragmented, anarchical, or incoherent." The multitude has a common-ness. Negri writes "we can see [the multitude] as something organized." This organization is the basis by which the multitude differentiates itself internally.

The multitude is organized along the contours of its capacity for action and thought, the general intellect. Thought here indicates communication, sociality, affect, and should be understood as something corporeal. As Giorgio Agamben says, thought is "the nexus that constitutes the forms of life ... an experience, an experimentum that has as its object the potential character of life and of human intelligence."

In his recent work, Negri refers primarily to ‘the common’ rather than ‘general intellect’, in recognition that the general intellect lives in our bodies just as much as our brains. My paper from this point will follow Negri’s shift in terminology. The term ‘common’ underlines the corporeal and biopolitical aspects of general intellect. To quote Marx again, "the powers of social production [tend to be] produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life practice." The common is the multitude’s capacity to produce, both under capitalist command and autonomously.

For capital the common is labor power, the capacity to work. For the multitude the common is the potentiality for counterpower. The same capacities that produce value compose counterpower. This renders work and society - increasing synonymous terms - tremendously volatile for capitalist management: "labor today is life itself, and society can no longer define itself in any other form than as a productive general synergy ... following the circle of life along the length of a tangent" of value production. Sites and forms of antagonism multiply exponentially. Production and circulation of subversive knowledges and sociabilities occur with unprecedented rapidity. Myriad points of constitution and disruption become possible within the heart of the global labor process, exactly because the heart of the labor process tends toward being all of social and biological life: the biopolitical common.

Putting the common to work means exploitation becomes expropriating and domesticating the cooperative production of the multitude. Capitalism increasingly requires communism - production and innovation by freely associated labor via the common: "[c]ontrary to what is believed, people have become more communist than before.... Today levels of community and sharing exist everywhere: even writing an article on a computer means relying on a common knowledge." The multitude continually produces new ways of being, new modes of the common, in producing for capital and for itself. Capital continually must reimpose command over the multitude, neutralize the subversive potentiality of this excess - the multitude’s capacity to mobilize the common toward abolishing the present order - so as to render the multitude’s activity value productive. Capital’s command is a Sisyphean task, however, as "[b]iopolitical production is ... always excessive with respect to the value that capital can extract from it because capital can never capture all of life."

The common is the means by which the working class produces itself as multitude. While the historical commons were largely destroyed in the birth of capitalism, the multitude continually produces the new common. Capitalism’s current arrangement requires this common. "Nothing is produced that is not produced through the common.... The common is production, and all that is produced must be related back to the common." At the same time, "the common is the product of the multitude."

In the postmodern common, the right to resist recurs, as the multitude produces, reorganizes, and defends the common against capitalist command. "[T]he co-operation and productivity that postmodern individuals experience" is part of "an antagonism towards exploitation ... the constitution of new co-operative constellations" beginning from "the network of production, ... social reproduction, and ... participation in the ‘general intellect’". Against capitalist and imperial subjugation, Hardt and Negri pose configuring the common as absolute democracy; this "rule of everyone by everyone, a democracy without qualifiers" echoes the Müntzerite religiousbattle cry "Omnia Sunt Communia" - "Everything belongs to everyone!" in Luther Blissett’s novel Q. The key point, however, is that Hardt and Negri are not making a moralistic or utopian demand for communist democracy, but rather believe there are real bases for potential communism at work within our world: "democracy is really the basis of every society. The vast majority of our political, economic, affective, linguistic, and productive interactions are always based on democratic relations", that is, on the common, on collective and cooperative activity. Absolute democracy is the multitude exercising "the power of command over itself, overcoming all other forms of organized social existence", to "develop a new power of life, of organization and of production."

Absolute democracy and counterpower do not constitute a political program formulated from outside the multitude, but rather are internal to the multitude’s being multitude. The becoming-multitude of the proletariat in real subsumption is the production of multitudinous counterpower - in both senses of the word production: the proletariat produces itself as multitude by struggle, and becoming-multitude produces new struggles and challenges to constituted power. The multitude’s autonomous activity, production of alternative values, ways of being and sociabilities, disrupts constituted forms of power. The multitude disrupts, undermines, and blocks the operations of representative political structures by its own working existence, by its very becoming-multitude. The communism of the multitude "can be thought only in the form of expressions and not in the form of representations."

Constituted power seeks to include the multitude in the representational order. Representation limits and segments the multitude into unity and identity. Representational strategies are inadequate to the proletariat as it becomes multitude. Forcing the multitude into unity and identity is an operation of violence and subordination.

Failing incorporation into representational schema, power seeks to crush instantiations of the multitude directly. In Agamben’s words, "[t]he threat the state is not willing to come to terms with is precisely the fact that the unrepresentable should exist and form a community without either presuppositions or conditions of belonging." Incorporation or scorched earth are the only options for power, since capital and sovereignty cannot coexist with the multitude as multitude.

The multitude de-stitutes constituted forms. The animating force of constituted power is constituent power. De-stitution is exodus, the withdrawal of constituent power, such that constituted power collapses, brittle and empty.

Exodus is a moment of counterpower, of constitution of alternative sociabilities that render representation superfluous. Exodus produces the common as space-times of encounter, as freely associated production. The common is a zone of indistinction of life, labor, society, and politics. From the perspective of capital, exodus produces this zone as an empty negative space outside the legal order, a threatening nonjuridical space. In response, constituted power seeks to reimpose command by formatting this zone as the juridically empty space of the state of exception, the space most internal to power.

Exodus is the freely associated production of the common as resource for the abolition of the present order, and the assertion of the ontological priority of the multitude against the vampirism of transcendent power. Capital can not eliminate the possibility of counterpower, because the multitude’s practices of counterpower use the same capacities mobilized in immaterial production. Communism is a permanent potentiality of labor, continually pressing from the future into the present. Better, communism continually threatens to erupt from inside the present, to throw off the nightmarish weight of dead traditions and invent a new future in which many futures fit.

The multitude opens the possibility for a new communism produced "[o]n the edge of being," in the time of a new communist transition, a transition from the always-already to the not-yet, from the productivity of the common for capital to the production of the common for the multitude’s own needs. The communist project now is to produce, in Giorgio Agamben’s words, "a nonstatal and nonjuridical politics and human life". This project entails many changes in political action and theoretical practice. I would like to briefly note three such results:

First, the old project of seizing state power goes out the window. Instead, revolution becomes exercising power, not seizing power, or, in other words, configuring the commons as a moment of communism.

Second, the division between political and economic action breaks down, since the economic and the social now have a political character and political forms of sovereignty have a character closely paralleling the economic.

Thirdly, the project of struggle occurs increasingly at the level of the everyday, and in a transverse form. Struggle becomes the autonomous exercise of our collective capacitities, the articulation of practices of the right to resistance, meeting our own eeds, and composing relationships among the multitude of singularities and ensembles of struggle.

These notes are schematic, and don’t go far enough to address Agamben’s observation that the new politics and life "are yet to be entirely thought." This political thought requires starting from our positions situated inside the multitude. This thinking must seek to understand the multitude’s specific determinations, the history of its self-production, and its potential to produce the future.

One area of needed analysis is the history of the composition of the labor prosess and the changing hegemonic class figure - from professional worker, to mass worker, to socialized worker, to multitude. As Matteo Mandarini writes, "it is only through an exploration of the transformation of the class composition of the working class that one can arrive at an adequate notion of ... the composition of the multitude."

The multitude consists of particular acts and compositional processes. These process or microprocesses that compose the multitude are concrete and specific. We must attend not only to spectacular conflagrations in which the multitude’s profile can be traced in relief behind clouds of tear gas, but also to the less visible dynamics out of which large events emerge. As Sergio Bologna’s has discussed, what is called spontaneity is actually the product of microscopic arrangements of struggle. More research is needed into these microscopic arrangements. If we agree with Hardt and Negri that "[o]nly the multitude through its practical experimentation will offer the models and determine when and how the possible becomes real" then surely attention to the struggles of the multitude in their concreteness and specificity is a pressing intellectual and political task. After all, as Negri has said, today "What Is To Be Done can only be written from inside the analysis of the cycle of struggles."

Notes:

1 Bottomore, editor, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 87-90.

2 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 26.

3 Negri, "Twenty Theses on Marx," 164.

4 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 26.

5 Hardt, "The Art of Organization."

6 Negri, Time For Revolution, 16.

7 Murphy, "The Ontological Turn in the Marxism of Georg Lukacs and Antonio Negri," 164.

8 Negri, "Twenty Theses on Marx", 165.

9 Negri, Time For Revolution, 26.

10 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 222.

11 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 392-396.

12 Negri, Time For Revolution, 185.

13 Negri, Time For Revolution, 185.

14 Negri, Time For Revolution, 176.

15 Negri, "Twenty Theses on Marx", 169.

16 Read, "The Antagonistic Ground of Constitutive Power," 8.

17 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 255. 'Complete' subordination does not mean final or fully accomplished subordination. Rather, it means 'global' subordination, which stretches spatially and temporally across the entire surface of the globe, into our everyday lives and implicating the myriad processes of social and biological reproduction.

18 For one treatment of immaterial labor, see Lazzarato, "Immaterial Labor."

19 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 108.

20 Dyer-Witheford, "Empire, Immaterial Labor, the New Combinations, and the Global Worker."

21Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 66.

22 Negri, El Exilio, 36, my translation. On the role of the production of subjectivity in capitalism and theories of subjectivity in Marxism, see Jason Read, The Micropolitics of Capital.

23 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 61.

24 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 189.

25 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, (New York: The Penguin Press), p.113

26 See Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 49-71.

27 Negri, Time For Revolution, 144.

28 See Virno "Notes on the 'General Intellect'."

29 Marx, Grundrisse, 706.

30 Negri and Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, 91.

31 As such, immaterial production may be something of a misnomer, as it is eminently corporeal and affective. In their newest book, Hardt and Negri prefer the term 'biopolitical', which has the dual function of underscoring the corporeal, affective, and political (that is, contested) nature of current forms of work.

32 Ronneberger and Schollhammer, "No Past? No!"

33 Marx, Grundrisse, 706.

34 See Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 112 for the traits of labor in our era. See Virno, "The Ambivalence of Disenchantment" and A Grammar Of The Multitude on the prevailing affective structures of our era.

35 I owe this insight, that the process of precarization in immaterial labor cuts both ways, rendering capitalist command precarious as well as the conditions of labor, to Angela Mitropoulos. Angela Mitropoulos, personal communication.

36 Virno, "Labour and Language."

37 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes On Politics, 10.

38 "This is an old Marxist idea, that struggles are what make history; not only history, in fact, because such struggles diffuse a certain consciousness everywhere. This is one way of expressing a principle that is found in all my theoretical work." Negri and Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, 19.

39 Negri, Time For Revolution, 128.

40 Deleuze, Foucault, 89. See also Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 64.

41Negri and Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, 63.

42 "The power of the proletariat imposes limits on capital and not only determines the crisis but also dictates the terms and nature of the transformation. The proletariat actually invents the social and productive forms that capital will be forced to adopt in the future." Hardt and Negri, Empire, 268, emphasis in the orginal. In the Italian case, the transition to real subsumption occurred with the rise and decomposition of the cycles of struggles from 1968 to the Movement Of 1977. For more on the Italian context specifically, see Bologna, "Tribe of Moles", Red Notes "Italy: Living In An Earthquake", Wright "Storming Heaven" and "A Party of Autonomy?"

43 Virno, A Grammar Of The Multitude, 98.

44 This transition "disrupted the existing balance of power - and gave rise to other power relations". Negri and Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, 18. Elsewhere Negri identifies this change with a passage from passage from disciplinary power to systems of control. Negri, Time For Revolution, 144.

45 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 225.

46 Negri and Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, 112.

47 Virno, A Grammar Of The Multitude, 21.

48 Virno, A Grammar Of The Multitude, 42-43.

49 Negri, "Approximations: Toward an ontological definition of the multitude."

50 Hardt and Negri, "Adventures of the Multitude," 242-243.

51 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 99.

52 Negri, "Approximations."

53 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 25.

54 Agamben, Means Without End, 9.

55 Marx, Grundrisse, 706

56 Negri, Antonio. Job, la fuerza del esclavo, 37, my translation.

57 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 385.

58 Negri and Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, 27.

59 This suggests a rethinking of the Marxian categories of primitive accumulation and enclosure. Rather than a historically accomplished fact, primitive accumulation is the continual - and contested - process of capital seeking to reimpose command and secure the conditions of its continued existence. Several contemporary marxists have begun rethinking the category primitive accumulation. See contributions by De Angelis, Bonefeld, nd Midnight Notes, in De Angelis, The Commoner issue 2. See also Cleaver "Study guide to Capital" and Read, Micro-Politics of Capital.

60 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 146. The conditions which make biopolitical production so productive for capital are the same which make it so volatile.

60 Virno, A Grammar Of The Multitude, 21. Again, it must be remembered that the entry of general intellect into production, the transition to real subsumption, occurred precisely as a result of the struggles of the working class. That is, producing itself is the very volatility of biopolitical production tha

61 Virno, A Grammar Of The Multitude, 21. Again, it must be remembered that the entry of general intellect into production, the transition to real subsumption, occurred precisely as a result of the struggles of the working class. That is, producing itself in struggle as multitude, the proletariat imposes conditions wherein labor power, variable capital - that is, the working class for capital, rather than for itself - takes on a form of being as multitude.

62 Negri, Time For Revolution, 188-189.

63 Negri, Time For Revolution, 195.

64 "Living labour ... escapes from the transcendental dominion of dead labour, when it reappropriates the tool", which is the commons, the biopolitical being of the multitude itself. Negri, Time For Revolution, 242.

65 Negri, Time For Revolution, 141.

66 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 237. See also Negri, "Reliqua Desiderantur".

67 Luther Blissett, Q, 13 and 25. The practices and writings of the Luther Blissett Project and its heir, the Wu Ming Foundation, are sorely lacking in scholarly attention, which is unfortunate given that they are both descendants of the same political traditions and experiences that Negri's work arises from, and a direct political response to the current era of capitalism.

68 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 311.

69 Negri, "Contrapoder", 88, my translation.

70 See Negri, "Contrapoder", 83-86, my translation.

71 Negri and Colectivo Situaciones, "Entrevista a Toni Negri," 122, my translation.

72 Negri, "Labor in the Constitution."

73 "The people" names the multitude produced as unity, as the political subject which can be represented. I have not spent time on the conceptual pairing "multitude" and "people" in this paper, for reasons of space and in order to avoid defining the multitude by what it is not. A great deal has been written on "the people" as unitary and state oriented. See for instance Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 21-25, and Agamben, Means Without End, 29-35.

74 Agamben, Means Without End, 89.

75 See Colectivo Situaciones, "Causes and Happenstance."

76 Analysis of the state of exception runs throughout the body of Giorgio Agamben's work. One good example of writing on the exception is Agamben, Means Without End. On page ix Agamben defines the exception succintly as "that temporary suspension of law that is revealed to constitute the fundamental structure of the legal system itself".

77 Negri, Time For Revolution, 176.

78 Agamben, Means Without End, 112.

79 For an account of the division between the political and the economic within the Marxist tradition - and the varying political strategies bound up with this debate - see Bologna, "Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at the Origin of the Workers-Council Movement." On the outmoded nature of this division under the current arrangment of production, see Negri, "Twenty Theses on Marx". On the increasing structural parallel of the sovereign relationship to the capital-labor relation, see Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 335.

80 Agamben, Means Without End, 112.

81 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 409-410.

82 Negri, Time For Revolution, 7.

83 See Cunninghame, "For an Analysis of Autonomia."

84 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 411.

85 See Emery, "No Politics Without Inquiry."

86 Negri and Colectivo Situaciones, "Entrevista a Toni Negri," 123, my translation.

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The Political Life in Giogio Agamben

Colin McQuillan, Emory University

The work of Giorgio Agamben has been tremendously appealing to a number of contemporary thinkers because of its allusions to an innovative ontology of potentiality, and its suggestions of a radical politics. Yet none of these thinkers have adequately understood what Agamben’’s work is about, or done justice to the role of politics in that work. Evidence of this is to be found in the dramatic differences in the appropriation of Agamben’’s thought.

On the one hand, Judith Butler uses Agamben to argue for the expansion of the concepts of ""humanity"" and ""politics"" to include marginalized and excluded elements of the community in her book Antigone’’s Claim.

1 Here, she seems to understand Agamben’’s discussion of bare life through a conception of belonging which Agamben challenges. By seeking to include that which is by definition excluded for Agamben, Butler fails to take proper stock of the state of exception her proposed revision of the concept of belonging would produce in the concept of the political, much less the consequences of such a revision for human life. There is more at stake than the ""catachresis"" of a set of arbitrarily defined, historically contingent social relations, as Butler seems to think––What is at stake is life itself, as Agamben makes clear. That Butler has not appreciated this is evident in her new book Precarious Life. Here, even in chapters where she considers Agamben, Butler fails to explain why it is life which is precarious and imperiled, even as she considers the fragility of human rights and the concept of humanity, the rights of citizens, and a host of other fundamental political identifications.

Slavoj Ži žek, on the other hand, seems to understand that bare life is by definition excluded, but uses Agamben to argue that liberal democracy is a mask hiding the fact that

""ultimately, we are all homo sacer,"" that is, we are all subject to totalitarian domination and the mechanisms of biopolitical social control. Ži žek believes that there is no democratic solution to this problem.

2 However, inasmuch as he equates bare life merely with the subject of domination and control, he has failed to grasp the potentiality of bare life, that is, life itself, that Agamben develops––though quite subtly and allusively. This leads Ži žek to reject the greater part of Agamben’’s analysis, and to champion a heroic politics of decision––a politics which Agamben does not share. For example, in his book Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Ži žek argues that the only way out of the contemporary ""state of emergency"" is to be found in ""the magical moment when the infinite pondering crystalizes itself into a simple yes or no,"" in ""a gesture of radical and violent simplification""––a decision––which Agamben thinks only leads back to the logic of sovereignty and the subjection––the sacrifice––of bare life.³

Antonio Negri––whose review of Agamben’’s The State of Exception is one of the most insightful commentaries on Agamben there is, and who is the only commentator who seems to understand what is really at stake for Agamben––celebrates Agamben’’s attempt to formulate a ""fully immanent redemption"" through a critical ontology, but says there are, in fact, two Agambens. The first, Heideggerean Agamben, he accuses of holding onto ""an existential, fated, and horrific background,"" forcing him ""into a continuous confrontation with the idea of death,"" so that his approach results in mysticism––Mysticism, for Negri, ""always stinks of the boss.""⁴ Negri celebrates the Spinozist Agamben, the Agamben who ""seiz[es]... the biopolitical horizon through an immersion into philological labor and linguistic analysis.""⁵ This Agamben is much closer to Negri’’s own project of a wholly positive metaphysics. As compelling as some of the similarities are between Agamben and Negri, and as close as they are in so many of their formulations, we must admit that there remains a critical difference between them––a difference which is, unfortunately, outside of the scope of this paper.

In this paper I will try to lay out Agamben’’s idea of the political life. It is my hope that it will become apparent that Agamben is a committed political thinker, in the sense that he thinks the human form-of-life is political, that his understanding of politics as ""a life directed toward the idea of happiness and cohesive with a form-of-life"" in which ""the single ways, acts, and process of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always above all power"" is not mystical, but is the result of a radical rethinking of the ontology of potentiality, as the immanence of life.⁶ To explain this requires, first of all, an inquiry into how this potentiality is and lives. And this requires that we address the problem of language.

In The Coming Community, Agamben says language is the reason why there is something rather than nothing. He calls language ""the power to not not-be.""⁷ Thus, for Agamben, being is the power of language, and being is ""being in language.""⁸ Language, therefore, is not the signification of being––which can only signify the categories of second substance, that is, qualities––but a way of being, a being-thus, whatever it is, along with its qualities.⁹ For Agamben, being-thus is being’’s taking place in language––its ""Being-there,"" so to speak, as a being-called. As in Heidegger, being in language has its place in being said, and it is for this reason that Agamben emphasizes the role of the voice in his book Language and Death. Voice is the manner or mode in which language takes place. It is not merely the sound of the spoken word––the phon‘––nor the written mark of its absence––the gramma––but an ""intention to signify"" and ""a pure indication that language is taking place.""⁰ Thus, for Agamben, voice designates pure being, such as it is. Voice is being as such. And, as such, the voice is always already transcendent––""the pure transcendent is the taking-place of every thing""––insofar as it is presupposed in every expression.¹

Always at work in the taking place of language, in being, however, is negativity. Being-as-such is opposed to being-thus, the transcendence of pure being contrasted to the inauthenticity of its immanence, its being-such-as-it-is, with all of its qualities, thus, whatever it is––its singularity. Insofar as it is the pure taking place of being, voice is marked by the negative ground of being––nothingness––which must be presupposed in order to give place to expression––to being. In Language and Death, Agamben writes that, in the history of metaphysics, this correlation is grasped by a distinction between voice and Voice, that is, by the voice which is announced, which is pronounced, or expressed, which signifies, and the Voice which keeps silent, the Voice from which expression and signification have been subtracted, as a ""no longer voice"" and ""not-yet meaning.

2

It is this negative Voice––indeed, Voice itself––from which the voice takes place. As such––as the negative ground of language––the Voice can only be indicated as a place––Da, there––and the taking place of language can only be indicated as an event––Diese, this. Metaphysics cannot understand language and being without indicating these essentially indeterminate, presuppositional structures, without referring to them in the instance of discourse, and yet it cannot acknowledge them, put them in their places, without becoming mystified––by attempting to take hold of this negativity in speech.³ This means that the transcendence of language, pure being ""necessarily remains unsaid in that which is said.""⁴ Metaphysics, bound to this negativity insofar as it is bound to the Voice, can never be made immediately or purely positive.

Heidegger attempted to show how even this lack of immediacy, this appropriation of positivity and negativity can lead beyond metaphysics, opening the door to a new understanding of potentiality––an understanding in which possibility stands higher than actuality. For Heidegger, the thought of this possibility would even disclose the possibility most proper to the human being––Being an issue for itself in its own being. In Language and Death, Agamben reminds us of the relation of this thought to Voice––for Heidegger, it is the silent call of conscience which calls Dasein to its owmost possibility––that is, to resolute anticipation of its own death. This anticipation allows Dasein to be ""stretched along""––to be temporalized––between birth and death, and thus to be there, to be Dasein. It is the anticipation of death, then, that lets Dasein live. And it is in this capacity that Dasein’’s life––its Being––is in time, not as a thing, but as care, as the ""quiet power of the possible."" Here, the logic of language’’s taking place––of language itself––falls into ethics, which, as Heidegger says in the Letter on Humanism, leaves humanity homeless, exposed, and abandoned, the shepherd who––precisely because of his poverty––stands in the clearing of Being.⁵

While Agamben takes up Heidegger’’s understanding of human being as exposed and abandoned, as potentiality, he takes exception to Heidegger’’s tragic view of human life––the view that life is what it is only in view of death. He shows that this is the result of a metaphysics––an ontology––which cannot escape the mysticism which results from attempting to take hold of the silence of the Voice––the presuppositional structure of language. Heidegger, in this sense, is still caught up in metaphysics. For Agamben, this mysticism is the daimon that ""threatens humans in the very core of their ethos, of their habitual dwelling place, that philosophy has always to think and to ‘‘absolve’’.""⁶ Such absolution requires a thought which can come to terms with the demonic in a way which will allow human ethos to take its distance from its ground––from the silence of death. In Language and Death, Agamben argues that such absolution is to be found in the thought of simply having language, a groundless speech.⁷

This speech is made possible, Agamben thinks, by the peculiar nature––or, more properly, the peculiar lack of nature––of the human being. He writes

To exist in language without being called there by any Voice, simply to die without being called by death, is, perhaps, the most abysmal experience; but this is precisely for man, also his most habitual experience, his ethos, his dwelling, always already presented in the history of metaphysics as demonically divided into the living and language, nature and culture, ethics and logic, and therefore, only attainable in the negative articulation of a Voice. And perhaps only beginning with the eclipse of the Voice, with the no longer taking place of language and with the death of the Voice, does it become possible for man to experience an ethos that is no longer simply a sigetics [the unformulatibility of the negative ground, mysticisim––cm]. Perhaps man––the animal who seems not to be encumbered by any specific nature or any specific identity––must experience his poverty even more radically.

8

This existence––having language without acknowledging the Voice, refusing to presuppose death by failing to considering the ground of existence, the ground from which language takes place, and so not actually existing––is the poverty of man, but also, Agamben says, ""his ethos, his dwelling,"" and, as such, his possibility––his life. If this poverty forbids man from taking as his own the negativity of the ground of his being, and so taking his proper place in the world, it leaves open the possibility that man can be redeemed, that he can live, not at the call of destiny, but by––and as––his own potentiality. This, however, leaves man exposed to his own groundlessness––that is, to his own violence. And this raises the specter of sacrifice, which is, for Agamben, at the heart of the crisis of contemporary politics.

At the end of Language and Death, Agamben writes that what is essential to sacrifice is that ""in every case, the action of the human community is grounded only in another action.""

9 This establishes sacrifice as the ""ungroundedness of all human praxis"" which hides ""the fact that an action (a sacrum facere...) is abandoned to itself..."" ⁰ However, sacrifice cannot admit its ungroundedness. It serves as ""that action which, remaining unspeakable (arreton) and intransmissible in every action and in all human language, destines man to community and tradition.""¹

Sacrifice thus becomes ""the foundation for all legal behavior,"" and a new kind of praxis, in which ""every facere is a sacrum facere.""

2

With this in mind, Agamben’’s reading of the figure of homo sacer, the man who, according to Roman law, could be killed but not sacrificed, becomes more comprehensible. Recognizing that, in the Roman legal tradition, life––vita––was only a correlate of the power to kill––nex––and that man––as citizen, as bios politikos––could be killed because he was subject to sovereign decision regarding his life and death––this, Agamben says, is the meaning of sacratio––human life––zo‘, the bare life of man––becomes the sacred, though unspeakable, ground of political order.³ The very conflation of the rights of man and the citizen––a conflation which is also, essentially, a distinction––the legacy bequeathed to modern democracy by Roman law––is the sacrum facere at the heart of its crisis––the sovereign decision which places human life under the ban.

This decision is made, Agamben thinks, because ""man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that life in an inclusive exclusion."" This separation and opposition, a function of the manner in which the groundlessness of the human capacity for language authorizes the logic of sacrifice is, in fact, the reason why human life is political, so that ""the fundamental categorial pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zo‘/bios, exclusion/inclusion."" Agamben calls this ""the fundamental biopolitical fracture of the West.""⁴

It is worth noting at this point that Carl Schmitt once attempted––in 1935, as he was attempting to reformulate the principles of jurisprudence in light of the Nazi Revolution––to eliminate the word ""man"" from the German Civil Code. He argued that

The legal concept of ‘‘man’’ in the sense of Article 1 of the Civil Code conceals and falsifies the differences between a citizen of the Reich, a foreigner, a Jew, and so on. Replacing scientific abstraction as something remote from reality, thinking in concrete terms, seeing equal as equal and above all unequal as unequal, and emphasizing the differences among men of different races, nations, and occupational estates in the sense of God-given realities––that is the goal of National Socialist academic jurists, not just those who are organizationally led by Carl Schmitt.

5

Agamben argues, on the contrary, that it is precisely the politicization of life, which Schmitt here advances, and which takes the form of an exclusion of bare life––man as zoon logon echon, irrespective of race, nation, and class––that has led to the ""bloody mystifications of a new planetary order,"" namely, ""the fundamental biopolitical fracture of the West.""

6 To overcome these ""bloody mystifications"" and this ""fracture"" requires an investigation of the form-of-life of the human being––that is, an ethics.

In The Coming community, Agamben appropriates Heidegger’’s definition of the meaning of Dasein as care––and, hence, possibility––in order to elaborate the ethics of the ""beautiful day"" of human life, which, in another essay, Agamben calls form-of-life.⁷ When Agamben claims that ""the only ethical experience (which, as such, cannot be a task or a subjective decision) is the experience of being (one’’s own) potentiality, of being (one’’s own) possibility––exposing, that is, in every form one’’s own amorphousness and in every act one’’s own inactuality,"" his claim resonates with Heidegger’’s conception of Dasein as the Being ""whose own Being is at issue in its very Being.""⁸ Indeed, he calls thought ""the nexus that constitutes the forms of life in an inseparable context as form-of-life,"" so that only where there is thought can there be a life ""in which it is never possible to isolate something life naked life.""⁹ This clearly echoes Heidegger’’s claim that thought is a way of dwelling whose essence is ""being-in-the-world.""⁰ It is worth considering that, in Homo Sacer, Agamben says that Heidegger’’s ""philosophical genius"" lay in having ""elaborated the conceptual categories that kept facticity from presenting itself as a fact,"" inasmuch as this constitutes Dasein as ""the inseparable unity of Being and ways of Being, of subject and qualities, life and world,"" so that ""the life of homo sacer, which was the correlate of sovereign power, turns into an existence,""––Dasein––""over which power no longer seems to have any hold.""¹ To be beyond the reach of power––unsubjected––opens the door to a different politics, one more in keeping with the potentiality of human being. Following Walter Benjamin, Agamben insists that this other politics––the coming community––be a purely profane order, constructed on the idea of happiness.²

Conceiving of human happiness in terms of potentiality requires a new understanding of the relationship between possibility and actuality. Aristotle defines happiness as the ""most complete end"" for human beings, an activity which ""lacks nothing."" Human beings can experience happiness only for a short time, according to Aristotle, because human things are not best things––being generated, and, more importantly, being incapable of continuous activity––and true happiness––defined as pure self-sufficiency and actuality––must be defined in view of the best things––because ""nothing incomplete is proper to happiness.""³ Thus, for Aristotle, true happiness belongs only to God––to self-thinking thought. Agamben, however, will contend that ""God or the good... is the taking-place of the entities, their innermost exteriority.""⁴

As man does not exist in the sense of Aristotle’’s God––perfectly, simply, eternally––being marked by the exteriority––finitude, which ""separates and opposes himself to his own life""––ethics must grasp the ""appropriation of the improper""––the exterior––not as impoverished or evil––but as ""perfectly analogous"" to the interior––that is, as possible, in order to be capable of happiness. In this sense, existence––as happiness––is the perfect ""appropriation of all possibilities""––slipping, with ease, into every paradigm––and ethics is ""the simple fact of one’’s own existence as possibility or potentially.""⁵ Indeed, this ethics is precisely the experience of being human, as the enjoyment of ""the experience of being (one’’s own) potentiality, of being (one’’s own) possibility.""⁶

In contemporary politics, however, this ethics––the form-of-life of humankind––has been obfuscated by the history of sacrifice. If man is, by definition, homo sacer––that which is both excluded and included by the violence of sovereign decision, itself included and excluded from the order of its own institution––this is a historical phenomenon, predicated on the history of politics in the west. As Agamben writes in Language and Death, the sacrifice of bare life and the constitution of sovereign power ""furnishes society and its ungrounded legislation with the fiction of a beginning.""⁷ But it remains the case that ""that which is excluded from the community is, in reality, that on which the entire life of the community is founded, and it is assumed by the society as an immemorial, and yet memorable, past.""⁸

As such, homo sacer––life which may be killed but not sacrificed––cannot be sacrificed because this would mean the destruction of the bearer of the relation between life and violence––bare life––and so the extinction of the community. Politics, then, is intimately bound up with life, and the subjection of bare life to sovereign power produces what Agamben calls ""the fundamental biopolitical fracture of the West,"" the fiction which grounds modern politics, be they democratic or totalitarian. ""Only a politics that will have learned to take the fundamental biopolitical fracture of the West into account,"" he writes, ""will be able to stop this oscillation and put an end to the civil war that divides the peoples and the cities of the earth.""⁹ However, politics is not only a means to stop this oscillation, division, and civil war, but an attempt to secure happiness for man, to recover the ethos of humanity.⁰

To ""clear the way for a long-overdue renewal of categories in the service of a politics in which bare life is no longer excepted,"" to recover the ethics of the human form-of-life and realize its happiness, requires that we address the potentiality of the human being. To this end, Agamben claims that

Only an entirely new conjunction of possibility and reality, contingency and necessity, and the other path‘ tou ontos will make it possible to cut the knot that binds sovereignty to constituent power. And only if it is possible to think the relation between potentiality and actuality differently––and even to think beyond this relation––will it be possible to think a constituent power wholly released from the sovereign ban. Until a new and coherent ontology of potentiality (beyond the steps that have been made in this direction by Spinoza, Schelling, Nietzsche, and Heidegger) has replaced the ontology founded on the primacy of actuality and its relation to potentiality, a political theory free from the aporias of sovereignty remains unthinkable.

1

This is not possible, he thinks unless it is possible to ""think the existence of potentiality without any relation to Being in the form of actuality... not even... actuality as the fulfillment and manifestation of potentiality... and think the existence of a potentiality even without any relation to being in the form of the gift of the self and letting be.""

2

In an article on potentiality in Aristotle, Agamben reads Aristotle’’s claim that ""all potentiality is impotentiality of the same and with respect to the same,"" to say that potentiality ""maintains itself in relation to its own privation... its own non-Being.""³ Thus, potentiality means ""to be in relation to one’’s own incapacity"" and ""to be capable of [one’’s] own impotentiality."" ""Other living beings are capable only of their specific potentiality,"" Agamben writes,"" they can only do this or that. But human beings are the animals who are capable of their own impotentiality. The greatness of human potentiality is measured by the abyss of human impotentiality.""⁴ But it is only the abyss of this impotence––desoeuvrement, inoperativeness––which can stop the oscillation between sovereign power and bare life. Only then can ""the two terms distinguished and kept united by the relation of ban (bare life and form of law) abolish each other and enter into another dimension.""⁵ In rendering the very opposition of these terms ineffective, Agamben thinks impotentiality opens a space––a margin, a threshold––on which life may survive the biopolitical fracture, free from the sovereign decision, unhinging and emptying the ""traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities"" which have born it.⁶

This impotence does not, however, negate the potentiality of life. Rather, impotence is an integral part of potentiality––it is that part of potentiality that makes redemption––being without lament––possible.⁷ It is the power of thought. As Agamben writes in The Coming Community, ""thought, in its essence, is pure potentiality; in other words, it is also the potentiality to not think... Thanks to this potentiality to not-think, thought can turn back to itself (to its pure potentiality) and be, at its apex, the thought of thought... What it thinks here, however, is not an object, a being-in-act, but that layer of wax, that rasum tabulae that is nothing but its own passivity, its own pure potentiality... In the potentiality that thinks itself, action and passion coincide and the writing tablet writes by itself, or, rather, writes its own passivity.""⁸ It is for this reason that, in Language and Death, Agamben calls thought ""the movement that, fully experiencing the unattainable place of language, seeks to think, to hold this unattainability in suspense, to measure its dimensions,"" and claims that it is in thought that ""the figure of humanity’’s having emerges for the first time in its simple clarity: to have always dear as one’’s habitual dwelling place, as the ethos of humanity.""⁹ In other words, thought is, for Agamben, ""the nexus that constitutes the forms of life in an inseparable context as form-of-life.""⁰

This inseparable context––form-of-life––means the end of the oscillation between sovereign power and bare life, insofar as it appropriates the process of exclusion and inclusion which constitute the exception. It therefore designates, not an exceptional, but an exemplary life, a life which is the ""impotent omnivalence of whatever being,"" in that exemplary life is ""a single object that presents itself as such, that shows its singularity,"" and allows for the possibility of community ""without being tied to any common property, by any identity.""¹ That is, a multitude, constituted by thought, as ""the unitary power that constitutes the multiple forms-of-life as form-of-life."" Agamben calls this power happiness, but insists that its attainment is a political process. Politics, then is on the threshold, in ""the empty space of the example"" of the happy life.

Notes:

1. Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: Columbia, 2000. pp. 81-82.

2. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. New York: Verso, 2002. pg. 100.

3. Welcome to the Desert of the Real, pg. 101.

4. Negri, Antonio. Time for Revolution. Translated by Matteo Mandarini. New York: Continuum, 2003. pp. 112-113.

5. "The Ripe Fruit of Redemption."

6. Agamben, Giorgio "Form-of-Life." Included in Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2000. pg. 11.

7. Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1990. pg. 104.

8. The Coming Community, pg. 2.

9. Agamben, Giorgio. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Translated by Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1991. pg. 20.

10. Language and Death, pg. 34.

11. The Coming Community, pg. 15.

12. Language and Death, pg. 35.

13. Language and Death, pp. 66-81.

14. Language and Death, pg. 77.

15. Heidegger, Martin. "Letter on Humanism." Translated by Frank A. Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray. Included in Basic Writings. Edited by David Farrell Krell. San Fransisco: Harper, 1993. pp. 234-241.

16. Language and Death, pg. 93.

17. Language and Death, pg. 81.

18. Language and Death, pg. 96.

19. Language and Death, pg. 105.

20. Language and Death, pg. 105.

21. Language and Death, pg. 105.

22. Language and Death, pg. 105.

23. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford, 1998. pp. 81-90.

24. Homo Sacer, pg. 8.

25. See Balakrishnan, Gopal. The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt. New York: Verso, 2000. pg. 188.

26. Homo Sacer, pg. 12.

27. The Coming Community, pg.

28. The Coming Community, pp. 43-44.

29. "Form-of-Life," pg. 9.

30. "Letter on Humanism," pp. 259-260.

31. Homo Sacer, pp. 152-153.

32. Agamben, Giorgio. "Notes on Politics." Included in Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2000. pg. 114.

33. Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000. 1177b20-27

34. The Coming Community, pg. 15.

35. The Coming Community, pg. 43.

36. The Coming Community, pg. 44.

37. Language and Death, pg. 105.

38. Language and Death, pg. 105.

39. Homo Sacer, pg. 180.

40. "Notes on Politics," pg.114.

41. Homo Sacer, pg. 44.

42. Homo Sacer, pg. 47.

43. Agamben, Giorgio. "On Potentiality." Included in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Edited and Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford, 1999. pg. 182.

44. "On Potentiality," pg. 182.

45. Homo Sacer, pg. 55.

46. The Coming Community, pg. 83.

47. The Coming Community, pg. 40.

48. The Coming Community, pp. 36-37.

49. Language and Death, pp. 80-81.

50. "Form-of-Life," pg. 9.

51. The Coming Community, pg. 11.

Between Disobedience and Exodus
Interview with Paolo Virno, by Flavia Costa
Spanish version available here. 

Perhaps it is distance, combined with a doubtlessly original thought, that allows Paolo Virno to see a link, a principle of comprehension, that unites the Argentinian cacerolazos with antiglobalization protests. "There is a line that connects the Argentinian revolt with the protests in Seattle and Genoa in 1999 and 2001", he affirms. And he adds that, beyond the singular, the Argentinian case shares with the antiglobal movement the eruption of a new political subject, the multitude, which emerges with the postfordist mode of production and resists delegating its powers to the state. "Unlike the people," explains the Italian philosopher, "the multitude is plural, it refuses political unity, it does not transfer rights to the sovereign; its resists obedience and is inclined to form non-representative democracy."

Currently a professor at the University of Cosenza, Virno was formed in the intersection of the philosophy of language and political theory, poetic experimentation and Marxist workerist militance. Together with Giorgio Agamben he founded the journal Luogo Comune. Today he is referent for the "new left" together with Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, the authors of _Empire_, the poetic political manifesto that has already had over a dozen editions. Here Virno responded to questions from Cultura.

Flavia Costa: In your last book, _Grammatica della moltitudine_ (_Grammar of the Multitude, online at -tr), you affirm that to understand contemporary social behaviors it is necessary to return to the notion of "multitude", which today replaces the "people" as fundamental historical subject. When and why does thus mutation from people to multitude occur?

Paolo Virno: The decisive fact was the end of the fordist factory and its assembly line, and the arrival of intellect, perception, and linguistic communication as the principle resources of production. Saying that work today as become communicative means that it absorbs the generic human capacities that, until recently, unfolded during time outside of work. Aesthetic tastes, ethical decisions, affects, and emotions converge today in the world of work, and thus it becomes difficult to distinguish between "producer" and "citizen", "public" and "private". In this indistinction the multitude affirms itself.

FC: You followed events in Argentina attentively. Do you believe that the prostests, with a strong anti-political sentiment, are an example of "multitude in action"?

PV: Certainly: multitude in action. The Argentinian revolt laid bare the most sensitized zone of so-called globalization. The other side of the moon. A line connects Seattle and Genoa, through an anti-state and anti-political sentiment that is proper to the multitudes. On the other hand, certain images remind me of the Paris Commune of 1871. Not because there are comparable events, but rather because they make me think of a phrase from Marx: "This is the political form finally discovered". He warned that they were at the time facing a form of atheist, materialist miracle: the advent of something absolutely unforeseen, a new form of life. And he saw also that it was necessary to create a thought and a praxis equal to the task of this new reality. Thus the revolts of Seattle, Genoa, or Buenas Aires reveal the existence of new forms of life and subjectivity, and challenge us to create new political forms that harmonize with them.

FC: What does a "non-representative democracy" mean? Put differently, what political exit are you beginning to see for these multitudes?

PV: In speaking of non-representative democracy I am not referring to a form of simplified democracy, of direct democracy, of assemblies. I think for example of the post-Genoa social forums of citizens, that assemble diverse collectives and individuals that organize themselves to think about alternatives to problems; I think of the laborious avenue of re-appropriation and re-articulation by the multitude of the knowledges and powers that until now have been congealed in the administrative apparatuses of the State.

FC: If the key to the epoch is the passage from fordism to postfordism, what happens in countries like Argentina, where fordism was precarious; where today, more than communicative work, the dominante trait is a dreadful level of unemployment?

PV: Yes, each case is particular, my impression is that where fordism was precarious there was a passage to postfordism without the fordist precedent. A central element of the new mode of production, as much in the Third World as in Germany, is the existence of a chronic unemployment that trains a large mass of workers for flexibility, the availability that the just-in-time system demands. The true training for postfordist production does not take place in the school but rather when the potential worker looks for work. It is there that he or she becomes opportunistic, adabtable, not fixed: when the worker acquires the aptitudes that the new mode of production requires.

FC: You say that the multitude is "ambivalent." What is the danger in this ambivalence; what is the "salvation"?

PV: To say it is "ambivalent" alludes to those distinctive characteristics of the multitude that can manifest themselves in opposite ways: as servility or as liberty. The multitude has a direct link with the dimension of the possible: each state of things is contingent, no one has a destiny - understanding by destiny the fact that, for example, no one is sure anymore that they will have the same job for life. This contingency is structural in this epoch and can have opposite developments: it can favor opportunism, cynicism, the desire to take advantage of the occasion in order to prevail over others; or it can express itself as conflict and insubordination, defection and exodus from the present situation.

FC: What do you understand by exodus? Because today this word for us has a special meaning: a great quantity of Argentinias leave the country, and even immigrants from neighboring countries are returning to their countries.

PV: No, I am not referring necessarily to a territorial exodus, but rather to desertion in one’s own place: the collective defection from the state bond, from certain forms of waged work, from consumerism. Some authors, like Albert Hirschman, affirm that sometimes protests, the voices don’t reach to manage a change and then they only are able to leave the game, run away. For that it is not only necessary to destroy certain things but also to construct, to have a positive proposal, so that exodus will no remain a solitary act.

FC: In relation to the changes in subjectivity, you have written in different texts that the human today is a stranger, a child, a lover of "common places". How do these three modes of being and inhabiting our epoch relate?

PV: The three things go together. Humanity no longer as a substantial ethos available, or rather, a repertoire of repetitive uses and customs that reassure us and order our praxis. Due to this, one no longer feels "at home" anywhere. One is a permanent stranger. Thus there arrives at the first level the biological condition of the species: lack of specialized instincts, constant disorientation, a high degree of uncertainty. As in infancy, this is a stage of learning that today takes on a chronic character. Infancy, which loves repetition (the same story, the same game), extends into the technical reproducibility of art and of all experience. And we come thus to the "common places". When we use this expression today, we understand a banality, a stereotype. But is original meaning is different. Aristotle called "common places" those forms of fundamental discourse that are present in each enunciation, like the relation between before and after, reciprocity. These logical forms are the skeletal structure of the mind. To the "common places" there are opposed the "special places", the discourses that function only before a specific audience. Well then, the stranger as much as the child, in order to orient and protect him- or herself from the unforeseen counts only on the generalized structures of the mind, which is to say, the "common places". The "special places", over which the traditional ethics are articulated, are today disappearing or becoming empty simulacra.

Translation by Nate Holdren

Facing A New 17^th Century

Veronica Gago

Brecha ( www.brecha.com.uy )Uruguay, July 2004

Spanish version at www.lainsignia.org/2004/julio/int_012.htm

   "If we identify the new figure of global sovereignty with the Clinton years, calling this figure Empire, we risk rendering ourselves speechless when Bush enters the scene. I think that only now, with the Iraq war, does the true period "after the wall" begin, that is to say, the true far-reaching redefinition of political forms. Only now does the "constituent phase" begin. It is terrible, certainly, but it has open possibilities, although it will only be because in this phase does the movement of movements come to act," says the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno.

   From Naples, Virno has been a militant since the agitated years of Italy in the 70s. From this perspective he has woven his theoretical production and undertaken his philosophical preoccupations. His books in Spanish (Virtuosismo y revolución, Gramática de la multitud and El recuerdo del presente ) and the recently published Palabras con palabras (Paidós) gives an account of this journey. On this occasion he reflects on the global conjuncture, starting from the forms of struggle capable of questioning the global conjuncture, for emancipation, or, as he puts it, the good life.

Veronica Gago: What are you referring to when you speak of a "constituent phase" of political forms that grew "after the wall"?

Paolo Virno: The Iraq war, the Israel-Palestine catastrophe, the slaughter in Madrid, the crisis of the postfordist economy, the indebtedness of whole subcontinents, the question of copyright of information and knowledge: these are the questions, it seems to me, that press everyone, each in a way, to invent new political forms. From here will be born the new nomos of the earth, the new global order. To have believed that the 90s - and in particular the Clinton administration - already delineated a point of arrival was an error.

VG: What is your perception of the present "European situation"?

PV: As for Europe, the victory of the left in Spain and in France is certainly important for the movements, to the degree that it can be used to develop the conflict of precarious labor. I distrust a juridical-illuminist idea of Europe. Europe is a battlefield, the field where favorable relations of forces are made to mature. What is, in this sense, the challenge for the global movement? To put itself forward as a candidate - in actions, we should understand ourselves well - as the only political subject capable of attempting an "armistice" with Islamic terrorism. And, in addition, as the only political subject capable of presenting a far reaching proposal (and exactly for this reason a realist proposal) on public debt, the abolition of private property over social intelligence, the Palestinian question. In sum: the movement has as its objective the prevention of the birth of what has been called - hastily - "Empire".

VG: What do you believe has been the global movemnt’s capacity to intervene, up till now?

PV: The global movement, from Seattle forward, appears as a battery that functions halfway: it accumulates energy without pause, but it does not know how where to discharge it. It is faced with an amazing accumulation, which has no correlate, at the moment, in adequate investments. It is like being in front a new technological apparatus, potent and refined, but ignoring the instructions for its use. The symbolic-mediatic dimension has been, at the same time, a set of favorable occasions and limits. On the one hand, it has guaranteed the accumulation of energy, on the other it has impeded its application, or deferred it to infinity. Every activist is conscious of this: the global movement has not managed to even impact (incidir) - I understand impact (incidir) with the image of a corrosive acid - the present capitalist accumulation. The movement has not placed into play a combination of forms of struggle capable of converting the conditions of precarious, intermittent, atypical work into a politically subversive power (potencia).

VG: Why such an impossibility?

PV: The question should be: from where does the difficulty arise? Why have the rate of profit and the functioning of constituted powers not been significantly affected after three years of disorder? Why this paradoxical "double bind", on the basis of which the symbolic-communicative is an authentic propulsive spring and, at the same time, a source of paralysis? The impasse that torments the global movement derives from its inherence in the current relations of production. It should not be seen as due to its otherness or marginality, as some consider. The movement is the conflictive interface of the postfordist labor process. Exactly for that (and not despite that), it presents itself in the public stage as an ethical movement. Let me explain: contemporary capitalist production mobilizes, for its own benefit, all the attitudes that distinguish our species - abstract thought, imagination, affect, aesthetic appreciation, etc. For fifteen years it has been said and repeated, I believe with good reason, that postfordism puts life itself to work. This is a simplifying formula, I agree: but we maintain the idea, taking more precise analysis for granted. Now, if it is true that postfordist production appropriates "life", that is to say, the combination of specifically human faculties, it is rather obvious that insubordination against it takes note of these same facts. To life included in flexible production there is counterposed the instance of a "good life". And the search for the "good life" is, precisely, the theme of ethics.

VG: And what would be the political implication of this ethical challenge?

PV: Here is the difficulty and, at the same time, the challenges are really interesting. The primacy of the ethical is the direct fruit of the material relations of production. But this primacy seems, in principle, to depart from the same thing that has provoked it: it is an ethical movement that interferes with the way in which today surplus value is formed. The labor power that constitutes the heart of globalized postfordism - precarious, flexibilized, with a permeable border between employment and unemployment - defends some very general principles concerning the "human condition": freedom of speech, co-participation in the common good that is knowledge, peace, protection of the environment, justice and solidarity, aspiration to a public sphere in which the singularity and irrepeatability of each singular existence would be valued. The ethical instance, which also has roots in the social workday, plans to a high degree without also altering the relations of force that live inside it. Anyone who distrusts the ethical charge of the movement - for neglecting the class struggle against exploitation - is mistaken. But it is also mistaken to delight, for speculative reasons, in this ethical charge, considering that it leaves categories like "exploitation" and "class struggle" out of bounds. In both cases, the decisive question escapes: the polemical nexus between the instance of the "good life" (incarnated in Genoa and Porto Alegre) and life put to work (axis of the postfordist enterprise).

VG: In your work you have theorized the idea of a "postmodern fascism". Do you consider this reflection useful for characterizing the present configuration of powers at the European or imperial level?

PV: In speaking of "postmodern fascism" I don’t refer so much to the ferocious face of the states and governments, so much as to the always possible entanglements in the interior of the multitude. It is a limit-concept to indicate the negative possibility that lives alongside occasions of liberty. For example: the taste for "differences", that is to say, the tendency to valorize everything that is unique or irrepeatable in the singular life. It is exactly this taste and this tendency that can be inverted perhaps as a proliferation of minute hierarchies, where "difference" comes to signify being subordinated to someone.

VG: In your words, we are on the edge of a new 17th century, in the sense that it was then, by means of the civil and religious wars, that the central concepts of modern politics were invented. What, in this new 17th century, are the principle alterations that you observe with respect to the sovereign configurations?

PV: There are a series of open questions. Above all, the fact that productive cooperation (based on social knowledge, collective intelligence, communication, science) is by far more powerful than the state apparatuses. The state seems like a typewriter next to the sophisticated computer that is the "general intellect" (as Marx called the social brain as pillar of modern production). The problem of our 17th century is this: how to make it so that this general intellect ceases being the principle productive force of capitalism and leads - based on a new public sphere - beyond the epoch of the State? In second place, there is the crisis of political representation. The transfer to the parliaments and the State, transfer of the capacity to decide politically, has always functioned with a collection of isolated "citizens" and atomized individuals as its presupposition. Each one participated in the public sphere through a delegation. Today, by contrast, each singular life presents itself immediately as a node of a "network", part of a full and articulated social cooperation. The cooperative - and because cooperative, public - quality of this experience is not delegable. It escapes political representation. Put another way, the crisis of this "monopoly of political decision" that is the State expresses the crisis of private property in which there are anomalous goods like information, knowledge, language, and thought at play. The problem is how to construct organisms of non-representative democracy that reabsorb for themselves the power/knowledge concentrated today in the state administration. Finally: in our epoch, human praxis adapts in the most direct and systematic way the combination of requisites - linguistic faculty, self-consciousness, affect - that make praxis human. In other words, postfordist capitalism has "human nature" as such as its primary material. The aspects that distinguish our species don’t remain at the second level, as a background or implicit presupposition, but rather stand out, appear in full relief, leading to what are in play in social struggles. In our 17th century the principle problem is: what is the political form to give to the basic prerogatives of the species homo sapiens?

 

 translated by Nate Holdren

General intellect, exodus, multitude

Interview with Paolo Virno, published in Spanish in Archipélago number 54
(Spanish version of this article is at  www.nodo50.org/ts/editorial/dossierlecturasvirno.rtf%202.pdf )

*

We thank Veronica Gago and Diego Sztulwark (Colectivo Situaciones) together with Marcelo Matallanes, who have facilitated this material for us.

We have known Paolo Virno for a few years, through fragmented readings of his classic articles: Virtuosismo y revolución:notas sobre el concepto de acción política* (1993) [*1] and Do you remember counterrevolucion (1995). With time his name began to circulate more frequently. First, as a consequence of the meteoric diffusion of the more celebrated work of his colleague, Toni Negri and, later, due to an interview - polemical in its effects - conducted by Flavia Costa and published the same year in the newspaper Clarín. [*2]

The preparations of our interview with Virno had begun more or less by that date. The link was a common friend: Sandro Mezzadra, intellectual and Italian militant, and co-editor - together with Virno - of the journal DeriveApprodi. Virno is a political militant with a long trajectory in the Italian workerist autonomy, founder of various political journals and author, of the following titles, among others: Convenzione e materialismo. L´unicitá senza aura (1986); Mondanitá. L´idea di "mondo" tra esperienza sensibile e sfera pubblica (1994); Parole con parole. Poteri e limiti del lenguaggio(1995); Radical thought in Italy, compiled with Michael Hardt (1996); and Il ricordo del presente, Saggio sul tempo storico (1999).

At the time of this interview he had just published his last book, Gramática de la multitud, Para un análisis de las formas de vida contemporáneas (2002), the conversation we had with him revolves around this work.

Paolo Virno, Neapolitan, fifty years old, lives a block from the Piazza di Fiori, one of the most beautiful in Rome. The first time we visited his home we had the pleasure of trying his specialty: homemade pasta. While he cut the tomatoes and ground the basil, he began to relate part of his life and to do philosophy in the style of Sor Juana: "while stirring the pot."

The following day, in thirty-seven degree heat, he received us again, in the afternoon, for many hours of conversation. This resulted in a chat that Virno initiated with another of his not so well known specialties: the philosophy of language. From there the opening was marked by one of the fundamental concepts of his work: as Aristotle says, the animal that has language is a political animal simply due to this capacity. Now we begin with the questions:

Before anything else, we wanted you to tell us a little about your political and intellectual biography.

As with many others, my youth, my adolescence, was marked by the insurrection of 1968. I lived in Genoa, went to high school and immediately political experience began, that new politics that one breathed in the air and that, as you said yesterday, corresponds to an idea of public happiness. Politics and happiness walked hand in hand during the class struggles in 1968. If it had expressed itself in synthetic form, this was the fundamental axis: in this moment large separation between happiness and the struggle against capitalism was recomposed. So, whoever felt it necessary to fight for happiness understood that they should fight against capitalism, and the inverse: one could not fight successfully against capitalism if it was not in the name of a full life. I insist: it is a little like what you said yesterday about the Argentine experience, that it is necessary to have something more than the right kind of chains in order to be able to struggle well: it is necessary to have a positive reality that can already be discerned, in the name of which to struggle. Later, my family moved to Rome where I entered into contact with the workerist comrades, the tradition of the Quaderni Rossi(*3), those comrades that were to found Potere Operaio (*4); I had a lot of luck because in the world of marxist-leninists, of thirdworldists, by pure chance I, a boy, very young still, encountered a type of thought that, by contrast, had no great interest in marxism but yes for Marx, that took the pages of Marx and put them in direct contact with the workers’ struggles. Also, workerist thought, in place of reading the Red Book of Mao, read the grand classics of bourgeois thought: Keynes, Schumpeter, also Thomas Mann, Nietzsche, Carl Scmitt. Another advantage of this type of political thought was that it considerered as the objective of our time the abolition, the elimination, the refusal, of waged labor as such: it posed the existence of waged labor as the great barbarity of our time.

Then, I began political militance in Potere Operaio which in 1968 was the revolucionary heir of Quaderni Rossi that had been born at the beginning of the 1960s. It carried out interventions in the factories of Rome, among the students, and later I moved to Milan and to Turin, undertaking political work around the great factories of the North: Alfa Romeo in Milan and FIAT in Turin. Potere Operaio, had a short and happy life, but in all ways short, because in 1973 the group terminated itself. Starting from this moment I participated in the history and life of the movement without belonging to any organization.

The other grand Italian event that influenced me and my friends and that caught us completely [unawares] was the so-called Movement of ‘77 (*5). We considered the Movement of ‘77 as a new beginning: the rise of the figures of social labor that was the result of capitalist restructuration; that is to say, that did not defend itself from capitalist restructuration but rather took the restructuration as its point of departure. This point of departure was constituted by mass intellectual labor, precarious labor, intermitent labor, etc, and it is a very important fact that postfordism commenced in Italy (*6) with the revolt of those that would be the productive subejcts. In 1977, other comrades of the old Potere Operaio and I decided to found an important, significant journal that would reflect on this new beginning, on this radical modification of mentality, of the forms of thinking, of the forms of life that, we said, projected to us something beyond the epoch of labor. The journal was called Metropoli and the friends with whom we did it were Oreste Scalzone, now in refuge in France, Franco Piperno, and others. In 1979, within the framework of the repressive operation counter to the Italian movement, Metropoli as a journal was criminalized and we were seized and jailed together with other comrades of the so-called "7th of April judgment", the judgment of Toni Negri (*7).

The jail time, shared with many comrades, began with some elements that recall the political jail of the fascist era but, at the end, a jail in which there was much discussion and much theoretical elaboration. The best philosophical seminars that I had in my life were in prison. Never in the university did I find anything similar. I did three years, total, in jail, total, of preventive prison, before the judgment. The first judgment, in the first instance, condemned me to twelve years with the charge of subversive association and constitution of an armed band, but my band had no name: it was not said that that I was a leader or a militant, for example, of the Red Brigades; it was a band without a name. Anonymous. In the judgment, and this is funny, the band is called simply "O", to indicate "Organization", but, I repeat, an organization without name, without identity.

I went free awaiting the second judgment. In this second appeal I and many others who were charged were absolved. From twelve years we passed to absolution. After being absolved, and this was already in 1987, I decided, in addition to the philosophical labor that I had begun to seriously undertake meanwhile, to take up political activity again. This new beginning in political activity coincided with the journal Luogo Comune (*8). Luogo Comune and, more generally, the analysis of the figures of social labor and forms of life, was born in the discourse of the emotions.

The hypothesis was this: if it is certain that postfordist labor has at its center communication - culture in the most full sense of the term - then, it is necessary to commence analysis starting from certain emotions, but not emotions in the psychological sense, but rather emotions understood as forms of being, forms of being in the world, and we began to discuss the negative feelings: before all others, opportunism, later cynicism and finally fear. We believed that opportunism understood as mass emotion, signified that each individual worked in contact with many distinct opportunities, opportunites understood in a technical sense.

Whoever labors in postfordism has to be familiarized with the most distinct options. Then, a typical bad moral feeling like opportunism had been put to work as a technical virtue. This meant, at the end of the 80s, trying to understand how in work there were many things at play that before had been seen as the time of non-work. As, in fact, the limit, the border-line between work and non-work had been weakened or even was, in part, disappearing. Luogo Comune, placed, later, in the center of its attention the famous - or at least famous for Italian operaismo - Fragment on machines from Marx’s Grundrisse and, above all, the concept of general intellect (*9). We made a critique of Marx, critique in quotes, saying that today the general intellect was no longer deposited in machines but rather existed and lived in the cooperation of living labor. We said it with the following formula: general intellect = living labor in place of fixed capital.

The intention was to create an organizing network, or to produce ideas, as a necessary condition for taking up again a discussion of practical politics. In this it was a failure. The noble motive of the failure was that the subjects of postfordist labor had found, in a little more time, a political representation in the new right, because the new right - Berlosconi and at first the Liga Nord - in some manner represented the mass intellectuality and also the crisis of representative democracy; it did so in a perverse, bad manner but in some manner it achieved that representation. On the other hand, in the past there had been examples of this: reactionary parties of workers, reactionary parties of peasants; in Italy, with the new right, we had the reactionary party of mass intellectuality.

This is the noble motive, the more concrete motive for the failure. But there was also a certain incapacity on our part for taking up again political activitiy in new conditions, with new subjects. In Luogo Comune we were all, or almost all, people linked to the old struggles and to the old methods of organization. There were three very beautiful theoretical seminars at the beginning of the 90s, in Paris, with the comrades from Future Anterieure (*10) that were developing some thematics about work, similar to ours: I’m thinking of Toni Negri, obviously. Then, our discussion in Luogo Comune on General Intellect as living labor, found an accord with the analysis of Negri, Lazzaroto, and others on immaterial labor.

A specialty of Lugo Comune was, by contrast, the discussion of exodus. By exodus was understood as a radical politics that does not want to construct a new state. In the end, it is only that and, then, is far from the model of the revolutions that want to take power, to construct a new state, a new monopoly of political decision; to the contrary, it is - in every case - to defend power, not to take power and, also the things that you said yesterday when you were speaking on the university - of the richness of relations - this positivity of experience as something that later deserves to be defended but that, in the meantime, should be [seen as] something already constructed in terms of sociability, productive relations, knowledges, networks of our part.

Exodus and General Intellect were an attempt to take up again an organized practical politics; it was, then, together with the comrades from Veneto - who are the current Disobedienti (*11) - an attempot that was not accomplished due to large and small motives, due to our incapacity. After Luogo Comune, I participated in DeriveApprodi (*12) which is the child, the immediate consequence. Luogo Comune was born, as I already said, with the discussion over the feelings, that took the form of a book that is called Sentimientos del mas aca.* With DeriveApprodi a problem presented itself, of how to translate, to transform, the discussions of General Intellect, multitude, exodus, into concrete forms of struggle. For this, after three years we wrote a document titled IWW - Industrial Workers of the World - which is the name of an old revolutionary union in the United States. [*13]

This documented tried to start from the more concrete problems of precarious labor. And it moved [across] the chambers of work and non-work: grassroots unionization as necessary condition for "leaving the symbolic dimension" [*14] Our problem was and continued being how to leave the symbolic dimension, this symbolic dimension that prevailed also in Genoa. That is to say, in Genoa there was a meeting of the "powerful of the earth", the movement reacted, but reacted on the symbolic plane, this was also the limit of the Social Centers and of forms of counterculture, of alternative culture.

For this, we had a discussion over forms of sturggle. Forms of struggle to invent, because in postfordist reality the strike frequently is no good or is not sufficient; over all it is necessary to mobilize the chainworkers: the workes of McDonlds, of the cleaning businesses, etc. Then it is necessary to invent a form of struggle equivalent to the old strike. This was maybe the most significant intention of DeriveApprodi with this document on grassroots unionism [*15].

Fine, that’s it, in broad strokes, those are the stages of my experience. I have to admit that in the last twenty years an important part of my time was dedicated to philosophical work, centered upon classical questions of philosophy: language, temporality, the question ‘what is historical time?, how is time made historical?’ I always thought that this philosophical work had a relation with political activity because I consider elaborating a non-reductionist materialism to be an important condition for the critique of capitalism, for the struggle against capitalism. Then, I understand philosophy as a materialism "shoulder to shoulder" in relation with the political. However, I have to admit that it is a mediated relation, in the last instance. Naturally there exists also a certain distance and I have lived after prison exactly this distance between philosophy and politics; it lived in my very body sometimes as a schizophrenia. A large part of my time was spent on philosophical writing, later I would put on the other mask and do political things, even if it was not for a political journal but, another context, another field. Then, I divided myself between the writing of philosophical books that sought contribute to the foundation of a new materialism, on problems like our relation with death, nature, time, and a political praxis. It is possible that in the last years it’s been more philsophical than political; on the otherhand, each one of us is formed by habitual practices: if one dedicates very much time to philosophical work, this changes you. Then, one has to bear in mind a double face: for philosophical moments, for political moments, for my time, for my activity. Two faces related but an immense, inevitable distance.

We wanted to converse a little over some of the things that you have come to consider and, in particular, over the manner in which you expound in your book, Grammar of the Multitude. In the first place, we are interested to know how the notion of multitude functions in your theoretical and political development. We have found that the use that you make of this category in Grammar... develops a very original dimension - we call it the ontological. Something thus like "the multitude is as much a fount of the good as of the bad". The fact is that the term has circulated, especially from the perspective of radical rereadings of Spinoza that present the question in less ambivalent terms, in a manner more unilateral, more linked "to the good" - we would say - than "to the bad". Now, being that your reading of the multitude is also part of the "polemic" between Spinoza and Hobbes, over the state and sovereignty, we wanted to ask you more concretely: what do you understand by bad? How do you come to think a link between the bad and the multitude?

The multitude is a form of being; and for the expression form of being I understand something fundamental, basic, in relation with the world, with others, with life. Naturally, each form of being is ambivalent: the important thing is to understand that this ambivalence of all forms is referentiable to the fundamental form of being. Take the example of opportunism. The opportunism of the postfordist multitude is something bad today, because it signifies the acceptance of domination. The decisive point is that the insurrections of the multitude, the struggles for liberation of the multitude, commenced by this sensibility for the possible, or it should be, for distinct opportunities.

Then, it is a same familiarity with the possible, that can transform itself into something bad if it leads to servility, corruption, opportunism but, at the same time, the same proximity to the possible, the same sensibility for the possible, typical of the multitude, can also construct struggles. The point is that the bad just as the good both derive from the same nucleus, from same form of being. For example, the thought of the traditional left condemns, criticizes opportunism and thinks that the good consists in not having more than a relation with the possible, but rather in having newly a well defined life.

Our idea was, in contrast, that the multitude in every manner has a form of being bound to the possible, to the contingent. This sensibility for the contingent can lead to corruption and opportunism or can lead to revolt, but always at the base of the corruption as at the base of the revolt is the sensibility for the possible, the contingent. Ambivalence of the multitude. Another example: the multitude does not seek to represent itself politically; that is to say: no more representative democracy. But this distance, this indifference for representative democracy does not exclude the presence in the multitude of many small Petains (the French general that, in the epoch of the Nazi occupation of France, collaborated with Germany) and many small Petains can control the multitude, and then, again, the possibility of the bad is totally present. We, in number four of Luogo Comune, came to hypothesize a postmodern fascism that feeds itself precisely on the forms of being of the multitude. [*16] We did not say that this fascism existed: it was a discourse carried to the limit, a hypothetical discourse, but that stated: "the problem of fascism is not the classic problem of the 30s, there are forms of fascism that base themselves exactly upon the contemporary multitude and its comportments". this was the discourse over the good and the bad: the use of the word ambivalence. The multitude is a form of being starting from that which can be be born one thing but also the other: ambivalence.

 

If this ambivalence of the multitude founds itself on an ontological nucleus that created some possibilities as their oppositves and if it is possible to find in the long history of the political and of modern political philosophy the recurrence of this ambivalence (as in the case of the "Spinoza-Hobbes polemic" we spoke of a moment ago, but also in the case that now you mention, the fascism of the 30s and the present "postmodern fascism"), why do you affirm, then, in Grammar of the Multitude, that postfordism is a properly ontological regime?

It’s a good question, a good question. My thesis is that postfordism directly brings to light the background charcteristics of the human species. Postfordism is on the historical and social plane a historical and social repetition of the anthropogenesis. I believe that on the ontological plane or, as it were, in the plane of invariable, constant conditions of our species, of the human species, of homo sapiens, the theory of philosophical anthropology is fitting, at least in part, that says that the human being is, above all, nonspecialized.

We are poorest of the animals in relation to our lack of specialized instincts and lack of a precise, determined environment. In general, culture, society, conceals, hides this condition, creating forms of specialization for the non-specialized animal and creating artificial environments for the animal that has no environment. Then, we say that culture and society hide distinctive aspects of human nature. Postfordism, by contrast, is the first society and the first culture that does not hide those aspects, but rather - on the contrary, valorizes them, places them fully in the light. Think of the universal watchword, as much in Argentina, in Italy and in Korea as in Eastern Europe: flexibility. Flexibility in all the languages of the world means non-specialization. The same occurs with this ugly word globalization, that has, in all forms, as its truth the fact that human beings should live openly, explicitly as those beings that don’t have a well-defined environment. In this sense, postfordism, the contemporary experience, signals perhaps a true novelty because, for the first time, society and culture correspond explicitly to an ontological condition.

This would be a synthetic response to the good question. Then, the multitude is not only a social subject, but rather it is that form of being human in which the ontological condition emerges explicitly in the empirical plane, in the social plane. Multitude is only the other face of exodus: men and women that do not want to conquer power, but rather than in each case want to extinguish it, annul it; they do not want to construct a new state, they want to extinguish it, to annul it. The multitude also lacks the unitary characteristics of the people. It possesses, as a political category, anthropological and ontological aspects, I think more in Hobbes than in Spinoza. In Hobbes the multitude is understood not solely as poltical category, but rather also as ontological category because for him in the form of being of the many, of the multiple, the human condition emerges as such.

People as historical regularity and multitude as moment of rupture in which there can emerge this ontological level that, at the same time, is ambivalent, that is to say, that does not determine but rather destroy determinations. This is, then, a return of - and to - the multiple.

If we follow you well, these cycles had been halted in the present conjuncture: that which was fully ontologized.

Starting from this radical historical singularity of postfordism we have, on one hand, exodus as the line of flight and of emancipation, and on the other, the threat of the very anthropological potentialities that confront us as the foundation of contemporary capitalist domination. And, if we follow your reasoning, here, in this last aspect, there appear the Foucaultian category - in principle - of biopower, to which you dedicate some polemical pages in the Grammar... There you specify in a very strict manner the legitimacy that you grant to this notion and you deny the generalized use of it. Then the question should be the following: can you specify your objections with the use of the category of biopower?

Yes, the use that Toni (Negri) and Michael (Hardt) make ...

And also Giorgio Agamben...

Agamben is a problem. Agamben is a thinker of great value but also, in my opinion, a thinker with no political vocation. Then, when Agamben speaks of the biopolitical he has the tendency to transform it into an ontological category with value already since the archaic Roman right. And, in this, in my opinion, he is very wrong-headed. The problem is, I believe, that the biopolitical is only an effect derived from the concept of labor-power. When there is a commodity that is called labor-power it is already implicitly government over life. Agamben says, on the other hand, that labor-power is only one of the aspects of the biopolitical; I say the contrary: over all because labor power is a paradoxical commodity, because it is not a real commodity like a book or a bottle of water, but rather is simply the potential to produce. As soon as this potential is transformed into a commodity, then, it is necessary to govern the living body that maintains this potential, that contains this potential. Toni (Negri) and Michael (Hardt), on the other hand, use biopolitics in a historically determined sense, basing it on Foucault, but Foucault spoke in few pages of the biopolitical - in relation to the birth of liberalism - that Foucault is not a sufficient base for founding a discourse over the biopolitical and my apprehension, my fear, is that the biopolitical can be transformed into a word that hides, covers problems instead of being an instrument for confronting them. A fetish word, an "open doors" word, a word with an exclamation point, a word that carries the risk of blocking critical thought instead of helping it. Then, my fear is of fetish words in politics because it seems like the cries of a child that is afraid of the dark..., the child that says "mama, mama!", "biopolitics, biopolitics!". I don't negate that there can be a serious content in the term, however I see thzt the use of the term biopolitics sometimes is a consolatory use, like the cry of a child, when what serves us are, in all cases, instruments of work and not propaganda words.

One thing that interested us in the Grammar... is the form in which you derive, from the General Intellect, the idea of a "non-remunerated life". There you develop a dialectic starting from the productive character of life in "itself" that announces that all distinction between laboral and extra-laboral fields is formal, to the degree in which the time of present value production involves all the fields of vital reproduction. In this fashion, postfordism appears as a moment "without possible political economy", or, taking the metaphor of Marx, as an object whose anatomy does not illuminate itself starting from the power of visibilization that previously was attributed to the categories of political economy and that, now, following what you state, what had been granted to other notions...

Yes, because postfordism transforms the human capacities that previously had to do - in every case - with ethics and asthetitcs into an instrument of labor and, naturally, transforms these human capacities into an instrument of economic valorization. But in political economy there are no categories for economically valorizing these capacities, therefore, there is a paradoxical situation: the wealth of nations to say it like Adam Smith or, in other words, the economy, is produced with modalities that are no longer thinkable, conceivable, with the categories of political economy. This is a paradox with a difficult solution. But exactly this paradox explains perhaps why there is such a great difficulty, in many countries such as Italy, of organization and struggle: because in labor enters much of life and it is very difficult to politically organize "life"; this is the problem.

In my opinion, the question of the equivalence between "non-remunerated/remunerated life" wants to demonstrate that today we should identify a distinct idea of wealth. At bottom, that which is in play is not the distribution of wealth, but rather the definition of wealth, a definition that in the last instance is not economic and that it is possible to see exactly in today’s transformed postfordist economy. Those who do not work but are in relation with others, think and have an experience of the city or, at least, of the places in which they live, and those who work, there are obviously monetary differences, of wages, but the type of capacities are similar.

The fact of considering those who are today without work as also productive modifies the very idea of social wealth. This naturally is difficult and poses a real problem, of what organization is possible, of the organization that could manages to turn the unity of labor and non-labor, life and production against capitalism. This is all much more ambitious with respect to the struggles of the traditional workers’ movement but, exactly for that, it is much more complex: a theory of organization today includes in itself all the major problems of philosophy: Lukacs also said this in History and Class Consciousness but, we say, that today this is even more certain.

Do you think it’s possible to sustain this point of view of exodus in the regions of the third world such as, for example, Latin America? We ask you this because starting from the events of December, in Argentina, there have been very polemical voices over the possibility of extending this thesis to contexts in which the struggles and the resistances must deal with an extreme, corrupt, and decomposed, neoliberal state, that don’t seem like the states of Western Europe. Above all was the critique of the Argentine philosopher Nicolás Casullo, that to maintain exodus, in our country, we should look not to the multitudes, but rather to the state itself.

It is not only an Argentine problem, also Italy or in France there exists the temptation to consider the National State as a refuge, a salvation in the face of globalization. Considering the National State as the place of possible exodus in the face of globalization, its violence, its laws. But this - in Argentina, as in France and Italy - is a complete illusion, a daydream that always run the risk of turning into a nightmare. Exodus is not nostalgic, but to consider the National State as refuge is nostalgic. Exodus is not a step back, but is rather leaving the land of the Pharaoh; the land of the Pharaoh was until one or two generations ago the National State, today it is the Global State, and the National States are like empty shells, like empty boxes and, for that, upon them is made an emotive investment but, naturally, that is very dangerous because it runs the risk of transforming sooner or later into xenophobia or, in every manner, into a rabid and subaltern attitude at the same time: rabies and subalternity together.

I want to be more clear: we shouldn’t speak more of Argentina, France or Italy, we should speak of Palestine. All of us are in Jenin. As much as you hope that the sooner a Palestinian state can be created the sooner it is possible to save lives, but in the conceptual plane I think that the creation of a new state is a disaster that would not have any power, that will have none of the prerogatives of the ancient national states: it would mean solely the fact that the prisoners, if not tortured, would be mistreated in their mother tongue, but it does not seem to me that that would be a grand conquest. The grand occasion that still was given after ten years, in the epoch of the first Intifada, was that of constructing a not necessarily statist or state-centric form of organization. All of the national states today, those that exist or those that are being founded, are the caricature, the parody of what the National State was as bearer of all rights. We all know that most of the economic, scientific research - not to speak of military - functions are in another place. I understand perfectly but it is a new form of ambivalence. Exodus is necessary but can also take a reactionary form.

In Argentina, all these polemics gave place - in a context of assemblies, piquetes, and much mobilization - to a debate "of and over" university intellectuals: does immanence dissolve the idea of "critical distance" attributed to the figure of the intellectual? After the experience of the 70s there appears a self-requirement of distance as condition itself of thought but, these last times, those who live this experience of politicization, in the street reclaim the "remaining at the margin" and a certain incapacity of thinking "from outside" of those new phenomena. What is, in your judgment, the possibility of articulating the function of the intellectual with the demands for a point of view immanent to these new experiences of struggle?

I don’t think that immanence impedes a critical view, an analytical view. Nor does immanence impede proposing new words and new concepts, nor should immanence should be a sad thing such that we should - together with Catholic priests - eulogize transcendence. By contrast, we are convinced that immanence is that which permits seeing better and farther, that there does not exist a view more panoramic than that which is situated in the plane, in a territory. It will not be perfected from a geometric point of view that requires, in contrast, a view from the height of a mountain, but from the point of view of the political geometry it is thus: only those who accept a certain opacity can look far. The view without the opacity of immanence is deceptive, as deceptive as when in the desert one has visions. And it is thinking in oneself, in one’s friends, in the biography of each one us, in the things that one saw, in what one did and in those that one was not accustomed to doing, where there is born the saying of "multitude" and no longer "people". Clearly one must also see the books that we read, the materialist theoretical positions, all what was desired, but recounting also a material experience, a direct experience.

Intellectuals, yes if are in agreement with their books - Marx, Hobbes, this, the other, (and me, more than for Foucault I have preferences for Wittgenstein because I am occupied with the philosophy of language), the decisive thing with books for materialists and communists is the Christian phrase "the word made flesh". [*17] All of materialism is there: the rest is chatter. This means understanding, on each occasion, as a concept, an abstraction, the "word" incarnates itself. [*18] Then, it can be that the question of the multitude was a question of political philosophy, from 1600, but the decisive thing is when and how it is incarnated. Now I have a question: Among the cultivated Argentine comrades Walter Benjamin is read?

(Laughter.) Yes, of course...

Ok, that’s good, the thesis on the philosophy of history by Walter Benjamin, at bottom, seems to me to become in this sense, in this direction: that a present moment links, says Benjamin, in constellation, with a moment very far but with which there is a species of precious similarity.Tthat is decisive in order to not be progressivist or, as Borges said, all true authors choose their own predecessors.

The same goes for movements: the struggles of the ‘60s and ‘70s are not necessarily the predecessors for you, it can be an episode further away or also an episode which occurred in another place; the same goes for the Italian movement. It is not certain that the predecessor of the anti-global movement was the movement of the ‘70s in Italy, it could be a thing much further away, it could be the Paris Commune. Or rather: the intellectuals transform themselves into a very large problem from the political point of view when, as in all countries that I can imagine imagine, it decisively leads to mass intellectuality. By mass intellectuality I understand the fact that one labors with the faculties of the mind. The knowledge of something at an "erudite" level is not important, what matters is the use of language, thought, of common capacities for abstraction. When labor is thus, it’s clear that the intellectuals in a restricted sense, the "high" intellectuals, little role as political leaders. I don’t know if I am being clear: or rather, the degree of feeling of mass intellectuality is tightly determined, in general, by the "high" intellectuality, at times more than by the political leaders of the parties. In Italy, for example, the problem of intellectuals in postfordism is set out with the so called "weak thought" or postmodern thought. [*10.8] Weak thought was developed by philosophers with theories that offer an ideology of the defeat after the end of the ‘70s and played a role for immediate political leaders, for that there is a specific problem over the theme of intellectuals that does not have to be left aside precisely because it entails that the multitude and the "high" intellectuals that have a public voice and that can transform themselves at times into immediate political leader of the multitude, of a multitude that does not trust any longer in the parties and, in every case, receives direct influence on the part of the intellectual.

 

Another Argentine philosopher, and a friend of the journal, Horacio Gonzalez, commented on an interview of yours that ran in a daily newspaper in Argentina and that started, in part, the discussion to which we made reference, which developed, in an unforeseen manner, in the written press. This discussion, impelled by Horacio, and inspired, at the same time, by your ideas on the multitude, consisted in refusing, in some fashion, the antagonism between people and multitude. Following him, it is necessary to strive to find dialectical forms that make possible a politics in which the "people" does not mean to say, in a direct and mechanical manner, state domination but rather refers to a common national memory, that is to say, to all those elements theorized by Antonio Gramsci and his pages on hegemony. In the end it goes a little toward the reflection that you brought about in us, on the multitude and politics.

It seems to me that the position of Gonzales is very similar to that of Ranciere of whom I have read a writing recently published in the French review Multitudes, which maintains that there exists a dialectical relationship between people and multitude. In my opinion, the burden of proof is on the side of Ranciere and Gonzales: they are the ones who should show that what is dialectical is conceptually and practically possible. In their position I respect very much the demand for a memory, of having in some fashion a tradition, of having shared memories and, clearly this, the shared memories, the tradition that we are able to have, is that of popular struggles of workers, proletarians. But: the multitude is really a new form of political existence and, in some senses, anthropological and for that it is a subject with sufficient potentiality to incorporate many of the good memories of the aspirations of the people. It can take charge of the demands for liberty that lived in the class struggles in which the working class expressed itself and, above all, comported itself as people. Again there appears the discourse of Walter Benjamin: the capacity to actualize the past relating it to the present. I respect that: I am not a postmodern in the sense of considering memory and tradition as disagreeable things; to the contrary, I think that no one can even undertake a strike for ten minutes without a grand tradition at their backs, and the multitude would be a poor thing if it was only a solitary crowd, the solitary mass, if it was the individual without spaces, without places, without times. All to the contrary: the multitude is also a combination of memory and a sensual enjoyment of places, of histories that those places tell us, that those places have, that a certain "neighborhood" of Buenos Aires or a certain "quarter" of Milan contain. If that didn’t exist, the multitude would be a poor thing, it would be a sociological - in the worst sense of the word - discourse.

Our last question returns a little to your work... We have been interested very much in tracing the concept and the use that you make of the notion of virtuosity. Do you consider virtuosity as the essence of a politics in the autopoetic sense of the multitude? How do associate all that with the actual Italian conjuncture in which, as you said a little while ago, the new right of Berlusconi maintains itself in power based on its capacity to "represent" the multitude?

One more time: ambivalence. In its most important meaning, viruosity means that many jobs today don’t have as their conclusion a definite physical product, and many jobs are similar to the act of a pianist, which is an act that leaves nothing behind but rather is valued for the performance for itself. The important thing is that virtuosity always was considered the model for political action. Or rather, to say that today labor has transformed, at least in some of its components, into virtuosity, means to say that postfordist labor absorbs in itself many of the characteristics that previously characterized political praxis. Aristotle said had said that the forms of life of the human being were three: labor (poiesis), politics (praxis) and theoretical life (pure thought). Well, I believe that another of the great innovations of postfordism and the multitude is that there exists a confusion and a superposition among these three forms of life: labor contains in itself many aspects of thought and politics. I say politics in its most anthropological aspects: relation with others, expounding in the view of others, to have to deal with the contingent and the unforseen; these are political categories that today are transformed into categories of labor. Then, there is a superposition, a confusion, among the three classic forms of life of our tradition and that is very important. At bottom, the concept of virtuosity tries to point out this superposition. Cleary Berlusconi, the new Italian right, the new international right, when it wins it is because it gives an organized political expression as if there were virtuosos, in the sense of virtuosity. That is certain but it pertains to this more general ambivalence of which we were speaking before.

Rome, June 2002.

 

 

 

Notes:

1. "Virtuosity And Revolution: Notes On The Concept Of Political Action", Tr.

2. See  Virno, "De la violencia a la resistencia"; Costa and Virno "Entre la desobediencia y el éxodo" - tr.

3. Quaderni Rossi was a legendary theoretical journal of marxist orientation that circulated in workerist fields, where were undertaken, "a workers inquiry". It was founded by Raniero Panzieri in 1959. Between ‘63 and ‘66 a split occurred in the original group. From that split emerged the journal Classe Operaia lead by Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna, and Antonio Negri, among others, an expression of the growth of the Italian workerist current.

4. Potere Operaio of a neoleninist orientation, was the first workerist mass organization that structured itself at the national level. Its action oriented itself toward the factories and the universities. The first group was formed in Venice, in 1967. In the autumn of ‘69 it constituted the national groups. In ‘73 it dissolved.

5. The movement of ‘77 is fully considered in one of Virno’s classic articles: "Do you remember counterrevolution?" Following Virno, the movement of ‘77, formed by "student workers and worker students" and precarious workers of all types taking the fluidity of the labor market, which determined common attitudes, as their own. They transformed the increase of the area of nonwork and precariousness into a collective journey, in a conscious migration from the labor of the factory. It broke the nexus between labor and socialization. Virno would later use this experience to ground a reflection upon exodus as a strategy that takes account of the nomadism (estranged from a fixed place of work, that comes to be only an episode in the biography more than a "perpetual chain") characteristic of this movement. [For additional sources on the Italian Movement of '77, see the following: Bologna, "Tribe of Moles",  excerpt from Patrick Cunninghame, Autonomia: A Movement of Refusal, Cunninghame's interview with Bologna, and Red Notes, Living in an Earthquake

6. Following Virno, postfordism emerged in Italy with an inverted ‘77: it is capital, now, that authorizes the tendencies of mobility, refusal of the ethic of work, and flexibility in order to restructure, upon these dynamic bases, new apparatuses for its proper reproduction.

7. The 7th of April of ‘79 Toni Negri was accused of being the head of a single organization that consists of a political wing (Autonomia Operaio) and an armed wing (the Brigatte Rossi). He was accused also of being the organizer of the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro and of "armed insurrection against the state." Thirty other people were detained at the same time.

8. Luogo Comune: political journal published between November of 1990 and June of 1993. They put out four issues. In addition to Virno, other collaborators on Lugo Comune, included Giorgio Agamben, Franco Piperno, Antonio Negri, Sando Mezzadra and Sergio Bianchi.

9. Fragment on machines and General Intellect. The fragment on machines is a text by Marx published in Notebook VI of the Grundrisse. There, in a few short pages Marx affirms that "capital works toward its own dissolution as dominant form of production" to incorporate general scientific labor, technological application of the natural sciences, social structuring of global production. General Intellect is a category extracted from the original text of the same fragment which says "The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process." [Marx, Grundrisse, p706, Vintage Edition - tr.] From here derives the notion of "mass intellect" or "intellect of the masses" that Virno uses in the interview.

10. Future Anterieure: journal founded by Toni Negri during his exile in France.

11. Disobbedienti: current Italian political organization composed, among others, by the dissolved Tute Bianchi and the Youth for Communist Refoundation.

12. DeriveApprodi: theoretical and political journal founded in 1992, coedited by Virno and others. Now it is a publishing house. [A good deal of material from DeriveApprodi is reprinted in Spanish in the journal Contrapoder - tr.]

 13. The Spanish version of this interview reads ‘International Workers of the World’, which is a mistake. The name of the union was and is Industrial Workers of the World. The original text Virno is referencing is titled "Immaterial Workers of the World." A Spanish version of this text is online at usuarios.lycos.es/pete_baumann/index-59.html - tr.

14. I am unclear on how to translate the phrase "syndicalizacion de base". For now the insufficient ‘grassroots unionization will have to do. In Italy there are unions called ‘base unions’, the COBAS. I am not sure whether Virno intends here this particular form of union organization, or simply ‘more unionization at the grassroots level’. For more on the COBAS, see Steve Wright, Radical Unions in Italy - tr.

15. Sindicalismo de base

16. See Tesis sobre el nuevo fascismo europeo  - tr.

 

17. In Spanish the phrase is "el verbo que se hace carne", literally "the verb that makes itself flesh." I have translated the phrase here as the more typical English phrase - tr.

18. "verbo", literally "verb" - tr.

19. See "Weak Thought between Being and Difference" by Adelino Zanini, in _Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics_, edited by Virno and Hardt. - tr.

 

Translation from Spanish by Nate Holdren. Thanks to Sebastian Touza for help on idiomatic phrases.