Paolo Virno Research Articles

Cinema, the Post-Fordist Worker, and Immaterial Labor: From Post-Hollywood to the European Art Film

This article examines relations between film and work under conditions of post- Fordist modes of production as they have emerged since 1970s. This necessarily involves engaging with recent po liti cal theories of post- Fordism, and immaterial labor and biopolitics, which were developed in Italy from 1970s and have become extremely influential on contemporary understandings of new modes of work and production. The concept of biopolitics- or, more precisely, biopower- was first developed in Foucault's work in late 1970s, especially introduction to History of Sexuality,1 and seminars such as Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics.2 Foucauldian refers to a contemporary mode of power that directly governs, manages, and monitors life, considered in terms of state of population control and security regimes. As such, it differs both from classical conceptions of sovereign power, based on power over life and death of an absolute ruler, or Foucault's own conceptions of modern power formation in terms of a disciplinary apparatus. This still nascent concept of was famously taken up in work of Giorgio Agamben, especially in Homo Sacer.3 In his earlier essay Form- of- Life, Agamben combines concept of with sovereign power and rejects, or at least problematizes, Foucault's genealogical distinction between sovereign and biopo liti cal modes of power.4 Instead, Agamben discusses biopo liti cal power as governance of what he calls or life.5 He traces concept of bare life to Aristotle, but points out that it took a par tic u lar significance in modernity, especially in such specifically modern sites as concentration camps and in relation to refugees, not covered under term human rights.6 According to Agamben, the first concentration camps in Eu rope were built as a means of controlling refugees ... Jews and Gypsies could be sent to extermination camps only after having been fully denationalized ... When their rights are no longer rights of citizen, that is when humans are truly sacred, in sense that this term used to have in Ancient Rome: doomed to death.7 While governance of stateless populations and even more so management of concentration camps are clear instances of biopolitics as a direct power over life itself, Agamben's insistence on these examples obscures pervasion of whole of social by theorized by Foucault by limiting it only to these extreme cases. Furthermore, it evacuates any possible agency from naked life by situating it as passive and even doomed to death, and therefore is not very amenable for thinking about creativity and re sis tance inherent in work. For these reasons, this article refers to a subsequent reformulation of biopower by Hardt and Negri, and other postautonomist thinkers such as Paolo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato, who have proposed a division between biopower, understood in Foucauldian sense, and what they call biopolitics, which refers to forms of re sis tance proper to regimes of biopower.8 This conception of biopolitics has advantage of privileging practices of re sistance and creativity over pro cesses of capture and control, and also focuses on sphere of work and its contemporary post- Fordist transformation. This is a much more productive account of biopolitics and bare life than Agamben's account, and one that shifts latter's passive conception of and sacrificial bare life toward what Hardt and Negri call biopo liti cal production, to bring out the synergies of life, or really productive manifestations of naked life.9 The emphasis on biopolitics as production is also usefully applied to cinema. Cinema, in its incorporation and coordination of bodies in movement, can be understood as biopo liti cal in sense that it directly incorporates living pro cesses by means of a technical apparatus that rec ords and then later projects them. …

The Word and the Flesh: Postworkerism and the Biopolitics of Language in Paolo Virno and Christian Marazzi

The Word and the Flesh: Postworkerism and the Biopolitics of Language in Paolo Virno and Christian Marazzi

THE WORD AND THE FLESH

Paolo Virno and Christian Marazzi, who both belong to the Italian tradition of postworkerist Marxism, moved in their more recent works towards an analysis of the invariant species-specific features of the human animal. Their main thesis is that contemporary capitalism is no longer basing its extraction of value on the industrial organization of labor but rather on the generic faculties of language. Every possibility of advancing progressive political claims and generating social conflicts will therefore have as a battlefield the biopolitical question “What is human nature?” Relying on Freud’s theory of jokes, Paolo Virno develops an analysis of the forms of innovative linguistic actions that highlights a different relation between a norm and its application or between a rule and what escapes it (which he defines as “regularity,” or “common behavior of mankind”). On the other hand, Christian Marazzi stresses that life itself has become a direct source of valorization at a stage of financial accumulation (based on the linguistic and performative “conventions” of the stock market) that is no longer able to control the living/speaking body of the multitude. This article claims that, although both authors understand human nature as a purely linguistic enunciation, they end up depending excessively on presumed substantialized evidence (neoteny, pure potentiality of speech, relationality, etc.) that does not leave any space for real historical mediations.

‘POPULAR CULTURE’ IN A CRITIQUE OF THE NEW POLITICAL REASON

Since the US presidential campaign of 2004, references to a new political ‘populism’ abound. Sometimes the politics of populism has been waged over the claim, by the Left and the Right, to populism. Although there is a long history of political movements representing themselves as populist, the struggle over the claim to populism has certain recent inflections, and matters differently than in the past, and in the USA differently than in other parts of the world. One thing that distinguishes the recent political populism in the USA is its articulation to and through a ‘media revolution’. My intervention in a collection of essays interested in rethinking ‘media convergence’ involves rethinking certain assumptions about the relation between the ‘media revolution’ associated with ‘new media’ and a new ‘convergence culture’ and the emergence of (the claims to) a new political populism in the USA. In so doing, the project also engages the writings of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau, Paolo Virno and Michel Foucault in order to rethink the relation between ‘the popular’, ‘populism’ and ‘population’.

Confessions of a Radical Eclectic

This paper explores the contributions of autonomist Marxist theory to my understanding of reality television, self-branding and social media. Autonomist Marxist ideas help to bridge the classic media studies divide between critical political economy and cultural studies, illuminating the very material connections between television’s mode of production, its texts, and its broader cultural context and impact. Concepts such as the social factory, immaterial labour, the socialized worker, and virtuosity, contributed by thinkers such as Mauricio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, have enabled me to argue that reality television is a privileged site of production in the post-Fordist era; it not only produces texts or ideologies about work and life, but also models the monetization of “being” and produces “branded selves”. While autonomist ideas are extremely useful, the field of thinking is complex and not without its internal debates. This paper also explores contributions by George Caffentzis, Massimo de Angelis and David Harvie, specifically the concept of the war over measure, arguing that this concept helps to frame some of the ways in which the public expression of opinion and feeling online and in social media are being captured, measured and put to work for capital.

15 * Continental Philosophy

This chapter focuses on books published in the field of Continental philosophy in 2009 and is divided in two sections: 1 . Oblique Biopolitics, Post-Fordist Happiness and the Dialectic of Inhumanism: Juxtaposing Hardt, Negri and Badiou. This section, written by Marios Constantinou, discusses Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth against the background of their earlier work, notably, Empire ; it traces critically the nodal points of this trajectory, marking in detail immanent shifts of emphasis but also contradictory displacements, precarious adjustments, delicate equivocations, political evasions and unexploited possibilities. It unpacks the core arguments of the Commonwealth framed by the transition from Negri’s early concept of the ‘constituent republic’ to the current notion of biopolitical governance that terminates any residual autonomy of politics, drawing into the discussion relevant aspects of the work of Antonio Gramsci, Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Paolo Virno and Jacques Rancière. This section concludes by examining Alain Badiou’s Logics of Worlds , which of course stands in its own right but may also be read as a critical supplement to Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth. It reconstructs, therefore, Badiou’s core arguments in Logics in terms of polemical anti-biopolitics and the Dialectic of Inhumanism. 2 . Giorgio Agamben–In the Meantime. This section is by Maria Margaroni, and focuses on current work by and on the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The main threads that bring the books under review together are: philosophy as a vocation in the constellation of the contemporary; Agamben’s philosophy of language; friendship as the experience of a sharing without an object and Agamben’s coming community; faith in ‘the now of knowability’ and the inevitability of betrayal.

On Ambidextrousness, or, What is an Innovative Action?

In his article "On the Ambiguity of Ambidextrousness, or, What is an Innovative Action?" Brett Neilson explores the significance of the fact that the technical equality of the hands is realized above all in the act of manual labor, revisiting an influential essay by Robert Hertz, a student of Emile Durkheim and associate of Marcel Mauss, published in 1909 and entitled "The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand." In his text, Hertz argued that the basic spatial distinction between the left and right hand acquires the polarity of a social hierarchy owing not to the physiology or psychology of motor asymmetry but owing to a cultural choice rooted in experiences of the sacred and profane. With reference to Marx's discussion of productive and non-productive labor in his Grundrisse, the world-making capacity of the hands is analyzed vis-à-vis the productive regime of capital and its increasing subordination of human motor control to machines. Finally, following Paolo Virno's observations regarding immaterial labor and cognitive capitalism in his The Grammar of the Multitude, Neilson discusses what relevance (if any) the cultural distinction — and ambiguity — between the hands holds in the age of information.

The Terrorist Entrepreneur

This paper theorizes by means of classical and contemporary social and political theory the figure of the terrorist entrepreneur. The figure is extracted from The 9/11 Commission Report—loosened from the person of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, coordinator of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, shown to express violations of category differences between East and West introduced by Max Weber and still in circulation today. Drawing upon contemporary Italian political theory of semiocapitalism and the strange fauna of political and rhetorical entrepreneurialism found in the works of Maurizio Lazzarato and Paolo Virno, the contemporary features of the terrorist entrepreneur are described.

Narrative Labor in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes R. P. Ladilaw turns this philosophical bent into an example of the eternal return of the same by following a dialectic of character and circumstance that empties individuality into a general repetition of events. W. David Shaw's reading also takes the Hegelian lure, presenting the novel as an attempt to overcome a crisis of representation between two competing historical perspectives, positivist and Hegelian. By contrast, Sue Lonoff displaces this method onto the reader's synthetic judgment, claiming that the novel's multiple narrators express a problem in epistemology that readers address in their textual uptake, much as in Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book. See King 253–56. King also provides Overends's 1865 prospectus as an appendix, see King 328–29. Marx wrote in Capital 1 that “work of this sort has scarcely reached the stage of being subsumed even formally under capital, and belongs essentially to a transitional stage” (Marx, Capital 1: 1044). Post-Marxists like Paolo Virno, Christian Marazzi, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt have spent much time explicating Marx's work on immaterial/biopolitical labor to describe labor's contemporary economic situation. In particular, Virno persuasively argues that contemporary capitalism relies on the general intellect and socialized production, which extends beyond labor's remunerated time. See Virno, Grammar; Negri; Marazzi. Betteredge's use of Crusoe essentially repeats Crusoe's discovery of the Bible's prophetic capacities: “only having open'd the Book casually, the first Words that occur'd to me were these, Call on me in the Day of Trouble, and I will deliver, and thou shalt glory me. The Words were very apt to my Case, and made some Impression upon my Thoughts at the Time of reading them, tho’ not so much as they did afterwards” (Defoe 80–81). In Lacanian terms, Franklin's internal difference becomes one between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation. In this respect, I concur with Lewis A. Lawson's psychoanalytic reading of Rosanna as the novel's castrating figure, but only insofar as this castration marks the cut disavowing narrative labor and collectivity since castration, in the Lacanian symbolic, marks the disavowal of the presubjective world of partial objects. The quote from Robinson Crusoe follows Crusoe's creation of an account book comparing the good and ill of being trapped on the island. Collins inserted “yourselves” for the original text “our selves” (58). Political economy often turned to the individual or isolated producer as a kind of ur-text for economic production. Marx uses Crusoe in Capital 1's well-known section “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret” to display how production in Crusoe is premised on the division of labor, even when there is only one laborer to be had (Marx, Capital 1: 169–70). The further implication of Marx's use of Crusoe not only reveals that the commodity obscures the social relations of production and exchange in an immediately present object but that Crusoe himself is the political economic fantasy of an economic producer whose product naturally carries exchange value even though it exists outside any social relation. OED, s.v. “rose” 7.a. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJoshua GoochJoshua Gooch received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. He is currently working on a book about the nineteenth-century novel, finance, and biopolitical labor. His work has appeared in Texas Studies in Literature and Language (forthcoming), the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, and Cinema Journal.

Grammar of the McMultitudes: The Labor (Value) of Theory

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The immediate references here are to Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000; Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multititude, trans., Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson, New York: Semiotext(e); and Christian Marrazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy, trans. Gregory Conti, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007; and to my own books, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, Hanover: Dartmouth College Press and UPNE, 2006; and Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle and the World-Media System, Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2006. 2. See George Soros, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, New York: Public Affairs, 2008, for his quasi-Lacanian if intellectually naïve views on what would be the economic Real. Randy Martin's brilliant book, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, explores the socio-economic changes foisted upon persons by the emergent society of risk as well as the economic function of ostensibly humanistic categories including “race.” 3. See Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, London: Reaktion Books, 2000. 4. See The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, NY: Semiotext(e), 2009. 5. For more on this issue of inscription on the flesh of the global–social body, see my essay, “Paying Attention,” in Cabinet 24 (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2007). The essay was republished for Documenta XII republication available at http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/article.php?IdLanguage=1&NrArticle=187 (accessed 17 December 2009). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJonathan BellerJonathan Beller is at Columbia University

Wielość: produkcja wspólnotowości

The paper is an attempt to reconstruct the notion of multitude which appears in the work of Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno. Multitude refers to the emergence of a new social subject, substantially different from the known historical formulations (nation, people, class). The notion is analyzed both in the context of the classical political philosophy and the changes in the modes of production occuring in the western societies - transition from the material to immaterial labor, which consists of producing relations between social singularities. The genealogical perspective will be therefore supplemented by the analysis of the biopolitical constituion of the multitude and both perspectives will show the exigency to deconstruct numerous notions of the traditional philosophy.

Virtuoso Servitude and (De)Mobilization in Robert Walser, W. G. Sebald, and the Brothers Quay

This article proposes a parallel reading of Robert Walser's novel Jakob von Gunten (1909) and W.G. Sebald's “Ambros Adelwarth” from the collection Die Ausgewanderten (1992), set off against an excursus on the 1995 filmic adaptation of Walser's text by the Quay Brothers, Institute Benjamenta. It focuses on the relevance in Walser of virtuoso forms of servitude as practices of demobilization and desertion at a time when teleological mobility and speed became increasingly synonymous with military mobilization. Walser's counter‐movement to the spirit of impending war is taken up in “Ambros Adelwarth,” yet in a more literal articulation of demobilization and desertion; this text also spells out the undercurrent of rigidity, dysfunction and mortification that runs through Jakob von Gunten. Close intertextual readings are framed by Paolo Virno's concept of “servile virtuosity,” as well as other theoretical considerations of movement and modernity. This essay both extends the growing research on intertextuality in W.G. Sebald towards an author whose impact on the latter has received comparatively little attention, and aims to contribute to the recent focus in German Studies on what one may term psycho‐physicality, clustered around theoretical reconsiderations of posture and gesture.

An Italian Rupture: Production against Development

An Italian RuptureProduction against Development Antonio Negri (bio) Translated by Bruno Bosteels How can I begin to define the Italian “difference” within the philosophical framework of postwar Europe? I begin with the end of the 1950s, when a group of politicized intellectuals began to question the extent of the immanence of work in the development of capitalist technologies.1 What were the transformations that from within the modern factory foisted labor-power on machines? Questions like these continued to be elaborated upon with respect to the violent social development of the postwar economic expansion. What, it was asked, was the impact of human activity on how society is structured, passing from the factory to society? On the one hand is this question: what was the effect of capitalist command (and its technological instrumentation) on social life? And vice versa: what transformations did social movements force upon the structures and the institutions of capitalist command? Capitalist power was quickly extended to the control of social life until being configured as biopower, in spite of widespread and effective resistance. How could biopolitical relations be lived and organized so as to create alternatives to biopower? 1 I am convinced that these are the central points around which an original political philosophy has come to constitute itself in Italy within the tormented framework of the heterodox Marxist debate but that also has deep ties with the Italian phenomenological schools of the 1960s. The latter came on the scene by opposing the tedious but extremely widespread Heideggerian philosophy that was hegemonic both on the Right, in neo-scholasticism, and on the Left, with the last Sirens of the Frankfurt School. They offered an analysis of the antagonistic subjectivity in the phenomenologies of Enzo Paci, Giuseppe Semerari, and Enzo Melandri (as well as the new critical positivism of Giulio Preti and Ferruccio Rossi-Landi). They focused on the anthropological relations between the human being and the machine, productive activity and language, perception and action; in so doing they updated Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s humanism, following it up with insights and approaches that “Western Marxism” had elaborated from Georg Lukács to Karel Kosíc. Some research paths have been identified in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno in 1996 (with essays written in the 1980s and 1990s). From this period onward, the themes mentioned above (originally conceptualized in terms of the relationship between class movements and technological transformations) became entwined with and nourished by contact with poststructuralist philosophical literature, primarily, but not exclusively, from France. Through this thematic hybridization, the problems summarized above became central to the postindustrial, postmodern, and globalizing debate. [End Page 21] If this is the overall framework in which the original adventure of the authors of The Italian Difference is to be located, allow me now to focus my attention on a concept, or better yet, on the watchword that was at the center of that period of research and political activity: a phrase that uniquely captured both the rational point of the period as well as its esprit de finesse. I want to ask what the “refusal of work” actually meant.2 To this end, I want to reflect upon a few concepts that, even though they do not immediately refer to the question of the meaning and significance of the “refusal of work,” will be useful to us if we wish to tackle this question. Here I would like to take up a few theoretical achievements that are relevant to our problem and that were set out decisively in Empire and then worked out above all in Commonwealth. Forgive me for employing concepts a posteriori but if I were to trace the development of these concepts from beginning to end, my thinking would become rather cumbersome. I would like to engage some hypotheses about the ways in which the ontology of human labor, or better, productive power [potenza] (as has been adopted in the social and political sciences), historically takes on a form and then in that form either becomes dominated (subjected and enjoyed, disciplined and controlled) or places itself in the condition of revolting, of liberating, and (in the words...

Introduction

Introduction Timothy Campbell Is there such a thing as Italian thought? That question was put to us two years ago by one of the leading lights of contemporary European philosophy. One of us had traveled to Italy to ask whether this philosopher would be willing to contribute an article to a conference on Italian thought that diacritics was organizing.1 Embarrassment prevents remembering our answer here, but the question lingered, not only across the conference and the debates that followed, but also in the exchanges that ensued in the months and years after. One can still hear echoes of the question in Italy today, where debates on the nature of so-called “Italian theory” play across the country’s major dailies, as well as in Anglo-American academies and the increasing number of journals that have devoted issues to the rubric of Italian thought.2 Indeed if some accounts are to be believed, Italian thinkers provided inspiration for the Occupy movements that sprung up in 2011 on campuses and in urban centers across the United States and elsewhere.3 The existential question of Italian thought surely demands a response and yet we believe it more productive to reframe the question: no longer what Italian thought is; no longer what concepts drive Italian philosophy, but rather how the texts collected here add up to “such a thing as Italian thought.” In what sense would such a thing “be” Italian thought? To pose the question in this fashion allows for a space in which one can glean connections, pertinent and impertinent, which together may or may not constitute a horizon for thought; neither philosophy nor theory, but an interval, a milieu with shifting boundaries, reciprocities, and allegiances. The advantages of such an approach are multiple, but none more decisive in our view than what becomes visible when the question is recast: the intense struggle for conceptual and philosophical dominance that is currently being waged, what might be called a conflict over a past and future canon. Rather than asserting a forced unity whose effect would be to contain or domesticate Italian thought, we prefer to leave the question of unity open so as to hear the particular rhythms associated with thought originating in Italy today. In this volume—the first of two—we have assembled a number of essays, histories, narratives, and polemical thrusts, arranging them so as to maximize the proximity and distance among them. In the juxtaposition of texts, we see the possibility of connections, folded and unfolded meanings, chiasmi, and above all interpretations: not a zero degree of order, but a snapshot of the theoretical and political landscape that characterizes Italian thought today. Now it is true that in the past a number of the thinkers gathered here sent missives to one another in their works and across edited collections: Antonio Negri and Giorgio Agamben have had their exchanges over the years, particularly on the nature of constituent power (a mapping of which the reader will find in Kevin Attell’s “Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power”); so too Adriana Cavarero and Roberto Esposito have dialogued over the political nature of logos and community, while Paolo Virno as well as Franco “Bifo” Berardi have on occasion aired their differences with Negri. In addition, the collection The Italian Difference went a long way toward providing an overview of Italian thought, while the SUNY [End Page 3] series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy continues to publish surprising and frequently ignored texts in Italian philosophy. As helpful as both have been, the threat of the forced unity I noted above is never far from the surface. The subtitle of The Italian Difference is “Between Nihilism and Biopolitics,” which suggests a Foucauldian/Heideggerian axis that is less warranted by the texts under consideration here. For its part, the SUNY series has already answered the philosopher’s question affirmatively, which makes composing the potential elements of Italian thought more treacherous. This special issues of diacritics is intended to suspend judgment so as to strengthen the movement of putting together. To what end? Where might such a rearrangement lead us? For Deleuze and Guattari, the answer will be linked to a “milieu for philosophy”: Italy and Spain lacked...

Stagflation, virtuosity and other ambivalences

This essay investigates emotional and affective dimensions to social life that emerge in the early period of neoliberalism. In consideration of the films Five Easy Pieces; Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, I argue that negative affects such as depression, fear, anxiety, and cynicism not only reflect reconfigurations of selfhood engendered by neoliberalism but also present the possibility for new modes of sociality. Drawing on the work of Paolo Virno, I suggest that virtuosity–the capacity to perform–allows neoliberal subjects to navigate the emotional situation emergent from dynamic changes in the economy, politics, and culture.

The Unworkable Interface

The Unworkable Interface Alexander R. Galloway (bio) I. Interface as Method Interfaces are back, or Perhaps they never left. The familiar Socratic conceit, from the Phaedrus, of communication as the process of writing directly on the soul of the other has, since the 1980s and 1990s, returned to center stage in the discourse around culture and media. The catoptrics of the society of the spectacle is now the dioptrics of the society of control. Reflective surfaces have been overthrown by transparent thresholds. The metal detector arch, or the graphics frustum, or the Unix socket—these are the new emblems of the age. Windows, doors, airport gates, and other thresholds are those transparent devices that achieve more the less they do: for every moment of virtuosic immersion and connectivity, for every moment of volumetric delivery, of inopacity, the threshold becomes one notch more invisible, one notch more inoperable. As technology, the more a dioptric device erases the traces of its own functioning (in actually delivering the thing represented beyond), the more it succeeds in its functional mandate; yet this very achievement undercuts the ultimate goal: the more intuitive a device becomes, the more it risks falling out of media altogether, becoming as naturalized as air or as common as dirt. To succeed, then, is at best self-deception and at worst self-annihilation. One must work hard to cast the glow of unwork. Operability engenders inoperability. Curiously this is not a chronological, spatial, or even semiotic relation. It is primarily a systemic relation, as Michel Serres rightly observed in his meditation on functional “alongsidedness”: “Systems work because they don’t work. Non-functionality remains essential for functionality. This can be formalized: pretend there are two stations exchanging messages through a channel. If the exchange succeeds—if it is perfect, optimal, immediate—then the relation erases itself. But if the relation remains there, if it exists, it’s because the exchange has failed. It is nothing but mediation. The relation is a non-relation.”1 Thus since Plato, we have [End Page 931] been wrestling with the grand choice: (1) mediation as the process of imminent if not immediate realization of the other (and thus at the same time the self), or (2) as Serres’ dialectal position suggests, mediation as the irreducible disintegration of self and other into contradiction.2 Representation is either clear or complicated, either inherent or extrinsic, either beautiful or deceptive, either already known or imminently interpretable. In short, either Iris or Hermes. Without wishing to upend this neat and tidy formulation, it is still useful to focus on the contemporary moment to see if something slightly different is going on, or, at the very least to “prove” the seemingly already known through close analysis of some actual cultural artifacts. First though, I would like to insinuate a brief prefatory announcement on methodology. To the extent that the present project is allegorical in nature, it might be useful to, as it were, subtend the process of allegorical reading in the age of ludic capitalism with some elaboration as to how or why it might be possible to perform such a reading in the first place. In former times, it was generally passable to appeal to some legitimizing methodological foundation—usually Marx or Freud or some combination thereof—in order to prove the efficacy, and indeed the political potency, of one’s critical maneuverings. This is not to suggest that those sources are no longer viable, quite the opposite, since power typically grows with claims of obsolescence; even today Marx’s death drive persists under the pseudonyms of Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, or McKenzie Wark, just as a generation ago it persisted under Jean-Joseph Goux or Guy Debord. Yet somehow today the unfashionable sheen, and indeed perceived illegitimacy, of the critical tradition inherited from the middle of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, with Marx and Freud standing as two key figures in this tradition but certainly not encompassing all of it, makes it difficult to rally around the red flag of desire in the same way as before. Today the form of Marxism in common circulation is still the antiseptic one invented a generation ago...

The Open Secret of Real Abstraction

This article revisits the Marxist debate on ‘real abstraction’ in order to evaluate the relevance of this concept to a period marked by the rise of cognitive capitalism and a proliferation of discourses on abstraction in social theory. The article touches on the interpretive debates around Marx's 1857 Introduction and tries to identify the tensions and contradictions at work in the distinctive contributions of Louis Althusser, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and Roberto Finelli to thinking on the specific status of abstraction, in terms of both the methodology of Marxism and the logic and ontology of capitalism. These foundational debates are then contrasted with attempts by Paolo Virno and Lorenzo Cillario to think the contemporary figures of abstraction in terms of its politicization, on the one hand, and its operational role in the labor process, on the other.

Spinozean Multitude: Radical Italian Thought vis-à-vis Sartrean Existential Marxism

The present paper aims to explore the Spinozean notion ‘multitude’ as it is used in texts by Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno, although I shall only touch upon the latter’s work to the extent that it appears to agree with Negri’s theses. Doing so will bring up an issue which, in my view, impinges on the articulation of the praxis of liberation envisioned by the above philosophers. In particular, although their analyses adopt ontology as a point of departure, and this is a core methodological tenet in their thought, they fall short of offering an account of the ontological structures of agency which would be adequate to ground the motivation for the appointed ethico-political task.

On the Parasitic Character of Wage Labor

Paolo Virno was active in Italian autonomist left during 1970s, when he edited journal Metropoli. He has worked as an editor for communist daily il manifesto and has published mainly in fields of philosophy and political theory. His works include Convenzione e materialismo. L'unicita senza aurora (Rome: Theoria, 1986) [Convention and Materialism. Uniqueness Without A Halo], Mondanita. L'idea di 'mondo' tra esperienza e sfera pubblica (Rome: manifestolibri, 1994) [Wordliness. The Idea of the World Between Experience and Public Sphere], and recent Grammatica della moltitudine (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2002), which has been translated into English as A Grammar of Multitude (New York: semiotext[e], 2004). In two short essays translated below, Virno addresses social consequences of transformations of labor characteristic of transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. On Parasitic Character of Wage Labor polemicizes against those neoliberal economic theories that celebrate decline of welfare state but refuse to abandon its ideological corollary, Fordist work ethic. Automation plus guaranteed income--a program that can be traced back to labor struggles of 1960s and that found expression in publications of international situationist movement as well as in certain currents of

On the Parasitic Character of Wage Labor

Paolo Virno was active in the Italian autonomist left during the 1970s, when he edited the journal Metropoli. He has worked as an editor for the communist daily il manifesto and has published mainly in the fields of philosophy and political theory. His works include Convenzione e materialismo. L'unicita senza aurora (Rome: Theoria, 1986) [Convention and Materialism. Uniqueness Without A Halo], Mondanita. L'idea di 'mondo' tra esperienza e sfera pubblica (Rome: manifestolibri, 1994) [Wordliness. The Idea of "the World" Between Experience and the Public Sphere], and the recent Grammatica della moltitudine (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2002), which has been translated into English as A Grammar of the Multitude (New York: semiotext[e], 2004). In the two short essays translated below, Virno addresses the social consequences of the transformations of labor characteristic of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. "On the Parasitic Character of Wage Labor" polemicizes against those "neoliberal" economic theories that celebrate the decline of the welfare state but refuse to abandon its ideological corollary, the Fordist work ethic. "Automation plus guaranteed income"--a program that can be traced back to the labor struggles of the 1960s and that found expression in the publications of the international situationist movement as well as in certain currents of