creative capitalism¹

“We have to live this dead reality, this mad transition, in the same way that we lived prison, as a strange and ferocious way of reaffirming life. You could not escape the atrocious experience of prison, the contact with death and its violence. […] We were constrained to suffer dark romantic hallucinations. There was no longer any alternative. Certainly for us, there has never been any alternative to the world, but always an alternative in the world. A la Rauschenberg: a world that is assumed, shattered, reinvented in the form of its monstrosity. But even the possibility of such a heroism was denied to us. […] We have to live and suffer the defeat of truth, of our truth. We have to destroy its representation, its continuity, its memory, its trace. All subterfuges for avoiding the recognition that reality has changed, and with it truth, have to be rejected. […] The very blood in our veins had been replaced.”

— Antonio Negri, Art and Multitude²

Negri’s Art and Multitude consists of nine letters, most of which were written to his friends at the end of the 1980s while he was in exile in France. Negri here describes the destitution that the left endured after the defeats of the 1970s: the destruction of all its hopes, the way in which it had been outflanked by a neoliberalism which successfully installed business thinking into all areas of everyday life. What emerges here, in other words, is an account of the immediate after-effects of the installation of what I have called capitalist realism: the view that, since there is no alternative to capitalism, the only possible attitude consists in adjusting to its demands. Negri poses the left’s predicament very acutely.

To go back to the seeming certainties of older forms of militancy would be to consign oneself to irrelevance, obsolescence, to become an historical relic; but to accept the new situation, to adapt to it, would be to concede total defeat. The only possibility, Negri suggests, is to endure the time in the desert as a kind of religious trial: a moment of terrible and terrifying renewal, a transformation of the revolutionary subject happening at the very moment when revolution seems impossible and the forces of reaction control everything. The new situation — capital’s mutation into a postFordist form in which labour becomes “immaterial”, “flexible” and subject to the pressures of globalisation — offers new potentials, which must be embraced.

Reading these at times extraordinary communications, I find myself, as ever, persuaded by Negri’s negative analysis, his vision of culture and consciousness totally subsumed by capital. What I am much less convinced by is his positive alternative to this banal yet dark dominion. Like his inspirations, Deleuze and Guattari, Negri is a vitalist who opposes capital’s necrotic force to the living potenza of the creativity of the multitude.

Art, Negri maintains, is intrinsically rebellious and subversive. Even though Negri himself recognises the dangers of taking too much consolation in art, he ends up retaining faith in it. “When I myself suffered the political defeat of the seventies and in the depths of despair, asked art to help me to endure it and to help me find individual ways of resistance and redemption”, Negri writes, “I was overestimating the capacity of art.” Yet Negri is soon arguing that art is a “perennial demonstration of the irreducibility of freedom, of subversive action, of love for radical transformation”.

From Negri’s point of view, there is no contradiction between these two claims. What he is arguing is that an individual can never find his way out of despondency through art alone; rather, it is only by new forms of solidarity — which necessarily must involve art — that escape is possible. While the point about collectivity has never been more pressing, Negri’s hymning of art seems strangely nostalgic. For the era of capitalist realism has also seen all kinds of synergies between art and business, nowhere better summed up than in the concept of the “creative industries”.

It is of course possible to argue that the art that has dominated in capitalist realism, its artistic and commercial value massively inflated, is a fake art, a betrayal and dilution of art’s inherent militancy. But why not go all the way with Negri’s logic of negativity, and argue that there is no readymade, already-existing utopian energy; that there is nothing which, by its very nature, resists incorporation into capital? So it is not then a matter of creativity versus capitalism — or rather of capitalism as the capturing of the creativity of the multitude. Instead, the enemy now could better be called creative capitalism, and overcoming it will not involve inventing new modes of positivism, but new kinds of negativity.