LUCA SALZA Can you explain for us the reasons why the concept of biopolitics has taken a leading role in the development of radical political thought in Italy? In addition to your positions I am thinking of Virno, Agamben and Esposito. Presumably the theoretical and political stances of Italian feminism, the insistence on sexual difference, and the battle for the politicisation of the sphere of reproduction have played a decisive role in this regard. We could perhaps start from your specific contribution to the question: ‘real subsumption’ and ‘biopower’.
ANTONIO NEGRI I would say that as regards Italy, the issue should be considered in the light of the internal crisis of Marxist categories; in other words, as part of the analysis of the concept of ‘real subsumption’ – which is not simply a concept, but also a dispositif of the concrete analysis of capitalist development – and the position of the movements within that development. We should bear in mind that the concept of ‘real subsumption’ derives from the work done by the Frankfurt School on the global extension of capitalist domination, but it makes possible (in the name of its immediate Marxian determinations, and differently from what happens in Adorno and Marcuse) the rediscovery of ‘class antagonism’ within this globality. This permits us to move beyond the concept of ‘alienation’ and beyond the paralysis that this concept induced (throughout the 1950s and 1960s) in the analysis of political subjectivity. It is from these assumptions that the definition of a biopolitical field and appropriate dispositifs for political intervention are now beginning to mature. This all happened in the 1970s, in the context of going beyond the workerism of Tronti and Quaderni Rossi. The hypothesis was that you had to go beyond the factory; above all, and once and for all, beyond the party. So I would add this aspect to the ones you listed, for example those that revolve around gender difference. It was an event that followed the actual dynamics of movement: political theory followed the transition from the class movement that took place in the factories to the movements that developed in the metropolis. Those were the years of the first social centres, the first centres of aggregation of proletarian youth. There was also the women’s movement, which at first was not simply a feminist movement, because, as the struggles developed, they turned impetuously, you might say, from the question of wages to that of income (whether of the family or not). There were also the movements of emancipation from the family and the first gay rights movements. What is strange is that biopolitics did not explicitly make its appearance in theoretical debates until the 1990s, 10–15 years after the start of these struggles, and when we started talking about biopolitics people assumed that this new language effectively relegated Marxism to the attic. In reality, what distinguishes the theoretical positions that you cite here is precisely their continuity with Marxism. Speaking for myself – but I could also cite Virno, Ferrari Bravo and others – I have always claimed a continuity with Marxism: the ‘biopolitical’, just like ‘real subsumption’, is taken on board as a dispositif of antagonism in the social struggle, as previously in the industrial class struggle. In the 1990s, when the theoretical dispositif of ‘biopolitics–biopower’ made its major entry into philosophical debate, in other positions there was a very marked shading off of the concept of class struggle within, and in relation to, the concept of biopolitics. This misinterpretation is absolutely characteristic of the weak conceptions of the postmodern period. In other instances one would have to check. Esposito for example sees himself as having a central and mediating position, but in my view he fears like the devil the re-emergence of an antagonistic subjectivity. In Agamben some antagonism does exist, but it is disengaged from any historically determined condition. There is an ideal–typical typology of antagonism that, in Heideggerian terms, is not given as singularity and invention–creation but as resistance in extremis and ‘extreme nakedness’. In fact, on these margins there is no longer any sense of an alternative, and struggle and resistance are lost in an atmosphere that is demobilising, not to say mystical (the neutralisation of passion in the sublime and of being in nothingness).
LUCA SALZA But along this continuous line you trace between the concept of biopolitics and Marx (and communism) there is also the presence of Foucault, which was decisive in those years.
ANTONIO NEGRI Certainly, the method of antagonism appears in Foucault, where it is characterised as the production of subjectivity. From that we draw some consequences. Communism is no longer a horizon implicit in history; rather it becomes an endangered element. On the one hand, it is based on and embodied in concrete determinations, in historical necessities of production – the productive transformation of labour into intangible, communicative, cooperative and linguistic activity. On the other hand, it becomes, as a result, a new mode of production (with the intensity and extent that the term ‘mode of production’ implies in Marxism) – a real and proper social innovation. It is in the social qualification of labour that we discover the common substrate, the singular and productive relationship that arises between historical determination and the production of subjectivity. There is thus an ontological engine, a vis [force, strength, vigour] or a potentia [force, power] that organises the relationship between these two moments. Here Foucault is essential reading – the later Foucault, mind you, from the period of the Collège. In 1974 or 1975 I wrote a review of Foucault for AutAut, later to be republished in Macchina tempo, which I have also integrated in this volume (Chapter 12); in analysing the writings on the clinic, and Discipline and Punish, I realised that he had reached the limits of the Frankfurt School and that, having thus identified the terrain of bios [life] – where there is not only alienation but also physicality, strength, and constitution – he had to move beyond structuralism for good. And this is exactly what he was going to do. But during those same years we had Cacciari and others railing at Foucault and the ‘mush’ created by his ‘vitalism’. And the other Italians who were learning from Foucault and beginning to translate his works were so frightened by his philosophical and political radicalism that, with a few exceptions, they did everything to restore the structuralist influences, to bring out the weak aspects of micropolitics and to ignore the testimony of militant activity. So we had the paradox that it was left to a young communist, Duccio Trombadori, to publish a powerful interview with Foucault in a small provincial journal and to offer it, just as it was, to the Italic public. We have to tell ourselves that the 1970s were difficult years and that the stakes were clear: either renew the political strength of the Italian movements (and of communism), calibrating them on the transformations that were taking place in production and giving voice to the new antagonist subjectivity (which was what Foucault was trying to do from his side), or strengthen the old alliances, repress the new, and promote the power of the party. As everyone knows, the second path was the one that was chosen – the outcome of a lack of intellectual and ethical courage that ended in the extinction of a glorious tradition.
In those same years another decisive authority was Spinoza, who became a reference point against the growing academic influence of Heidegger and the resulting conversion to Heideggerism of large contingents of academics and former Marxists. In contrast, choosing Spinoza meant, schematically, being for life and not for death, being on the side of the movements, within their proposal of resistance, rather than inside the academy and the institutions. In those years Alexandre Matheron, a former communist, was the first to discover the ontological and political density of the concept of power in Spinoza. (Those were the years of other fundamental books on Spinoza, from Deleuze to Gueroult.)
What was Matheron proposing? To open the analysis of Spinoza’s concept of potenza to questions of time (duration, history, eternity), to themes of action (that is, political potentiality [potenza] and the production of subjectivity), and finally to themes of the relationship – powerful and constitutive – of body and mind (in which were embodied a dynamics of the passions and a dispositif of the common institutions). Materialism, under the logical and ontological lens of Spinozism, could here perfect its traditional pantheist status, assuming a project that was (at the same time) subjective and constitutive. Thus, around 1968, it responds to the call of the times and to the new form of the class struggle. This was a decisive line, in my view possibly more important than the one that passes between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault – the other great roadway on which it was possible in those years to break with classical Marxism, even in its Sartrian figure, on a terrain of revolution.
LUCA SALZA A further line would be the one that Badiou was attempting to trace…
ANTONIO NEGRI What we have in Badiou is above all an abstract line, a claim on utopia, the political (namely communism) understood as a logical and ideal principle. Starting from that position there is an abiding concern not to allow this idea, this sacral assumption, to be sullied by the dimension of the real. It is the logical consequence of a certain French 1968, mainly student-based and Maoist, which saw itself (and its own identity) as a revolutionary event, completely disarticulated from the determinations of the class struggle (this position looks like a perverted reflection of the dogmatics specific to the French Communist Party, taken as a basic polemical objective). Communism would here be something that has nothing to do with the wage-related, trade unionist, and political aspects of the movement and with the historical continuity of the class struggle. It is an ideal or, better, an explosion, an event that stands beyond it. Only with the destruction of the present will the sun of the future emerge. It is, in short, a vehement critique of the class struggle as such. In this position either the transcendence of the communist ideal takes place or there is no longer any chance of achieving it. We need to break the process of struggles over the wage and invent communism as a future reality. There will never be a homology between the contents of the present-day struggle and the building of communism. The relationship between proletarian potenza and the power of the bourgeoisie must be absolutely interrupted. The event is something that explodes. It is transcendent. Essentially the thinking of Badiou seems to echo that of Tertullian: ‘I believe because it is absurd.’ The principle becomes absurd because it must be stated in absolute discontinuity with the struggle and with concrete life. There is a complete lack of models of historic and material instrumentation in the transition from the current struggles to communism. At the time of the riots in the banlieues, this is was what led Rancière and Badiou to say that those were not political struggles. It is Maoism in its rue d’Ulm version, where the political imperative is that you should not express, in the contents of communism, any relationship with the class struggle. Needless to say, all this requires a party and an intellectuality (external and vanguardist) to play the leading role, but on this terrain one has to wonder whether the ‘cynical witnessing’ of Foucault or Jameson’s ‘cynicism of reason’ were not preferable to this ‘pure politics’.
LUCA SALZA Is there perhaps an analogy between the theoretical and political split in the 1970s between ‘workers’ autonomy’ (Negri, etc.) and the ‘autonomy of the political’ (Cacciari, Tronti) and the split that is currently taking shape between the Deleuzian biopolitical option and what Žižek has described as ‘pure politics’ (Badiou, Rancière)?
ANTONIO NEGRI Not really. When Tronti and Cacciari spoke of ‘the autonomy of the political’, they were referring to the autonomy or self-sufficiency of the party. They insisted on the continuity and the originality of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). It was, of course, an illusion, but an illusion fuelled by something that claimed to be political realism. What we have in Badiou is an operation that is entirely philosophical, in which the political appears as a concept of logic. Politics is understood only in terms of ideal concepts – none other than those of communism: only such Platonic assumptions could organise matters of revolution. This, of course, is not a resumption of anarchist positions; it is rather an attempt to take refuge in idealism. In fact there is a certain tiredness, plus a certain desperation (which make this operation understandable at a fraternal level) and, in my view, a solely rhetorical appeal to Plato: Benjamin and Debord, and a certain ethical and utopian Kantianism, are the inspiration behind this position – rather than Marx and historical materialism.
The ‘political autonomy’ of the postworkerist theoreticians in Italy – the ‘entrists’ in the PCI – as well as being a pure product of the crisis (or rather defeat) of groups that had believed they could reform the left from within, was also an opportunist decision. To hide it, Tronti (as well as Cacciari) turned this into a historical question, a reflection on the twentieth century, the end of the politics of modernity. There are ambiguous Nicaean accents throughout this debate, and above all a strange psychological effect: these theorists, former communists, still saw themselves as the centre of the world at a time when their party (which gave them a position, if not at the centre, at least somewhere) had vanished. All this crying about the end of modern politics is therefore a very foolish thing, because then we find ourselves with a surprise such as Obama on our hands and we discover that the political still operates.
LUCA SALZA The question of the political brings in the theme of the institutions of the common: what is the relationship between constituent power and institutionalisation (communism and democracy)? Perhaps you could clarify your relationship with the positions of Deleuze: in Mille Plateaux we have the proposal of a radical ontology of the production of the social. Does that remain a chaotic and indeterminate horizon, or is there already something more? More generally, I would like to touch on one of the more delicate points of your proposition, the question of organisation. You have often insisted on the need for a subjective moment, a moment of subjectification, which you have characterised in classical terms as ‘decision’. This moment would consist in a shift from ‘multitude’ (resistances and differences) to the ‘common’.
ANTONIO NEGRI In Mille Plateaux there is a capacity of hybridisation of the analysis that is absolutely fundamental. A Renaissance explosion, like Giordano Bruno’s, a potential [potenza] for grasping, a ‘grabbing’ of reality and of the world as they are. But within this chaotic realism institutions still exist: they act within each historical situation, as within each singularity, and the hypotheses, projects and proposals that the historical movement determines in and of itself are always there, they constitute the multiplicity of the real. Mille Plateaux is not a machine that eliminates the problem of organisation but a track on which one can work for it. The term chaotic should not be taken with a negative connotation but, more precisely, as difference and complexity of differences. It is, first of all, resistance, and then it is productive emergence. (Here I would refer to Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Instincts et institutions’ in Deleuze, 2003.)
So the problem of organisation has to be linked to the theme of the multitude because the concept of multitude is – albeit within the chaos that constitutes it – a concept of organisation, just as is the concept of class. Joining together multitude and organisation means, as we say, ‘making multitude’. What does ‘making multitude’ mean? It means gathering together a series of chaotic elements and making them work so as to result in a new society, a new world, a new language, a new set of values. Build a machine that produces common life, organisation, and a constituent project that is always open. In all probability this step can take place through the rediscovery of the common. The common is the product of a multiplicity. But what the multitude produces is not simply a virtuality, a causal relationship of potenza and act: the virtuality endures. The common that organises the multitude is thus a matrix that singularities experience and express (in the sense acquired by ‘express’ in this new philosophy of Spinozan descent: to produce being and to put it into a shape). The problem of organisation then becomes the very dispositif of our common existence. It is a problem of ontological determination. This is why, in our discourse, we reject all political party alternatives; and this is not a question of adopting anarchist positions. What is absolutely central, then, is to bring the mediation process back within the real, when ‘expression’ is opposed precisely to ‘representation’. In Commonwealth (the recently published book in which Hardt and I address these issues) we try to define the multitude precisely as an expressive concept – expressive because it is ethically productive (the common is the element that renders the multitude expressive in biopolitical terms).
LUCA SALZA So production and organisation, material level and political level need to be made to function together.
ANTONIO NEGRI ‘Making multitude’ means building one’s own institutions. We live in an era in which the crisis of capital is deepening; we live in a revolutionary transition. We move on a terrain of freedom, in concrete terms – we have thus grabbed back the value of ‘freedom’ from capital. With the concept of the ‘common’ we are also saying that the future has begun. The exodus. Mao’s army crossing the Yellow River – for me, this is the image of the exodus, but also of ‘making multitude’.
LUCA SALZA Now I would like to touch on the issue of the poor [il povero], with reference to the notion of ‘use without property rights’, drawn from the tradition of Franciscan spirituality and from theological–legal dispute with the church. In what sense, today, is the poor the multitude?
ANTONIO NEGRI We are in absolute immanence; we live in a world that has no ‘outside’; inside that world, all are producers. In this framework the poor person also embodies a form of resistance–reversibility. The poor are productive: they produce sociality, languages, anger and struggle, pity and welfare, and so on. In Latin America, if you study a city such as Rio, you realise that the half of the population that lives in the favelas is as productive as, or even more productive than, the half that lives in the white or mulâtres neighbourhoods. The favela is an impressive centre of activities. Here we have a paradox: the global order is not merely extensive; it is also intensive. In other words it invests all citizens, all subjects, and takes the poor into the heart of production. The liberalism of the second half of the twentieth century has pushed the factory worker (the bedrock of the socialist revolution) into poverty. But in this process the poor have taken the place of the industrial worker. The poor person ‘covers’ the worker and is the first representation of potentiality [potenza]. So we have to reverse the Platonic myth of the poor who seek wealth as an ideal. In fact we have always known that it is Penia who creates Poros:* poverty is the ontological producer of all wealth, of all being. In this same perspective, the other element that we introduce massively in Commonwealth is the experience of love, detaching its concept both from the religious and from the bourgeois and romantic interpretation… Love is the ontological force that stands at the foundation of every society. The multitude is refusal of solitude, and this rejection is sustained by love. Love is the key to the potenza of the poor. So poverty – that poverty that seemed to have annihilated the workers – on the contrary redeems them. The poor is a potenza that expresses itself in terms of love. According to Machiavelli, the poor ciompo who rebels in thirteenth-century Florence cries out: ‘Strip all of us naked, you will see that we are all equal. … And when we realise that we are equal, there is no longer power, there is only our love’ (Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, iii 13.122–3, 444–5; see Machiavelli, 1971).
LUCA SALZA Perhaps the moment has come to address the issue of ontology, which we have already touched on. It would be useful to explore the relationship between excedence and measurement, between life and value. Viewed from a Nietzschian perspective, the biopolitical means life as something that cannot be evaluated. But from another perspective the biopolitical means techniques of valorisation and devaluation of life set in motion by capital on a global scale. In this sense, dealing with a political problem in the postmodern means directly confronting an ontological problem. But what kind of ontology are we talking about?
ANTONIO NEGRI The concept of excedence is terribly important, because that’s what allows you, for example, to make the transition (which we theorise in Commonwealth) whereby ‘what is one divides into two’. This means that we are entering an era in which reducing living labour under the command of capital, unifying within capital intellectual, emotional, and generally immaterial labour becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible. The ‘one’ – capital – breaks into two – living labour and command. In fact, when we speak of excedence, we no longer speak of surplus labour that can be transferred into surplus value and then into profit, and thus into the construction of a class of exploiter bosses – and hence the construction of a ruling class, of a state, and so on. Excedence has here become something that is non-recuperable by power. This is the excedence of immaterial labour in all its forms (cognitive, affective, linguistic, etc.), but above all the autonomous excedence of productive cooperation. Excedent means ‘beyond measure’, where by ‘measure’ we understand the qualitative and quantitative control of labour power (which creates value) in its subsumption to the command of capital. In short, here measurement is blown out, when measurement is the criterion that permits the recuperation of human activity by power. Therefore the critique of the concept of measure – and, consequently, of the concept of value and of the law of value in Marxism and in general under capitalism – and the practical verification of its historical and material crisis make it possible to make the assumption of a horizon of freedom. What will then always arise is the problem of defining a new measure of production and of the production of subjectivity when institutions might constitute themselves. This problem is never closed. In this openness of ours there is an undeflectable hostility to Plato and to all the representatives of knowledge and command enclosed within the walls of the great schools of Weimar, Oxford and, most recently (si parva licet – if one may compare small things with the great), Bologna. In any case, in Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo (Negri, 2000) I attempted a periodisation of the tropes of measure by defining ideal types: the ‘human to animal’, the Centaur, is the figure who, in ancient times, embodied a relationship of subordination to (measurement in relation to) nature; then, in the middle phase of modernity, it was the idea of ‘human to human’ [uomo–uomo], as Pico della Mirandola called it, that fixed the measure of value creation; and today there is instead a new ideal type, which I call ‘human to machine’. I do not know whether this image works in the context of this proposal of periodisation (today I would rather call it ‘human to excedence’). What matters, however, is the fact of reaffirming the idea of the metamorphosis of labour, which now connects directly to the excedence of value. Today, all this is machinic. As regards the production of value, resistance and reversibility live in a machinic regime. Against power’s measurement, excedence is a lack of measure [dis-misura] that explodes all logic of capitalism, and yet keeps this logic and these breaks always open. Until the extinction of capitalism? It may be so. Here, at root, you can see my problem, which has always been that of the class struggle, that is, of the liberation of human beings through class struggle, until the destruction of class society – in other words until the extinction of capitalist valorisation. From this point of view, the multitude as excedence is class struggle in a winning phase. These are ontological principles.
LUCA SALZA But how will this victory of ours come about? Instead of dialectics, in the biopolitical regime there is the logic of reversibility, so is there no longer rupture, discontinuity? And in what sense does biopolitics change the direction of the relationship between reform and revolution? Are the institutions of the common the form that takes the place of governance, or do they embody a revolutionary break?
ANTONIO NEGRI I build my languages, and through the languages I build my life concretely. We must be realistic. Communism, ce n’est pas n’importe quoi [is not just any old thing]. Communism today is this concrete goal: the construction of my life, the relationship with my children, with my sisters and brothers, with others, outside any capitalist subordination, outside the dominion of humans over humans. Clearly, therefore, the relationship of reform to revolution, which had been set in the classical theory from Engels to Lenin, passing through Bernstein, now works differently. Because today things are being made. Because we are living a transition. The transition is ontological. The revolution stands inside the transition. It is neither its starting point nor its culmination. Revolutionary war, which was a key element in the classical theory of communism, is now an everyday fact, and not a catastrophic one (or at least catastrophic in a different sense). When we speak of ‘absolute democracy’ we mean the ability (through political instruments, struggles, building of movements, insurrections) to build a new world in which everyone works for everyone; or rather to build new spaces, spaces of the common, and to defend them. Examples abound: the commons are not only the natural resources – water, air, gas, forests, oceans and so on; the commons are also these spaces that are transformed for common use; the commons are also all those artificial goods (machinic, built by the machine–human) such as money (or productive finance), informatic spaces, educational and cultural institutions, and so forth… spaces where everyone should have access and in which there is a common availability. Here profit no longer reaches. Thus one sees the extent to which the distinction between reform and revolution is tenuous. Reform may be revolutionary when it goes in the direction of the common. If, then, under the question of the relationship between revolution and reforms, we want to raise the issue of the use (or non-use) of violence, this may be a vulgar and hypocritical provocation, but it is above all devoid of meaning: the communist struggle (whether reformist or revolutionary) is always violent, because those who own and have accumulated wealth and power always defend their possessions with violence (of weapons, or of the law). Now, the defence and the development of already existing institutions of the common, such as might be the university or welfare, for instance, are certainly a priority, but this is obviously not enough. The movements have to foster the emergence of the ability to create ‘soviets’, councils, or other instruments of democratic organisation that expand, organise and guarantee the spaces and institutions of the common. You can devise programmes for this. It is not a matter of ‘hypotheses’, but of deeds and facts. We need revolution in order then to make plans. The revolution does not come afterwards. The revolution lives every day in this going beyond measure of our relationship and in this organised pressure for the construction of the common. It is, then, a matter of grasping, especially in the crisis, the dis-measure of the relationship of exploitation, when the bosses are no longer able to exploit you. This is because it is hard for the organisation of knowledge, for the organisation of life, for the biopolitical dimension of production to be subsumed in capital. There is a new and revolutionary element in the capitalist relation of exploitation: ‘what is one has divided into two’, and I can now be successful in not commodifying any longer what I do; rather I can consider it as something I transmit, in common terms, to future generations through the institutions I try to build.
LUCA SALZA What is the link between the common, communism and biopolitics in a crisis situation? How can the notion of the common become the conceptual medium between communism and biopolitics?
ANTONIO NEGRI Let us dwell on the crisis and its interpretation. I think that, of all interpretations, you should prefer those, whether of the right or the left, that reject the ideas that locate the reasons for the crisis in the separation between finance and so-called ‘real production’. Now, rather, we have to insist that financialisation is not an unproductive, parasitic diversion of increasing amounts of surplus value and collective savings, but rather the form of capital accumulation that is symmetrical to the new social and cognitive processes of production of value. The current financial crisis should therefore be interpreted as a blockage of capital accumulation rather than as an implosive result of a failed accumulation of capital. The blockage comes from the drives towards re-appropriation and from the rejection of cooperation exhibited more and more amply by the behaviour of the new globalised productive classes against the policies and practices of exploitation and neoliberal war.
How do you exit the crisis? On this issue, too, one has to express a communist radicalism matched to the depth of crisis. One can only get out of the economic crisis through social revolution. The fact is that today any New Deal that may be proposed has to involve building new rights of social ownership of common goods, rights that are clearly in opposition to the right to private property. In other words, if until now access to a common good has taken the form of ‘private debt’, if capital has foregrounded the sociality of exploitation by presenting itself – in a manner cleverly and wickedly mystified – as ‘communism’ (of the owners of capital, obviously), from now on it is legitimate to claim the same right in the form of ‘social income’. Imposing the recognition of these common rights is the only correct way to exit from the crisis.